Friday, March 05, 2004
THE BUSH HITLER THING
t r u t h o u t.org | Reader Submission
Friday 09 January 2004
Dear Sir,
My family was one of Hitler's victims. We lost a lot under the Nazi occupation, including an uncle who died in the camps and a cousin killed by a booby trap. I was terrified when my father went ballistic after finding my brother and me playing with a hand grenade. (I was only 12 at the time, and my brother insisted the grenade was safe.) I remember the rubble and the hardships of 'austerity' - and the bomb craters from Allied bombs. As late as the 1980s, I had to take detours while bombs were being removed - they litter the countryside, buried under parking lots,buildings, and in the canals and rivers to this day. Believe me, I learned a lot about Hitler while I was growing up, both in Europe and here in the US - both my parents were in the war and talked about it constantly, unlike most American families. I spent my earliest years with the second-hand fear that trickled down from their PTSD - undiagnosed and untreated in those days.
I'm no expert on WWII - but I learned a lot about what happened in Germany - and Europe - back in those days. I always wondered how the wonderful German people - so honest, decent, hard-working, friendly, and generous - could ever allow such a thing to happen. (There were camps near my family's home - they still talk about them only in hushed conspiratorial whispers.) I asked a lot of questions - we were only a few kilometers from the German border - and no one ever denied me. My relatives had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the war - they still haven't forgotten - I don't think anyone can forget such a horrible nightmare. Among the questions I asked:
Why didn't you do anything about the people in the camps?
Everyone was terrified. People 'disappeared' into those camps. Sometimes the Nazis came and lined everyone up, walking behind them - even school children - with a cocked pistol. You never knew when they would just shoot someone in the back of the head. Everyone was terrified. Everyone was disarmed - guns were registered, so all the Nazis had to do was go from house to house and demand the guns.
Didn't you see what was happening?
We saw. There was nothing we could do. Our military had no modern weapons. The Nazis had technology and resources - they just invaded and took over - we were overwhelmed by their air power. They had spies everywhere - people spying on each other, just to have an 'ace in the hole' in case they were accused - and anyone who had a grudge against you could accuse you of something - just an accusation meant you'd disappear. Nobody dared ask where you had gone - anyone who returned was considered suspicious - what had they said, and who did they implicate? It was a climate of fear - there's nothing anyone can do when the government uses fear and imprisonment to intimidate people. The government was above the law - even in Germany, it became 'every man for himself'. Advancement was possible by exposing 'traitors' - anyone who questioned the government. It didn't matter if the people you accused were guilty or not - just the accusation was enough.
Did anyone know what was going on?
We all knew. We imagined the worst because the Nazis made 'examples' of a few people in every town and village. Public torture and execution. The most unspeakable atrocities were committed in full view of everyone. If this is what happened in public, can you imagine what might be going on in the camps? Nobody wanted to know.
Why didn't the German people stop the Nazis?
Life was better, at first, under the Nazis. The war machine invigorated the economy - men had jobs again, and enough money to take care of their family. New building projects were everywhere. The shops were full again - and people could afford good food, culture, and luxuries. Women could stay home in comfort. Crime was reduced. Health care improved. It was a rosy scenario - Hitler brought order and prosperity. His policies won widespread approval because life was better for most Germans, after the misery of reparations and inflation. The people liked the idea of removing the worst elements of society - the gypsies, the homosexuals, the petty criminals - it was easy to elicit support for prosecuting the corrupt 'evil'people poisoning society. Every family was proud of their hometown heroes - the sharply-dressed soldiers they contributed to his program - they were, after all,defending the Fatherland. Continuing a proud tradition that had been defeated and shamed after WWI, the soldiers gave the feeling of power and success to the proud families that showered them with praise and support. Their early victories were reason to celebrate - in spite of the fact that they faced poorly armed inferior forces - further proof that what they were doing was right, and the best thing for the country. The news was full of stories about their bravery and accomplishments against a vile enemy. They were 'liberating' these countries from their corrupt governments.
These are some of the answers I gleaned over the years. As a child, I was fascinated with the Nazis. I thought the German soldiers were really something - that's how strong an impression they made, even after the war. After all, they weren't the ones committing war crimes - they were the pride of their families and communities. It was just the SS and Gestapo that were 'bad'. Now I know better -but that pride in the military was a strong factor for many years, only adding to the mystique of military power - after all, my father had been a soldier too, but in the American army. It took a while to figure out the truth.
Every time I've gone back to Europe, someone has taken me to the 'gardens of stone' - the Allied cemeteries that dot the countryside. With great sadness, my relatives would stand in abject misery, remembering the nightmare, and asking 'Why?'. Maybe that's why they wouldn't support the US invasion of Iraq. They knew war. They knew occupation. And they knew resistance. I saw the building where British flyers hid on their way back to England - smuggled out by brave families that risked the lives of everyone to help the Allies. As a child, I had played in a basement, where the cow lived under the house, as is common there. The same place those flyers hid.
So why, now, when I hear GWB's speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase 'Never forget'. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.
So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I've seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive war'. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of 'undesirable' aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one's neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to 'fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed 'enemies'. The establishment of 'Homeland Security'. The dehumanization of 'foreigners'. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of 'goodness' and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.
There isn't much doubt in my mind - anyone who compares the history of Hitler's rise to power and the progression of recent events in the US cannot avoid the parallels. It's incontrovertible. Is Bush another Hitler? Maybe not, but with each incriminating event, the parallel grows -it certainly cannot be dismissed. There's too much evidence already. Just as Hitler used American tactics to plan and execute his reign, it looks as if Karl Rove is reading Hitler's playbook to plan world domination - and that is the stated intent of both. From the Reichstag fire to the landing at Nuremberg to the motto of "Gott Mit Uns" to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to the insistence that peace was the ultimate goal, the line is unbroken and unwavering.
I'm afraid now, that what may still come to pass is a reign far more savage and barbaric than that of the Nazis. Already, appeasement has been fruitless - it only encourages the brazen to escalate their arrogance and braggadocio. Americans support Bush - by a generous majority - and mass media sings his praises while indicting his detractors - or silencing their opinions completely. The American people seem to care only about the domestic economic situation - and even in that, they are in complete denial. They don't want to hear about Iraq, and Afghanistan is already forgotten. Even the Democratic opposition supports the occupation of Iraq. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Hussein deserves to be executed -with or without a trial. 'Visitors' are fingerprinted. Guilty until proven innocent. Snipers are on New York City rooftops. When do the Stryker teams start appearing on American streets? They're perfectly suited for 'Homeland Security' - and they've had a trial run in Iraq. The Constitution has been suspended - until further notice. Dick Cheney just mentioned it may be for decades - even a generation, as Rice asserts as well. Is this the start of the 1000 year reign of this new collection of thugs? So it would seem.
I can only hope that in the coming year there will be some sign - some hint - that we are not becoming that which we abhor. The Theory of the Grotesque fares all too well these days. It may not be Nazi Germany - it might be a lot worse.Wednesday, March 03, 2004
WHY BUSH WILL WIN IN 2004
In some of the most insightful writings concerning the dynamics of the Dubya mystique, Dr. Renana Brooks, one of our favorite shrinks, lays out how it is that GWB has half the country totally hornswoggled, and why that's enough to keep him in power.
The first article, "A Nation of Victims" was published last June. I can't tell you how many times and by how many people it was sent to the Howard Dean crew, with exhortations to 'read and act'. Clearly, the Dean campaign did not get the memo...
The second article, "The Character Myth", came out a few days ago. It explains why/how all those moron shitkickers out there (you know which ones - your idiot neighbor, the jackass at the gas station, the loudmouth on the barstool next to you) actually NEED to believe that Dubya is a square-shootin' real hombre and that he's a-doin' the right thing by gum.
A Nation of Victims
by Renana Brooks
George W. Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language--especially negatively charged emotional language--as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.
President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others. Abusive language has been a major theme of psychological researchers on marital problems, such as John Gottman, and of philosophers and theologians, such as Josef Pieper. But little has been said about the key role it has come to play in political discourse, and in such "hot media" as talk radio and television.
Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will. The first is empty language. This term refers to broad statements that are so abstract and mean so little that they are virtually impossible to oppose. Empty language is the emotional equivalent of empty calories. Just as we seldom question the content of potato chips while enjoying their pleasurable taste, recipients of empty language are usually distracted from examining the content of what they are hearing. Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and "reframe" opposing viewpoints.
Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech contained thirty-nine examples of empty language. He used it to reduce complex problems to images that left the listener relieved that George W. Bush was in charge. Rather than explaining the relationship between malpractice insurance and skyrocketing healthcare costs, Bush summed up: "No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit." The multiple fiscal and monetary policy tools that can be used to stimulate an economy were downsized to: "The best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place." The controversial plan to wage another war on Iraq was simplified to: "We will answer every danger and every enemy that threatens the American people." In an earlier study, I found that in the 2000 presidential debates Bush used at least four times as many phrases containing empty language as Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Senior or Gore had used in their debates.
Another of Bush's dominant-language techniques is personalization. By personalization I mean localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker's personality. Bush projects himself as the only person capable of producing results. In his post-9/11 speech to Congress he said, "I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people." He substitutes his determination for that of the nation's. In the 2003 State of the Union speech he vowed, "I will defend the freedom and security of the American people." Contrast Bush's "I will not yield" etc. with John F. Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
The word "you" rarely appears in Bush's speeches. Instead, there are numerous statements referring to himself or his personal characteristics--folksiness, confidence, righteous anger or determination--as the answer to the problems of the country. Even when Bush uses "we," as he did many times in the State of the Union speech, he does it in a way that focuses attention on himself. For example, he stated: "Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."
In an article in the January 16 New York Review of Books, Joan Didion highlighted Bush's high degree of personalization and contempt for argumentation in presenting his case for going to war in Iraq. As Didion writes: "'I made up my mind,' he had said in April, 'that Saddam needs to go.' This was one of many curious, almost petulant statements offered in lieu of actually presenting a case. I've made up my mind, I've said in speech after speech, I've made myself clear. The repeated statements became their own reason."
Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush's political agenda is out of step with most Americans' core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.
Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of "learned helplessness," showed that people's motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing.
Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress on the 9/11 attacks, he chose to increase people's sense of vulnerability: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.... I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight.... Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat." (Subsequent terror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security have maintained and expanded this fear of unknown, sinister enemies.)
Contrast this rhetoric with Franklin Roosevelt's speech delivered the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He said: "No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.... There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces--with the unbounding determination of our people--we will gain the inevitable triumph--so help us God." Roosevelt focuses on an optimistic future rather than an ongoing threat to Americans' personal survival.
