| |
Promise ‘em the moon – give ‘em what they get
Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
Progreso Weekly, 29 January 2004
Webster’s Dictionary defines "lunatic" as "insane and believed to be affected by the phases of the moon;" someone "possessed".
On January 14, President Bush rehearsed his delivery for the impending State of the Union sermon before NASA personnel in Houston. His eyes glowed with passion while he removed himself (his mind anyway) from earthly problems and envisioned building "new ships to carry man forward into the universe, to gain a new foothold on the moon, and to prepare for new journeys to worlds beyond our own". As if reading lines from a "Star Trek" script, Bush pledged that the United States would create a permanent base on the moon by 2020 and eventually send astronauts to Mars.
Is this better than the president tripping on Rapture? While we banal creatures still worry about losing jobs, not having health care or money to pay for the kids’ education, or vexing over possible terrorist attacks, Bush devises a space or spacey vision that Gregg Klerkx, former SETI Institute executive and author of Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age, estimates will cost "between $400-500 billion, if it comes in on schedule and on budget".
Shall we just wait until he privatizes social security and unemployment insurance funds run out? The Great Divider promises to lead us to the Moon and Mars where fundamentalist Christians know that same sex marriage will never take place, thus solving one critical Earth problem. And Bush won’t have to convince the craters, since they don’t vote.
In his January 20 State of the Union homily, Bush reverted to tested strategies to convince US voters: lying and dissembling. Bush tried to connect his Iraq war with "gains" in his war on terrorism. But Professor Jeffrey Record of the Air War College, called the Iraq War "a strategic error", which sidetracked the war on terrorism. Bush’s strategy "promises much more than it can deliver" (Houston Chronicle, January 12, 2004).
Although he avoided mention of Mars and Moon, Bush’s spacey mid January enthusiasm did carry over to his address to Congress. White House spinners will doubtless argue that moon bases will help combat this "particularly elusive enemy" (White House’s September 2002 National Security Strategy).
Do we really need more bases – anywhere? According to Chalmers Johnson (LA Times, January 18, 2004), the Pentagon already has 702 bases in 130 countries plus 6,000 bases on US land and territories. But under Bush’s National Security Strategy these installations will help "to contend with uncertainty and to meet the many security challenges". Like the future moon base, US military installations represent more than empire. "The presence of American forces overseas", the above document reminds us, "is one of the most profound symbols of the US commitments to allies and friends".
Bush’s lunar wanderings even inspired Vice President Dick Cheney to emerge from hiding to lecture the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on the earthly part of the Administration’s "security" mission. "We must do everything in our power to keep terrorists from gaining weapons of mass destruction", Cheney warned the audience. He was referring to what Bush, in his State of the Union, defended as a precautionary act for "all who love freedom and peace". Despite the army’s inability to find any trace of WMDs, active programs or links to Al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush insisted that he had to act or "the dictator’s weapons of mass destruction programs would continue to this day".
Bush-Cheney politics may be remembered for pre-emptive war in 2003 and lunacy moon gazing in 2004! Back in 2001, while Bush mouthed platitudes about God blessing America, Cheney conspired with Enron and other oily bandits on the National Energy Plan. According to a classified document obtained by "60 Minutes" (January 11, 2004), this entailed privatizing Iraqi oil and whatever other wealth existed over there.
The former Halliburton CEO assured the world he had nothing to do with his former company’s award of a $1.2 billion contract in January to repair refineries, pipelines and enhance oil production in southern Iraq.
Cheney, who still receives payments from Halliburton deposited in a blind trust, insisted to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that President Bush makes "no distinction between terrorists and those who support them". Cheney declared that "the Bush doctrine, is now understood by all: any person or government that supports, protects, or harbors terrorists is complicit in the murder of the innocent, and will be held to account".
