WOW…In theory, Bush and his minions have destroyed the concept of America. And Lincoln so foolishly prophesied that a government of the people,by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The civil war cannot be prevented. Once you have promised people that you will place them above the law, they cannot be stood down. The end game will play out precisely as it did in Rwanda, through mass action, neighbor against neighbor.

Iraq was never about Iraq. It was an allegory and a dress rehearsal. The Iraqi people are neither beneficiaries nor victims. They are not even spectators: they are scenery. That is the real moral horror of Iraq. That is also why the loss of Iraqi lives does not trouble Mr. Bush: they weren’t really “lives” to begin with.

…AND NEITHER ARE WE. Never lose sight of the fact that the end game is civil war here in America.

Totalitarianism is always and everywhere the same. Historians make two mistakes: they focus on the local differences between totalitarian regimes, and they focus on the charismatic leaders. But the differences are never significant, and the leaders are nonce figureheads who originate nothing.

Here is how totalitarianism goes. The order in which things happen is extremely important and usually misconceived.

First you decide to kill people.

Then you decide WHICH people to kill, AFTER deciding to kill SOMEBODY: Jews, kulaks, niggers, faggots, liberals, whatever.

Then you decide WHY to kill them, AFTER deciding whom to kill. This is where the pseudo-philosophies come in.

Then you decide which Church or Party to join to move you closer to the opportunity to do the killing. The Church or the Party probably has a charismatic leader figure, but he is merely the penguin droppings on the tip of the iceberg.

I doubt if he will ever see the inside of the Hague, but censure and impeachment should definitely be in his future. Please.

I always felt there was more than a little twitchy-eyed Michael Corleone “You tried to kill my pop, now you have to die” in Bush’s true reasons for invading Iraq. That much I can visualize. Ick.

The WMD issue is bullshit on its face, given that Blix had made two reports stating compliance and no WMD to the UN in the weeks before Bush wrote Congress saying the only way to protect us from Iraq was to invade.

As for protecting Saddam, Amnesty International wrote prior to the invasion: ” Once again, the human rights record of a country is used selectively to legitimize military actions.”

USA/Iraq : Not in the name of human rights

http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE140092002?open&of=ENG-IRQ

Finally, a lot of people before the invasion and since have raised security for Israel as a reason we went to war. Even Fox News has repeatedly stated that Saddam supported terrorism by giving financial aid to the families of suicide bombers.

On the one hand I have trouble believing that the Israelis weren’t smart enough to realize that invading Iraq was going to be a disaster, probably resulting in a civil war, a break up into 2 or 3 smaller states, Shiites with close ties to Iraq, instability and possibly war between Turkey and the Kurds, and Sunni Arab anger at the dispossession of Sunni Arabs.

Is that what Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing believes is in Israel’s best interests? It’s not like they weren’t aware of these likelihoods, as Juan Cole and others were writing about this from the beginning.

And I really doubt that we invaded without some serious conversations with Mr. Sharon. He had to sign off on this, or the pro-Israeli lobby in the U.S. would have been howling.

So I’m left with the final impression that either Sharon stupidly agreed to a disastrous policy, or he believes that instability in the Middle East favors Israel (whose ex-commandos are training Kurds, btw).