All political leaders must define the present threats and problems faced by the country before describing their approach to a solution, but the ratio of negative to optimistic statements in Bush's speeches and policy declarations is much higher, more pervasive and more long-lasting than that of any other President. Let's compare "crisis" speeches by Bush and Ronald Reagan, the President with whom he most identifies himself. In Reagan's October 27, 1983, televised address to the nation on the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, he used nineteen images of crisis and twenty-one images of optimism, evenly balancing optimistic and negative depictions. He limited his evaluation of the problems to the past and present tense, saying only that "with patience and firmness we can bring peace to that strife-torn region--and make our own lives more secure." George W. Bush's October 7, 2002, major policy speech on Iraq, on the other hand, began with forty-four consecutive statements referring to the crisis and citing a multitude of possible catastrophic repercussions. The vast majority of these statements (for example: "Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time"; "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists") imply that the crisis will last into the indeterminate future. There is also no specific plan of action. The absence of plans is typical of a negative framework, and leaves the listener without hope that the crisis will ever end. Contrast this with Reagan, who, a third of the way into his explanation of the crisis in Lebanon, asked the following: "Where do we go from here? What can we do now to help Lebanon gain greater stability so that our Marines can come home? Well, I believe we can take three steps now that will make a difference."
To create a dependency dynamic between him and the electorate, Bush describes the nation as being in a perpetual state of crisis and then attempts to convince the electorate that it is powerless and that he is the only one with the strength to deal with it. He attempts to persuade people they must transfer power to him, thus crushing the power of the citizen, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even constitutional liberties, to concentrate all power in the imperial presidency and the Republican Party.
Bush's political opponents are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas. However, people do not support Bush for the power of his ideas, but out of the despair and desperation in their hearts. Whenever people are in the grip of a desperate dependency, they won't respond to rational criticisms of the people they are dependent on. They will respond to plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism. Bush's opponents must combat his dark imagery with hope and restore American vigor and optimism in the coming years. They should heed the example of Reagan, who used optimism against Carter and the "national malaise"; Franklin Roosevelt, who used it against Hoover and the pessimism induced by the Depression ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"); and Clinton (the "Man from Hope"), who used positive language against the senior Bush's lack of vision. This is the linguistic prescription for those who wish to retire Bush in 2004.
The Character Myth
by Renana Brooks
If progressives want to defeat George W. Bush in the 2004 election, they first have to understand the sources of his continuing popularity. The good news is that Bush is looking much less invincible than he was just a few months ago. As unemployment remains high and as the casualty list in Iraq grows longer, targets of opportunity are emerging for the Democratic candidates. For example, Bush's job approval rating has declined to 52 percent in the latest Time/CNN poll.
Yet Bush remains quite popular by historical standards. Moreover, the task that lies ahead for any Democrat is a daunting one, for a more fundamental reason than what Americans think about Bush's job performance. By repeatedly insisting that only he has the tools and the determination to fend off terrorism in the post-September 11 era, Bush has cultivated feelings of crisis, pessimism, anxiety and a loss of control throughout the nation [see Brooks, "A Nation of Victims," June 30]. He has instilled a sense of dependency in Americans--and found a place in their minds and hearts as the repository of strength, action and control. The electorate passively and often subconsciously relies on his authority and power to act on their behalf. This is why Americans consistently find ways to justify Bush and to convince themselves that he is doing a good job, even when his actions and policies are opposed to their beliefs and values.
But this core of support is not merely a result of post-September 11 patriotism or of the fact that Bush is perceived as a likable, regular guy, as the conventional wisdom has it. The President and his advisers have deliberately cultivated an image and leadership style that fosters these results.
Bush's handlers project the President as a man of character. His team has carefully crafted an image of him as a man who is strong and moral, someone who sticks to his principles and is capable of making tough decisions. This phenomenon was foretold by media philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who warned: "Politics will eventually be replaced by imagery. The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image because the image will be much more powerful than he could ever be."
Theory soon became reality. Ronald Reagan was the first American politician to demonstrate the power of what I call the character myth, a project launched by his speechwriter Peggy Noonan, whose biography of him was titled When Character Was King. The character myth relies on the psychological phenomenon that a person who speaks frequently and passionately about morals is generally regarded as a moral person. According to the character myth, a person who demonstrates that he has "character" need not present any evidence in support of his policies or decisions. They are simply assumed to be correct, since they come from a person with the ineffable quality known as "character." Even though Reagan was divorced and many of his Hollywood friends hardly saw him as a paragon of morality, he managed to present himself in politics as an exemplar of "family values." Reagan was seen as having character for sticking to his principles. He was widely viewed as someone who cut taxes, even after actually raising them. Americans simply ignored all data that did not fit the myth.
Similarly, Bush's handlers use the rhetoric of morality to bypass people's resistance to his ideas and to convince them that they should not go beyond their core belief that "Bush is doing the right thing." This imagery of strength and morality is inspired by the ideas of conservative philosopher Leo Strauss, who has strongly influenced many within the inner circle of the Bush Administration. As James Atlas wrote in a piece on Strauss in the May 4 New York Times, "To [some] theorists, the Bush administration's foreign policy is entirely a Straussian creation. Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, has been identified as a disciple of Strauss; William Kristol, founding editor of The Weekly Standard, a must-read in the White House, considers himself a Straussian; Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American Century, an influential foreign policy group started by Mr. Kristol, is firmly in the Strauss camp. One is reminded of Asa Leventhal, the hero of Saul Bellow's novel 'The Victim,' who asks his oppressor, a mysterious figure named Kirby Allbee, 'Wait a minute, what's your idea of who runs things?' For those who believe in the power of ideas, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch to answer: the intellectual heirs of Leo Strauss." Strauss feared the mediocrity that he believed was inherent in democratic societies. He argued that when a strong political leader explains his policies he should develop a mythology for the consumption of the general public that hides his true motivations, because the people will not accept the boldness of the leader's initiatives if they are presented in an unvarnished fashion. This mythology should use the language of morality to mask the candidate's real interests, which are his own survival in power and his ability to continue to exert dominance over the populace.
Psychologists have long understood that people who hold views that are mutually inconsistent, or who perform actions that depart from their values or that threaten their positive self-image, will experience discomfort. This is known as cognitive dissonance. People naturally choose to remove the discomfort through rationalization, thus repairing their self-image as people who are reasonable and moral and act in ways consistent with their values. Bush's leadership style and use of language essentially have created cognitive dissonance in the electorate. The more that Americans observe the Bush presidency pushing policies they do not support, and would normally question, the more they confront the choice of whether to oppose him actively or rationalize away their discomfort. Many Americans have chosen the latter because the President has convinced them that the situation is desperate and that only he can handle the continuing crisis. The more they depend upon Bush, the more they rationalize away any objections they may have to his specific ideas and policies. In this manner, Bush has forged an emotional, visceral relationship with the nation, successfully bypassing conscious resistance and stripping away any sense that he needs to answer to a higher legal or constitutional authority beyond his personal moral force.
President Bush wields the power of a stern, authoritarian parent over the national psyche. Just as such a parent may justify a command with the words "because I said so," Bush has often reverted to explanations in the style of "it's the right thing to do" in order to justify the war on Iraq or his tax cuts. By changing frames in this manner, a political leader can erode resistance to his actions. His shifting, ultimately arbitrary reasoning deters any listener from challenging his ideas and even leads the listener to believe herself or himself incapable of understanding the reasons given for policies or actions.
When people feel overwhelmed, as I believe Americans have been over the past few years, they tend not to think rationally about complex details. Further, many psychologists, sociologists and historians argue that Americans are prone to believe in the Great Person theory--the idea that if a person has the correct personality traits, his instincts will lead to the correct actions regardless of the details of a given situation. However, research shows that no character trait--not courage, charisma or self-confidence--correlates well with effective leadership as defined by historians. For example, Dean Simonton studied 100 personal attributes of all US Presidents, including their personality traits, and found that only one variable--intelligence--correlated with presidential effectiveness as measured by historians.
But Bush's team knows how to exploit the Great Person myth. Bush's deliberately constructed image as a moral leader who knows what is right for America takes the place of rational analysis, and his insistence that we are in an ongoing state of crisis in our war against terror helps to perpetuate this dynamic. Bush and his supporters often silence opposition and dissent by encoding in their arguments a worldview that implies that even to challenge Bush's ideas is immoral and damaging to the social order, and even to the survival of the nation and of Western civilization. Linguists call this device the lost performative. The speaker purposely leaves out the authority behind far-reaching statements in order to pass off controversial viewpoints as the absolute truth. When Bush says "Our cause is just," he purposely leaves out the "according to whom?" Saying "I think the war is just" or "Donald Rumsfeld thinks the war is just" is much different from asserting "Our cause is just." The underlying message from the authoritarian leader is, Do exactly as I say, or catastrophe follows. Overgeneralization and false generalization are powerful vehicles for such a leader.
Joan Didion captured this well in her book Fixed Ideas: America Since 9.11. She writes: "We had seen the general acquiescence in whatever was presented as imperative by the administration. We had seen the persistent suggestions that anyone who expressed reservations about detentions, say, or military tribunals, was at some level 'against' America. (As in the presidential formulation 'you're either with us or you're with the terrorists.') We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war." As Didion suggests, absolutist language overloads people with information and leaves them confused and unable to judge for themselves. They crave simplicity and fall back on the character myth.
Past US Presidents of both parties have consistently chosen to evoke collective principles despite commanding overwhelming and dominant military power, carefully avoiding provocative imagery or dominating attitudes. Presidents typically reach for the language of consensus and empowerment in important speeches and addresses, focusing on the word "we" and presenting themselves as leaders of a strong community, whether domestically or internationally, with shared strengths, abilities and responsibilities.
John F. Kennedy, in his commencement address at American University on June 10, 1963, just after the Cuban missile crisis, declared, "Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament--and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must re-examine our own attitude--as individuals and as a nation--for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward--by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home."
Ronald Reagan, in his first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1981, echoes these collective aims and affirmations of Americans' strength: "And as we renew ourselves here in our own land, we will be seen as having greater strength throughout the world. We will again be the exemplar of freedom and a beacon of hope for those who do not now have freedom. To those neighbors and allies who share our freedom, we will strengthen our historic ties and assure them of our support and firm commitment."
George W. Bush's father, in addressing the United Nations on October 1, 1990, before going into war in the Persian Gulf, placed a notable emphasis on consensus: "We have a vision of a new partnership of nations that transcends the cold war: a partnership based on consultation, cooperation and collective action, especially through international and regional organizations; a partnership united by principle and the rule of law and supported by an equitable sharing of both cost and commitment; a partnership whose goals are to increase democracy, increase prosperity, increase the peace and reduce arms.... We stand together, prepared to swim upstream, to march uphill, to tackle the tough challenges as they come not only as the United Nations but as the nations of the world united."