Neither Cheney nor Bush in his State of the Union mentioned, however, that this "absolute" doctrine did not include anti-Castro or anti-Chavez (Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela) terrorists. In May 2002, at a Miami fundraising speech, El Chino Aquit, an anti Castro Cuban convicted of terrorism in Florida, sat on the platform with Bush. Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who together plotted the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, got trained, protected and financed by US sources. In December 2002, Bosch bragged to a Miami Times reporter that he still sent explosives from Florida to terrorist compatriots in Cuba. In the 1980s, Posada, now in prison in Panama on charges of attempting to assassinate Fidel Castro, worked for Col. Oliver North on US covert operations in Central America.
On January 29, 2003, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of terrorist training camps in Florida’s Everglades. It named as leaders, Rodolfo Frómeta, a Cuban, and former Venezuelan Army Captain Luis Eduardo García, who played a prominent role in the April 2002 unsuccessful coup against President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Have Homeland Security and other enforcement agencies overlooked these terrorists? Or did the "overlooking" relate to the help given by these groups to the electoral campaigns of Bush and his Florida Governor brother Jeb?
The Doctrinaire Bushies don’t mention these terrorists. They also ignore the cost to life and health of daily attacks in Iraq against Occupation forces – and many more Iraqis. They adamantly deny they contrived the Saddam threat, which their critics charge was invented as a pretext for launching pre-emptive war. Denial? The White House prohibits the media from photographing US dead and wounded as if by not having pictures of it, the public won’t know about the tragedies. But on January 17, just three days before his speech to Congress and some ten months after Bush invaded, the press reported that the 500th American solider died in Iraq when a bomb killed him and 3 other GIs. Bush spoke of the bravery of those in uniform, but has yet to attend a funeral for one of them or visit a wounded GI in hospital.
Covering up Iraqi reality and engaging in lunar fantasies may brighten the façade of Bush’s election platform, but US troops pay with their lives and the poor at home with their spirits. On January 14, as Bush waxed eloquent over future cosmological conquests, Pentagon Dr. William Winkenwerder announced that the "Army’s suicide rate in Iraq has been about one third higher than past rates for troops for peacetime" (Associated Press). Twenty-one have taken their lives thus far. Figures are not available on how many others attempted suicide. In army hospitals, some 2,500 troops await medical care while armless, legless and eyeless youth occupy the available military hospital beds.
In the bubble of Bush enthusiasm for his war in Iraq victims have no place. In his zeal for space exploration he has forgotten not only about those who lost jobs – he urges upgrading their skills – but about the deteriorating environment on Earth. Sir David King, British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser, referred to melting ice caps, rising sea levels and polluted skies triggered by global warming, a phenomenon the Bush Administration still disputes. In the January 9 issue of the Science journal, Sir David writes, "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem that we are facing today, more serious even than the threat of terrorism...As the world’s only remaining superpower, the United States is accustomed to leading internationally co-ordinated action. But the US government is failing to take up the challenge of global warming". The January 9 Independent confirms Sir David’s assessment: "Results of a major study showed yesterday that more than a million species will become extinct as a result of global warming over the next 50 years".
Bush has, however, placed fundraising before environment and all other issues. As of January, Republican plutocrats had contributed $130 million for his re-election bid. Bush spinners will use some of this money in slick ads to divert Americans from unpleasant facts: 2.4 million Americans have lost jobs under Bush’s watch; the budget deficit reached $374 billion in 2003; the Iraq War has cost American citizens $100 billion and thousands dead and wounded – and still mounting (Independent, January 20, 2004).
Now that the Democrats have finished their Iowa food fight, they can present a viable alternative to lunacy while Bush’s spin doctors reroute public attention from terra firma to terra farther. Ray Bradbury, in his 1950 Martian Chronicles, described the first men in Mars "thinking about honor and fame, while their lungs became accustomed to the thinness of the atmosphere, which almost made you drunk if you moved too quickly". Space on Earth, Good War to All!
Copyright 2004 Progreso Weekly
|
|
