Bush impeachment hearings essential

There are too many idiots on this Earth.
--Frantz Fanon, “Black Skin, White Faces”
Among the idiots are President Bush, members of his enabling Congress and Americans who twice voted for him.
Bush, the worst president in U.S. history, is sponsoring wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are imperialistic, unilateral, illegal, immoral and unjustifed. They have not been declared by Congress.
Bush has given about 10 reasons for the Iraq war, all of them lies. What he has not said is the real reason: oil.
His colonialism was epitomized in a cartoon by Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times during the First Gulf War. It showed a GI sprawling on the sand saying to his buddy: “Do you think we’d be here if all the Middle East produced was broccoli?”
No less an authority than Alan Greenspan, former Republican chairman of the Fed, confessed in his memoir: “Everybody knows that the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Dick Cheney, CEO of the energy behemoth Halliburton before he became vice president, told the oil industry: “By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day…While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil…is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
The Geneva Conventions makes it illegal to invade other countries for their resources. But Bush violates the Constitution and the nation’s laws so international conventions mean nothing to him.
As for the so-called Democratic Congress, the leaders in the Senate, Harry Reid, and in the House, Nancy Pelosi, have been appalling. Both have cooperated in the Bush destruction of the Constitution.
Reid is a conservative at heart and Pelosi is gutless, beginning her feckless Speakership by declaring that impeachment is off the table.
It shouldn’t be. Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio has the fight that Pelosi lacks. He first introduced 35 impeachment articles then narrowed it to one: falsifying reasons for invading Iraq,
Congress has no intention of removing Bush from office. Moreover, even people who hate Bush ask why bother because he has just six months left in office.
Because it is worth the bother. The “high crimes and misdemeanors” and war crimes of Bush should be embedded in history.
Impeachment hearings would hold King Bush accountable. They would provide a record of his great betrayal of American ideals. They would prove to be a valuable teach-in, educating the people about his usurpations.
The catalog of abuse of power by Bush is staggering: smashing international laws against torture; torture rendition; abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib; making Guantánamo a global symbol of injustice while adopting communist torture tactics; spying on American citizens; obstructing justice in the outing of a CIA agent; politicizing the misnamed Justice Department; destroying the credibility of federal agencies; and issuing signing statements that defy the will of Congress.
But the Congress too is the great betrayer of the Constitution, repeatedly capitulating to Bush, repeatedly passing laws to back the Bush positions.
Jonathan Turley, constitutional law professor at George Washington University, said the Framers “would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion” of the Democrats in protecting Bush.
Congress made a pact with the devil, funding the Afghanistan and Iraq wars for another year while pardoning telecommunication firms for crimes committed while spying.
Seymour Hersh, writing in the July 7 New Yorker, revealed another of the daily outrages of the Bush administration agreed to by Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress.
They authorized--in secret--$400,000 for a Presidential Finding to destablize the Iranian government. Hersh writes: “The Finding was focused on undermining Iran’s nuclear ambitions and trying to undermine the government through regime change. ”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Prime Minister Mossedegh nationalized Iran’s oil so he was overthrown in 1953 by a CIA-engineered coup.
The limits of presidental power were spelled out by the Supreme Court in Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer (1952). The court overturned President Truman’s seizure of steel plants to end a strike during the Korean War.
Justice Jackson, in a concurring opinion, said seizure “represents an exercise of authority without law.” The president should never be above the law.
Using the ersatz cover of executive power, Bush has done extensive damage to the sacred beliefs of America, worldwide opinion of the United States and democracy.

