Author: Charley Reese

The Israeli lobby and the neoconservatives are beating the drums for war with Iran. I hope the president is not that dangerously stupid. (The betting on whether he is that stupid is about even.) The neocons are advancing the premise that a military attack on Iran will cause the people to lose faith in their government and result in regime change.

A military attack on Iran will have the opposite effect. The people will rally to their government, and any hope of regime change will be dead. That people will rally around their existing leaders in the face of an attack by a foreign power is as certain as sunrise. Neither Israel nor the U.S. could do a greater favor for the ruling mullahs and Iran’s president than to launch an attack. It would cement their hold on power.

The neocons’ fallacious premise has already been disproved. In the first Gulf War, the first Bush administration confidently incited the Shiites and the Kurds to rebel after Saddam Hussein’s forces were expelled from Kuwait. The administration thought that Saddam, embarrassed by a crushing military defeat, would fall from power in Iraq easily. Instead, he rallied his forces and crushed both the Shiites in the south and the Kurds in the north. Oops.

In the first place, it is not embarrassing for a Third World country with obsolete equipment to be defeated by the world’s strongest military superpower. In the second place, the Sunnis, however much they might have disliked Saddam, disliked even more the thought of being ruled by Kurds or Shiites. In the third place, after President George H.W. Bush’s decision to not go to Baghdad, Saddam could say he duked it out with the world’s superpower and was still standing after the fight. That, in most eyes, could be counted as a victory.

Some months ago, an Iranian human-rights advocate pleaded with the current Bush administration to cease its rhetorical attacks on the Iranian government. She said, quite accurately, that such attacks make life impossible for Iranian reformers. Needless to say, the blockheads in Washington ignored her.

What did we do when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked? We rallied behind George W. Bush — Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike. That’s the natural reaction of normal human beings, and the Iranians are normal human beings. Attack their country and they will rally round their flag.

The Iranians still insist they are not seeking nuclear weapons, and there’s not a scrap of evidence to contradict that claim. They still adhere to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They have often called for a nuclear-free Middle East.

Once again, the dead roach in America’s salad is Israel. The U.S. is hypocritical when it says it opposes a nuclear-free Middle East because Israel has nuclear weapons. We hypocritically claim the Iranians are in violation of international law when, in fact, it is Israel that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and refuses international inspections. Given our craven obedience to Israel, we have exactly zero credibility in the Arab and Muslim worlds.

As I have said before, I don’t care if the Iranians do develop nuclear weapons. My whole adult life was lived with 30,000 Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at me. I can certainly live with the six or seven Iran might be able to scrape together in the next five to 10 years. In the meantime, the U.S. government should kick the Israeli lobby out of the country and support Iran and the Arab League in pushing for a nuclear-free Middle East.

The Israeli lobby pushing America to fight yet another war for Israel reminds me of what the French ambassador to Great Britain said at a party a few years back: “Why does the world allow this [expletive deleted] little country to cause so much trouble?”

Why indeed? You should ask your politicians that question.

I fear Vice President Cheney has had one too many heart attacks. His mind seems to have slipped its moorings and is drifting out into the sea of fantasy.

Cheney was the misleader in chief prior to the war in Iraq, and in a recent speech in which he chastised people for suggesting such a thing, he made yet another whopper of a misleading statement.

“Those who advocate a sudden withdrawal from Iraq should answer a few simple questions,” Cheney said, such as whether the United States would be “better off or worse off” with terror leaders like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Osama bin Laden, or Ayman al-Zawahiri in control of Iraq.

Dearly beloved, that is akin to saying that if Eliot Ness hadn’t come along, Al Capone would have been the dictator of the United States. Zarqawi is a miserable little terrorist with a small band of fanatical followers and a life span that is shrinking by the day. To suggest that there was even a remote possibility of him taking control of Iraq is, well, grossly misleading. Zarqawi is a Jordanian, not an Iraqi; he has been denounced by his tribe and his family, and he has killed more Iraqis than Americans. It is just a matter of time before some Iraqi drops a dime on him, and he’s packed off to Islamic hell.

