President Bush ordered the bombing of 1,200 targets in Iran, decimating

Iran's uranium enrichment facilities and crippling its military forces. And
early Christmas day, Bush's "pre-emptive strike" came screaming back
home to rip out our hearts.
World War III and The Dawn of
Humanity
A copyrighted essay, ©
At 9:15 on that crystalline morning, in Washington D.C., the cherry trees
2008 By William Alan
along the Tidal Basin bowing under their loads of fresh snow, three
Shirley
Ryder trucks had rolled unnoticed into town on three different byways,

each finding their designated post and exploding within seconds of each
"We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in
other their radioactive payloads, their dirty bombs, rendering our
defense of our great nation."
nation's capital a cancerous death zone. A killing field so lethal it will be
President George W. Bush, 2002
untold months before a battalion of HAZMAT teams can begin the trillion

And here
dollar, at Fortress
seven America,
year task with Bush
of imploding it all and Vice President
to rubble Cheney at
and hauling
26 December 2008: President-elect Barack Obama sits alone in a
distant secure
Washington locations,
away Obama is watching the leaders in the level below
to be buried.
subterranean office, watching worldwide panic, shock and indignation play
him on the right-most bottom screen in the wall of monitors. At last count
out on a wall of television monitors, contemplating the plight of America
there were thirty-three of them, while the rest of our legislature is being
and the world, the interconnectedness of us all, and the crusading cartel
rushed here by land and air military transports. Generals and admirals,
that had sealed his windowless destiny. And in a vast concrete assembly
senators and congressmen and women, members of the president's
hall directly beneath him, in this Fortress America, our nation's new
cabinet, all of them over-shouting one another about where and against
capital, the U.S. Strategic Command Underground Command Center in
Obama's campaign had vowed to restore international respect for our
whom to retaliate. Iran has denied any role in the devastation of
founding ideals, toour
Offutt, Nebraska, revive the diplomatic,
political and militarypolitical,
leaders and economic to
are struggling
components of our global military strategy that had made us the
Washington,
greatest whereas Osama bin to
Laden, in a the
video delivered this morning
maintain nation on earth.
a semblance Vowed
of government. embrace Baker-Hamilton
Commission's recommendation of engaging Iraq and its neighbors in
to Al Jazeera,
diplomacy has boasted
"without of engineering
preconditions." And onit,4calmly narrating
November theturned
we had blueprint
out in record numbers to vote him into office. But on 6 November our
by which his
mandate wasjihadists
thwarted had carried it out. So bomb Pakistan! snarls a
when

congressman. No, cries another, bomb Tehran. Hell, bomb Damascus,

against us."
Istanbul, Riyadh. Bomb Mecca! Blow Islam from the face of the earth.

"Nuke them all!" barks a senator. "They're only Muslims. And nuke any

impudent nation that dares to side with them

Sliding from his chair to his knees, Obama clasps his hands atop the

desk and bows his head.

This isn't one possible future, its stage has been set. George W. Bush,

despite a recent CIA report that Iran is five years away from having

nuclear capability (The New Yorker, 8 October 2007), despite the latest

National Intelligence Estimate report, which declared that Iran had

abandoned its covert nuclear weapons program in 2003 (New York Times,

3 December 2007), continues to insist that "Iran was dangerous, Iran is

dangerous, and Iran will be dangerous." And on 20 March 2008 Bush said

Iran "wants a nuclear weapon to destroy people." He has ordered the

Pentagon to draw up plans for air strikes against 1,200 targets within Iran

(The London Sunday Times, 2 September 2007). He's ordered a second

plan from the Pentagon for "surgical" strikes against the Republican Guard

facilities, in Tehran and elsewhere, to lay Iran's military capabilities to

waste. And who would stand with Iran against us? Russia and China (both

of them nuclear), are on record as opposing any attack on Iran, while India

and Pakistan (both of them nuclear) and Israel (which refuses to confirm

or deny its nuclear capability) are watching like the estranged neighbors

they are. And we're being sold the bombing of Iran the same way we were

World War
sold the III is upon
invasion us. It's
of Iraq. Bushlong
andsince begun.
Cheney are Its first shot
touting fired is of Iran
the bombing

already
with theasame
tragicbrand
chapter in our
of fear history, the
mongering, mass murder
smoking on 11 and
guns, WMDs,

