The Two-Front War
Bush Inc. Uses Iraq Invasion to Distract from His Domestic Aggressions
by Tamara Baker

Nov. 15, 2002 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- You gotta hand it to Richard Perle. Rummy and Wolfie's best bud has just won the Newt Gingrich Award for Most Brazenly Hypocritical Statement of the year, by having the gall to attack the "moral fiber" of those Europeans (you know, like the Pope) who aren't keen on the Rumsfeld-Perle-Wolfowitz plan to invade Iraq.

But sheer shameless audacity won't be enough to make this war work for the Bushistas. Ralph Peters, a military man who is not a peacenik by any stretch of the imagination, points out in a recent Washington Post piece that in order to make the invasion of Iraq be the successful quick strike Darth Rumsfeld envisions, Rummy needs the Saudis to sign on so we can use their land and bases. But the House of Saud, which knows full well that they're Target #2 once Saddam goes down (cripes, anyone who's read Rumsfeld and Perle's favorite website, New American Century, knows that the neocons want to take out Saudi Arabia!), has flatly refused to even let Rumsfeld use their airspace, much less their bases. So that means that Rumsfeld is committed to doing a slow, Vietnamesque, "conveyor-belt-style" escalation of forces -- which will wind up yielding a Vietnamesque result.

But Rummy and his friends squatting in the White House seem not to mind this whole Vietnam-quagmire-neverending-war thing. After all, they need the war outside our borders to distract us from the war within.

The war they've declared on the American people.

In an act of supremely sick irony, the Bush Junta is creating an agency, the "Homeland Security Agency," as a Trojan Horse to strip Americans of their security at home, even as they promise to uphold it.

It's not just the vast authority the bill gives the Bushistas to spy on every single American. It's not just the virtual suspension of habeas corpus, or in fact every single major right and freedom going back to the Magna Carta. They're also using their pet agency to trash the Civil Service System, the system that once was the envy of the world's government, and return to the hideously corrupt days of the "spoils system."

For those of you who slept through your Civics and History classes in sixth grade, here's a brief reminder, courtesy of the sixth edition of the Columbia Encyclopedia, of what the "spoils system" was all about:

...in U.S. history, the practice of giving appointive offices
to loyal members of the party in power. The name supposedly
derived from a speech by Senator William Learned Marcy in
which he stated, "to the victor belong the spoils."

[...]

The dispensation of offices by strict party allegiance was
followed in succeeding years and critical opposition grew.
The corruption and inefficiency bred by the system reached
staggering proportions in the administration of Ulysses S.
Grant, and reaction against this helped bring about civil
service reform, which was inaugurated by creation of the
Civil Service Commission in 1871.

This is what Bush wants: Corruption and sleaze that would make a Central American dictator blush for shame.

Let's not let him have it.