As for bin Laden and his Egyptian adviser — assuming they’re still alive — they are probably hiding out in some cave or rat-infested village in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They could not control a small town, much less a country of 25 million people of which neither of them is a native.

I don’t know who the vice president’s speechwriters are, but he ought to fire them all. What he said was so far off the map of reality that it is embarrassing. He might as well have said that if Americans withdraw, Martians will land in spaceships and take over the country. If he himself believes what he said, then he has displayed an ignorance of the Middle East that is embarrassingly gargantuan. A 12-year-old street vendor in Baghdad could tell you that those three men have zero chance of ruling Iraq.

I’m beginning to feel like a crew member of the doomed ship Pequod, with mad Captain Ahab stumping about on the quarterdeck and cursing the heavens in his fanatical pursuit of the white whale that crippled him. One likes to believe that the leaders of one’s country are, at a minimum, sane, no matter how flawed their policies might be.

Whether we leave or stay, we probably won’t like the man who emerges from the December elections as the leader of Iraq. There are no Thomas Jeffersons over there. Twenty-five years of brutal dictatorship do not produce either idealists or democrats. But he will not be a terrorist, and he will not be a man who will welcome terrorists. Least of all will he be a foreigner.

The Iraqis are desperate for security and stability, and once they have the power, woe to anyone who challenges them on those points. The Bush administration, in order to maintain a never-ending war, has greatly exaggerated the power and influence of terrorists. From the way Cheney is acting and talking, he seems to have been taken in by his own propaganda.

Just keep in mind that no terrorist has a real army; no terrorist controls a country or even a city. Terrorists are nothing more than criminal gangs scattered about and perpetually on the run. When they draw blood, it is usually at the cost of their own lives. However magnified they might be in Cheney’s murky mind, they are in reality losers, doomed to die for lost causes.

Here’s another example of 1) how stupid some people are and 2) how the media can turn an anthill into a Himalayan mountain.

Fisher DeBerry, the longtime football coach at the Air Force Academy, remarked after losing a game recently that they (the Academy) needed to recruit more minorities. This was in the context of discussing a game with Texas Christian University in which he also remarked at how fast the TCU players were.

Asked the next day to elaborate, DeBerry said the following: “It just seems … that Afro-American kids can run very, very well. That doesn’t mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can’t run, but it’s very obvious to me they run extremely well.”

“Racist, racist, pants on fire” went the cry, and the news media treated it as if it were important.

Since when is it racist to remark on a demonstrable fact? I’m not an avid sports fan, but casual observation seems to verify the truth of his remark. We can assume that track-and-field events, the National Basketball Association, and the National Football League do not impose any racial quotas, yet African Americans are prominent in those sports far beyond their proportion of the population.

Offhand, I can’t think of an outstanding running back or receiver who isn’t black. I’m sure there are some. I can’t recall any outstanding performers in track and field who aren’t African-American. Again, there might be some, but African Americans seem to dominate those sports. If you watch Southeastern Conference football, you will notice that even many of the teams in the Old South are predominantly made up of African-American athletes.

There are some physiological differences among the different races. We can dismiss them all as superficial, and certainly none of them would justify any kind of discrimination, but why is it considered a sin to even mention them? I don’t know why they exist and don’t care. Why are there no redheaded Chinese? Why are there so many blonds in Norway? Why do so many African-American kids seem to be able to run very, very well? Who knows and who cares? They just do.

I suppose if you gathered all of the African-American 18-year-olds and all of the Caucasian 18-year-olds and had them run in a timed race, you might discover that on the whole the differences in speed were measured in seconds. In sports, seconds can make the difference between winning and losing.

By all accounts, the Air Force Academy coach is a decent man without a racist bone in his body. Since when, by the way, is it racist for a man to say his university needs to recruit more minorities? A decent man should not be subjected to the media grinder over a perfectly innocent remark. This was a nonevent, a non-news story made into one only because of the stupidity of the reporters who thought what he was saying was racist.

