These are some thoughts of a good friend of mine who's father was a Marine. I thought I'd share them here.


"You had best not mock the death of United States Marines.

They are committed unto their deaths, if necessary, to protect and defend the United States. They are trained to carry out their orders, not to question them. They are the finest soldiers on the face of the Earth, and they deserve our respect and support.

The fact that they are commanded by a self-serving imbecile who would spill their blood recklessly to invade a nation that never attacked us on the other side of the planet isn't their fault.

Real patriots oppose this senseless war. Our brave men and women in our armed forces deserve a real commander who would never use them to further his own personal and political agenda. Bush has used the blood of our servicemen and women to ensure Republican control of the legislature. He ought to be impeached.


The best and most meaningful way to support the troops is not to use them in this way."
xxxxxxxx: Patriotism isn't anything that the neocons can claim as their own
xxxxxxxx: The real thing is scary enough! (Bush's Legacy)
yyyyyyyyy: true


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"Question Authority"

"It's A Patriotic Thing
You Wouldn't Understand"


"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)

THERE IT IS !!!!!!

As this 'from a friend' letter above reports, we now exist in a fake American democracy under a fake corrupt regime that is supported by many in the military who are neconically brainwashed! This is the Bush mentality that has replaced good common sense in America when at a time in our early lives, true patriotism for a proper democracy existed. The article below explains how Bush democracy works today.

What is most troubling about President Bush's focus on spreading democracy worldwide is that American democracy is hurtling towards becoming a fake democracy – and perhaps has already become one.



http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?f...nder%20Reported


The Bush Doctrine Paradox

January 23, 2005

First, consider the long-standing axiom that democracies do not start wars. Supposedly it supports the “Bush doctrine” of seeking democracy in all other nations so that Americans have greater peace. But through preemptive wars like the one we started in Iraq? If so, the U.S. is a fake democracy. Now, I understand Bush logic. War in the pursuit of others’ democracy is as justified as war in defense of our democracy. And all the people who voted for Bush understood this? And all the men and women serving and dying in Iraq, and their families, support this doctrine?

Second, understand the Bush II administration’s effectiveness at eroding American democracy through distraction of its citizens. For the 2004 election, never have so many Americans voted so eagerly for a president that has failed so miserably. The war on terror succeeded as a distraction for time-poor Americans getting their information from corporate-corrupted mainstream media. So millions of Americans looked away from a foolish and failing Iraq war, from an economy being decimated by huge budget and trade deficits, from corporate greed imposing terrible impacts by exporting American jobs, from the invasion of illegal immigrants offering lower costs to business, and from a world made more insecure because of Bush’s war on terrorism.

The latest Bush distraction is his emphasis on exporting democracy at the very time U.S. democracy looks more like a fake democracy. Which raises the question: When does a genuine democracy become a fake democracy?

The answer is: When the “consent of the governed” no longer has meaning. Permission or approval lose meaning when: too few citizens vote, there is too little difference between candidates that have a chance of winning, corporate money shapes the policies and actions of government, and gerrymandering promotes reelection of incumbent congressmen.

In a fake democracy, citizens play a role defined by the power elite, but are not truly empowered or engaged. In Cuba and other fake democracies, citizens are hostages to raw state power that controls personal freedom. In the U.S., citizens are hostages to consumerism. Controlled distraction replaces brute force. Instead of overt government propaganda, U.S. Citizens are victims of sly corporate media.

At the same time that Bush supporters were celebrating his second term in inaugural balls there was no public outcries about how undemocratic all the celebrations were. The general public could not attend official balls by paying a reasonable amount of money. No, they were for the power elite who really determine government policies and actions; that is what they were really celebrating.

To say the U.S. has a representative form of democracy is to hide the greater truth that we have little more than a formal democracy, not one in which citizens can trust their representatives to serve the public interest. Our representatives serve the power elite. To recognize that there no longer is any public disgust and outrage that ordinary Americans have virtually no access to their “public servants” compared to corporate and other special interests, is to recognize how much we have become a fake democracy.