September 2001,
sanctimonious the deaths
aggression onherded
that our soilusofcheering
2,974 people from behind
en masse seventy-
their
Cheney turned their backs on Afghanistan, where we had every ethical
two nations.
invasion right when
Its first escalation came
of Iraq. to be, Bush and
abandoning our stalwart message to al Qaeda that we would hunt them

down, bring them to justice, and crush all regimes that harbor them (a

genuine war on terrorism), to divert our troops into Iraq. And now a

Yet we have
second it within
escalation, theus, We the of
bombing People, tomounting.
Iran, is end the escalations of an ever-

expanding global war, and return to the war on terrorism. To search the

very core of our hearts and ignite a national revolt of conscience,

embracing what Martin Luther King Jr. once called the "fierce urgency of

now," breaking through our prejudices that divide cultures, ethnicities,

religions, and genders, with reverence to the ultimate reality that we are

all one race. And we will ignite a revolution of consciousness, creating a

momentum we will look back on as The Dawn of Humanity, a time when

we soared above our vain differences, when withstanding the worst in

ourselves finally brought forth our best. We have the power the right and

Let's look because

the duty, back countless thousands
the good we don'tof
dolost
willlives
echoand hundredsallofofbillions
throughout

of dollars, at the ever-changing rationalizations for what We the People

eternity.

have let the Bush Doctrine foment in our names, so far.

Hans Blix, United Nations weapons inspector and his team told the world
he couldn't find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He wanted to
keep looking. But Cheney told us, "Simply stated, there is no doubt that
Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. He’s amassing them to
use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." That was in
August 2002. Four years later, after Cheney’s statement had been proven
and roundly reported to be untrue, 50% of us still believed it (Harris poll,
July 2006). It's no wonder we bought into everything from "smoking gun"
and "mushroom
cloud," to "mobile chemical labs," and "yellowcake uranium from Niger,"
to "We’ll be greeted as liberators," to "Shock and Awe," and "Mission
Accomplished," to "They’re in their last throes," to "a few stragglers and
dead-enders," to "We’ll leave when the job is done," to "When the Iraqis
stand up, we’ll stand down," to "stay the course, stay the course, stay the
course," to "It was never stay the course, it’s about adapting and
winning", to "not winning, but not losing," to "Never cut and run," with the
degradation of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the murders
in Haditha along the way.

Year after year, longer than the entirety of World War II, we have created

and fostered a nation of chaos and anarchy. We failed to send enough

U.S. troops to secure Iraq, and we disbanded the Iraqi Army, leaving three

hundred thousand young Iraqi men unemployed and vulnerable to jihadist

recruitment, all but inciting the looting of Iraqi schools, hospitals,

museums, banks, and vast depots of bombs and weaponry that were then

turned by insurgents against our troops and against each other. And force

continued to beget force. As far back as May 2005, a CIA report (The New

York Times, 22 June 2005) stated that "our presence in Iraq is creating

So much
more for CIAof
members Director George
al Qaeda Tenet's
than we predicted
are killing "slam dunk." So
in Iraq."

much for "Shock and Awe."

"Bottom line is," Cheney told Wolf Blitzer on 24 January 2007, "we've

had enormous successes (in Iraq) and we will continue to have

What was the bottom line our vice president was congratulating? The
skyrocketing price of Halliburton stock? The record breaking stock prices
enormous successes."
of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Washington Group
International, the Parsons the
Bechtel and the Fluor Corporations? Those Powers That Be, the CEOs who
continue to meet secretly in Cheney's office, whose profits burgeon with
every deadly morning that dawns on our troops in Iraq. Those among the
1% who own over 50% of the world's wealth, and will do anything to keep
it. Those Powers That Be who glower down at us, those faceless Masters
of War, ushering in the New World Order, where they are the self-
proclaimed lionhearts, unburdened by any need to explain themselves,
hoarding Bush's tax cut for the super-rich as they expand their global
empire, and we are the mice.