The current President, however, uses the word "I" far more often than the word "we," and usually refers only to the United States, or himself and his party, not the entire world community, when he says "we." This President also tends to undercut his words of inspiration with references to dangers that loom and threaten, hovering vaguely outside our immediate sphere of control. Even as Bush promises action, he fosters a sense of chaos and danger: In his speech to the United Nations on September 12, 2002, he stated, "Above all, our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent ambitions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destructive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, including my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale."
Some Americans find a certain comfort in Bush's thoughts, because they feel that dominance implies moral order and establishes God's moral authority in the world. They believe there is a natural hierarchy in which those who enjoy dominance have the right to do so. Just as God has dominion over man and man has dominion over animals, the imagery of the moral order assumes a world in which people dominate those who are below them.
While many Americans feel reassured by the appearance of moral dominance, other nations, even friendly ones, do not find the President's stance reassuring. Non-Westerners tend to view dominance as imperialism. Many nations perceive the President's authoritarian imagery and mythology and are impelled to find ways to fight against American dominance. Because the world already fears US power, other nations are not comforted by Bush's leadership style. They feel only repugnance and fear. Left unchallenged, the character myth could potentially win George W. Bush four more years, but it will cost his nation dearly over a far longer period of time--perhaps stiffening resistance to American hegemony enough to end our current run of dominance.
The Democratic presidential hopefuls have begun to attack the character myth with repeated statements that Bush has lied to the American people. But the character myth is more pernicious than just lying. Often being bold, cocky and sure of yourself, and inflexibly and rigidly adhering to your principles because you are convinced you are right, can lead to catastrophic consequences. In Iraq, for example, it led to an absence of planning for any failure of our military to win a complete victory with the acceptance of a grateful Iraq. The Army consequently was unprepared for any nation-building, so that the country is now plunged into chaos and disorder, and in real danger, like Afghanistan, of becoming a permanent home for terrorists.
To be truly effective to the broader public, the Democratic candidates must present their own vivid, descriptive depiction of how they can make America safe, not merely dominant. Just as George H.W. Bush called for a New World Order and Truman had the Marshall Plan, the Democratic candidate should enunciate a new vision of a safe and secure world. He or she should show how a collaborative world is really safer than a dominating one. This is the prescription for success in 2004.
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about Renana Brooks
Renana Brooks, PhD, is a clinical psychologist practicing in Washington, DC. She heads the Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion (www.sommetinstitute.org) and is completing a book on the virtue myth and the conservative culture of domination.
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
WHAT'S RIGHT WITH KERRY
We at Title Goes Here(tm) are of the ABB (Anybody But Bush) brand of citizenry. We'd vote for Triumph the Insult Comic Dog if we thought he had a prayer in hell of getting that asshole Dubya out of the White House. But we have to say, we're less than thrilled with John Kerry, whose empty suit, weathervane positions, and just plain snot-nose arrogance really frosts our shorts. If we had our way, we'd get John drunk, strip him down to his birthday suit, and dump him in downtown Houston without cabfare. Bring it on, baby.
However.
It looks like Kerry will indeed be this year's ABB candidate, and as such, we should at least look at what the hell, if anything, the guy actually has in his favor. So here, to elucidate all of us on what these sterling qualities might be, is David Corn, whom we mostly like.
What's Right With Kerry
by David Corn, The Nation
In the heat of battle, with his campaign crumbling, Howard Dean lashed out at John Kerry. First, he called the leader in the Democratic presidential race a "Republican." Then he said, "When Senator Kerry's record is examined by the public at a more leisurely time...he's going to turn out to be just like George Bush."
Just like George Bush? It is true that Kerry, another Yalie and Skull and Bones alum, has voted in favor of NAFTA and other corporate-friendly trade pacts, that he once raised questions about affirmative action (while still supporting it), that he has, like almost every Democratic senator, accepted contributions from special-interest lobbyists (while being one of the few to eschew political action committee donations), that he voted to grant Bush the authority to invade Iraq. But this hardly makes him Bush lite. There is, as evidence, his nineteen-year Senate record, during which he has voted consistently in favor of abortion rights and environmental policies, opposed Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, led the effort against drilling in the Alaskan wilderness, pushed for higher fuel economy standards, advocated boosting the minimum wage and pressed for global warming remedies. But what distinguishes Kerry's career are key moments when he displayed guts and took tough actions that few colleagues would imitate. One rap on Kerry is that he is overly cautious and conventional. He's no firebrand on the stump, nor does he come across as the most passionate and exciting force for change. But his history in Washington includes episodes in which he demonstrated a willingness to confront hard issues, to challenge power, to pursue values rather than political advantage, to take risks for the public interest.
Kerry arrived in the Senate in 1985. This Vietnam War hero turned antiwar leader had been lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. But he entered the body more as the prosecutor he had been in the late 1970s after graduating from Boston College law school. In early 1986 Kerry's office was contacted by a Vietnam vet who alleged that the support network for the CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras (who were fighting against the socialist Sandinistas in power) was linked to drug traffickers. Kerry doubted that the Reagan Administration, obsessed with supporting the contras, would investigate such charges. He pushed for a Senate inquiry and a year later, as chairman of a Foreign Relations subcommittee, obtained approval to conduct a probe.
It was not an easy ride. Reagan Justice Department officials sought to discredit and stymie his investigation. Republicans dismissed it. One anti-Kerry effort used falsified affidavits to make it seem his staff had bribed witnesses. The Democratic staff of the Senate Iran/contra committee--which showed little interest in the contra drug connection--often refused to cooperate. "They were fighting us tooth and nail," recalls Jack Blum, one of Kerry's investigators. "We had the White House and the CIA against us on one side and our colleagues in the Senate on the other. But Kerry told us, 'Keep going.' He didn't let this stuff faze him."
Kerry's inquiry widened to look at Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, Honduras and Panama. In 1989 he released a report that slammed the Reagan Administration for neglecting or undermining anti-drug efforts in order to pursue other foreign policy objectives. It noted that the government in the 1970s and '80s had "turned a blind eye" to the corruption and drug dealing of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had done various favors for Washington (including assisting the contras). The report concluded that "individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking...and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers." And, it added, US government agencies--meaning the CIA and the State Department--had known this.
This was a rather explosive finding, but the Kerry report did not provoke much uproar in the media, and the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill did little to support Kerry and keep the matter alive. His critics derided him as a conspiracy buff. Yet a decade later the CIA inspector general released a pair of reports that acknowledged that the agency had worked with suspected drug smugglers to support the contras. Kerry had been right.
After the contra investigation, Kerry next turned to a far more sensitive target: a bank connected to a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser. During their investigation of Noriega, Kerry's staff discovered that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International had facilitated Noriega's drug trafficking and money laundering. This led to an inquiry into BCCI, a worldwide but murky institution more or less controlled by the ruling family of Abu Dhabi. BCCI was a massive criminal enterprise, although this was not yet publicly known. It had engaged in rampant fraud and money laundering (to help out, among others, drug dealers, terrorists and arms traffickers) around the world. Its tentacles ran everywhere. Its political connections reached around the globe. Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger both became involved in the scandal. When banking regulators finally shut down BCCI in 1991, an estimated 250,000 creditors and depositors from forty countries were out billions of dollars.
One key issue was whether BCCI had secretly and illegally acquired control of First American bank in Washington, DC. The top officials of First American were Clark Clifford, a longtime Democratic graybeard and a party fundraiser, and Robert Altman, his protégé. Democratic senators grumbled about Kerry's crusade, which put Clifford in the cross-hairs. "This really pissed people off," Blum says. BCCI hired from both Democratic and Republican quarters an army of lawyers, PR specialists and lobbyists (including former members of Congress) to thwart the investigation. The Justice Department of the first Bush Administration did not respond to information on BCCI uncovered by Kerry's staff. So Blum took the material to New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who then commenced an investigation of BCCI that led to indictments. And Kerry again found himself tussling with the CIA, for the agency had been using the services of BCCI even after it had learned that the bank was crooked and in league with terrorists (including Abu Nidal).
In the fall of 1992 Kerry released a report on the BCCI affair. It blasted everyone: Justice, Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, Clifford and Altman (for participating in "some of BCCI's deceptions"), high-level lobbyists and fixers, and the CIA. The report noted that after the CIA knew the bank was "a fundamentally corrupt criminal enterprise, it continued to use both BCCI and First American...for CIA operations." The report was, in a sense, an indictment of Washington cronyism. In the years since, there's been nothing like it. Senator Hank Brown, the ranking Republican on Kerry's subcommittee, noted, "John Kerry was willing to spearhead this difficult investigation. Because many important members of his own party were involved in this scandal, it was a distasteful subject for other committee and subcommittee chairmen to investigate. They did not. John Kerry did."
While Kerry was in the middle of the BCCI muck, Senate majority leader George Mitchell asked him to assume another difficult task: investigate the unaccounted-for Vietnam POWs and MIAs. For years so-called POW advocates, like billionaire Ross Perot, had claimed American GIs were still being held in Vietnam, and the highly charged POW/MIA issue was the main roadblock to normalizing relations. Working closely with Senator John McCain, a Republican who had been a POW, Kerry got the Pentagon to declassify 1 million pages of records. His committee chased after rumors of American soldiers being held. He took fourteen trips to Vietnam. This was a hard mission: How could his committee say there were absolutely no POWs still captive in Vietnam? Yet anything less could keep the POW controversy alive.
On one trip to Hanoi, as Douglas Brinkley notes in Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, Kerry insisted that he be allowed to inspect the catacombs beneath Ho Chi Minh's tomb, where, according to a persistent rumor, the remaining POWs were being held. Permission was granted, and with conservative Republican Bob Smith by his side, he inspected the tunnels and found no signs of POWs. In January 1993 Kerry's POW/MIA committee released a 1,223-page report concluding that there was "no compelling evidence that proves any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia." Some POW die-hards howled. (Journalist Sydney Schanberg has accused Kerry of covering up and destroying evidence that POWs were left behind.) But the report mostly settled the issue. President Bill Clinton was able to drop the Vietnam trade embargo and normalize relations.