Besides lawyers, we have way too many radio and TV talk-show hosts who will seize any piece of trivia to give themselves an excuse to flap their jaws. Too many of them have diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain. It was apparently the host of some dumb sports show who started this flap. Political correctness, as practiced in this country, is akin to insanity, a flat-out denial of reality. It deserves zero tolerance.

I was born and reared in the Deep South, and I know what a racist is. This poor coach doesn’t even come close. He is as innocent as a baby angel. As a man involved in sports all of his life, he remarked on what seems to him (and to most people, I would guess) an obvious fact. There was no malice, no put-down, no ridicule — nothing except an observation on what he perceived as an athletic virtue among African-American kids. Even if he were wrong, it wouldn’t be racist.

Perhaps the people in Colorado, which doesn’t have many African Americans living there, are just too inexperienced to recognize real racism. Their racist experience seems to be confined to American Indians and Hispanics.

What Americans should demand from their governments at all levels is accountability. Accountability is far more important than transparency, which can be easily faked.

Accountability is not complicated. It simply means people must take responsibility for their actions. If the actions are successful, take responsibility; if they are a failure, take responsibility. This principle applies daily to Americans in their private lives.

Of all the sins one might list of the Bush administration, failure to be accountable is the worst. As a justification to go to war, the Bush administration insisted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. It did not. The Bush people insisted Saddam Hussein had ties to al-Qaeda. There were none. They insisted Iraq was a threat to its neighbors. It was not, as all of its neighbors publicly said.

So, obviously, it was a case of lies or blunders – take your pick. In either event, people should have been held accountable for misinforming the American public and going to war on false pretenses. Not one single person, not a clerk or messenger or janitor even, has been held accountable. In fact, the people who made the blunders or told the lies have all been rewarded with promotions or medals.

This refusal to admit mistakes and to be held accountable is what gives the Bush administration the eerie atmosphere of being totally disconnected from reality. Whatever Bush says or does is always correct and successful, no matter how copious the evidence to the contrary. Members of the administration just don’t talk about the weapons or the ties to al-Qaeda anymore. You must be mistaken, they say. We went to war because we love the Iraqi people so much, we wanted them to have a democratic government.

Excuse me. You want me to believe that you love a people – who for 13 years we bombed and impoverished with sanctions – so much that you will gladly spend 2,000 American lives to relieve them of a dictator the U.S. once supported? This is insane.

I can live with crooks. I can live with differences of opinion and of politics. After all, those are parts of a democratic society. But the Bush administration scares me because it seems on its face irrational. That’s a fancy word for crazy. The world is too dangerous for us to have a president who seems unable to connect to reality and who surrounds himself with people whose chief qualification is that they agree with whatever he says.

I think there might be an arrogance gene in the Bush family. His father might well have been reelected if he had gone to the American people, apologized for breaking his promise that he would veto any new taxes and explained why he thought it was necessary to do so. But, no. It was “read my hips” as he stalked away from reporters. Apparently, in the Bush family’s eyes, it is impossible for anybody named Bush to make a mistake, tell a lie, or do anything wrong.

Of course, in fairness, most American politicians refuse to be accountable. Members of Congress in particular will pass bad laws and then act as if they had been sneaked onto the books by Martians in the dead of night.

But politicians don’t take responsibility because the American people and the media don’t demand it of them. If the American voters continue to act like ignorant sheep and the media continue to concentrate on trivia, you can’t blame the politicians for taking advantage of them. As an outlaw said in an old cowboy movie: “It may even be sacrilegious [not to rob the villagers]. If God did not want them sheared, why did he make them sheep?” Indeed, why?

Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate, Inc.

The underlying theme of most Western politicians can be summed up in the phrase “It’s not my fault.” This is the motto of the Age of Irresponsibility.

Have you ever wondered how, if all the problems we face are nobody’s fault, they became problems in the first place? It’s been my experience that when I tracked down the source of nearly all of my problems, it was me. I was fortunate to grow up when the most commonly heard phrase was “no excuses.”

It’s the not-my-fault syndrome that explains why both President Bush and Great Britain’s Tony Blair react so angrily when someone suggests that terrorist attacks are a response to American and British foreign policy. If they are a response, then the attacks are the fault of the policy-makers.