Supreme Court invokes rule of law

John Adams, second president, popularized the words enshrined in the Massachusetts Constitution: “A government of laws not men.” G.W. Bush, 43rd president, reversed that truism to the great detriment of the American people.
A perfect example of that reversal is found in the arrogant attitude of Vice President Cheney. He was being interviewed by Martha Raddatz of ABC. She noted that two-thirds of the American people thought that the war in Iraq was not worth fighting.
“So?” Cheney asked.
“So? You don’t care what the American people think?”
“No.”
Cheney doesn’t care but the Supreme Court does. Three times since 2004 it has rebuked the lawless Bush administration with ringing declarations that this is a nation of laws not men.
The latest decision, Boumediene v. Bush, declared that prisoners held at Guantánamo have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
Habeas corpus, the Great Writ, still rules despite the efforts of Bush to quash it.
The roots of habeas corpus go back nine centuries to England. Its rudiments can be found in the Magna Carta of 1215 when barons at Runnymede forced King John to yield some of his arbitrary power. Habeas corpus was codified by Parliament in 1679.
In America, habeas corpus has been considered legally holy. It has been called “the most important human right in the Constitution.” Chief Justice Chase declared in a 1868 ruling that habeas was “the best and only sufficient defense of personal freedom.”
In a 1963 case, Justice Brennan was absolutely ecstatic about the writ. He wrote:
“Its history is inextricably intertwined with the growth of fundamental rights of personal liberty. For its function has been to provide a prompt and efficacious remedy for whatever society deems to be intolerable restraints. Its root principle is that in a civilized society government must always be accountable to the judiciary for a man’s imprisonment.”
Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion in Boumediene, said that liberty and security must be reconciled “within the framework of the law,” that President Bush cannot “switch the Constitution on or off at will.” He added:
“Within the Constitution’s separation of powers few exercises of judicial power are as legitimate or as necessary as the responsibility to hear challenges to the authority of the executive to imprison a person.”
Many of the 270 Guantánamo prisoners have been held for six years without charges. Geoffrey Stone, University of Chicago law professor, said Bush “has made extreme claims that are lawfully and constitutionally unfounded.”
But to dissenting Chief Justice Roberts, the Great Writ is nothing more than “a procedural right.”
Another dissenter, the reactionary Justice Scalia, complained of the majority’s “inflated notion of judicial supremacy” and declared that the ruling “will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed.” Scalia is the same despicable justice who told BBC in February that torture may sometimes be justified.
Scalia, a supposedly brilliant guy, speaks an infinite deal of nonsense. He concluded his dissent by declaring that “the court warps our Constitution” and that the nation “will live to regret” the decision.
Scalia is a sorry excuse for a justice on a court that once had giants like Brandeis, Holmes, Warren, Murphy, Black and Douglas.
A New York Times editorial praised the Boumediene decision and denounced the “imperial overreaching” of Bush. It noted:
“With the help of compliant Republicans and frightened Democrats in Congress, President Bush has denied the protections of justice, democracy and plain human decency to the hundreds of men that he decided to label ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ and throw into never-ending detention.”
Columnist Eugene Robinson, noting that Bush had put a “chainsaw to the rule of law,” wrote that he was amazed that there was anything to debate about “arbitrary arrest, indefinite detention and torture.”
Bush also put a chainsaw to the Constitution, international treaties and the military code of justice.
Few people know what it means to be a true American, to be a real patriot. It is not wearing a flag pin. It is not flying the flag.
No. It is words like these by Holmes dissenting in Olmstead (1928): “For my part I think it is less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.”
Or those by Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead: “Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher…it teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for the law.”
Or these by Murphy dissenting in In Re Yamashita (1946): “The immutable rights of the individual…belong to every person on the world.”

Why McCain may win—alas!