Investigations were not the only notable moments in Kerry's Senate career. On September 10, 1996, as he was in a tight re-election contest against William Weld, the popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, Kerry voted against the Defense of Marriage Act, which would deny federal benefits to same-sex couples and permit states to not recognize same-sex marriages conducted in other states. He was one of only fourteen senators to oppose the measure. Several leading Senate liberals--including Paul Wellstone, Tom Harkin and Pat Leahy--had voted for it. But on the floor of the Senate that day, Kerry, who noted that he did not support same-sex marriage, said, "I am going to vote against this bill...because I believe that this debate is fundamentally ugly, and it is fundamentally political." He refused to pretend that the bill was not a wedge-issue trap devised by conservative Republicans. The legislation, he charged, was "meant to divide Americans," and he argued fiercely that it was unconstitutional. "If this were truly a defense of marriage act," he said, "it would expand the learning experience for would-be husbands and wives. It would provide for counseling for all troubled marriages, not just for those who can afford it. It would provide treatment on demand for those with alcohol and substance abuse.... It would guarantee daycare for every family that struggles and needs it."
The following year, a re-elected Kerry was in another lonely position as one of only five original sponsors of the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act, to provide for full public financing of Congressional elections. The measure would remove practically all special-interest money from House and Senate campaigns. (Kerry's colleagues were Wellstone, Leahy, John Glenn and Joe Biden--all Democrats.) "Kerry was totally into it," says Ellen Miller, former executive director of Public Campaign, a reform group pressing for the legislation. "He believes in this stuff."
In introducing the legislation, Kerry said on the Senate floor, "Special interest money is moving and dictating and governing the agenda of American politics.... If we want to regain the respect and confidence of the American people, and if we want to reconnect to them and reconnect them to our democracy, we have to get the special interest money out of politics." He was also a backer of the better-known McCain-Feingold legislation, a more modest and (some might say) problematic approach to campaign reform. But over the years he's pointed to the Clean Money, Clean Elections Act as the real reform. "It is a tough position in Congress to be for dramatic change in financing elections," says Miller. "It's gutsy to go out and say, 'Let's provide a financially leveled playing field so there is more competition for incumbents.' Kerry and Wellstone were the leaders and took a giant step. It was remarkable."
After two decades in the Senate, Kerry has a long record that can be picked apart by competitors within his own party as well as in the GOP. And though he has been re-elected three times, he has not developed the best political skills. He has not shed a manner too easily criticized as aloof or patrician. He has had brushes with smarmy campaign financing. But there have been times he has shown courage, devotion to justice and commitment to honesty, open government and principle-over-politics. There are few senators of whom that can be said. A full assessment of the man ought to take these portions of his public service into account.Wednesday, March 03, 2004
DEAN UNDONE
There was always something not quite right about the whole thing, and we never could put our finger on it. This article explains a lot, and shows how no matter how much the little people wanted Howie to "give 'em hell", there was no way he was gonna win, not with all the kiddie power struggles, amateurish decisions, and ego feeding going on behind the scenes...
The Campaign's Hip, High-Tech Image Hid a Nasty Civil War
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 29, 2004; Page D01
The feuding and backbiting that plagued the Howard Dean campaign had turned utterly poisonous. Behind the facade of a successful political operation, senior officials plotted against each other, complained about the candidate and developed one searing doubt.
Dean, they concluded, did not really want to be president.
In different conversations and in different ways, according to several people who worked with him, Dean said at the peak of his popularity late last year that he never expected to rise so high, that he didn't like the intense scrutiny, that he had just wanted to make a difference. "I don't care about being president," he said. Months earlier, as his candidacy was taking off, he told a colleague: "The problem is, I'm now afraid I might win."
As Dean was swallowed by the bubble that envelops every major candidate, he allowed his campaign to sink into a nasty civil war that crippled decision-making and devastated morale. In the end, say some of those who uprooted their lives for him, these tensions hastened the implosion that brought Dean down.
The polarization revolved around two people: Joe Trippi, the rumpled, passionate, sometimes headstrong campaign manager who drew rock-star coverage in the press, and Kate O'Connor, the quiet, shrewd, low-profile Vermont confidante who never left Dean's side.
Trippi, 47, said it was "hard for a campaign manager to function" amid the "infighting" when he was constantly being undermined. He said O'Connor was trying to help Dean, "but there were two worldviews of what was best for him, and those two worlds kept colliding.
"We would have served the governor better if it hadn't existed, but it did, and it did play a role in our not making it. Those differences were a disservice to him. But he is the candidate and had a lot of say."
O'Connor, 39, joking about her "evil" reputation, said that "my mind boggles at some of this stuff. . . . You don't manage Howard Dean, and that was a problem for some people who came in and wanted to manage him. I understood that. Other people just didn't understand that. . . . You learn who the loyal people are. You learn who your friends are."
Interviews with more than a dozen Dean advisers -- portions of which were not for attribution because many did not want to be viewed as disloyal to their former boss -- produced a picture far different from the public image of a hip, high-tech operation of dedicated Deaniacs.
It was, instead, a dysfunctional political family, filled with tales of blocking access to the candidate, neutralizing internal rivals, trying to penalize reporters deemed unfriendly. And some of its members just plain despised each other.
The Discord Coalition
Every presidential campaign has an ambitious strategist, a James Carville or Karl Rove, pulling the strings back at headquarters, and an unassuming body man (or woman) traveling with the candidate, a loyalist who can read his moods, cater to his needs and watch his back. And there are often tensions between "the office" and "the road." For Trippi and O'Connor, the sparring began early and never let up.
When Dean, once dismissed as a gadfly candidate, was surging to the front of a crowded Democratic field in September, things came to a head.
O'Connor, according to a staffer who saw the e-mail, wrote a friend that she wanted to get rid of Trippi and that she felt like quitting herself except that she needed to protect Dean. This followed a clash in which Trippi and other top political advisers helped craft a major Boston speech in which Dean was to denounce special interests -- only to have him toss out most of the speech after O'Connor expressed her opposition.
O'Connor, who said she had "possibly" sent the e-mail but did not recall it, said Dean felt the speech wasn't suitable for a large rally. But she confirmed that she was "uncomfortable" with the campaign's move toward "harping on the special interests. . . . I thought it was not a message that was true to who Howard Dean was." While she offered her opinions, "the thought that I could manipulate him is just absurd."
In October, as much of the media and political establishment began to view the former governor as unstoppable, Trippi was so frustrated by the mounting strife that he threatened to resign, he and other officials confirmed. Trippi asked his campaign allies to join an "intervention" with Dean to get things changed, but they told him he was being unrealistic. Trippi's partner in a consulting firm, Steve McMahon, and his wife, Kathy Lash, a campaign aide, talked him out of quitting. But he made a pact with his wife that, win or lose, he would quit the day after the New Hampshire primary.
For all the low-level warfare between what was termed the "Washington faction" and the "Vermont faction," O'Connor does not believe the disagreements damaged Dean's effort. "Maybe I'm just naive," she said. "Maybe it did and I'm oblivious to the fact that it hurt the campaign."
Bob Rogan, the deputy campaign manager and, like O'Connor, a longtime Vermont aide to Dean, believes the criticism is overblown.
"While it's easy to blame the Vermonters, I'm not going to participate in the blame game," Rogan said. "It's ridiculous to think that Kate, Howard and I ran this into the mountain on our own."
Suspicious Minds
Back in 2002, there was just Howard Dean, an obscure small-state governor, and Kate O'Connor, who had managed his Vermont campaigns and was running the presidential effort out of her house.
Trippi, a national political veteran and Internet consultant whose Alexandria firm had handled Dean's Vermont advertising, signed on as campaign manager in February 2003.
Even when there were just a handful of staffers, Dean and Trippi had trouble seeing eye to eye. Trippi complained to others that the candidate -- and O'Connor, who was always by his side -- didn't trust him.
On a plane ride that spring, Dean asked Trippi about working out a contract for his salary and for his consulting firm to handle the advertising. As Trippi has recounted to several colleagues, he told Dean to deal with his partner McMahon because he didn't want a salary and wasn't doing this for the money. Dean's response, according to these accounts, was to tell another staffer that he would not give Trippi financial control of the campaign because "he doesn't care about money and I don't want anyone who doesn't care about money managing the money."
A pattern of suspicion and doubt had been set. When Trippi, who worked from a messy office with a beat-up couch in the Burlington, Vt., headquarters, had trouble reaching Dean on the road, he became convinced that O'Connor wasn't giving him the messages. O'Connor dismissed that complaint, saying, "Nobody who wanted to talk to the governor couldn't get to him."
Even the highest-ranking advisers found Dean resistant to changing his approach. Dean strategists say campaign chairman Steve Grossman repeatedly urged the candidate to talk about treating patients as a physician and expressed frustration that Dean never took the advice.
"Unfortunately Howard never took advantage of that unique quality and experience he had, that of being a doctor," Grossman said. Had Dean used more "personal examples" involving patients, it "would have humanized him and created more of an emotional link between him and the voters."
Trippi dispatched various aides to accompany Dean and O'Connor on the road, but problems developed each time. One said he was viewed as "Trippi's spy." Another said O'Connor would "kill" people she viewed as insufficiently loyal. A third said staffers were frightened of "the wrath of Kate." As fundraising surged and the campaign was rapidly expanding, Trippi tried to hire several seasoned pros but told colleagues that O'Connor had blocked his efforts.
"Completely false," said O'Connor. "I didn't meddle in hiring." She said Trippi refused to hire some people suggested by Dean, which Trippi confirmed.
But O'Connor saw herself as standing up for Dean. "If Washington people wanted to change a position, Kate would be the first one to say no, because she knows how long and how adamantly the governor held a particular position," said Sue Allen, Dean's longtime Vermont spokeswoman.
"She had the thankless job of keeping him on message. He's the kind of guy who will chat with somebody and change his opinion. She would control access, and that angers people. . . . She's a handy scapegoat."
David Bender, the New York senior deputy campaign director, said that when O'Connor complained about exhaustion and he suggested some time off, "she looked at me with a ferocity in her manner and voice and said: 'I know they want to get rid of me. . . . I will do this job if I have to do it from a hospital bed hooked up to an IV because I'm the only one who protects Howard. Everyone else wants something from him.' "
Spin Control
The internal struggle produced sharp disagreements about dealing with the legions of reporters who were investigating or traveling with Dean. The candidate and some of his advisers came to feel under siege by the media, while some correspondents were irritated by a campaign they viewed as not ready for prime time.
Dean's often testy relations with journalists were exacerbated, several officials said, by what one who spent time on the trail called O'Connor's "contemptuous attitude toward the press."
When Dean was to fly from New York to Detroit and back on a small charter, O'Connor turned down a request by New York Times correspondent Jodi Wilgoren to ride along, a campaign official said. At a luncheon, Wilgoren slipped Dean a note saying the staff's decision would prevent her from covering the Detroit event. Dean overruled the staff and allowed her on the plane.
"Kate didn't speak to me for a couple of weeks because I'd gone around her," Wilgoren said.