So, to avoid any share of responsibility whatsoever, both Bush and Blair propagate the line that terrorists are complete nut cases acting irrationally because of crazy hatred of our wealth and freedom. This is particularly clever political propaganda since it asserts that we are hated not for our faults, but for our very virtues.

It’s pure hogwash, of course. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East and terrorism knows that nearly all of the terrorist leaders are university-educated and come from middle-class to upper-class families. Why would bin Laden, himself a multimillionaire, hate wealth? Why would a man who freely chose a life of hardship when he could have been a decadent playboy despise freedom? Bin Laden fought for the freedom of Afghanistan. For whose freedom have Bush and Blair ever fought?

Bin Laden is certainly one of terrorism’s wordiest leaders, but in all his speeches and messages of which I’m aware, he’s never criticized wealth or freedom. He has been quite specific. He wants the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf ended. He criticizes our support for Arab dictators and for Israeli abuses of Palestinians. He wants us out of the Persian Gulf, and he wants an end to Israel.

Acknowledging what he believes is not agreeing with him. You can agree or disagree, but it is both stupid and dishonest to deny that bin Laden believes what bin Laden says. The Bush-Blair ploy is the same as if Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill had said of Adolf Hitler, “Well, he’s not really anti-Semitic and he’s not really interested in controlling Europe, he just hates us Brits and Yanks because we are such virtuous people.”

It’s this irresponsibility that sickens me. I long for a leader with the guts to speak the truth. What’s wrong with saying to the American people: “The terrorist attacks against us have nothing to do with Islam. They are a response to our policy of supporting Israel and the Arab governments we like, our military presence in the Persian Gulf, and our decision to attack Iraq. I think our objectives are worth the price, but if you disagree, vote against me in the next election.”

It’s been so long since honest speech has come out of a politician’s mouth, I’d probably faint if I heard any. And it’s not just foreign policy. Public education is entirely within the control of politicians, yet they deny any responsibility for its failures. They control Social Security and Medicare and deny any responsibility for the problems in those programs. They vote for the deficits and they write the tax laws, but they deny any responsibility for red ink or impossible-to-understand tax codes.

Insoluble political problems do not exist. The only question we face is, Do we have the brains and guts to preserve our country and its institutions and to demand accountability from our politicians? n

Charley Reese writes for King Features Syndicate, Inc.

Once upon a time in a mountainous land far away, a superpower came to the aid of a government that shared its political philosophy. No one dreamed that an insurgency made up of Muslims could possibly prevail against the military superpower.

Yet that’s what happened in Afghanistan, and it produced several results: It created a cadre of Muslim fighters who called themselves mujahideen; it created the myth surrounding Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; and it made the U.S., which had helped recruit and arm the mujahideen, feel it had paid back the Soviet Union for its help to the Vietnamese.

It’s too bad that Washington is a city in which nobody seems to have any long-term memory. If someone did, it might occur to him that we are in Iraq playing the role the Soviet Union played in Afghanistan. We are the invading superpower and are every day providing on-the-job training for terrorists and jihadists who want to take a shot at us. And, for that matter, they haven’t stopped shooting at us in Afghanistan either.

No other large power — so far — is providing money and weapons to the insurgents, at least none that we know of. Iraq was an open-air ammo dump, and one of the gross blunders we made was not blowing all that stuff up. The insurgents seem to have plenty of ammunition and plenty of money. Given the Bush administration’s preference for belligerency over diplomacy, it’s not hard to imagine future help coming to the insurgents from Iran, North Korea, and possibly even China.

Five times in his recent speech, President Bush tried to tie the war in Iraq to the 9/11 attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. What is deceptive about that is that prior to our invasion of Iraq, there were no connections whatsoever between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on us. But, like Afghanistan, Iraq will play a role in future attacks because we are training a whole new generation of terrorists. While Cheney insists the insurgency is in its last throes, Rumsfeld said the insurgency could last 12 years. The Bush administration cannot seem to get its story straight. At any rate, the facts don’t back up Cheney.

