“War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.” – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

The Voice of America’s Washington DC based bureau daily radio broadcast promotes President Bush’s State of the Union battle cry for global democracy and freedom as the altruistic war weapon against terrorism just as the Central Intelligence Agency broadcasted to Soviet occupied European countries during the Cold War.

Such shortwave radio propaganda is symbolic of the highly paradoxical conventional wisdom in our geopolitical relationship with warmongering, in actu and peacemaking, in posse the White House actions of which continue to be kept secret during Bush’s mega State of War.

VOA also reported that, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, is restructuring the U.N.’s Human Rights program, claiming it is fraudulent and ineffective, most likely so Bush can eliminate international whistle-blowers on his excessive executive policy violations of human rights with alleged terrorist detainees. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is touting saber rattling brinkmanship to justify another unilateral preemptive military strike, this time upon the alleged rogue-state Iran for reopening the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant and two others. And President Bush continues to conduct his knee-jerk legislation from the Oval Office, professing in the vein of Richard Nixon that as Commander in Chief he has the right to subvert constitutional law for the sake of national security. Freedom and liberty spoken from the mouths of Republicans has become the synonym for War.

“The apotheosis of State power is war. War creates a hell on earth.”1

The calculation of prosperity for the lavish lifestyles of a Republican congressional majority; empowered by a $2.5 trillion federal-state-local conglomerate cash cow – with an estimated $2 trillion dollar investment in the Iraq war2 — supplying 50 percent of all weapons for sale on the world market – a 2.1 billion dollar a year K Street Project launched by former majority House of Representatives leader, Tom Delay — is wholly separate from that of the common people’s interests of sovereignty.

By instituting an ersatz “state of war” the Bush-Cheney vanity has gained unprecedented unipolar power by conscripting patriotic American wage earners under the control of its unitary executive doctrine enhanced by promoting emotion-charged irrelevancies in the media, which is as formidable even in the absence of military conquest, e.g. War on Christmas. The insatiable assembly-line demand and tolerance for violence by America, buffered by the luxurious bubble of continental isolationism from the horrors inflicted on billions of innocent humans outside its borders, has smeared the hands of its citizenry with blood.

The dark sordid ambitious high-stakes payoff for war profits is good enough for Republicans to enact a hostile take over of democracy, who discount cold-blooded killing of innocent lives as a necessary sacrifice in exchange for corporate exploitation.

“Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war.” ~Donald Rumsfeld

The falsified dangers of national security breaches in the Bush-Cheney administration era have encouraged the Republican Congress and its bribing-for-votes special interest allies to look for more trumped-up emergencies and moral equivalents for war to rally the citizenry and persuade them to give up more of their liberty and their constitutional rights to the State’s body politic. Because of a fatal lack of solidarity to the democratic system by the American people, Republicans have shifted majority partisanship into a pedigree of totalitarian government.

All of it is a deliberate deception to mislead with “Swiftboating” ambiguousness by aiming at the common people’s anxieties to seduce them into the “national effort”: Republican belittling of the rule of law. “The most egregious example is the conduct of the war in Iraq,” reports Elizabeth Holtzman in “The Impeachment of George W. Bush.”3

“We inherit the warlike type; and for most of the capacities of heroism that the human race is full of we have to thank this cruel history.”4

The list of recent abrogation’s of constitutional law duly enacted by the tyranny of Republicans broadening their despotism continue in a laundry list of a drudged through scandal after scandal with no constitutional accountability to its subversions. The president’s testimony on his own controversial actions is never impartial, often dangerous, and always useful, for it reveals the mind of the man if not the truth of the matter.

– Bush to criminalize protesters under Patriot Act as “disruptors” that violates civil rights.5

– Bush nullifies the anti-torture McCain Amendment with wavier right to use torture or engage in cruel, inhuman, and degrading conduct when he sees fit. ”The executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President . . . as Commander in Chief,” Bush wrote, adding that this approach ”will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the President . . . of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.” This was reinforced by Vice President Dick Cheney who said, “I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it…” By asserting constitutional authority in violation of the statute where it would assist the war on terrorism, Bush as re-opened the torture loophole.6

– President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity.7

– Bush issued warrantless wiretapping on Americans prior to 9/11.8 The National Security Administration’s eavesdropping policy shows the extent to which Bush’s corruption has spurred the intelligence community to flout legal conventions domestically and internationally where the most covert tools of national-security policy have been misused.9

– Bush advocates he is above the rule of law under the Theory of Unitary Executive10, endorsed by Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito11 that undermines our constitutional legislative and judicial branches of government. Bush specifically claims that his executive authority outweighs the province of duty of the judicial department to interpret legislation.12

“No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.” — Edward R Murrow

There is a call to arms among us in the midst of this constitutional crisis. The need for mental alertness and dedication to clear critical thinking as rules of political engagement to checkpoint propaganda – a constant exercise of democratic judgment in discriminating and exposing propaganda for what it is – the deception of the Bush-Cheney regime to herd people into lock-step docility, and exhibit proof, the business of equality that American democracy was founded upon. Democratic constitutions are not designed to confirm the predominance of any elite interest, but to prevent it by upholding the permanent reign of rule of law against arbitrary partisan opinion.

As Dahr Jamail pointed out in “US Propaganda vs. Iraqi Reality” another his bullet point look at foreign media outlets yields the following developments that continue to be ignored or under-reported in the US: All told, over two hundred noncombatant Iraqis died in a three day period.

Moreover, from Dahr Jamail’s dispatch, “Freedom in action” I can concur with his anonymous friend’s comment in the email sent to Mr. Jamail from Iraq. “The Iraqis now get frightened from the local police and military as they exhibit a very high level of misconduct and abuse of the authority that they now have.”

This morning my exchange with a middle-aged Iraqi citizen in Baghdad was guarded but explicit about his living conditions. He had not slept in 48 hours, remaining alert to the unstable conditions outside on the streets. Fearful of harassment by the U.S. military patrols or Iraqi Police, he prefers to stay hidden in his house. In a desperate attempt to make light of his confining situation, he says he wants to fly to my country, where it’s safe to be outside.

In “‘Democracy’ Brings Bleak Days,” written by Dahr Jamail and Arkan Hamed for the Inter Press Service, the fear of national security forces stems from no impunity for their abuses and violations of the new Iraqi constitution, a constitution that sanctifies a police state rather than an open society. The similarities to Saddam Hussein’s regime are frightfully parallel.

“People have no recourse to law any more. “We are not living in a proper way,” restaurant owner Qassim Abdul Hamed told IPS. “We are suffering at the hands of those who come in their vehicles just to have meals free of charge.” The restaurant has to go on serving free meals to the Iraqi police, he said. “We can’t say a word because they have guns.”

Thus is the complimentary acrimonious style of George W. Bush’s arbitrary executive policy that has crept into the homes of Americans.

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious” – 1984 – George Orwell

Ask a Republican if they are more willing to kill “over there” in cold blood, and they will blindly vote to wage war as the ideal harvest of an elitist democracy; the pure pugnacity of love glory that triggers the salivating appetite for foreign plunder of an unrestrained oligarchy. This kind of reckless Republican ego inflation has been enforced upon the egalitarian general welfare just as the Iraqis experience the brutal iron heel of oppression by the Pentagon’s military-industrialized complex.

“The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered than the glory and shame that come to nations as well as individuals from the ups and downs of politics and the vicissitudes of trade.”13

Obviously no substitutes have been offered, even after George H. W. Bush Sr. wrote, “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam.”14 I paraphrase his Time magazine article:

“Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we have been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different – and perhaps barren – outcome.”

Of three intellectual perceptions on Bush’s utopian despotism; Kevin Phillips’, “plutocracy”; Bertram Gross’ “friendly fascism” and Robert Kaplan’s Athenian oligarchies, I side with Kaplan. “The powerful exact what they can,” said the Athenians, “and the weak grant what they must.” American politics in the 21st century is a democracy in theory, and an oligarchy in practice. For as the Athenians learned, partisan corruption has a better chance of slipping through the fingers of justice in a democracy for all things are done by dint of money.

Just as the Bush administration has fundamentally divided the working class by race, creating a massive geoeconomic quadrant beyond the reach of “We the People,” these illicit strategies have been executed upon the Iraqi people as the greatest fallacies of far-fetched foreign policies in preserving national security.

Chris Floyd writes, “This was vividly demonstrated in one of the most revolting scenes in recent U.S. history: Bush’s State of the Union address in January 2003, delivered to Congress and televised nationwide during the final frenzy of war-drum beating before the assault on Iraq. Trumpeting his successes in the war on terror, Bush claimed that “more than 3,000 suspected terrorists” had been arrested worldwide — “and many others have met a different fate.” His face then took on the characteristic leer, the strange, sickly half-smile it acquires whenever he speaks of killing people: “Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem.””15

The Bush-Cheney regime has established War as America’s reason for existence, not liberty and freedom; it is a new brand of democracy in extremis, propagated by an egomaniacal Unitary Executive Power: The Mega State of War to established a never ending global dictatorship.

1 The State of War, Chapter 9; Libertarianism, by David Boaz http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-11.html

2 Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate the cost of the Iraq war to be between $1-2 trillion.

3 Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman served four terms in Congress, where she played a key role in House impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060130/holtzman

4 The Moral Equivalent of War by William James, 1906 http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

5 ACLU Opposes Patriot Act Provision http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/12/AR2005121201448.html

6 Bush Could Bypass New Torture Ban, by Charlie Savage

7 President Signs H.R. 3402, the “Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act of 2005” http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060105-3.html

8 Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11 by Jason Leopold http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011306Z.shtml

9 State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration by James Risen http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743270665/ref=ase_bookstorenow57-20/002-5594253-0312050?n=283155&tagActionCode=bookstorenow57-20

10 View of the George W. Bush Administration http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_Executive_theory

11 The Wall Street Journal, 5 January 2006, p.1

12 Scholar says Bush has used obscure doctrine to extend power 94 times, by Jennifer Van Bergen, The Raw Story; http://rawstory.com/news/2005/CanExecutive_Branch_Decide_0923.html

13 The Moral Equivalent of War by William James, 1906 http://www.constitution.org/wj/meow.htm

14 Time (2 March 1998) http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm

15 Sacred Terror: Bush’s “Universal Death Squad” By Chris Floyd, December 10, 2005; Bush Watch http://bushwatch.com/floyd.htm