O'Connor said it wasn't her job to decide which journalists got on the plane. But she acknowledged her frustration with the coverage. "I stopped reading newspapers and watching television," she said, because many stories were "completely false."
Several officials say O'Connor helped stoke Dean's anger about articles viewed as negative, sometimes before public events. She "got him very worked up" about a Newsweek report on his finances before an Iowa debate, said one staffer who saw her read it on her laptop. Trippi told Dean by phone that the piece was tame.
Dean sometimes pressed Tricia Enright, the communications director, to complain to editors about negative stories by their reporters and say Dean would no longer deal with those reporters -- calls that Enright usually declined to make, two officials said.
Enright said she tried "to develop relations with the media." But Trippi said that "people like Trish Enright, who thought we should give more access to reporters, were seen as somehow soft on protecting the governor. You got a bad mark next to your name. . . . That created a schism. This was an overly protective group of people who thought they were protecting the governor but were hurting him."
While Trippi constantly bantered with reporters, he could lose his temper as well. When The Washington Post's Jim VandeHei wrote a story on Dean's misstatements -- filed on the night that he and Trippi had dinner and drinks -- Trippi sent word through an aide that neither he nor Dean would speak to him again.
In another incident that left tempers frayed, a Time story online quoted Dean from an interview as having said, "We won't always have the strongest military." According to an official who heard the discussions, Dean and O'Connor told Trippi, who was worried about damage control, that the candidate had never used those words and Trippi should explain that to the press. It turned out the Time reporter had recorded Dean's comment.
O'Connor called the matter "petty," saying she could not have disputed the quote because she wasn't there.
Even Trippi's admirers dubbed him the "mad scientist," a fast-talking, frenetic salesman who worked the phones all day and spent the wee hours answering bloggers on the campaign's Web site. But his detractors said he wasn't attending to the nuts and bolts of staffing and scheduling.
"Joe was a brilliant strategist, but he wasn't a manager," said an official sympathetic to O'Connor. "We all tried to fill in for Joe's shortcomings."
Enright's press operation also drew some internal flak, with detractors saying she held no morning message meeting and was slow in getting back to reporters. National spokesman Jay Carson said the campaign "got so big so fast that we weren't ready for a lot of the stuff that came down the pike."
Enright said her small staff, which she couldn't get permission to expand, was deluged with hundreds of calls a day. "We did the best we could with the resources we had," she said. "A lot of times it was triage."
"Everyone worked their heart out," McMahon said, "whether they had been around Howard a long time or a short time. The system that Howard set up and Howard liked was a lot of different people giving him a lot of different advice simultaneously. That's not necessarily the best way to run a presidential campaign, but it was the way he was comfortable with."
The strains of the campaign, meanwhile, were exacerbating Trippi's diabetes. On a June visit to California, his blood sugar level got so high that he lost his vision for several hours. But he disregarded medical advice and kept working around the clock.
Money and Myths
By the fall, the Dean operation was using its Internet savvy to raise more money than any Democratic campaign in history but was spending it almost as quickly. Trippi, who said he regrets some of the early spending on television ads, tried to stop what he saw as marginal expenses, such as the hiring of a communications director in Maine, the 11th state to vote. Trippi openly grumbled about Dean giving the financial authority to deputy campaign manager Rogan. He and two other senior officials said they were mystified that the amounts they were told they had in the bank would abruptly shrink by millions of dollars after spending decisions had been made.
"With 20/20 hindsight, the biggest mistake I made was not to demand ironclad authority over the budget and check-writing," Trippi said. "Bob Rogan is a really good person, one of the best I've met in politics, but he had never run a presidential campaign before and it made no sense to put him in that position."
Said Rogan: "The revisionist historians are hard at work. Together we made some mistakes, all of us. What I managed was the checkbook, not the spending decisions. . . . It's preposterous to suggest I was the one making those decisions unilaterally." He said Dean, Trippi, McMahon and pollster Paul Maslin were all involved, a point confirmed by McMahon.
Despite the sniping, Dean made the cover of Time and Newsweek, Trippi made the cover of the New Republic, and the Howard Dean phenomenon was taking the country by storm. Trippi seemed to be engaging in false modesty when he kept telling reporters, "The biggest myth in American politics is that Joe Trippi is running the Dean campaign." Few grasped at the time that he was sending a veiled message, and that he felt the campaign ship might soon hit an iceberg.
While he was talked out of quitting in October, Trippi clearly had never bonded with Dean.
"We talked a lot on the phone, but we never became best buds," Trippi said. "I respect him a lot more than I liked him. I think he respected me a lot more than he liked me."
The Schism Widens
Kate O'Connor knew about the Al Gore endorsement. Joe Trippi didn't. He blamed O'Connor. He also blamed Howard Dean.
It was early December, and Dean and Gore had agreed to keep quiet about the former vice president's plan to announce his support within days, fearing a premature leak. Trippi grew suspicious when staffers were asked to charter a large plane to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He asked Dean, who said someone would be endorsing him but he couldn't tell Trippi who it was. Trippi reminded him that he was the campaign manager. But Dean wouldn't budge.
The larger message was that O'Connor had known and the Washington faction had not. O'Connor said she was simply doing what Dean and Gore wanted. What no one knew was that this would be the high point and that the corrosive sense of mistrust would eat away at the campaign at the worst possible time.
Over the next six weeks, Dean's rivals escalated their attacks on his fitness for the White House, and he was hit by an avalanche of negative headlines. "Every media organization and reporter went after us because, you know, take down the front-runner," he told CNN.
But Dean also started making high-profile mistakes. After the seizure of Saddam Hussein, Dean's top political aides scripted a San Francisco speech in which the candidate would say that although his opposition to the Iraq war was unchanged, the capture was a victory for the American military. At the last minute, Dean added a line that the country was no safer, sparking a new controversy.
It was during this period that some senior officials became convinced that Dean wasn't serious about doing what it takes to win the White House, especially when he refused repeated requests to ask his wife, Judith Steinberg Dean, to make even an occasional campaign appearance. Dean did not respond to an interview request, but O'Connor believes he never wavered in his desire to be president.
Still, she said, "he didn't expect to be there" as the front-runner, and they were surprised at the intensity of the media barrage. "We never anticipated the constant getting beaten up over something every single day," O'Connor said.
But others felt the campaign should have been better prepared to play defense and that this contributed to the daily drip of damaging stories.
Senior officials, for instance, said they had never been able to gain access to the boxes of Dean records in O'Connor's garage or the files kept in her car trunk. Enright had reviewed tapes of Dean's appearances on a Canadian talk show from 1996 to 2002, but there was one tape she never got -- and NBC triggered a flap by reporting that Dean on that tape had disparaged the Iowa caucuses as "dominated by the special interests." The staff blamed O'Connor, who said she had never seen that tape and that the material in her Ford Focus was just news clips from Dean's gubernatorial days.
Campaign officials said they also tried to get O'Connor to dig out old National Rifle Association questionnaires completed by Dean. Enright was blindsided when the New York Times obtained one from a rival campaign, showing that Dean had opposed restrictions on owning assault weapons -- a contradiction of his current position.
When Dean, despite raising $40 million, finished third in Iowa on Jan. 19, he ripped up his prepared remarks and started yelling on his campaign bus, officials said, proclaiming that the message of taking on Washington's entrenched interests hadn't worked, that the grass roots were a mirage and had let him down.
Trippi told him the front-runner's weight Dean had complained about, because it was forcing him to measure every word, had been lifted from his shoulders, according to accounts from colleagues. Trippi said Dean should tell his supporters that he'd only just begun to fight.
Dean walked into the ballroom and began screaming the names of states he intended to win, finishing with a guttural "Yeaaahhhh!!" In the days that followed, O'Connor minimized the impact of that moment.
"We didn't get to see television because we were on the road all the time," she said. "We had absolutely no idea it was being played all the time."
Returning to Vermont, O'Connor maintained in a meeting with Hollywood activist Rob Reiner, who had flown in to advise Dean, that people were overreacting to the high-decibel speech and voters didn't care. Reiner was flabbergasted at this attitude -- he wondered whether the staff was "crazy" -- and expressed amazement that they hadn't moved faster to neutralize the issue, two participants said.
The warfare continued over Dean's message, the outsider-against-Washington-special-interests pitch that Trippi had developed in a PowerPoint presentation, tested in polls and, despite O'Connor's concerns, used to sell the candidate to major labor unions.
Dean's policy director, Jeremy Ben-Ami, declared in an e-mail: "The message of the campaign is simply no longer our campaign vs. the special interests. This is not what the governor wants to be saying -- or frankly what he ever really wanted to be saying."
Joe Drymala, the chief speechwriter who received the e-mail, resigned in protest. "I refused to believe it because I didn't want to," he said. "To believe that was to believe that Howard Dean was a fraud."
Ben-Ami said he was explaining that Dean "wanted his message to be at least equally focused on solutions and his record." But Trippi argued that John Kerry and John Edwards had beaten them in Iowa by stealing the message.
Trippi, who had been courting former Gore aide Roy Neel as an addition to the team, started hearing rumors that Neel might replace him. He told O'Connor and Rogan that he was prepared to leave and there was no need for whispered meetings about his future. They assured him there was no effort to dump him.
Something in Common
On Jan. 28, the day after Dean lost New Hampshire, Trippi had his bags packed, ready to quit. Kathy Lash says she confronted O'Connor and Rogan in their office, saying that they had lied to her husband for days and that this was no way to treat him after all he had done.
O'Connor insisted she knew nothing until Dean and Neel sealed the deal that morning. "There was no 'Get Joe out of here.' I know people don't believe that," she said. Rogan said he had known for a couple of days that Dean was courting Neel but that "the governor was hoping Joe could accept he needed some help with his management skills and would see it as a positive."
When Dean delivered the news that Neel was getting the top job, Trippi declined an offer to stay on in a secondary role. McMahon repeatedly told Dean he was making a mistake, but Trippi told him to sit down, that he didn't want to make things harder for the governor. When Trippi and his wife left the building, they were surrounded by photographers and concluded the story had been leaked.
Trippi returned to his farm on Maryland's Eastern Shore, having earned $165,000 through his consulting firm, and signed on as an MSNBC pundit. When Dean bowed out from the presidential race on Feb. 18, Trippi was driving to Washington and could only hear the speech on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, fuming as Limbaugh made disparaging remarks. Afterward, he fought back tears.
"I wouldn't have done it for anybody else," Trippi said. "He really did inspire me. . . . But it came to a point where I realized I couldn't make a difference in his campaign anymore."
O'Connor thanked her longtime boss at an emotional staff meeting that day. "I came into this campaign not because I wanted to work in the White House or be a television commentator or write a book," she said. "I did it because Howard asked me to help him. My loyalty is to Howard."