Pessimism should spring eternal within the human breast. Politics has proved time and time again that hope is a delusion. So here is why John McCain will probably beat Barack Obama in the presidential election:
Many Americans will vote against Obama because he is black.
Anecdotal evidence abounds. A customer tells a Reno barber that he will never vote for a “nigger.” A man at a San Francisco Bart station, asking directions from a black newspaper vendor, addresses him as “boy.”
More solid evidence: 17 percent of white voters in the Pennsylvania primary said “they wouldn’t vote for a black.”
Unspoken but real is white fear. This sort of illogic: “If Obama wins what will blacks want next?” Or, “If Obama wins, blacks will think they are running things.”
A black First Lady? What an absurdity!
The rebarbative Joe Lieberman, asked on Fox News if Obama is a Marxist, replied that he would “hesitate to say” but that some of his positions “are far to the left” of mainstream America. (Untrue)
The GOP smearmeisters will say Obama “lacks American roots.” His middle name is Hussein, isn’t it?
McCain will tout his foreign policy experience while declaring that Obama has none. McCain will cite his military experience while declaring that Obama has none.
The troglodytes on radio and TV talks shows will shrilly denounce Obama, calling him an appeaser, too willing to talk to “rogue” leaders.
Fact: American voters usually pick the worst presidential candidate. Look no farther than the White House incumbent.
Here is why Obama must win:
He is right on most of the issues. McCain, a Bush clone, is usually wrong.
Obama wants to pull out of Iraq. Warhawk McCain will keep troops in Iraq “100 years or 1,000 years or 10,000 years” just as long as there are few U.S. casualties.
McCain, the son and grandson of admirals, has that military mindset, a mindset that says war is good, peace is bad. He loves the U.S. empire with its 1,000 bases spanning the globe.
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone writes that McCain believes war is “righteous and necessary, a tonic for the national soul, intrinsically noble.”
McCain wants to solve problems with force. He admits: “There’s gonna be other wars.” He declares defiantly: “Bomb bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran.”
What a stunning contrast with the view General Grant expressed in his great Civil War memoir: “This war was a fearful lesson and should teach us the necessity of avoiding wars in the future.”
McCain invokes the GOP ghosts of yesteryear. He uses fearmongering. He says Obama is naïve, weak on national security and soft on terrorism. All are bogus arguments but play well with boobus Americanus.
McCain, the soi-disant Mr. Clean, was involved in the Keating Five scandal concerning the collapse of Lincoln Savings and Loan. He has cozied with the K Street lobbyists.
Asked what he had been reading lately, McCain said he was inspired by the books of Texas pastor Joel Osteen, who preaches the gospel of greed. “God wants us to prosper financially, to have plenty of money, to fulfill the destiny he has laid out for us,” Osteen says.
McCain is a champion flip-flopper. He first opposed tax cuts for the wealthy but now he not only wants to make them permanent but proposes more tax cuts tilted toward the rich.
As a tortured prisoner of war. McCain once opposed the barbarous practice. But now he favors it. He once denounced Jerry Falwell and Rush Limbaugh as “agents of intolerance” but now the religious right is OK. McCain once favored abortion but now is strongly opposed. He once favored gay marriage but now is opposed.
Indeed, McCain may be the only politician to oppose positions of two bills that bear his name, campaign finance and immigration reform.
McCain’s lust for the Oval Office leaves him devoid of principles.
Political writer Taibbi put it scathingly in another article: “The media-manufactured ‘maverick’ has remade himself into a dumbed-down Republican Party stooge.”
McCain belongs to the Grand Old White Party which pushes capitalism and corporatism at the expense of most Americans. He voted against the Martin Luther King holiday. He wants to drill for offshore oil although he knows it will be of little help at the pump.
McCain voted against limiting the CIA to the Geneva Conventions. He backs Bush wiretaps without warrants. He opposes a new GI Bill. McCain would stuff the federal courts with right-wingers.
The Brave New World of McCain offers the same dreary world of Bush.

Obama offers hope after gloom

Amid the uproar of empire…the gentle stirring of…hope.
--Albert Camus in 1957 lecture at Uppsala University