So how can a fake democracy have the gall to see itself as having the moral authority to compel other nations to be democracies? Only a fake democracy that was the only remaining global superpower could have the chutzpah to attempt this and the weapons to pursue it. What foreigners see is that an American fake democracy is most likely to help create other fake democracies.

Sadly, through oppression by consumerism, most Americans have no ability to see their government as so many foreigners see it. They have eyes wide shut. I was impressed by what Peter S. from the United Kingdom said recently on an Internet blog site:

Nearly everything about America is fake. From fake tits to fake democracy. And they want to inflict all this on the rest of us! …The whole notion of America (at present and past) as something worthwhile is, in a word, obscene. …But like all vast controlling nations, America is crumbling.

What should morality, patriotism and conscience require of Americans? To understand that love of country – not government – means taking care of its political system and when necessary, as it is now, repairing its democracy. Taxation with misrepresentation is just as bad as taxation without representation. To save the Republic, we must put politicians in their proper place, servants to we the people, we the sovereign. This is what real patriotism requires. We must tell elected officials they no longer have “the consent of the governed” because they have not earned it.

A Tale of Two Wars
In Baghdad, I Hear Echoes of Saigon in '67

By Lewis M. Simons

Sunday, August 28, 2005; Page B01

I went to Vietnam a hawk. It was July 1967; I was an ex-Marine and a reporter for the Associated Press. It took only a few months before I realized I was being fed official lies on a daily basis. Now, having spent decades covering war and its aftermath around the world, I have just been through an eerily reminiscent experience in Iraq.

In the Baghdad of 2005, as in the Saigon of four decades ago, my government tells me that by staying the course, we'll cut out a vicious tumor metastasizing through the body of Western democracy.



April 23, 2005: U.S. troops secure a road leading to the Baghdad airport road after a fatal car bomb explosion elsewhere in Baghdad. It's a worrisome sign, the author writes, when a military force is still struggling to control a critical highway more than two years into occupation. (By Khalid Mohammed -- Associated Press)


Today's cancer is terrorism, not the red menace. But the singular constant remains this: Armies and governments at war all lie. They tell us that we're winning hearts and minds, that the troops will be home for Christmas, that the mission is accomplished. They did it then, and they're doing it now.

My hawkishness is long gone. I went to Iraq this May on an assignment for National Geographic magazine, already convinced that this war was a mistake. I found myself cloistered in a nightmare world, behind layers of 12-foot concrete barriers beyond which no thinking American strays without armed guards. I returned home a month later, certain that this war, like Vietnam, will never be won.

What would "winning" in Iraq mean, anyway? A democratic society that's free to elect an anti-American, pro-Iranian, fundamentalist Islamic government? A land of gushing oil wells feeding international oil company profits at U.S. taxpayers' expense? Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis joining hands to end terrorism around the world? Since, in my judgment, we were wrong to go in, I'm afraid there's no good way to get out.

Americans didn't know what "winning" meant in Vietnam, either. Most didn't understand the enemy, its objectives or the lengths to which it was prepared to go to attain them. We had a fuzzy notion of communist "world domination," and the "domino theory" and no realization that what the Vietnamese wanted, south and north, was independence. They didn't want to take over Southeast Asia. They didn't want to invade Los Angeles. They wanted to run their own country. They wanted us out.

Nor do we understand Iraq. The truth -- that Iraq was not a terrorist haven before we invaded, but we're making it into one today -- has been thickly painted over with unending coats of misinformation.

The enemy body-count fiasco at Saigon's daily "5 o'clock follies" -- as military briefings were dubbed by a derisive press corps -- has been replaced by meaningless claims of dead insurgents. Lyndon Johnson's vision of "light at the end of the tunnel" has evolved into Dick Cheney's embarrassing "last throes." Where 392 Americans were killed in action in Vietnam from 1962 through 1964, the first three years of the war, (and 58,000 by the time of the U.S. withdrawal in 1975), after 2 1/2 years in Iraq we have nearly 1,900 American KIAs. Where 2 million Vietnamese were killed by the war's end, we have no idea how many Iraqis have died since we unleashed "shock and awe." Is it 10,000, 20,000, 30,000? More? Who knows? Who in America cares?

