Iraq Wars II: Attack of the NeoCons

I've been hanging on to this essay for awhile, feeling it was a little over the top. However, with the expanding revelations of torture, rape and murder in Iraq at the hands of military intelligence and mercenary led soldiers, as well as reports coming out of the notorious resumes (like affiliations with South African apartheid death squads among other things) of some of these crazoid mercenaries, I thought it was time to post this.

Remember the last installment of the Star Wars franchise? We KNEW full well that Chancellor Palpatine was the ultimate bad guy. Here he was maneuvering the Republic and the Separatists into a bloody costly war with each other. You could see how he manipulated the Republic Senate, the Jedi Council and our heroes on the one side and the various factions of the Separatists on the other. Was there anyone in the theater who doubted for a second that the evil Darth Sidious was our Emporer Palpatine under the hood?

How many kids, young and young at heart, didn't want to shout at the silver screen when Obi Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Mace Windu were fretting about how the future was clouded: "it's Palpatine you freakin' idiots!!"

That's how it is with George W. Bush and his neocon handlers. If this were a Saturday picture show and not reality as reported by American MegaMedia Inc., the audience would obviously see how the only characters benefitting from 9/11 was the Bush crew and their approval ratings. The same Bush crew whose lives and finances intersected closely with the Saudis and Bin Laden for decades. We would see that the anthrax attacks against Democratic Senators (Still unsolved. Who da thunk it?) coincided neatly with the panic atmosphere needed to pass the USA Patriot Act without much opposition.

The Saturday picture show movie-goers would have had to step out for popcorn to miss how our leaders manipulated the good guys into warring with Iraq, possibly the biggest enemy of Bin Laden in the Islamic world there ever was. The theater audience surely would have seen how our war with Iraq actually strengthened the fortunes of all sides of this unholy alliance - Bin Laden and his ilk have millions of followers now where before they had mere hundreds.

The position paper of the Dark Lords of the Sith, otherwise known as the Project for a New American Century, did in fact lay it all out. In September 2000,. Darth Rumsfeld, Darth Cheney, Darth Wolfowitz and a host of their disciples and retainers unveiled their first strategy paper, called "Rebuilding America's Defenses". It called for hiking up military spending to 5% of GDP and redeploying American forces to create an invincible military presence in the oil fields of the Middle East and other strategic parts of the planet. The paper observed that it was unlikely that their platform would be implemented "absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor" (page 51). The paper also recommended that Saddam Hussein's Iraq be used as the pretext for deploying a massive U.S. force in the Persian Gulf. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein" (p.14).

One year later, 9/11 happened. One year and one day later, Darth Rumsfeld and others were preparing for the Iraqi invasion, long before even the bodies were recovered from NY's ground zero. We're told that Darth Rumsfeld has a shard from the WTC on his desk as a grisly souvenir. Beware the Dark Side of the Force.

So now Obi Wan Kerry tries to think it all through and the Democratic Party Jedi Council furrows their brow and tries unsuccessfully to see through it all. "everything the future is, the Dark Side clouds" laments the Democrats on the Jedi Council. "It's Palpatine you freakin' idiots!!" shouts the audience. Will we have to sit through four more movies before the Emporer is dethroned?

May the force be with us.