Resistance Isn't Futile, War's Not Inevitable, and Bushistas Aren't Invulnerable
by Tamara Baker

Jan. 15, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- It's just as Karl Rove hoped.

The rumblings of war dominate the news, shoving news about Bush Junta crimes and malfeasances off the front pages and the nightly newscasts.

At least one hospital ship, staffed with 500 surgeons, is now heading for the Persian Gulf. The US Marine Corps has cancelled virtually all discharges -- just as they did before the first Gulf War in 1991. National Guard troops stateside are getting ready to go to Bosnia, to replace those US troops that Don Rumsfeld wants to move into Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, having been told by his reluctant Joint Chiefs that he can't just use Dick Cheney's old idea of dropping the 82nd Airborne into downtown Baghdad, is calling the Pentagon's bluff. He's scouring the land for as many warm young bodies as he can find, in order to achieve the 250,000-troop figure that the Pentagon's legitimate military experts warn is the bare minimum needed to pull off a successful, and relatively quick, land conquest of Iraq.

Even the the unpleasantness in North Korea hasn't dimmed the Bushistas' sunny insanity. Rumsfeld cheerily boasted about a week ago that he thought he could fight a two-front war, against Iraq and North Korea, and still win.

In other words, the Bushistas, with the assiduous assistance of the folks manning the Mighty Wurlitzer's of America's corporate media, are aping the Borg Collective:

"Resistance is futile. War is inevitable. Millions will die. You will be assimilated."

However, there are a few roadblocks standing in the way of the BushBorg:

1) The United Nations isn't exactly clamoring for an immediate invasion of Iraq.

As noted in a recent Washington Post article, Hans Blix, even as he was making the expected pro-forma boilerplate denunciations of Iraq, was telling the world that it could be months before UNSCOM would be able to say for certain whether Iraq has restarted any weapons programs: "We have now been there for some two months and been covering the country in ever wider sweeps and we haven't found any smoking guns. We think that the declaration failed to answer a great many questions."

This throws a spanner in the works, as far as trying to whip up international support for taking out Saddam Hussein is concerned. In fact, as the Post article notes, many European nations, even those allied with Bush, are taking a "go-slow" attitude:

Germany's U.N. ambassador, Gunter Pleuger, reflecting a widely
shared view among the 15-nation council, said there were still
"no grounds for military action" and that inspections should
be given more time to succeed. A leading British newspaper
reported that Britain is seeking to persuade Washington to
delay the onset of a war with Iraq until the fall.

That "leading British newspaper" happens to be The Daily Telegraph, a staunchly conservative outfit known to many Labour supporters as the "Torygraph". The fact that even the Torygraph isn't fully on board with the Bushistas is pretty significant, especially since Richard Perle is one of the persons who helps run it, and leads me to my second point:

2) Support for an invasion is crumbling in the UK.

Tony Blair is Bush's staunchest ally in the drive to take out Saddam Hussein. But the citizens of Great Britain aren't too fond of the idea. A recent BBC poll showed that three out of four respondents were against invading Iraq. Blair's own Labour Party is in open revolt against the invasion scheme, and they have been quick to remind him that the last time a British Prime Minister went to war without the backing of his party, the Suez incident in 1956, it ended with disaster and Prime Minister Anthony Eden's fall from power.

It's not helping the case for invasion that Rummy is refusing to reveal the "evidence" he claims to have of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. That's probably because of this:

3) Each time the Bushistas reveal "proof" of Iraq's having weapons of mass destruction, that "proof" gets shot down post haste.

We ran into this with the aerial photos and the aluminum tubes.

Well, the Bushistas rolled out the aluminum-tube gambit again, only to get their hands slapped, again, by the International Atomic Energy Agency :

Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum
tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon," Mr. Bush
said.

But Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the I.A.E.A.,
offered a sharply different assessment in a report to the
United Nations Security Council today. Dr. ElBaradei said
Iraqi officials had claimed that they sought the tubes to
make 81-millimeter rockets. Dr. ElBaradei indicated that he
thought the Iraqi claim was credible.

"While the matter is still under investigation and further
verification is foreseen, the I.A.E.A.'s analysis to date
indicates that the specifications of the aluminum tubes
sought by Iraq in 2001 and 2002 appear to be consistent
with reverse engineering of rockets," the agency said in
its report. "While it would be possible to modify such tubes
for the manufacture of centrifuges, they are not directly
suitable for it."

But even if the Bushistas manage to create a pretext, WMD-based or not, for invasion (and there are hints that they're working on one, and that the US press will as usual faithfully broadcast it: CNN last week recycled without question the long-discredited story about Saddam's evil warriors smashing incubators at a Kuwaiti hospital during the 1991 Gulf War), there might be other factors to distract them from going after Saddam:

4) Events in Venezuela and Israel, as well as in North Korea, aren't breaking the Bushistas' way.

Let's get the nastiest thing out of the way first.

Joshua Micah Marshall passes on an item from the Nelson Report, a preeminent DC paper on foreign policy, that has grave, grave import for the Bush Junta:

According to today's always invaluable Nelson Report, former
Clinton administration officials are now prepared to testify
before Congress that they got intelligence about the NK's
clandestine uranium enrichment program back in 2000 and
briefed the incoming Bush administration folks on that
intelligence at the beginning of 2001.

Blammo. And, according to Nelson:

Democrats are prepared to ask what the Bush people did with
this intelligence, all through 2001, and why negotiations
with N. Korea weren't begun on this vital topic. Democrats,
and perhaps more objective observers, note that, instead, it
was only in October, 2002, after months of international
pressure to Pyongyang, that the subject came up. Administration
sources have refused comment on what they were told by the
Clinton folks two years ago, but they frankly admit, off the
record, that the Kelly mission's use of the [uranium enrichment]
intelligence on Oct. 3 was designed to continue the stalemate
with N. Korea, not to start substantive negotiations on nuclear
weapons. Clearly, it never occurred to them that approach this
would fuel the c! urrent crisis, with N. Korea seizing the
opportunity to increase the "blackmail", rather than
"surrender", as some Bush hardliners apparently predicted.

Hmmmm. First Condi Rice blows off Sandy Berger's warning about Al Qaeda. Now we have evidence that the Bushistas ignored Bill Clinton's warning about North Korea.

I see a pattern here -- of gross and willful stupidity on the part of the Bushies. When will they learn that they can't use a complete lack of scruple to substitute for brains and knowledge?

But North Korea is by no means the only danger spot for the Bush Junta. Even Israel, which as recently as a month ago seemed to be on its way to re-electing Richard Perle's best buddy Ariel Sharon and the Likuds, is suddenly on the verge of going for Labor. Something about the incredible stench of recently-revealed large-scale corruption and racketeering emanating from Sharon's government. If this happens, Israel's support for invading Iraq will be severely weakened, if not eliminated. And the Bushistas need Israel.

However, they may not openly intervene on Sharon's behalf, though they'll be tempted to do so. The problem is that lately, when they've tried to pick out a country's rulers for it, the effort blows up in their faces, as is shown by what's happening in Venezuela. Chavez has, with the help of technicians provided by the OAS, started to bring back oil production in his country. It's already at 400,000 barrels a day -- a far cry from the 3 million barrels a day it normally exports, but it's steadily increasing as new technicians are trained to replace the ones in the pay of the Bush-aligned oligarchs.

So there it is. Resistance isn't futile, war isn't inevitable, the Bushies aren't invulnerable.

Pass it on.