This blithe American disregard for their lives infuriates Iraqis. After President Bush recently congratulated soldiers at Fort Bragg for fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we wouldn't have to face them here at home, a Baghdad University professor told an interviewer that Bush was saying that Iraqis had to die to make Americans safe.

What we failed to understand in Vietnam -- that people who want foreign occupiers out of their country are willing and prepared to withstand any kind of privation and risk for however long it takes -- we are failing, once again, to grasp in Iraq.

I've returned repeatedly to Vietnam since the war. About 20 miles northwest of Saigon, in Cu Chi, I had one of the more harrowing experiences of my reporting career, crawling for an hour through black, airless, grave-like tunnels that spider-web for well over 100 miles beneath the jungle floor. (This was before the Tourism Ministry enlarged some of the passages, to accommodate super-size Western travelers.)

Here, entire armies and civilian communities had lived and worked and plotted attacks, through not just the American war but the earlier war against the French. With dirt dropping into my sweat-stinging eyes, my imagination raced: What must it have been like with tanks and bombers rumbling overhead? When I stumbled out, heart pounding, I told my guide that finally I understood why his side had won.
---NEXT >>>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...82700035_2.html

This article expresses the split between the neocons and the republicans, of which I have called such republicans 'BushCons' that are just as evil only hellbent on their greedy path to the New World Order.




http://www.antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=2726
June 2, 2004

Neocon Collapse in Washington and Baghdad
by Jim Lobe

"And neocon has become a dirty word up here," he added, referring to the Congress, where Republicans have become increasingly restive as a result of recent debacles in Iraq, including the scandal over the abuse by U.S. soldiers of Iraqi detainees and leaks that Chalabi had been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran, and may have done so for years.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts – a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy – by force if necessary," said Senator Pat Roberts, a conservative Kansas member of Bush's Republican Party and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, in a speech last week that was understood here as a direct shot at the neocons.

The neoconservatives, a key part of the coalition of hawks that dominated Bush's post-9/11 foreign policy, were the first to publicly call for Saddam Hussein's ouster, which they saw as a way to transform the Arab world to make it more hospitable to western values, U.S. interests and Israel's territorial ambitions.

Since the latter part of the 1990s, when they led the charge in Congress for the 1998 Iraq Liberation Act (ILA), Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress (INC) was their chosen instrument to achieve that transformation.

While no neocons were appointed to cabinet-level positions under Bush, they obtained top posts in the offices of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – where Paul Wolfowitz was named deputy defense secretary and Douglas Feith undersecretary for policy – and Vice President Dick Cheney, whose chief of staff and national security adviser was I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

The Fire Sermon: The emblem of Bush's Military Crusade for "Freedom"


In his inaugural speech last January, President George W. Bush repeatedly invoked images of unbridled, ravaging destruction as the emblem of his crusade for "freedom." Fire was his symbol, his word of power, his incantation of holy war. Mirroring the rhetoric of his fundamentalist enemies, Bush moved the conflict from the political to the spiritual, from the outer world to the inner soul, claiming that he had lit "a fire in the minds of men."

But words are recalcitrant things; they have their own magic, and they will often find their own meanings, outside the intentions of those who use them. Bush has indeed inflamed the minds of men -- and women -- with his military crusade. But it is not the "untamed fire of freedom" that scorches them: It is the fire of grief and outrage at the lies that have consumed the bodies of their loved ones. This bitter flame burns in the rubble of blasted houses in Iraq and in the quiet, leafy suburbs of America, where the dead are mourned and the mutilated are left as the enduring legacy of Bush's cruel, wilful and unnecessary war.

This "fire in the mind" has now found its own symbol in the unlikely figure of Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a slain American soldier. Here again, Bush's war-rousing words have gotten away from him. Sheehan's campaign -- which began as a lonely vigil outside Bush's vacation ranch and has now spread across the country -- centers on a single, simple request: that Bush explain to her what he means when he describes the war as "a noble cause."

