Fw: [ANSWER]: What to expect from Bush

["Nello Margiotta" <animarg at tin.it>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "A.N.S.W.E.R." <answer.general at action-mail.org>
To: <answer.general at action-mail.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2002 6:44 AM
Subject: [ANSWER]: What to expect from Bush


 WHAT TO EXPECT FROM BUSH
 
 Frustrated that Iraq appears to be cooperating with the 
 United Nations' intrusive weapons inspections, the Bush 
 Administration is rushing this week to proclaim that the 
 so-called disarmament effort has failed: that inspections 
 are an empty effort and the 12,000 page Iraqi declaration 
 is insufficient.
 
 It is urgent that the anti-war movement not be lulled into 
 a false sense of optimism because Iraq and the UN are 
 cooperating. Various governments are reporting that they 
 are hopeful that the inspections process can help avoid 
 war. UN General Secretary Kofi Annan went out of his way 
 to say that war is not inevitable.
 
 However, the extent to which the world is voicing cautious 
 optimism about a peaceful solution, is also the extent to 
 which the Bush foreign policy team is racing to dash all 
 hope for such an outcome. There is now an almost perfect 
 inverted ratio between the worldwide clamor for restraint 
 and peace and the Bush Administration's eagerness to 
 publicly announce that war is certain.
 
 By the end of this week, we can expect that Bush will try 
 to announce that Iraq has failed to come clean about its 
 purported weapons program. Then the war mobilization can 
 go onto automatic pilot and the gauntlet will be thrown 
 down to the vacillators: "Are you with Us or Them?" In so 
 doing, the White House will inadvertently reveal a truth 
 known to all objective observers of this conflict -- that 
 the disarmament of Iraq was never really the issue. The 
 nuclear scare was to keep Americans frightened of the 
 "enemy" as the Bush Hawks frantically prepared to wage 
 aggression against a country that possesses 10% of the 
 world's known oil reserves.
 
 The administration has a real objective and a stated 
 objective. The real objective is to wage war against Iraq 
 and conquer and occupy that country. To do so requires 1) 
 overwhelming force and 2) the elimination of dissenting 
 opposition that can derail Bush's dreams of empire. The 
 U.S. has massive force. But it has encountered formidable 
 opposition from people around the world and in the United 
 States. So, the Bush administration shifted its claimed 
 objective from regime change to disarmament, a much more 
 palatable purported objective for public distribution and 
 one that can be embraced by even those who support peace.
 
 The White House wants to get the people of the U.S. behind 
 this claimed objective of "disarmament." Once having done 
 so, the administration can insist that the mechanisms in 
 place for the purported disarmament have failed, or cannot 
 accomplish the task, and that military might is necessary.
 
 There is only one reason that makes the war drive rapidly 
 escalate in the face of the apparent success of the new 
 inspections process: The Bush Administration has never 
 intended the "inspections" process to serve as anything 
 but a trigger for war. This is why the Iraqi cooperation 
 with the inspection process and disclosure has failed to 
 produce even the slightest slowing in the preparations for 
 war and, in fact, has seemed to produce an escalation in 
 the rhetoric from Washington, including recent policy 
 statements confirming Bush's plans for first-use 
 deployment of nuclear weapons. The Washington Post 
 reported that a classified version of the new Bush 
 Doctrine "breaks with the fifty years of 
 counter-proliferation efforts" by planning for the use of 
 nuclear weapons against countries that not only have not 
 attacked the US but that do not themselves possess nuclear 
 capability ("Preemptive Strikes are Part of U.S. Strategic 
 Doctrine," front page, December 11, 2002).
 
 These signals from the White House and Pentagon provide no 
 basis for optimism to believe that the war has been 
 averted. The inspections process, whose true purpose is 
 solely to serve as a trigger for war, at the moment is not 
 providing the political cover that Washington needs to 
 attack Iraq and seize its oil and land.
 
 The warmongers in the Bush Administration will need now to 
 manufacture other circumstances to justify an attack and 
 occupation of Iraq.
 
 The Bush Administration rammed Resolution 1441 through the 
 Security Council for one reason: to provide the diplomatic 
 fig leaf for a US war. To the extent that the process 
 serves as a political restraint, Bush and Co. will scuttle 
 the process.
 
 The Administration now needs a new trigger. It will use 
 the resolution 1441 to create an obvious source of 
 provocation. The U.S. forced language into the resolution 
 that would allow for the forcible removal of Iraqi 
 scientists, government officials, and their families and 
 children to be held incommunicado in other countries and 
 interrogated by U.N. inspectors.
 
 The U.S. wants to abduct Iraqi officials and interrogate 
 them planning that by threat or bribe one will help create 
 the trigger that the U.S. desperately needs and the 
 "evidence" that the U.S. has long claimed to have but has 
 never put up. One need only remember the Gulf of Tonkin 
 resolution, the Pentagon Papers, or even the lie 
 manufactured about the Iraqi army throwing babies out of 
 incubators (put in cite) to judge the quality of results 
 likely produced by this effort.
 
 In the New York Times for December 16, 2002, William 
 Safire urges that Iraqi scientists should be visited at 
 home, removed to other countries by helicopter on the 
 spot, and be threatened that they must provide the right 
 answers in order to "ameliorate sentences at war-crimes 
 trials." And of course, any failure of Iraq to facilitate 
 these abductions will itself be considered "material 
 breach" of the Security Council resolution.
 
 There is really only one restraint that can block the war. 
 It lies within the people themselves. Neither Congress nor 
 the Security Council will stop Bush's dangerous war drive. 
 The optimism of the antiwar forces must be premised on 
 reality. If we can mobilize the millions - in the US and 
 around the world - and ignite a firestorm of activism then 
 the political climate can be changed, and changed 
 dynamically.
 
 Public opinion is Bush's enemy. Time is also an enemy for 
 the warmakers. With each passing the day antiwar momentum 
 grows. The global desire for a peaceful outcome is 
 considered subversive because from that sentiment can 
 emerge a potent mass movement - as happened during the 
 Vietnam era.
 
 With the cooperation of the Corporate-owned media, the 
 White House has attempted to create a false myth of 
 consensus about the war. False polls, false reports and 
 non-stop propaganda have filled the airwaves so that the 
 American people will be paralyzed and confused. Yet people 
 all over the country are talking to their neighbors, 
 co-workers, fellow students, and congregations and 
 learning that they too oppose Bush's war, that there is, 
 in fact, widespread, deep, and passionate opposition to 
 the war.
 
 When hundreds of thousands marched on October 26th, the 
 same corporate media tried to whiteout the sudden 
 emergence of this movement. But they were confronted by 
 overwhelming demand for truth from people across the 
 country and some were forced to correct their coverage.
 
 The peoples movement continues to grow by leaps and 
 bounds.
 
 On January 18, massive protest will again fill the streets 
 of Washington DC and San Francisco. Thousands of cities, 
 towns, college campuses, high schools, religious and civil 
 rights organizations are mobilizing together.
 
 The scenario for January 18th includes a brief rally on 
 the West side of the Capitol Building in Washington DC 
 starting at 11 am, followed by a massive march to the 
 Washington DC Navy Yard -- a massive military installation 
 located in a working class neighborhood in Southeast 
 Washington DC that parks warships on the Anacostia River. 
 We will demand the immediate elimination of US weapons of 
 mass destruction and a people's inspection team will call 
 for unfettered access and a full declaration of U.S. 
 non-conventional weapons systems.