© 2004 The Washington Post CompanyTuesday, March 02, 2004
WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAY
From Hitler to Bush
Original article by Dr. Federico Fasano Mertens, editor of La República del Uruguay: http://www.diariolarepublica.com/2003/3marzo/especiales/separata_20030330.htm
Reply from the editor of La República del Uruguay to the US ambassador there, Martin Silverstein, who complained about the comparisons the newspaper had drawn between Hitler and Bush:
A few days ago I received a letter from Martin Silverstein, the US ambassador to Uruguay, accusing La República, a publication which I am honoured to edit, of "totally lacking any sense of journalistic integrity" by comparing George Bush, the president of his country, to Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of the Third Reich.
I have been unable to reply to him any sooner because the act of piracy which his country has committed, attacking a defenceless and close to disarmed country with the most formidable killing machine that the history of the world has ever known, has forced me to devote more than the usual amount of time to publishing special editions on the slaughter. I also found myself taken up by trying to convict US-trained uniformed torturers who had slandered me, a task which I have only recently been able to bring to completion.
Not long ago, when the ambassador visited me in my office, I remember saying to my colleagues that he was the most intelligent, perceptive and witty American ambassador I had ever met. "At last," I said, "a representative from the empire with whom you can exchange ideas, without being poisoned by the same tired, old clichés whenever you attend a meeting."
Unfortunately for the ambassador, however, his wisdom has not spared him the misfortune of having to represent the forty-third president of his nation, George Bush Jr.: a paranoid fanatic intoxicated by messianic passions and dimmer than a slug. A man drunk with power, as he was drunk with alcohol before—and legally condemned for it on 4 September 1976, for driving drunk at full speed. Admonished, too, by none other than the evangelist Billy Graham who told him, "Who are you, to think yourself God?". A militant for the Christian Right, the Texan, Southern Christian right that is. A racist in love with the death sentence, especially when it comes to African-Americans. All in all, the worst US president for over a century, the man who will unleash the greatest tragedies on his own people. The opposite of Homo Sapiens, the incarnation of Homo Demens.
And a misogynist, to boot, like any good racist. No one could forget the public humiliations he has put Laura Bush through. You can well imagine Laura Bush's embarrassment on hearing her husband's reply when asked by the press why she wasn't accompanying him on that day, "it's been raining and she's had to sweep the driveway to our Crawford ranch, we're expecting Jiang Zemin, the president of China, tomorrow".
His compatriot, the aged writer Kurt Vonnegut did not hesitate in calling him "the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'état leader imaginable".
But let's get to the heart of the matter. Let's leave the US ambassador with his sad misfortune of having to defend the most delirious resident the White House has ever known, and me with the honour of trying this man armed only with words.
The matter at hand is the comparison between Adolf Hitler and George Bush.
There are obvious differences. The first being that the war criminal, the murderer of the Jewish and Soviet peoples, won a resounding victory in the German elections, while the war criminal and murderer of the Iraqi people reached power fraudulently, in the biggest electoral scandal in US history.
From the theoretical point of view, the comparison between Bush and Hitler is correct. The scientists have described Nazism as a terrorist dictatorship of corporate expansionism. Bush, by putting himself beyond the law and invading a defenceless nation which it had not attacked in order to take over its oil wealth, the second largest on the planet, and then stating that other oil-producing nations will follow, comes close to the definition of a corporate terrorist dictatorship. Even though he may not like to admit it.
George Bush is a Nazi in his genes.
His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman and one of the proprietors of the Banking Corporation Union. Both companies played a key role in financing Hitler on his way to power in Germany. On 20 October 1942, the US government ordered the confiscation of Ranking Corporation Union, owned by Prescott Bush, and in addition seized the Dutch-US Trade Corporation and Seamless Steel Corporation, both administered by the Bush-Hamman Bank. On 17 November of the same year, Franklin Delano Roosevelt confiscated all assets of the Silesian American Corporation, again administered by Prescott Bush, for trading with the enemy. George's great-grandfather, God's warrior, Samuel Bush, father of the Nazi Prescott Bush, was the right hand man of the steel magnate Clarence Dillon and the banker Fritz Thyssen, who wrote a book called I Paid Hitler, joining the German Socialist Workers Party in 1931.
Should the ambassador have any doubts on the spurious alliance between the Bush family and Hitler, I would recommend he reads Victor Thorn's splendid essay. Thorn states: "An important part of the basis for the Bush family fortune was created by the help it offered Adolf Hitler. The current president of the United States, as his father (ex-director of the CIA, vice-president and president), reached the summit of the North-American political hierarchy because his grandfather, great-grandfather and their political family aided and abetted the Nazis". This without going into how the Bush family swindled and embezzled four-and-a-half million dollars from Broward Federal Savings in Sunrise, Florida, or the fraud of millions of savers at the Silverado Savings Bank (Denver, Colorado).
A Nazi great-grandfather, a Nazi grandfather, a father who wasn't able to be a Nazi because Hitler had already killed himself in the ruins of the Chancellery gardens, though he benefited from the ill-gotten gains of his ancestors.
But let us not condemn our homo demens for his evil genes.
Let us judge him only by his works. And let's compare. Just compare.
How does the ambassador believe that the delirious Austrian corporal reached the pinnacle of public power? Hitler reached power in clean elections, but then found that the Constitution of the Weimar Republic placed limits which his omnipotent desires refused to accept. He then plotted the burning of the Reichstag and in a single night was anointed the elector of war or peace.
Doesn't this sound familiar, Mr Ambassador?
The criminal demolition of the Twin Towers brought about the same mire as the burning of the Reichstag. Obviously, I am not about to be so bold as to join those who accuse the Bush warmongers of having orchestrated the massacre or of not stopping it when they learnt of its preparation. There is no conclusive proof for such an outrageous statement, though there are many signs of criminal negligence and huge suspicion which is only encouraged by strict censorship that is without precedent in modern US democracy. Some day, when the American people fully recover their freedom of information and investigate that black Tuesday morning of September 11, today corralled by a Patriot Act, approved with the single vote against of a woman, a symbol of national US dignity, we shall be able to find out why the many tell-tale signs of an impending large-scale assassination left throughout the country were ignored. We shall be able to learn why the Air Force jets took 80 minutes to intercept the hijacked planes, when it was known that the planes were hijacked and heading for Washington as soon as they took off from Boston and the manual lays down the procedure for the intervention of the Air Force within 5 minutes of a hijack.
We will be able to find out why the remains of the presumed plane that hit the Pentagon were hidden. We shall be able to learn why, according to the conservative Wall Street Journal, immediately after meeting in Washington with CIA director George Tenet, the head of the Pakistani secret services arranged for Islamabad to send one hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta in the US, the organiser of the New York Twin Towers suicide attack. The suspension of civil rights by the Patriot Act now prohibits the investigation of this frightening piece of information. We will finally be able to find out why 15 of the 21 commandos came from Saudi Arabia, the chief US ally in the Persian Gulf. There wasn't a single Iraqi onboard those planes. Not even accidentally.
Apart from all the suspicion, there is no doubt that the chaotic forty-third president of the US, anointed by fraudulent elections, in the middle of an impressive recession with no end in view, with the lowest initial approval ratings for a head of state, has moved on to dominate the stage by acquiring powers inconceivable in a democracy and been crowned the avenging Emperor that he may cleanse the affront the barbarians had infringed upon his people.
The American Burning of the Reichstag of September 11 gave George Bush the chance of a lifetime. The worst electoral victory of a US president since 1876 had turned into the best historical opportunity for a warmonger to impose a new US order on the world.
As in Hitler's case, the first thing he did was to surround himself with a clique of con artists such as himself, men obsessed with the intimidating power of force. Like Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Mengele, or Eichmann, the Texan president searched for the protective shell of an iron guard, often more war-like than himself to impede any temptation to doubt, and men of a common stamp: all oilmen. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, came from Halliburton Oil, the chief of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, from Occidental, another oil company, the National Security Advisor, the spinster Condoleeza Rice, whose name in Spanish by a twist of fate means "with sweetness", was on Chevron's board of directors and has oil tankers named after her. Then there's the Secretary of the Interior, Gale Norton, who is also linked to the oil industry, as is Bush Sr. with the Carlyle oil group, and the current president, Bush Jr. with Harkins Oil.
This quintet of death around warrior Bush, a true mafiocracy, as with the quintet who joined Hitler, were fed on a very special Bible. In this case the philosophies of Hegel, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, which formed and inflamed the inventor of the Holocaust of the 20th century, were replaced by less cultivated specimens who did not posses such an esteemed intellectual lineage, but who were more useful for the Hitler of the 21st century.
What is the bedtime reading of this gang of warmongers?
The Bostonian Henry Cabot Lodge asserting that "in the 19th century, no other people equalled our conquests, our colonisation or our expansion, nobody will stop us now". Marse Henry Watterson stated that the US "is a great imperial republic destined to exercise a determining influence on mankind and mould the world's future as no other nation has ever done before, not even the Roman Empire". Or Charles Krauthammer who not long ago, in 1999, declared in the Washington Post: "the US rides over the world like a colossus. Since the time that Rome destroyed Carthage, no other great power has reached the heights we have attained. The US has won the Cold War, Poland and the Czech Republic are in its pocket, and then it pulverises Serbia and Afghanistan. And, on the way, it has proved the non-existence of Europe". Or Robert Kaplan pointing out that "the US victory in the Second World War, as with Rome's victory in the Second Punic War, made it a universal power". Or the well-known historian, Paul Kennedy, explaining that "neither Pax Britanica, nor Napoleonic France, nor the Spain of Felipe II, nor Charlemagne's Empire, or even the Roman Empire could compare to the current US dominion. Never before has there been such a wide disparity in power on the world stage".
Or the director of the Olin Strategic Studies Centre of Harvard University, Professor Stephen Peter Rosen, stating that "our objective is not to fight a rival, as he doesn't exist, but to preserve our imperial position and keep imperial order".
Or the ineffable Zbigniew Brzezinski declaring that "the objective of the US should be to maintain our vassal states in a state of dependency, to guarantee the docility and protection of our subjects and to prevent the barbarians from uniting".
Or president Wilson declaring in the Union Congress that "I would teach the South American republics how to elect good representatives".
Or the famous Billy Sunday who defined a Latin American left-winger as "someone with a porcupine's snout and breath that would scare a skunk away", adding that if he could, "he would pile them all into prisons until their feet stuck out the windows".
Now listen to the current US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, who with Sweetness Rice form the belligerent triangle, more fearsome than the Bermuda Triangle.