Presidential politics are fought in the center. You cannot be too leftist or too rightist to win a major party nomination. The middle ground is precisely where Barack Obama stands after wresting the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton.
Historian Howard Zinn observes that Obama offers no change from the status quo, just more “capitalistic greed and militarism.” Doubtless proper cynicism. That view is supported by Obama’s appointment of Jason Furman as his economic adviser, a centrist favoring Wall Street over Main Street.
Nevertheless, a President Obama would re-invigorate the Oval Office in contrast to the despicable foreign policy and musty domestic policies of Bush-McCain.
Obama’s instincts are progressive, McCain’s retrograde. As Lincoln phrased it in his First Inaugural, Obama can summon “the better angels of our nature.”
Two candidates on the Left were forced to drop out early, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards. Kucinch, the best, would have pulled U.S. troops from Iraq immediately and battled for Canadian-style universal health care.
The populist Edwards rightly denounced corporation money controlling politics and the ever-growing gap between the Haves and Have Nots.
As for Clinton, she is a warhawk. She vowed to “totally obliterate” Iranians in the event of a nuclear attack on Israel.
She is a gross exaggerator--if not a liar. She claimed that she had been against NAFTA “from the very beginning.” Truth squad: she spent 10 years praising trade deals. She ignored concerns of labor, farm and environmental groups to urge passage of NAFTA in 1993.
Even worse, when an Obama nomination seemed inevitable, Clinton hinted that she would not quit because he might be assassinated.
She slimed Obama. She said that when it comes to national security, she would prefer McCain to Obama.
Another truth: the Clintons, Bill and Hillary, are not very nice people, betraying long-time friends and supporters.
Clinton’s first “concession” speech was no concession. It showed her utter lack of class, her gracelessness.
Yet it is clear why so many women supported Clinton. They were anxious for her to break the ultimate glass ceiling: the White House.
So many women have felt the sting of bias in the workplace: sexual harassment, denial of justified promotions, squashing of justified executive hopes, less pay than men in comparable jobs and advice ignored as “mere” woman-talk.
To them, the nomination of Clinton would have been wonderful payback, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.”
As it is, the Democratic nomination fight had important political and sociological significance. For the first time one of the two major parties produced a black man and a woman who were powerful candidates for president.
Obama’s record and speeches offer hope again after eight years of hopelessness under the wretched Bush administration.
Alice Walker, author of “The Color Purple,” has observed of Obama: “He is a remarkable human being, not perfect, but humanly stunning as King was and Mandela is…He is the change America…must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people.”
Running for the U.S. Senate in 2002, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq. He pointed out presciently that such a war would “fan the flames of the Middle East…and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaida.” (Mission accomplished!)
In the Illinois Legislature he made his mark by championing civil liberties. So he rightly lauded the recent Supreme Court decision to grant Guantánamo detainees habeas corpus, hailing it as “an important step toward re-establishing our credibility as a nation committed to the rule of law.”
In bleak contrast, McCain called it “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.”
Obama would raise the Social Security payroll tax from the maximum of $102,000 to $250,000, noting that it is unfair for most workers to pay the tax on “every dime they make” while millionaires and billionaires pay a tiny percentage of their income.
Even in relatively minor matters Obama exudes a marvelous feel for humanity, He advocates the end of federal intervention in medical marijuana cases, wanting states to make their own rules.
But the paramount issue in the presidential campaign is ending the sickening Iraq War quickly, withdrawing U.S. soldiers and shuttering military bases.
If Obama would do this as president the great bulk of the American people would applaud and the Muslim world would have far less reason to hate U.S. policies.

Top court sides with corporatocracy

It speaks volumes about the Supreme Court when it could not rule on a case recently because it lacked a quorum of six. Three justices recused themselves because they held stock in companies being litigated. A fourth justice recused himself because his son works for one of the firms.
Embarrassing, yes. But it shows that the justices are rich and therefore seldom rule for the vast majority of people.
Seven members of the court are millionaires. Justice Kennedy, poor fellow, has a net worth of just $750,000. Weep too for Justice Thomas who has gotten just $1 million in book advances since 2003.
Earlier this year Chief Justice Roberts recused himself in a drug case because he owns stock in Pfizer, the parent company of a defendant in the litigation. This resulted in a 4-4 decision, upholding the appeals court.
The same thing could happen when the court soon hands down a decision on the damage suit against Exxon in the Valdez oil spill. Justice Alito recused himself because he owns stock in Exxon.
Executive branch officials are required to divest themselves of stocks that could be a conflict of interest. Not the justices. They are a law unto themselves.
The Supreme Court is the least known branch of government. That’s why few people realize that it is very much a part of the corporatocracy ruling America, the unholy triumvirate of corporations, banks and government.
The court made clear its preference for that corporatocracy when it ruled in April that the Indiana voter photo identification law was constitutional.
In effect, the decision restored the poll tax, designed to hold down black votes in the South, which the Supreme Court had abolished four decades ago. The ruling also nullified the 24th Amendment which prohibits poll taxes.
The Indiana law, upheld 6-3, requires citizens to show a photo ID at the polls, either a driver’s license or a passport. The decision reverses two centuries of jurisprudence declaring a voter signature sufficent ID.
The majority opinion, fracturing logic, was written by Justice Stevens, once a liberal but now becoming senile at 88 and returning to his GOP roots. He claimed the risk of voter fraud is real.
Palpable nonsense. Voter fraud is so rare as to be nonexistent. The truth is that photo ID is part of a concerted effort by Republican state lawmakers to prevent blacks, Latinos and the elderly from voting. Why? They tend to vote Democratic. The court ruling has prompted 20 states to seek enactment of photo ID statutes.
Up to 13 percent of Indiana voters, most of them Democrats, will be ineligible to vote for lack of photo ID. Indeed, about 20 million Americans do not have a driver’s license bearing a photo.
In dissent, Justice Souter saw through the chicanery. He said the photo ID requirement was a serious burden, one that Indiana had not justified.
Comparing photo ID to the poll tax struck down by the Supreme Court in 1966, Souter said: “the onus of the Indiana law is illegitimate because it correlates with no state interest so well as it does with the object of deterring poorer residents from exercising the franchise.”
The New York Times noted the irony of the ID decision: “Seven years after it invoked the Constitution to vindicate what it saw as President Bush’s right to fair election procedures, we are still waiting for the court to extend this guarantee with equal vigilance to every American.”
Illegal immigrants voting? Ridiculous. As illegals, they would hardly risk exposure by trying to vote. However, vigilant officials did stop a subversive group from voting in the Indiana primary this year: a group of nuns without voter ID!
Driving down the voter turnout will help the corporatocracy rule in perpetuity. Keeping the poor, the elderly, racial minorities and college students--who are wild about Obama--from voting fosters that sinister design.
The head of the Republican Party in Alabama has admitted that the Republicans object to restoring voting rights of former felons “because felons don’t tend to vote Republican.” Positions are taken in politics, not because they are right, but because of partisan advantage.
America is far from the great democracy it boasts of being. Bush brags about the wonders of voting in Afghanistan and Iraq while his party denies the franchise to voters who do not have a driver’s license.
This is the reactionary Supreme Court that gave us eight years of the Bush stain and is now ruling so McCain can continue that imperial, unconstitutional reign.