Or was Cheney congratulating The Project for the New American Century,

the neoconservative think tank that had been lobbying since 1997 for the

United States to invade Iraq, the foundation of its blueprint for dominating

the Mideast and turning Iraq into a gas station for The Powers That Be, the

think tank that gained its imperious momentum in 2000 when Bush

named eighteen of its signatories (including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle,

Libby, Armitage, Bolton, and Cheney himself) to high posts in our

government? The front men for The Powers That Be, men who themselves

had never served in our armed forces, who bring our troop's coffins home

from Iraq under a cloak of secrecy, no media cameras allowed, who won't

institute a draft, who lowered rather than raised taxes before they went to

war, all to placate us and avoid stirring up any nationwide protests, who

touted 9/11 like the new Pearl Harbor, turning their four years of lobbying
And now, over five years into their endless war, the price per gallon of gas
has
and gone from White
authoring $1.45 Papers
on 20 January 2000, Bush’s
into a real-life inauguration
invasion day
of Iraq, even though
(national average, the Lundberg Report), to $3.26 on 28 March 2008. In
that same
Iraq had period,
had the price per
zero complicity barrel
with 9/11.of
oil has risen from $27 to over $110, with ExxonMobil's $39.5 billion annual
profit (as reported in February 2007), $1,300 in profits per second for
every second of the year, breaking all previous record profits of any
corporation in the world. . . this while the man who'd planned and ordered
9/11, the man who we were going to "smoke out. . .at a time and place of
our choosing," remains at large, still taunting us with videos.

There was a time when Osama bin Laden was our enemy. "Soon," Bush

told us, with the World Trade Center rubble smoldering behind him, "the

people who knocked these buildings down are going to hear from all of

us!" And days later he said, "We will not waver, we will not falter. We’re

going to find those evildoers, those barbaric people who attacked our

country, and we’re going to hold them accountable." Those first days

after 9/11 were heart-wrenching. Remember looking into even a

stranger's eyes as they passed you on the street and feeling such a

bittersweet depth of camaraderie? The free world sent their hearts out to

us. We were one fervent nation under God, and our troops went

But at a White
thundering intoHouse press conference
Afghanistan, sixevery
to turn over months
lastlater
rock(13 March
in the hunt2002),
for

Bush said of
bin Laden, bin Laden
whom Bush "I truly
said he am not that
wanted concerned
"dead or alive,"about him." And
and Bush's

within months
approval ratinghe pulled
shot our 5th Special Forces Group from Afghanistan to
to 90%.

invade Iraq, an invasion that has squandered the goodwill from around

the world, uniting much of the world against us. In the years of war that

followed, as his approval rating at home spiraled down to 27%, he has

shrugged off our few remaining allies: our "Coalition of the Willing." Spain,
from Iraq, and Britain cut their initial troop level of 40,000 to 5,000, as a prelude
Italy, Japan, Australia, Denmark, andto total
a handful of smaller nations pulled

their troops
withdrawal, leaving the Coalition's troop commitment in Iraq at 6.52 % as

compared to America's 93.48%. Remarkably, Bush called the British

withdrawal "a sign of success." In an interview with Bob Woodward, Bush

said, "I will not withdraw (from Iraq) even if Laura and Barney (his dog) are

the only ones supporting me." And with his loyalist base cheering, he

forged ahead with "We’re fighting them over there, so we don’t have to

fight them over here," and his oft repeated "I listen to my generals." But

Bush doesn't listen to his generals. He's been systematically firing them in

"You did
search ofnot
onelisten, Mr. parrot
who will President," said General
the agenda behindJohn
The Batiste, former
Project for a New

commander of our 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, in a commercial by

American Century.

votevets.org. "You continued to pursue the failed strategy that is breaking

our great Army and Marine Corps. I left our Army in protest in order to

speak out. You have placed our nation in peril. Our only hope is that

Major General
Congress Paulact
will now Eaton, formerour
to protect Commander of our troops in Iraq,
men and women."

speaking on Hardball about his tenure with the White House during the

weeks leading up to the war, said, "If you didn’t accept the party line that

this was going to be a cakewalk, rose pedals, you were dismissed out of

hand by the administration. . . they were fixed well before they decided to

invade, in the face of some very fine advice by very fine leaders who'd
General Eric Shinseki and General Anthony Zinni both told Bush that we
would need several
been working in thishundred thousand
region for troops
a very long for the invasion, yet Bush
time."
stuck to his original plan and sent 125,000 troops. General Zinni soon
retired and General Shinseki was fired. And
Paul Wolfowitz, speaking on behalf of the White House, called the
generals' estimate of needed troops "wildly off the mark."