Sheehan is no professional activist, no savvy insider or political junkie. She's an ordinary citizen whose unadorned speech has none of the sweep and grandeur of Bush's expensively tailored rhetoric. But she has one thing that his professional scripters can never put in the presidential mouth: truth.

They must labor in the service of a lie, but Sheehan has read the Downing Street memos, the Duelfer WMD report, the September 2000 manifesto of a group led by Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld calling for the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and the top-level revelations by Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Seymour Hersh and many others. She knows the mountain of freely available, credible evidence that shows unequivocally that Bush and his minions sought this war of aggression from their first day in power; that they openly longed for "a new Pearl Harbor" to use as justification for their plans; that they deliberately manipulated, "stove-piped" and fabricated intelligence to concoct a false case for war; that they used UN diplomacy as a cynical sham to mask their military intentions and then invaded before the weapons inspection process, which they themselves had insisted upon, was even halfway complete.

Every housewife and truck driver, every Wal-Mart clerk and office worker in the United States has access to this information, these established facts. The death of her son drove Sheehan to throw off the torpor that has afflicted so many of her compatriots for so many years and look reality in the face. There she has seen Iraqi civilians and American soldiers being shredded, gutted and burned alive by the fire of Bush's death-dealing lies. As New York Times columnist Frank Rich notes, she and other war survivors have watched Bush turn the search for WMD -- the ostensible reason for the sacrifice of their children -- into a comedy routine, a filmed skit for sycophantic journalists, showing the president of the United States goofily searching under desks and behind curtains, then shrugging with a dullard's grin: "No weapons here!"



Bush's audience, the highly paid cream of the national media, roared with laughter at the Leader's barbaric wit. Now these same blind guides are struggling to comprehend the fire of dissent that Cindy Sheehan has lit with her vigil in the Crawford scrublands. Many of them have mocked and vilified her, trumpeting the lies that the Bush machine began pumping out like bilgewater the moment her campaign found resonance with the wider public. Others have dismissed it as a flash in the pan, a copy-filler for the August doldrums, a minor blip soon to be swept away by the president's proven mastery of the national agenda.

Perhaps they're right. Perhaps this too shall pass, just as every other scandal and tourbillion that has momentarily shaken the Bush regime -- from Enron to Abu Ghraib and beyond -- has fallen by the wayside. It's true that the polls show that Bush is now deeply unpopular, mistrusted by more than half the electorate, who say, as Sheehan says, that he misled the nation into a pointless war. But by hook and crook, with fear and lies, he and his faction have gathered all the reins of power into their hands. With a complaisant media, a feckless opposition, unprecedented control over the nation's electoral machinery -- and the full backing of the corporate oligarchy they have enriched beyond all measuring -- the Bush elitists are not much concerned with the "consent of the governed" anymore. They will wade on through the swamp of blood they have created, generating more terrorism, sacrificing more sons and daughters, engendering more hatred, anguish and death.

But what if the form that Sheehan has somehow given to the nation's growing sense of betrayal does not simply fade at summer's end? What if that spark takes hold in the Texas scrub and sets off "an untamed fire of freedom" from the murderous lies that have led America into crime and disgrace? We might yet see Bush undone by his own incantation -- and truth become the new word of power.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?con...9&articleId=879

Letter From an Iraq Vet

"What I witnessed was the total opposite of what President Bush told the American people"
by Sgt. John Bruhns
Editor's note: Following is a letter by Army Sgt. John Bruhns, excerpts of which were read on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) on July 19, 2005.


I am a concerned veteran of the Iraq war. I am not an expert on the vast and wide range of issues throughout the political spectrum, but I can offer some firsthand experience of the war in Iraq through the eyes of a soldier. My view of the situation in Iraq will differ from what the American people are being told by the Bush administration. The purpose of this message is to voice my concern that we were misled into war and continue to be misled about the situation in Iraq every day. My opinions on this matter come from what I witnessed in Iraq personally.