Faced with this holy war, Cheney declared: "the US need not blush for being a great power. It has the duty to use force in order to create a world in the image of the US". The chief of the Pentagon put it more clearly, in case we failed to understand. Rumsfeld dixit, quoting Al Capone's favourite line: "You get more with a nice word and a gun, than with only a nice word."
This language which oozes from Bush's pores and brain is a dense, authoritarian, intimidating use of language which inevitably leads to morally perverting the ends to justify the means. The essential nature of the language used by the Bush gang, as with the language of the Nazis, is its simplification, reductionism and intimidation. This predatory group's language is a schematic, emotional language loaded with prejudices which inflame the people's noblest sentiments. I have no doubt that Bush feeds off the same source as Nazi language.
Like Hitler, Bush does not believe in the Rule of Law. This is not a State which possesses Laws, but a State which yields, of its own accord, to the rule of law and in no circumstances can it break the law, even less for reasons of State. Abominable crimes have been committed in the name of reasons of State, or the Homeland, or national security.
What differences can there be between the intellectual edifices created by Bush and Hitler when it comes to reasons of state? Not many I believe. Except for differences of style, age and magnitude of might and power.
The Bush clique's discourse is a discourse between master and slave. It is no different from the Hitler clique's discourse. One is friendlier than the other. Though history is showing us that the less friendly one was less lethal.
Civilisation, savagery, pacifying the barbarians, the chosen people and from there to the chosen race in a single step. In short, does this remind us of the psychopath with the moustache?
And talking of moustaches, the account given by an influential Washington security advisor to the Argentinean magazine Noticias is instructive: "For better or worse, George Bush Jr. is the most appropriate person for this war. He was born for it. He shakes with the power coming from within. When you're with him in his office he seems like he's about to eat up whoever is in front of him. He sits on the edge of his chair, almost without resting on it and moves his arms as if he doesn't know what to do with them. He needs action".
Now there's a good imitation of the gesticulating Nazi dictator. Though the phlegm of a Texan cowboy, with pistol in holster, is not the same as a semi-epileptic Teuton choking with rage and spitting out his words as he wildly gesticulates. Bush doesn't spit when he speaks. It's his soul that spits, hate and violence, generating terror. He couldn't care less. He must have learnt Caligula's "oderint dum metuant" ("Let them hate us, it's enough that they fear us").
Bush's emotional incontinence is already a classic and, like Adolf, he won't take NO for an answer. His wife, Laura Bush, once told the press that the first time she said she didn't like one of his speeches, he crashed his car against the garage wall in rage.
He comes across as a Nazi deity, an emissary of God, whom he summons whenever the opportunity presents itself. He has ordered all cabinet meetings to begin with prayer. And claims to have consulted God before attacking Iraq, dismissing the position of the majority of the planet's nations and 90% of mankind. He attempts to imitate president William McKinley invading the Philippines to bring the Gospel to the natives and blaming God for ordering him to invade the country against his will.
Another coincidence in these parallel lives, which would have pleased Plutarch no end, is that Hitler and Bush would have avoided entering the Hall of Fame for History's Buffoons if they had only had access to a decent psychoanalyst. A good psychoanalyst would have helped them both channel their libidos into more normal duties, and learning to control the only aphrodisiac they have ever known: cruel, all-embracing power over others.
Let's go on and look at other similarities between the warrior for the Aryan race and "God's warrior", as Telma Luzzani so perceptively calls the excitable Texan. Bush declares a pre-emptive war, urbi et orbe. In 1953, Dwight Eisenhower had no doubts on the matter: "Pre-emptive war was invented by Adolf Hitler. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't take anyone who came up with such a thing seriously".
But pre-emptive war against whom? It is a well known fact that truth is the first casualty of war. And the first thing Bush does to manufacture his pre-emptive war, after the burning of the Reichstag, is to lie like Goebbels in such an unsophisticated manner that nobody believes a word of it. First he said that Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda. When it was shown that there ran an irreconcilable hatred between Saddam Hussein and the ex-US-employee Osama Bin Laden, Bush appealed to have Iraq included on his list of Moslem fundamentalism. Difficult to believe in the most secular country in the Arab world. He then claimed there were weapons of mass destruction. Asserting that Iraq wouldn't allow inspections and, when it did, declaring that it wouldn't let the UN enter Saddam's palaces or any other protected places. When it was then revealed that this wasn't the case, the administration said that the weapons were well hidden. In the end, not a single weapon of mass destruction has been found. When all the arguments were well and truly buried, he insisted that Saddam Hussein should stand down or go into exile, while admitting the real truth: we want to occupy Iraqi territory, no matter what, and decide who will govern the country. Planetary democracy they call it. The very same disinformation campaign that Hitler launched against Czechoslovakia, Austria and Poland. The same excuses that would change as soon as they were overrun.
Another resemblance is the disdain for the international community and public world opinion. Hitler destroyed the League of Nations founded in 1919. Bush tore the United Nations to shreds, inciting the greatest opposition to a country since the founding of the UN: 170 nations did not support the war against the 30 that did, the majority lightweight states or the result of the break up of the Soviet Union, and ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder. Bush, like Hitler, was not stopped by the greatest defeat to US diplomacy since the founding of the UN. Hitler was never concerned about the hate and condemnation he generated in people's hearts. Bush hopes to surpass the Teuton. The mass demonstrations without precedent on the face of the planet are war-drums to Bush's Wagnerian ears. He is faced with the spirit of Seattle which, in 1999, founded the most important pacifist, anti-globalisation movement of all time. Nothing stops him.
It was outrageous to see the rudeness meted out to the UN chief of inspectors, Hans Blix: a man with 75 years on his back, born in frozen yet wonderful Uppsala in social-democratic Sweden, an honourable follower of the democratic traditions passed down by the martyr Olof Palme.
Disdain for people and their rights is the driving force behind their "humanism". Listen to Marshall Goering in the Nuremberg trials: "It is natural for the common people to not want war but, after all, it is a country's leaders who determine policy and it is an easy matter to convince the people. Whether they have a voice or not, the people can always be made to do what their rulers wish. It's easy. All you have to do is tell them they are under attack and condemn the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for exposing their country to danger". It was Goering the Nazi who said this in 1945, not George Bush. The difference is that the Nazi said this in German and Bush says it in English. The invasion of a sovereign country that has not attacked you requires ethical though illicit legitimacy: toppling the tyrant Hussein and imposing a popular democratic government through blood and fire. It sounds nice, though the price to pay may go against the international community and its regulations. But this is not necessarily so. Nobody doubts that Saddam Hussein is an evil dictator who has murdered his own people and that there is nothing socialist about his Baath party. But who is going to believe that Bush is about to install an Iraqi democracy when his predecessors, less Nazi than he, have for years and years invaded and occupied sovereign nations and established ferocious dictatorships which they defended in the face of popular opposition; Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti, Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. Just like the despotic, puppet regimes which the Nazis imposed on the countries they occupied, including the anti-Gaullist France of Marshall Petain.
Just as Hitler invaded Europe in search of his Lebensraum, for the purposes of territorial expansion, the urgent need for raw materials required for German growth and the construction of a new German empire that would avenge the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, Bush is also looking for his own Lebensraum. A Lebensraum which, in today's globalised world, is no longer measured in terms of kilometres of physically occupied territory but in economic and political domination wielded from distant international financial centres.
The objectives of the new Hitler are many. In the first place, to take over the gas tank of world capitalism, which is none other than the Persian Gulf. Bush knows full well that the oil produced by his country, the motor driving the production of the world economy, will inevitably be exhausted within 10 years. In 40 years there will be no more oil left on the planet. It's a race against time. According to the Statistical Review, the discovery of new energy reserves is falling off alarmingly. These have grown by only 5% in the last decade, compared to 45% in the decade before. Sixty-five per cent of the reserves are located in the Middle East. The US consumes 20 million barrels a day, compared to the 77 million produced each day throughout the world, of which only 10 million is produced by the North-Americans who therefore depend on the rest of the world so they can go on being an imperial power. The purpose of attacking Iraq, the world's second largest reserve of petroleum, is to control these deposits, control its price and control its production. It's nothing to do with hidden weapons or anything else. As Galeano says, if Iraq produced radishes instead of oil, who would even consider invading the country?
For Bush, the oil is on a plate. All he has to do is take it. It's just that he just doesn't know how easily he could choke on it.
Bush's second game plan is to discipline his ally Saudi Arabia, the world's number one oil producer and largest energy reserve, whose pricing policy is of little value to US interests. The third aim, as revealed by the undersecretary of state, John Bolton, last February, is to invade Iran and Syria, which together with North Korea form the "Axis of Evil". And, if winds are favourable, why not include Libya in the Holy of Holies? The fourth step is to destroy OPEC and control the world's fossil fuels. If it doesn't expropriate these and find alternatives in time, North-American capitalism will be forced to change its model of national consumption, and with it perhaps lose the fulcrum of its global hegemony. The fifth aim is the succulent bandwagon business of reconstructing Iraq, onto which are leaping many of the 500, mainly US, multinationals dominating the world. No less important is the sixth objective, which lives off the teachings of Lord Keynes; using the war industry to pull the US economy out of the deep zero-growth recession which it is in. Let's not forget that winning a war is not about imposing one's military supremacy over an adversary, but being able to reap the financial returns thereof, the reason why it was unleashed in the first place.
I cannot help bringing up one last aim, which is perhaps the most important one of all in this war: imposing the supremacy of the dollar over the euro, which has recently been giving the dollar a thrashing on unexpected fronts, and threatened the privileged position of the US in the crude oil market. Over the last few months, the dollar has been falling in relation to the euro, some 17%, figures that would have been hard to believe when the single European currency was set up. Part of this fall is due to the Iraqi decision to transfer 10 billion dollars of its reserves to the common European currency. This is another reason to attack Iraq: to persuade a puppet government of its liking to return Iraq's 10 billion dollars to the dollar area. Russia is also operating in petroeuros, and Iran and several other OPEC countries are considering whether to abandon the dollar and adopt the euro. Should this happen, the economists believe that the dollar will go through an unwonted depreciation, US share prices will plunge, and will generally bring the clay-footed giant to the brink of a financial collapse similar to the one it went through in the 'thirties.
The root cause of this invasion lies in the need to create a new redistribution of the planet's wealth after the failure of the triad accords (US, Europe and Japan) at the Paris OECD meeting in 1998, and the 1999 WTO meeting in Washington. No agreement was reached on how to share out a world market besieged by a diminished percentage of the Gross World Product, of which only 50% was in the hands of the triad and its multinationals at the end of the century. The inability of neoliberalism to maintain a maximum rate of exploitation of dependent nations, the fatigue and decadence of unipolar hegemony and the not-too-distant possibility of a world crisis which would transform today's arrogant domination into a tyranny in tatters, are the roots of this act of international piracy.
Europe did not accept the terms of the share out and steamed ahead with the Euro. The US is responding with the subtlety of a bull. If it gets hold of the black lakes it will have as much cheap oil as it wants, while its allies will be forced to pay top dollar for a few drops, to the detriment of their economies.
That's the war plan. The same reasons for economic dominance that threw Hitler in the arms of Mars, with a cry of "occupy, administer, exploit". From there to Bush actually accomplishing his mission is a long stretch. Especially when you bear in mind that the only one picking up the bill for this war is the US. The last invasion of Iraq, legitimised by the international community, was financed by all nations. This illicit invasion, a crime against humanity that challenges the civilised world, will be paid for solely by the US, with only a small percentage coming from the England of renegade Blair. And it's a lot of money. Enough to further destabilise the proud owner of the little machine used for printing dollars and sitting in the Department of the Treasury of the most highly indebted nation on the face of the planet: the United States of America.
Once the real objectives had been drawn, Bush and his band of hawks patented the Nazi military strategy: the famous Blitzkrieg which the Nazis used to devastate Europe, lightning war combining attacks by whole divisions of Panzer tanks supported by waves of aircraft and artillery pieces. Times change and the Nazi blitzkrieg has become the US hyperblitzkrieg, but the style of fighting invented by Hitler's marshals is the same as that used by Bush, though with one thousand times greater firepower.
Another similarity is the disproportion of forces. The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, or Poland where the Polish cavalry facing German tanks was decimated beforehand by the planes. This was nothing compared to the infernal firepower of the most powerful technological meat-grinder in history. It's as if the Poles had been armed only with slingshots to defend themselves from Goering's Luftwaffe. In the first invasion of Iraq, the Iraqis suffered 120,000 casualties compared to 137 US dead and 7 missing in action. With the exception of Saddam's Republican Guard, the rest of the Iraqi army consists of starving peasants without training, technology or suitable weapons, all facing three hundred thousand soldiers who have been trained to kill with not a moment's hesitation.
What can a country with a military budget of 1,400 million dollars do against another which has invested $400,000 million per annum in its armed forces? And as if that weren't enough, Bush has just asked for a further 75,000 million dollars in spare change for this massacre. In exchange he promises that the spoils of war will far exceed the initial investment involved.
Before the slaughter began, the Iraqi army was bled in the same way as a bull is bled by the picadors when it goes into the bullring so that the bullfighter can have an easier job of it. A decade of economic sanctions, embargoes, a lack of spare parts, no planes, a limited number of tanks, few anti-aircraft batteries and an army equipped only with old AK-47 assault rifles, have driven the Iraqi bull on its knees. The bullfighter need only drive the sword down to the hilt and wait for the death throes.
Bled though it may be, the latest news from the front indicates that the bull is ready to sell its life at a high price.
The Viennese tramp-cum-prophet-of-the-Aryan-race, Adolf Hitler, plunged ahead showing no respect for mankind's treasures, destroying wondrous cities, assailing unrecoverable peoples and their culture and fabulous monuments created by the hand of man over the centuries.
Acting like the chosen son, George Bush bursts into the cradle of mankind spitting blood and fire, Mesos Potamos as Iraq was called eight thousand years ago, the "land between the rivers", where the first state was created, the first agrarian civilisation flourished and cuneiform writing was invented. In the land of the legendary library of Niniveh, the Tower of Babel, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, Bush launches mercilessly into the first pre-emptive war of the 21st century.
He will also have to answer for the cultural treasures he destroys. His homo demens will have to render account to homo sapiens. Just like Hitler was forced to succumb to history and his henchmen to the Nuremberg Trials.
The US ambassador to Uruguay, in his communiqué to LA REPUBLICA, claims to be astounded by the comparison of his president to Hitler, explaining that what Bush is doing in Iraq is precisely what the US did when it liberated Europe from Nazism. I believe it is an insult to intelligence to compare the brilliant creator of the New Deal, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with this power-crazed lunatic who, in the name of ideals, kills ideals, and with people inside them still. Roosevelt went to war legitimised by all the nations then facing Nazi barbarity, first among them the Soviet people who offered up the lives of thirty million of their best men, women and children on the altar of the German Moloch, people who gave their lives to change the course of the war, till then victorious for the Third Reich.
Bush is like Hitler, not Roosevelt. Bush violates all international law, challenges the United Nations and invades an almost disarmed nation that has at no time attacked it, just like Hitler.
In any case, when you consider statements like the US liberating Europe or the heroic surrender of the lives of American soldiers in the war against the German Führer, it would be good to remember that the US entered the conflagration very late, almost at the end of the conflict, when Germany had been worn down by the Soviet resistance which, alone, faced 95% of the Nazi war machine ranged along the eastern front. The US was the only beneficiary of the Second World War. During and after the conflict. During, as Heinz Dieterich well describes in LA REPUBLICA, because it was able to develop its industry and agriculture far from the battlefields, which led to real income rising 27% between 1941 and 1945, generating seventeen million new jobs and, by 1944, offering its population more products and services than before the war.
After the war it charged ten to one for its involvement. Yalta saw it rise to become the strongest power on the planet, shunting England to one side, though fearing the Soviet Union, its new historic counter-weight.
And, though I say that it would be an insult to compare Bush to Roosevelt, we should also not confuse the Founding Fathers of American democracy, heroes of freedom such as Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, with this instructor of crime, a mobster of death, who is incapable of camouflaging the skulking gestures typical of cowards whenever he appears on television. Charles De Gaulle, the valiant rebel of anti-Nazi France, once asked the great philosopher Jean Guitton, "What is cowardice, master?". And the source of wisdom replied, "Cowardice, General, is seeking approval and not the truth, decorations and not honour, promotion and not service, power and not the health of humanity". How well would our new Hitler, who claims to defend the human rights of the Iraqi people while he specialises in making them human waste, do against this measure?
How can we be surprised by this behaviour in a leader who refuses to save the planet from devastation and sign the Kyoto protocols, unanimously approved by the international community. A leader who has rejected bacteriological arms control because he believes that agreeing to prevent the proliferation of these arsenals would be prejudicial to his country. A leader who demands that independent countries sign a document in which they relinquish their right to judge US citizens for crimes committed abroad. A leader who refuses to sign up to and take part in the International Criminal Court, recently created by the world community to judge crimes against humanity. This rejection of an institution approved by more than 190 countries, with only 7 against, coincides with the similar rejection by recently invaded Iraq, who also did not want to see an International Criminal Court made up of 18 independent lawyers that could legally hinder the continued presence of war crimes, committed by both the US and Iraq.
What do you expect from a leader who in his own country, the cradle of democratic tradition, has suspended civil rights, has introduced censorship, black lists, done away with habeas corpus (a right for which so many generations have given their lives), imposed clandestine trials, secret jails and made having an opinion a crime, taking his country back to the black night of the most backward McCarthyism.
Against all odds, in the middle of a huge intellectual void in American society, he has created a silent majority in favour of the horrors of war, a state of mind driven by disinformation, his method being to distort reality and play on the legitimate pain of the criminal attack on the Twin Towers—which cut down the lives of four thousand human beings— and a nationalism intentionally whipped up by this hypocrite in the White House. Nationalism and false patriotism are other links which unite Bush and Hitler. This form of nationalism is the scoundrel's last refuge and thrives on ignorance.
Albert Einstein described it well: "Nationalism is a children's disease, the measles of mankind".
However, a people's movement is beginning to rise up, from the feet up, from the roots, in the best civic traditions of the American people. People are standing up in the large cities, driven by the moral certainty created by common sense, an attempt to halt this serial murderer as he unleashes the greatest warmongering injustice of the last few decades.
Though slowly at first, the American people are beginning to understand that "freedom can not be brought into existence by people whose brows are stained with blood".
Who will have the guts to stop this psychopath? It's a question the whole planet is asking itself.
The United Nations could not. Nor could NATO. The European allies were snubbed and humiliated.
However, from the depths of history itself, the antidote is beginning to brew. All empires and their prophets have moved from victory to victory to their final downfall. And this empire and its emperor, who care so little for winning the hearts and minds of the world's nations, who is deaf or feigns dementia in the face of the immense rebellion of common sense, in the face of this resounding howl rising from the exasperated throats of the multitudes that have taken to the streets throughout the world clamouring for peace and an end to the slaughter, will, in the end, have no other choice but to accept that the winner of this crusade will be left picking through the ruins.
Men like Bush believe that crimes are easily swept under the carpet. Wrong. They come back to haunt us.
People are sick of violence. Sick of petty vendettas that pitch groups against one another. They want to see an end to the days of murderers. And if they are led up the garden path, they will react.
The sinister dialogue between master and slave nearly always ends in the ferocity of the slave as he has nothing to lose. Spartacus dixit.
The protests in every corner of the planet do not cease. There has never been an empire so lacking in support as the one today incarnated by this power freak.
But this immense world movement against Bush, only comparable to the world movement against Hitler, has one thing in its favour: the classic cockeyed view of the new messiahs which prevents them from clearly seeing the truth. To be cockeyed is a vicious condition of the eyes where the two visual axes can not hold the same subject at the same time. Reality is then distorted.
The murmur of millions can then become the weapon that stops this madness.
We need not fear these giants who ignore the laws of history. They use cunning more than intelligence, sending them back to the age of dinosaurs, those gigantic animals who developed an enormous body, and a minuscule head. When disaster struck their small heads were incapable of inventing the necessary mutation. Mosquitoes had no trouble.
There's a German saying referring to Hitler which says, "when you see a giant, first look at the position of the sun, make sure you're not looking at the shadow cast by a dwarf". We still cannot say how much of the giant and how much of the dwarf there is in our new Hitler.
Remember Gandhi, that moral incendiarist who alerted our consciences. Just his voice and peaceful bearing brought the greatest empire of its age to its knees.
Gandhi used to say that the most appalling thing about the evil deeds perpetrated by evil people was the silence of good people. Today, this silence does not exist.
At the beginning of the 21st century, all nations, rich or poor, whether governed by the right or by the left, everyone, everyone, with the exception of those living in the land of the aggressor—who are only now beginning to awaken from their slumber—, are aware that war as an irrational crusade is capable of changing mankind. We know that unjust war is a catastrophe which stunts the possibility of man discovering his humanity. We join our planetary hands to tell the hired assassin in the White House that there is a life and a breed of man less sordid than he, and that we are ready to stand up and defend it. This is my reply, Mr Ambassador.
Dr. Federico Fasano Mertens, editor of LA REPUBLICA.
Montevideo, Uruguay, 30 March 2003