by Paul Craig Roberts
The most important casualties of Sept. 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq was based on the deliberate suppression of fact. The invasion was not the result of mistaken intelligence. It was based on deliberately concocted "intelligence" designed to deceive the U.S. Congress, the American public, and the United Nations.
In an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC News, General Colin Powell, who was secretary of state at the time of the invasion, expressed dismay that he was the one who took the false information to the UN and presented it to the world. The weapons of mass destruction speech, he said, is a "blot" on his record. The full extent of the deception was made clear by the leaked top secret "Downing Street memos."
Two and one-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the U.S. Congress and the American people still do not know the reason Iraq was invaded. The U.S. is bogged down in an expensive and deadly combat, and no one outside the small circle of neoconservatives who orchestrated the war knows the reason why. Many guesses are rendered – oil, removal of Israel's enemy – but the Bush administration has never disclosed its real agenda, which it cloaked with the WMD deception.
This itself is a powerful indication that American democracy is dead. With the exception of right-wing talk radio, everyone in America now knows that the invasion of Iraq was based on false information. Yet, 40 percent of the public and both political parties in Congress still support the ongoing war.
The CIA has issued a report that the war is working only for Osama bin Laden. The unprovoked American aggression against Iraq, the horrors perpetrated against Muslims in Abu Ghraib prison, and the slaughter and mistreatment of Iraqi noncombatants, have radicalized the Muslim world and elevated bin Laden from a fringe figure to a leader opposed to American hegemony in the Middle East. The chaos created in Iraq by the U.S. military has provided al-Qaeda with superb training grounds for insurgency and terrorism. Despite overwhelming evidence that the "war on terror" is in fact a war for terror, Republicans still cheer when Bush says we have to "fight them over there" so they don't come "over here."
If fact played any role in the decision to continue with this war, the U.S. would not be spending hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars to provide recruits and training for al-Qaeda, to radicalize Muslims, and to destroy trust in the United States both abroad and among its own citizens.
FULL ARTICLE : America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup
