By Eric Groves
God help me, I agree with Pat Buchanan
I must admit, I normally don’t consider three-time presidential hopeful Pat Buchanan to be one of the most compassionate politicos in Washington. Let’s just say I wouldn’t vote for Buchanan for president if my ballot were on fire and his name was the only one unscorched. But there’s one thing Mr. Buchanan and I see eye-to-eye on: the Bush junta’s forthcoming invasion of Iraq. Check out this zinger Buchanan lobbed at his Republican brethren in the Bush administration: “They not only want to go into Iraq and disarm and overthrow this regime. They want to make Iraq a satellite of the US, democratize it and use it as a base camp for modernizing the Arab and Islamic world. That is imperialism pure and simple.” Yowza! Pat Buchanan, “Mr. Conservative, Pro-Life, religious right zealot himself,” said that?!? If that quote were anonymous, I’d be much more likely to attribute it to the late, great Paul Wellstone (R.I.P., Senator) or outgoing Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney. “Imperialism” is not a nice term for you pro-Bushies out there, especially coming from one in your own camp! But just as Mr. Buchanan suggests, it’s really irrefutable.
If you sincerely believe that the Bush administration’s sole reason for removing Saddam Hussein from power is because of his fledgling weapons of mass destruction program, then you are either extremely naïve or extraordinarily ignorant. Why are we not so belligerent toward North Korea, a tyrannical regime that, to the best of U.S. knowledge, has been developing a nuclear weapons program for over a year? And if we truly are concerned for the well-being of the Iraqi people, the way Dubya and his cronies make it sound with their “humanitarian” pleas, why aren’t we equally as concerned with the abject poverty in North Korea? Hunger is so rampant in North Korea that citizens have resulted to cannibalism as a means of survival. (There have been several reports of human cadavers being ground into sausage and distributed for human consumption.) Please, hate-mail-sending Bushies, do us all a favor: investigate the corporate backgrounds of nearly the entire Bush administration and then enlighten us “ranters” on the common denominator. I find it likely that you’ll see there’s some money to be made in the energy sector, and specifically in oil and gas. ‘Nuff said.
What remains remarkably baffling to me about those who quickly dismiss dissenters as merely “ranters and ravers,” those of us who believe this whole little facade is indeed about only the oil under the Iraqi desert: what “facts” would you like about Iraq’s weapons program? How about this lovely little morsel: a U.S. Senate report that ran in several European newspapers, including the Daily Herald in Scotland, says, “The United States provided the government of Iraq with ‘dual use’ licensed materials which assisted in the development of Iraqi chemical, biological and missile-system programs.” So, we’re going in to wipe out Saddam’s WMD that we, in essence, provided? Anyone care to explain, especially a Bush-backing hawk? Please, feel free to enlighten us. According to the aforementioned Senate report, some of these agents, including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs, and botulism (among other biological agents), were sold to Iraq until March 1992! That’s over a year AFTER the Gulf War! So theoretically, some of these agents the Bush administration rightly claims were used against Iranians and Kurds could have also been used against our very own troops who were fighting against Iraq during the war! Talk about sickening irony, and talk about a terrible black eye that would be left on the administration if the mainstream media ever had the stones to run a story like that.
