Time for Regime Change

According to some, once war is declared, everyone in this country should support the soldiers who are fighting and dying half way around the world, and the policies of the Bush administration in general. Similar dilemmas may be occurring in Iraq as the population is urged by their leaders to fight off this UN Security Council prohibited invasion and occupation of their sovereign country: the very same offense that triggered the first Gulf War, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Ironically, the intellectuals in Iraq probably justified that war as an act of liberation of the backward sheikdom of Kuwait, where 80% of the population is not allowed to vote and the royal family lounges in palaces encrusted with gold and rare gems.

The security of this nation is threatened, but not in the way it is usually meant. Can you imagine a bomb being dropped from a helicopter on a residential neighborhood in Philadelphia, causing an inferno destroying many lives and two city blocks? It could happen, and did, when city, state, and federal authorities bombed a radical environmentalist group in 1985. How about a large religious commune in the lonely Texas prairie being assaulted with automatic weapons, CS gas, and eventually burned to the ground? That happened in Waco. And what about the truck bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City? McVeigh learned all he needed to about the rules of engagement as he fought in the first Gulf War, burying Iraqi conscripts alive with an armored bulldozer.

The REAL question is not whether or not freedom of speech should be silenced in the name of defending freedom, it's "why is the Bush administration invading Iraq in the first place?" The answers are usually worn-out slogans from the past. Killing people to liberate them. Driving ever-familiar HumVee's and even heavier SUV's across the desert "defending the American way of life" by seizing more than 10 percent of the world's known oil reserves at the point of a depleted-uranium-spitting machine-gun. "Preventing Iraq from selling WMD to groups that might use them," when it is America that nuked Japan and the Reagan administration, much of which now works for George junior, that provided the chemical and biological ingredients and know-how to Iraq in the first place.

What value are promises of food aid from a country that has been starving Iraq with an economic sanctions regime so brutal that it has killed well over a million of civilians, according to UN estimates? Who will believe U.S. promises of help building a democratic government to a population that was betrayed by Bush senior after he told them to rise up, resulting in the extermination of the most militant opponents of Saddam Hussein.

So "mistakes were made," but what should we do now, especially now that war has begun?! Saddam Hussein is a repressive leader who has gassed his own people and may destabilize the world with WMD! How can we allow him to continue to rule? Certainly, the freedom-loving people of the world can't and shouldn't. I have every confidence that if the US can refrain for awhile from arming nearly everyone in the Middle East, including Iraq and Israel, a habit that makes Saddam Hussein's brand of nationalism so popular, the people will be more than capable of taking care of that regime and many others.

While the US troops hired to fight in Iraq might believe in freedom, like the voters believed they had mandated the principle of "no escalation in Vietnam" in the election of 1965, the millionaires in Washington who ordered them there clearly don't. We need only ask the activists who continue to bravely face tear gas, pepper spray, clubs, and all sorts of new crowd-control weapons in the streets of Seattle, New York, LA, DC, and throughout this country to understand repression and the threat of absolute rule by an un-elected royal family. We need only ask the Afghan prisoners held without rights in Cuba and brought to allied countries to be tortured to know that the promised land of America is really a greedy fundamentalist's nightmare for most of the people on earth.

We need only ask China and the seven other countries that the Bush administration has recently threatened with the 'first-use' of nuclear weapons how to contain dangerous leaders and their evil regimes. The fact is that there are many regimes and leaders around the world desperately in need of spiritual and moral guidance, reasoned diplomacy, careful containment, firm pressure, and eventual removal from power... and I join much of the world in putting the Bush regime here in the "United" States on the top of the list.

The nuclear non-proliferation treaty is a transparent lie; No American government has any intention of ever giving up its nuclear weapons. 'Free Trade' has nothing to do with freedom and everything to do with bringing all resources and labor under absolute corporate control: the ultimate "national socialism." At every level, American policy and politics are based on money and coercion, not democracy, civil rights, or vague notions of "the collective good." Such old-fashioned ideals will vanish if they aren't defended now.