Court decisions dent gay bias

Intolerance. Hatred. Bigotry. Prejudice. Discrimination. Ignorance. Fear. All were dealt a severe blow by the courts as gays and lesbians recently won two sparkling victories.
One declared the right of same-sex couples to marry and the other portended the end of the military’s absurd policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
The California Supreme Court struck down state laws that had limited marriage to a union between men and women. And, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a suit against the Air Force, declaring that the military cannot discharge people because they are gay.
In the gay marriage case, Chief Justice Ron George wrote for the majority: “In view of…the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship, the California Constitution…guarantees this basic civil right to all Californians.”

The ruling gives gay couples the benefits and protections of hetrosexual marriage. They can get tax and insurance benefits and the right to family leaves and hospital visits.
An editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle had it right: “Two

people who love each other should have the chance to build a life

together, raising children, sharing dreams and balancing careers.”


Predictably, the Yahoos went beserk from their mental caves. They wailed about the sacredness of marriage, lamented ruination of the culture, decried the end of religious faith, declared that marriage was for procreation, labeled homosexuality immoral and damned “activist judges.”
Sanctity of marriage? What’s so sacred about marriage if one out of two end in divorce?
In dissent, California Justice Marvin Baxter complained that the majority, unsatisfied “with the pace of democratic change…subtitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the people themselves.”
But as Justice Holmes pointed out, courts must act for “the felt necessities” of the times. Chief Justice Warren reinforced that view when he declared that courts must act for fairness and justice.
“Judicial restraint has too often meant judicial abdication of the duty to enforce constitutional guarantees…for too long we have been sweeping under the rug a great many problems basic to American life,” Warren said. “We have failed to face up to them.”
Leaving public affairs up to the people often produces injustice.
Look no farther than California’s “three strikes and you’re out” law. Under this reprehensible legislation enacted by the people, some one goes to prison for life for a third felony even if it is as trivial as stealing a bag of golf clubs.
I.F. Stone rightly noted during the 1960s: “If you give power to the people we’d all be in jail.”
Under the Justice Baxter rationale, it would have been up to the states to outlaw segregation. But without the Supreme Court’s activist role, Alabama and Mississippi still would have apartheid.
The fear here is that a California referendum in November could nullify the humane court decision.
In the federal decision, the court said that the Air Force must prove that Major Margaret Witt’s dismissal farthered the military’s goals of readiness and cohesion.
The court cited the 2003 Supreme Court decision invalidating the Texas anti-sodomy law as an unconstititional intrusion on privacy.
Witt, a flight nurse, was suspended in 2004 after the Air Force learned that she had a relationship with a civilian. Dismissed in 2007, she filed suit.
But a U.S. district court tossed out her case after the military argued that gays are bad for morale and lead to sexual tension. (Some antediluvians in the Pentagon still argue that homosexuality is a mental disorder.)
Writing a concurrence for the appeals court, Judge Ron Gould noted: “When the government attempts to intrude on the personal and private lives of homosexuals, the government must advance an important interest…and the instrusion must be necessary to further that interest.”
An attorney for Witt, James Lobsenz, hailed the appeals court ruling as the beginning of the end for “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The military policy is so lame. It fires hundreds of highly capable gay and lesbian soldiers and sailors. It spends millions to recruit and train replacements. It turns down college students who are gay while practically enrolling the lame, the halt and the blind for duty in Iraq.
Social progress in this nation is maddeningly slow. It may take centuries before America is truly civilized. At least the courts are nudging the nation toward civilization.

