Bush's Multiplex Wars Iraq, “terrorism,” class, and environment

G eorge Bush and his cabal are not just attacking and conquering Iraq, they are fighting a “war on terror,” a class war on ordinary citizens at home, and a war on the environment. These wars are linked. Bush would have had much greater difficulty carrying out his regressive economic, social, and environmental programs without the distractions of terror scares and war; 9/11 gave the cabal the excuse to move ahead, and the collapse of the Democrats and spectacular propaganda service of the mainstream media have allowed the Bush team to project force globally under the guise of pursuing terrorists. This has enabled Bush and the cabal to consolidate their power more firmly at home, posing as the leaders of a more “security” conscious America while actually stoking fear and reducing public security, both economic and political. 

The Bush team’s success in portraying itself as a protector of security is remarkable, given that the team was on duty and had primary responsibility for the spectacular security failure of 9/11. It had ignored numerous leads and warnings and actually called for counter-intelligence budget cuts on 9/10. The team’s over-reaction to the “security threat” thereafter and the normal double-standard of the media in dealing with Democratic and Republican miscues, helps us understand how Bush and company could get away with—and even benefit from—gross security failure succeeded by gross alarmist, mismanaged, misplaced, wasteful, and civil liberties-threatening security excess. 

This has been a straightforward war of aggression carried out by Bush in league with Blair, which made it clear that the post-Soviet New World Order was one of U.S. military rule, with the UN and other countries “relevant” only insofar as they aligned with the United States. The motives for the attack and occupation are still in dispute, but control of Iraq’s oil resources, the excuse to establish military bases and military domination in the Middle East, the desire to establish U.S. authority and put lesser countries and institutions in their place on a global basis, the aim of protecting Israel’s intensified ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories, and the usefulness of war and security threats as a cover for regressive domestic policies, all deserve weight.   

The justification of the war in terms of Saddam Hussein’s despotism and evil character, and his threat to U.S. national security by virtue of his possession of weapons of mass destruction, was laughable, but sufficed for the U.S. mainstream media. (He had of course been a despot, and was supplied with weapons of mass destruction and was protected when using them in service to the Reagan-Bush administration in the 1980s, but he didn’t use them in the Persian Gulf War when he would have suffered disproportionate retaliation, and had few if any by 2003, according to all authorities not in U.S.-British service.) But is there any excuse, or lie, that the mainstream media would not swallow as its members help orchestrate a wave of serviceable propaganda? Vietnam’s “internal aggression” against a minority regime imposed by U.S. force? The threat to U.S. medical students in Grenada in 1983? The Sandinista government’s “revolution without frontiers?” (fabricated to justify Reagan’s actual “counterrevolution without frontiers”) 

 You name it, and the media will swallow and help put it over. The obvious problem today is that since 1989, and the disappearance of any serious external force of containment, this unlimited gullibility gives unlimited sanction to the “projection of power” by the cabal.

War on Terror 

I n the aftermath of 9/11 the Bush administration declared a war on terror, just as Reagan did when taking office in 1981. The media never point out this similarity, because it is now obvious that Reagan, supporting the Argentine military junta, Savimbi and UNITA in Angola, and the South African apartheid government in its struggle against Nelson Mandela and his “terrorist” African National Congress, was actually supporting extreme forms of state terrorism. In one important overlap, also, Reagan supported Menachem Begin’s and Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon, culminating in the huge civilian massacre at Sabra and Shatila. At Sabra and Shatila, Ariel Sharon oversaw the massacre of at least ten times the number of women and children that the famous terrorist Carlos the Jackal killed in his entire career, and that doesn’t exhaust Sharon’s death-dealing. Sharon now leads Israel, and is implementing a very aggressive form of ethnic cleansing and state terrorism in the occupied territories, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and numerous Security Council resolutions. This is being done with the approval, protection, and support of the Bush administration and without demurral from congress or the mainstream media. This is dramatic evidence that the “war on terror” is a fraud, as the Bush- Sharon alliance involves active U.S. support of an extreme form of state terrorism. 

 It is also demonstration of fraud because all independent observers recognize that U.S. support of Israel’s brutal occupation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is a festering wound—a form of blatant discrimination-cum-violence that stokes the fires of anti-U.S. hostility and a terrorist response. The Western establishment cannot absorb the fact that many regard the U.S./Israeli treatment of Palestinians as the primary terrorism and the deadly responses to that violence as “retaliation.” 

The Bush administration’s closer embrace of the Colombian government and army and open return to counterinsurgency operations in that country is another major push of state terrorism under the guise of a war on terror (previously named a “war on drugs”). It is hardly a secret that the paramilitaries affiliated with the Colombian army are among the most brutal terrorists in action in the world today and their terrorist activities now receive Bush administration support, direct and indirect. 

 More broadly, any government that is “with us” can count on U.S. support or toleration of repression of dissent, from Putin in Chechnya to Mubarak in Egypt to Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo in the Philippines to Karimov in Uzbekistan. In short, the war on terror is a war of state terror against those targeted by the Bush team or by an ally, targets who may be linked to Al Qaeda or may just be people who oppose their state and its policies. Factoring in the Iraq aggression/conquest and the Bush support of large-scale ethnic cleansing in Israel and Colombia, we are dealing with an across-the-board war against the world’s people (who expressed their discontent in massive global protests against the Iraq war in February/March 2003). 

Class War 

T he Bush administration is an open representative of the business community, more aggressively assertive of business interests with the help of numerous rightwing ideologues who for many years have been cultivated in business lobbying and thinktank offshoots like the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, and Hoover Institution. The ideo- logues produce theoretical arguments that ruthless attacks on labor, the poor, blacks and other minorities, and largess to business and the wealthy, will serve the victims as well as the well-heeled, in the long run. This provides an intellectual and quasi-moral cover for aggressive class warfare and infliction of pain on the weak. 

One clear piece of evidence of anti-people bias has been the Bush tax program, with the massive income tax cuts hugely favoring the upper 1 and 5 percent of income recipients and with tiny benefits for the majority. In the latest tax proposal of the Administration, 40 percent of the tax cut will go to the top 1 percent; and this follows on an initial tax cut similarly regressive, along with a major assault on the estate tax. What makes this so brazen is that virtually all of the benefits of the economic growth and stock market advance of the prior 20 years went to the same upper income group, with the incomes of the majority stagnant or falling, sometimes maintained only by working longer hours or wives entering (or reentering) the job market. 

Bush, like Reagan before him, has been steadily attacking the safety net, trying to force more poor people off the welfare rolls, cutting back unemployment benefits, shifting control over social services to the states as regards housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and the Head Start preschool children for disadvantaged children. While sending programs to the states for management, the Administration keeps tight federal controls over some programs for the poor, as in its effort to increase the number of hours parents on welfare are required to work. Bush is cutting housing subsidies and tightening up qualifications on the earned-income tax credit for the non-affluent and discounted meals for children. 

As with Reagan, a Bush tactic is to cut taxes, and then when deficits follow increased military spending or other greater-than-expected expenditures, use this as an excuse to savage the non-military budget. The pushing of service responsibilities on to the states is done with capped block grants that shrink federal aid even as new unfunded mandatory obligations are imposed on them (e.g., dealing with terrorism alerts). This is being done at a time when the states are in a huge fiscal crisis, assuring both drastic cuts in services and inappropriate uses of federal aid.

These cuts are required to help sustain the $1.5 trillion in tax cuts mainly benefiting the wealthy. The wealthy are also protected by the Bush team’s refusal to make any moves to close offshore tax shelters, with Bush even supporting a rider to the Homeland Security bill that allows these “profit patriots” that have moved offshore to evade taxes to continue to obtain government contracts. Bush and the Republicans have continued the attacks and funding constraints on the Internal Revenue Service, limiting its ability to pursue wealthy tax evaders who are also looting the Treasury. 

 While protecting corporate looters, Bush has declared open season on labor unions and worker rights. He quickly overruled the Clinton proposed ergono- mics standard that promised help to millions of workers, but was opposed by employers. He has proposed rules on pensions that favor employers and threaten older workers’ retirement funds. Just in the last six months he has applied Taft Hartley in favor of West Coast shippers and against dockworkers. He is threatening to weaken overtime rules. He has called for privatization of the jobs of half the federal workforce, which represents a major assault on an important bastion of unionization. He has proposed new reporting requirements for unions that will be a heavy financial burden and will provide details on union affairs useful to union-busting employers. He has stopped tracking mass layoffs and plant closings. He has terminated collective bargaining rights for federal workers entering the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (see further, www.aflcio.org/bushwatch). 

 On civil rights, Bush has continued in the great tradition of the Republican’s “southern strategy,” using anti-black code words and tactics to splinter the working class and win the more numerous white vote. His main attack on black people has been through his economic and social policies. Prominent among the latter are his attempts to toughen work requirements for welfare recipients and his push for marriage as the solution to single mother poverty. His declaration of opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program, larded with lies about alleged “quotas,” was his assurance to white racists that despite his reprimand of Tom Delay for open support of segregation, he was still with them (see Derrick Jackson, “The Great Demancipator,” Boston Globe , January 17, 2003). 

 While claiming to be fighting enemies in the interest of liberty, Bush has engaged in a systematic attack on liberty at home. He has centralized power in the executive branch, bypassing and overpowering the legislatures and judiciary, and therefore threatening the touted checks-and-balances system. He has steadily refused congressional access to important information, as in the case of Cheney’s discussions with energy companies prior to energy policy decisions and enactments, Patriot Act-related records, and war plans prior to war; and he has made government-produced information less accessible to the public. Through the USA Patriot Act and executive orders he and his agent John Ashcroft have badly weakened or nullified Fourth Amendment protections of privacy, giving major new freedoms to the secret police to invade homes, computers, and private records without warrant or evidence of a crime or criminal intent. His Total Information Awareness program, combining the culling of records and spying on neighbors, is a police state program, causing conservative Republican Dick Armey to declare that the “Justice Department right now is the biggest threat to personal liberty in this country.” 

 The Bush team has deprived non-citizens of due process and First Amendment rights and arranged for the seizure and indefinite incarceration and “disappearance” of several thousand mainly Arab and Muslim men. Many of these, “with no links to terrorism or records of violence, charged with no more than minor immigration violations, have been placed in solitary confinement for months at a stretch” (Nancy Chang, Silencing Political Dissent ). Even U.S. citizens have been declared “enemy combatants” and held indefinitely, and Ashcroft has expressed the view that we need military detention camps to hold such U.S. citizens. 

  The Patriot Act’s definition of terrorist is dependent on the arbitrary judgment of the Secretary of State, and could easily be extended to an ordinary protester or contributor to any action group. Penalties are severe, running from 15 years to life in prison. In Ashcroft’s secretly prepared Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, known as Patriot Act II, anyone designated a terrorist can be deported on the ground that his terrorist affiliation implies an intent to repudiate his U.S. citizenship. This and many other features of this monstrosity would be a major step in fully terminating liberty and moving us into a Christian-fascist world. A number of analysts believe Patriot Act II was readied by Ashcroft and Bush to jam through congress without debate at the start of the Iraq invasion (Chisun Lee. “Bracing for Bush’s War at Home,” Village Voice , March 26-April 1, 2003). This plan failed to come to fruition, partly because the proposed act was leaked to the Center for Public Integrity and exposed in early February and the cabal was forced to deny its existence and any plan to push such a proposal without debate. 

However, the Bush attack on free speech and a democratic order has already been impressive. As Yale law professor Jack Balkin has said about Patriot Act II, “It is frightening to think that our leaders would try to undermine our civil liberties through a cynical manipulation of public opinion in time of war. It would be even more frightening if they succeeded” (“USA Patriot Act: A Dreadful Act II,” Los Angeles Times , February 13, 2003).   

War on the Environment 

T he Bush administration’s war on the environment is not deliberately aimed at the environment, rather it is a derivative of Bush’s almost total subservience to the corporate interests that funded his career and election and who expected and have received a payoff for services rendered  The Bush team is embedded in the corporate community and pursuing its interests came naturally. Put otherwise, the Bush economic and environmental policies and the related appointments of “public servants,” have been characterized by massive conflicts-of-interest and self-dealing (see "Paybacks," by Public Campaign and Earth- justice: www. publicampaign.org/publications/ reports/paybacks/ Paybacks.pdf). 

The Bush team is virtually an arm of the oil industry, which may have something to do with the attack on Iraq and projection of power around the Caspian Sea, as well as profoundly influencing environmental policy. That influence can be seen in the peremptory abandonment of the Kyoto agreement, the drive to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling,  the expansion of oil-drilling rights in Big Cypress National Preserve, and the weakened protection of wetlands. But business across-the-board has received help from Bush in his undermining of environmental rules. They have all shared the benefits of a halving of environmental enforcement budgets and prosecutions as compared with the Clinton years. Many have benefited from the elimination of the tax on polluters to fund the cleanup of toxic waste sites. 

 The mining industry has gotten reduced regulation of its operations on federal lands and the opening of formerly protected areas like the Everglades. The timber industry was given enlarged access to national forests in the name of fire prevention, although this “Healthy Forests Initiative” will surely reduce forest size and health. The electric power industry obtained a major windfall in the Bush administration’s rule revision making voluntary the Clean Air Act’s requirement that companies install modern pollution equipment when they expand older plants. The nuclear power industry got a break when Bush went back on his campaign promise and backed the Yucca Mountain plan for disposing of nuclear wastes. The automobile industry received a windfall with Bush’s ignoring the deadline for boosting auto efficiency in April 2002.    

Bush has been given essential help in getting away with this war on the environment by the “liberal media,” sometimes also referred to as the “corporate media,” or “advertising-based media,” that have treated each gross conflict of interest appointment and each abuse lightly if at all and moved on quickly to more important matters, in contrast with their treatment of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinski or his pardons or Bush’s weekly warnings about terrorism at home or Hussein's weapons of mass destruction allegedly threatening U.S. national security. 

The Bush administration is a war regime, dependent on armed conflict to achieve its goals at home as well as abroad. Abroad, war carves out opportunities for domestic business enterprise both directly and indirectly, via war contracts and the establishment of positions of access and privilege in an expanding empire. At home, the wars abroad create a moral environment that facilitates class war and a ruthless exploitation of the environment. This may be at the expense of liberty, but many businesspeople and affiliated ideol- ogues would consider—in Madeleine Albright’s memorable words about the sanctions’ price of 500,000 dead Iraqi children—that it is “worth it.”  

Edward S. Herman is an economist, author, and media analyst. He has been a regular contributor to Z since 1988.