To use the same time span the president used to talk about progress, last year attacks averaged 40 a day; they are now averaging 70 a day. Since we turned over sovereignty (remember how that was supposed to knock the wind out of the insurgents?), 885 Americans have been killed, 74 coalition soldiers have died, and 482 car bombs have killed 2,176 people and wounded another 5,500.

I remember the neoconservatives saying not to worry, that Iraqi oil revenues would pay for the invasion and occupation. Don’t worry, they said, we will be welcomed with flowers and candy. It’s no wonder Washington prefers to operate in the Alzheimer’s mode, because memory would cause some people to be held accountable for their mistakes and bad advice.

The really sad thing about the president is that he seems to believe that a democratic government in Iraq is nirvana, and that once achieved, its brilliant light will spread over the Middle East and change the hearts and minds of 200 million people. He seems not to know that Iran has a democratically elected government, and it still doesn’t like us. Even if a democratic government in Iraq survives, it will not solve any of the other problems in the Middle East.

In the meantime, I’m sure little ads are appearing on the Internet saying: “If you aspire to be a terrorist or a jihadist, come to Iraq and get on-the-job training at killing Americans. No need to hurry. They will be here a long time.” 

Charley Reese writes for King Syndicate.

If you would like a role model on how a manly person should act in front of politicians and the media, I highly recommend the Honorable George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament.

A Senate subcommittee out to discredit the United Nations made the mistake of inviting Galloway to appear before its members. They had smeared him. Accusing a man of serious wrongdoing without a shred of evidence is a smear job, plain and simple. Senator Norm Coleman, like most senators, is used to people either fawning or being timidly evasive. Galloway landed on him like a rattlesnake.

Coleman had dredged up the old accusations that Galloway made money off Iraqi oil or was otherwise receiving money from Iraq. The Christian Science Monitor had taken a run at him and was forced to admit that the documents it had based its story on were forgeries. The British Daily Telegraph ran the same charges that Coleman had dragged out and lost a libel suit. It’s too bad U.S. senators have immunity from libel and slander suits.

At any rate, Galloway laced into them: “Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader, and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one — and neither has anyone on my behalf.”

Galloway had led a campaign to get the sanctions lifted from Iraq and also strongly opposed the war against Iraq. In the good old corrupt United States, where dishonesty and deceit and greed have become the norms, it’s inconceivable to many people like Coleman that anybody would do anything just because he or she believed in it.

Galloway picked their report to pieces. It claimed he had had “many meetings with Saddam Hussein.” He had, in fact, only two, and he pointed out that that was the same number that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had during the Reagan administration. The difference, he said, is that Rumsfeld was there to sell Saddam guns, and he, Galloway, was there to promote peace and persuade Saddam to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to come in.

He then pointed out that he had been an opponent of Saddam when the U.S. was his ally, an ally that made excuses for the gassing of Kurds, blaming those deaths on Iran.

Another blunder he pointed out was that the committee claimed its documents (provided by the infamous Ahmad Chalabi, who has boasted of having deceived the United States about weapons of mass destruction) were current, while the Daily Telegraph‘s libelous story was based on documents dating to 1992-1993. Galloway delighted in putting this lie to rest. Both sets of documents covered the same period, and there wasn’t even an oil-for-food program in 1992-1993, he said.

After exposing their errors, Galloway laced into the senators, pointing out that 100,000 people, including 1,600 Americans, have died because of “a pack of lies” spread by Coleman and his neocon allies. He pointed out that during the 14 months the U.S. was in charge in Iraq, $8.8 billion went missing and is still unaccounted for. He pointed to the corruption of the American corporations.

The slimy Coleman tried to save face afterward by telling the press that Galloway wasn’t “a credible witness.” The hell he wasn’t. It’s Coleman and his subcommittee who lack credibility, not to mention ethics or a sense of justice.

Follow the example of a brave man: Don’t let politicians or the media browbeat you, intimidate you, or lie about you. Tell the truth, and don’t sugarcoat it. The world needs more Galloways and far fewer Colemans.

Charley Reese is a columnist for King Features Syndicate.