George Bush and his political advisors have been successful in presenting a false image to the American people, that Saddam Hussein was an "imminent" threat to the security of the United States. We were told that there was overwhelming evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed a massive WMD program, and some members of the Bush administration even hinted that Saddam may have been involved in the 9/11 attacks.

We now know most of the information given to us by the current administration concerning Iraq, if not all the information, was false. This was information given to the American people to justify a war. The information about weapons of mass destruction and a link to Osama bin Laden scared the American people into supporting the war in Iraq. They presented an atmosphere of intimidation that suggested if we did not act immediately there was the possibility of another attack. Bush said himself that we do not want the proof or the smoking gun to come in the form of a "mushroom cloud." Donald Rumsfeld said, "We know where the weapons are."

After 9/11, comments like these proved to be a successful scare tactic to use on the American people to rally support for the invasion. Members of the Bush administration created an image of "wine and roses" in terms of the aftermath of the war. Vice President Dick Cheney said American troops would be greeted as "liberators." And there was a false perception created that we would go into Iraq and implement a democratic government and it would be over sooner rather than later. The White House also expressed confidence that the alleged WMD program would be found once we invaded.

I participated in the invasion, stayed in Iraq for a year afterward, and what I witnessed was the total opposite of what President Bush and his administration stated to the American people.

The invasion was very confusing, and so was the period of time I spent in Iraq afterward. At first it did seem as if some of the Iraqi people were happy to be rid of Saddam Hussein. But that was only for a short period of time. Shortly after Saddam's regime fell, the Shiite Muslims in Iraq conducted a pilgrimage to Karbala, a pilgrimage prohibited by Saddam while he was in power. As I witnessed the Shiite pilgrimage, which was a new freedom that we provided to them, they used the pilgrimage to protest our presence in their country. I watched as they beat themselves over the head with sticks until they bled, and screamed at us in anger to leave their country. Some even carried signs that stated, "No Saddam, No America." These were people that Saddam oppressed; they were his enemies. To me, it seemed they hated us more than him.

At that moment I knew it was going to be a very long deployment. I realized that I was not being greeted as a liberator. I became overwhelmed with fear because I felt I never would be viewed that way by the Iraqi people. As a soldier this concerned me. Because if they did not view me as a liberator, then what did they view me as? I felt that they viewed me as foreign occupier of their land. That led me to believe very early on that I was going to have a fight on my hands.

During my year in Iraq I had many altercations with the so-called insurgency. I found the insurgency I saw to be quite different from the insurgency described to the American people by the Bush administration, the media, and other supporters of the war. There is no doubt in my mind there are foreigners from other surrounding countries in Iraq. Anyone in the Middle East who hates America now has the opportunity to kill Americans because there are roughly 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. But the bulk of the insurgency I faced was from the people of Iraq, who were attacking us as a reaction to what they felt was an occupation of their country.

I was engaged actively in urban combat in the Abu Ghraib area, west of Baghdad. Many of the people who were attacking me were the poor people of Iraq. They were definitely not members of al-Qaeda or leftover Ba'ath Party members, and they were not former members of Saddam's regime. They were just your average Iraqi civilians who wanted us out of their country.

On Oct. 31, 2003, the people of the Abu Ghraib area organized a large uprising against us. They launched a massive assault on our compound in the area. We were attacked with AK-47 machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars. Thousands of people took to the streets to attack us. As the riot unfolded before my eyes, I realized these were just the people who lived there. There were men, women and children participating. Some of the Iraqi protesters were even carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein. My battalion fought back with everything we had and eventually shut down the uprising.

So while President Bush speaks of freedom and liberation of the Iraqi people, I find that his statements are not credible after witnessing events such as these. During the violence that day I felt so much fear throughout my entire body. I remember going home that night and praying to God, thanking him that I was still alive. A few months earlier President Bush made the statement "Bring it on" when referring to the attacks on Americans by the insurgency. To me, that felt like a personal invitation to the insurgents to attack me and my friends who desperately wanted to make it home alive.

I did my job well in Iraq. During the deployment, my superiors promoted me to the rank of sergeant. I was made a rifle team leader and was put in charge of other soldiers when we carried out missions.

