http://byrd.senate.gov/byrd_speeches/byrd_speeches_2003march/byrd_speeches_2003march_list/byrd_speeches_2003march_list_4.html

Originated March, 2003

Senator Byrd is and has  been a firm critic of Shrubbyist war policy.  Yet even he permitted himself, while criticizing the impending war, to be fooled into the vain hope that "the cloud will lift".  No sign of a lifting yet, at all.

We are becoming in Iraq a despised, and perforce despotic, invading and occupying power, aligned (in fulfillment of  the apocalyptic visions of Perle, Wolfowitz, Rove, and their religious fundamentalist, neo fascist section of the PNAC company) with both the politics and methods of the fascistic Sharon family ruling the once, but no longer, democratic state of Israel.  The signs and portents of their dark vision are manifest; they lead to the death of the vision of human freedom and progress that has been the official public ideology of the "West" since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

We are ourselves subject to the rule of a Supreme Court selected Regent, George W. Bush, who is afflicted with messianic delusions, and locked in mortal personal and psychic combat with his equally megalomaniac alter-egos around the world - Osama, Saddam, Kim Joing Il.  In the final analysis, Bush will sacrifice anyone and anything to win this war, these impending wars, so the eventual  outcome is a foregone conclusion.  All that is in doubt is the size of the sacrifice, and its consequences to the future of the world.

Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, retired former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force offers  a professional military assessment of the magnitude of our political leadership's diplomatic failures and their consequences.   And Thomas Freidman will lay out, in an excessively optimistic and pro-interventionist context, the impending consequences of the Shrubbyist failures in a report airing tonight, Tuesday, April 1, at 8:00 PM ET, on the new "Discovery Times Channel".  (The program "Thomas L. Friedman Reporting: Searching for the Roots of 9/11" premiered on the Discovery Channel Wednesday, March 26, 2003 from 10-11 PM (ET/PT.)

Mass death and destruction in Iraq, with consequent world wide rejection of US and British pretenses to benignity, and a flood of rage against the "West" among humiliated and impoverished Muslims, seems increasingly likely.  Of course our client regimes in the Arab world will be well paid and increasingly militarized to suppress popular discontent.  This is a far sight from the supposed vision of a flowering of democracy which has been proffered by PNAC and the Shrubbyists. But I, personally,  have never believed the fundamentalists were after anything other than the re feudalization and militarization of world civilization.

The war in Iraq is promised to be followed by the same in Korea, Iran, possibly Pakistan... there seems to be no limit.  Perpetual war is a goal, not an accident, for these people.  They suspended operations against Al Qaeda, and shelved plans for the Department of Homeland Security until after the 9-11 attack gave them the "opportunity of a century" they proposed in the PNAC master plan.   This goal is in service of even broader, political goals and objectives, represented by such actions as the un American "Patriot Act" and its successor "Patriot II" which Granny D has so cogently called 'treasonous'.

But perpetual war is more than the justification for suppression of Civil Liberties.  It is also a political strategy, based on the public's natural support for a "war president" and the slavish devotion of the US media to servicing the goals of the war, to gain passage of an extremist political agenda.  That agenda, long in place but in serious political doubt until 9-11,  is rooted in the  religious fundamentalist, messianic and apocalyptic character of Bush and his advisors, which fits so well with that of his political 'base'.

"For months, there has been a widespread assumption in Washington that, once the war with Iraq is successfully completed, Republicans will use the patriotic afterglow to push through the most controversial elements of Bush's domestic agenda. What virtually no one imagined was that they would begin doing so as soon as the war began. The GOP strategy was set out by a Republican leadership aide speaking anonymously to Roll Call this week. "As one evaluates the next three weeks," the aide said, "you have got to say, 'Okay, let's assume in a war context the public doesn't have an appetite for bickering and the president's approval is additional leverage."  http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030407&s=chait040703

Through diversion of our national income and treasure to war, combined with (war linked!?!) tax reductions for the wealthiest and most powerful, it is intended to "make inevitable" the permanent impoverishment of the public sector, of any possibility of support for public services and purposes at any level of government, and to prevent the funding of the Social Security system, which was clearly within reach only 3 years ago.

Through semi legal administrative devices, it is placing religious extremists in positions of power over major areas of public policy, especially those related to the reproductive rights of women and the education of our children.

It is attempting to pack the Judiciary arm of the United States government with judges who have no judicial experience or qualifications, except alignment with the  extreme right wing poliltical agenda.

It is providing for further concentration of media ownership, which has already reached proportions unimaginable only 20 years ago.  The company (Clear Channel Communications) owning the vast majority of US radio stations is prohibiting the playing of anti-war music on its stations, and funding pro-war demonstrations in US cities already.  The path is being cleared by the Powell FCC for even more egregious violations of what was once considered to be a public trust for balance and impartiality on the part of media organizations.

Right wing organizations have aquired control of the electoral process itself, through ownership of the companies manufacturing voting machines and the software operating them.  These companies have refused to open the software to scrutiny by computer science experts, and have fought the adoption of systems of voter confirmation records which would provide voters a record of how their votes were recorded by the systems.

The battle to prevent war in Iraq is over.  Bush has won that battle, and will win the war, no matter what the cost.  He must do so, because his true goals, the subversion of democratic government in the US and over the world, cannot be achieved if he loses it.  In winning the war in Iraq he guarantees the perpetuation of world wide war, especially terrorism by the impoverished and humiliated peoples of the countries he causes us to destroy and dominate.

At this point, if he and his anti Enlightenment, religious fundamentalist allies are to be opposed, it must be politically, by opposing and defeating his agenda for fundamental,  anti democratic alterations to the basic political culture and systems of governance of the US and other traditionally democratic countries.  If the Shrubbyists were to win those battles, the entire "developed" or "first world" civilization would  come to look like the fortress of repression that Ariel Sharon has made of Israel, after the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by his religious fundamentalist allies there.

I believe that those who oppose the war on Iraq must realize that they are opposing a strategy of perpetual war; that that strategy is in service of the Bush regency's messianic and apocalyptic vision of the future of the world which requires reshaping of world political culture away from democratic ideals and toward the neo feudalist, fundamentalist visions of his advisors and polital allies, and that the only truly effective way to oppose war is to oppose the entirety of the Bush government's political program.
end of draft material