60 years of Palestinian hell

Israel is rejoicing over the recent 60th anniversary of its founding but for the Palestinians it is nakba, unmitigated catastrophe.
The Israelis have usurped Palestinian land, illegally established a Jewish state, imposed a brutal occupation and systematically destroyed the infrastructure of Palestine.
As Henry Siegman, director of the U.S.-Middle East project in New York, wrote in a Nation editorial: “Israel’s occupation is maintained by Israeli Defense Force checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighters, targeted assassinations and military incursions…it is unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians.”
Many Palestinians have been exiled from their own land in an unspoken ethnic cleansing. Israeli continues to build settlements on Palestinian soil. It has reduced many Palestinian villages to rubble. It has erected a wall of separation.
Israel chokes fuel supplies in Gaza. Its military strikes are violations of international conventions. It blockades 1.5 million people.
It has established more than 500 West Bank checkpoints that divide Palestinian land and make Palestinian lives hellish.
One Palestinian living in the West Bank, an emergency room doctor, now has a two-hour trip to his hospital, a trip that took 30 minutes before the checkpoints were set up.
Israel has, in effect, imposed apartheid, once roundly condemned in the American South and in South Africa.
Israeli historian Benny Morris has painted a grim picture: “Like all occupations, Israel’s was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers and daily manipulation, humiliation and manipulation.”
Despite all this horror, the European Union and the United Nations remain frighteningly silent.
Israel does not want peace. It will not negotiate without preconditions as Jimmy Carter has urged, rendering all so-called road maps to peace worthless.
Israel does not want a Palestinian state. And it will not grant one as long as America gives its mighty and unstinting support to Israel. The United States is backing the gross injustice of land theft. It supports the fragmentation of the land Palestine does occupy.
America has established military bastions in Iraq, protecting Israel and threatening to attack Iran, the archenemy of Israel,
A case could be made that the “Jewish cabal” of Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby and Richard Perle, with the backing of Vice President Dick Cheney and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, urged the war so that a Saddamless Iraq would recognize Israel.
The cost of that war: Iraq destroyed and more than 100,000 Iraqis killed, more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead and thousands maimed in body and mind, expected expenditures of $3 trillion and destruction of much of the world’s belief in America.
Former President Carter had the courage to write a book recently, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid,” urging the legitimate rights of Palestinians. He had the courage to meet recently with the exiled leader of Hamas, militant Islamist group.
It was the same courage he showed to broker the Israeli-Egypt peace accord in 1978 and the courage to return the Canal Zone to its rightful owner, Panama.
The shameful treatment of the Palestinians raises a profound religious question. How can Israel claim to be a religious state yet treat the Palestinians with total disregard of religious values, morality, decency and humanity?
It cannot.
The occupation is endless. The war of the Israelis against the Palestinians will never end as long as the United States continues to pledge allegiance to Israel.
Nor will that allegiance change no matter who wins the presidency in November. The powerful Israeli lobby and the craven pro-Israeli politicians in America guarantee that. Example: Hillary Clinton vows “massive retaliation” and obliteration of Iran if it threatens Israel.
This inhumane treatment of Palestinians has a lengthy pedigree. In 1969 Israel’s Prime Minister Golda Meir denied that a Palestinian people even existed.
Another Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, claimed that a Palestinian state was incompatible with the historic Jewish right to Palestinian land and the concomittant Israeli right to security.
Such attitudes make it clear that these two bitterly opposed peoples can never live in peace.