My time as a team leader in Iraq was temporarily interrupted when I was sent to the "green zone" in Baghdad to train the Iraqi army. I was more than happy to do it because we were being told that in order for us to get out of Iraq completely the Iraqi military would have to be able to take over all security operations. The training of the Iraqi army became a huge concern of mine. During the time I trained them, their basic training was only one week long. We showed them some basic drill and ceremony such as marching and saluting. When it came time for weapons training, we gave each Iraqi recruit an AK-47 and just let them shoot it. They did not even have to qualify by hitting a target. All they had to do was pull the trigger. I was instructed by my superiors to stand directly behind them with caution while they were shooting just in case they tried to turn the weapon on us so we could stop them.

Once they graduated from basic training, the Iraqi soldiers, in a way, became part of our battalion, and we would take them on missions with us. But we never let them know where we were going, because we were afraid some of them might tip off the insurgency that we were coming and we would walk directly into an ambush. When they would get into formation prior to the missions we made them a part of, they would cover their faces so the people of their communities did not identify them as being affiliated with the American troops.

Not that long ago President Bush made a statement at Fort Bragg when he addressed the nation about the war in Iraq. He said we would "stand down" when the Iraqi military is ready to "stand up." My experience with the new Iraqi military tells me we won't be coming home for a long time if that's the case.

I left Iraq on Feb. 27, 2004, and I acknowledge a lot may have changed since then, but I find it hard to believe the Iraqi people are any happier now than they were when I was there. I remember the day I left there were hundreds of Iraqis in the streets outside the compound that I lived in. They watched as we moved out to the Baghdad Airport to finally go home. The Iraqis cheered, clapped and shouted with joy as we were leaving. As a soldier, that hurt me inside because I thought I was supposed to be fighting for their freedom. I saw many people die for that cause, but that is not how the Iraqi people looked at it. They viewed me as a foreign occupier and many of the people of Iraq may have even preferred Saddam to the American soldiers. I feel this way because of the consistent attacks on me and my fellow soldiers by the Iraqi people, who felt they were fighting for their homeland. To us the mission turned into a quest for survival.

I wish I could provide an answer to this mess. I wish I knew of a realistic way to get our troops home. But we are very limited in our options in my opinion. If we pull out immediately, it's likely the Iraqi security forces will not be able to provide stability on their own. In that event, the new Iraqi government could possibly be overthrown. The other option would be to reduce our troop numbers and have a gradual pullout. That is very risky because it seems that even with the current number of troops the violence still continues. With a significant troop reduction, there is a strong possibility the violence and attacks on U.S. and coalition forces could escalate and get even worse. In my opinion, that is more of a certainty.

And then there is the option that President Bush brings to the table, which is to "stay the course." That means more years of bloodshed and a lot more lives to be lost. Also, it will aggravate the growing opposition to the U.S. presence in Iraq throughout the region, and that could very well recruit more extremists to join terror organizations that will infiltrate Iraq and kill more U.S. troops.

So it does not seem to me we have a realistic solution, and that frightens me. It has become very obvious that we have a serious dilemma that needs to be resolved as soon as possible to end the ongoing violence in Iraq. But how do we end it, is the question.

We must always support the troops. If there were a situation in which the United States is attacked again by a legitimate enemy, they are the people who are going to risk their lives to protect us and our freedom. In my opinion, the best way to support them now is to bring them home with the honor and respect they deserve.

In closing, I ask that we never forget why this war started. The Bush administration cried weapons of mass destruction and a link to al-Qaeda We know that this was false, and the Bush administration concedes it as well. As a soldier who fought in that war, I feel misled. I feel that I was sent off to fight for a cause that never existed. When I joined the military, I did so to defend the United States of America, not to be sent off to a part of the world to fight people who never attacked me or my country. Many have died as a result of this. The people who started this war need to start being honest with the American people and take responsibility for their actions. More than anything, they need to stop saying everything is rosy and create a solution to this problem they created.

Thank you for hearing me out. God bless our great nation, the United States of America.

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/bruhns.php?articleid=6902