And consider the wizard-like title of War Czar, a position Bush offered to

several seasoned generals who declined it before it was finally accepted

by Lieutenant General Douglas Lute. One of the generals who'd turned

down Bush’s offer, Marine General John Sheehan, a former top NATO

Commander, explained his decision to pass this way: "The very

They didn't know where the hell they were going, yet Cheney, backing his
earlier claim of
fundamental "enormous
issue successes"
is, they don’t in Iraq,the
know where toldhell
us they
in anare
interview
going."with
Rush Limbaugh (January 2007) that, "If you look at the general overall
situation they’re doing remarkably well." Remarkably well where? When?
Yes, we routed Saddam's army, despite Donald Rumsfeld's insistence on
armed forces-lite--inadequate manpower, inadequate armor-despite Bush
having rejected former Secretary of State Colin Powell's doctrine of
overwhelming force (That's General Powell, the former Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, another general Bush ignored). But Bush's nothing of
a plan beyond reaching and claiming Baghdad, the fact that he did not
send the three times more troops that his generals had told him would be
necessary, his failure to secure Iraq, or even to secure just Baghdad,
opening the door to anarchy and civil war, and the fact that he launched a
contrived war in the first place, are high crimes against our fallen soldiers,
against our Constitution, against America and against humanity, serial
treachery on a global scale for which impeachment would be but a slap on
the wrist. Bush has told us that "History takes a long time," that History
will judge his legacy differently than public opinion currently sees it, that
we don't yet have the proper historical perspective with which to assess
his
legacy. So let's look at the facts by which History will record him, the
tragedies of his five year quagmire, with no end in sight:

4,007 American troops are dead, as of 29 March 2008. Sons, daughters,

husbands, wives, many of them young parents whose children weren't yet

old enough to meet or know them. And all but 139 of them died after

"Mission Accomplished." And shouldering unprecedented repeated tours of

combat, their suicide rate is the highest in our army's history. Over 30,000

more are officially counted as wounded, many of them terribly,

permanently disfigured and disabled. Over 10,000 need lifelong health

assistance. "There are wards that you will never hear about," wrote

Seymour M. Hersh, ". . . ward after ward of vegetables because the brain

injuries are so enormous." And Hersh’s statement was proven all the more

telling when USAToday (23 November 2007) uncovered and reported

20,000 additional troops with traumatic brain injuries the Pentagon hadn’t

classified among its 30,327 wounded. And estimates of Iraqi civilian

deaths run as high as one million (Reuters), with millions more Iraqis

wounded, many of them terribly, permanently disfigured and disabled,

while over two million more are now refugees, among them physicians,

scientists, engineers, teachers, and businessmen, the core elements that

drive a society's ability to grow and prosper, having fled or been driven
In an essay by seven American soldiers stationed in Iraq (The War As We
Saw
from It, published
their homes in
to The New Yorknations
neighboring Times,that
19 August 2007), them
either turned the soldiers
away or
wrote that "engaging in the banalities of life has become (for the average
Iraqi)
herded a death-defying act. Lucky
them into sprawling Iraqis
refugee camps along their borders. Secretary

Powell's warning in 2002, "If you break it you own it," now seems

criminally sanitized.
live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that
provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any
sense of security we would consider normal." To even begin to imagine
the horror of an Iraqis' daily life, think Oklahoma City and recall its
staggering carnage. Every week. Deafening explosions, another masque
or funeral or wedding or marketplace or police recruitment center blown
half to rubble, their perimeters scattered with smoldering body parts.
Every week. And imagine that countless Timothy McVeighs aren't caught,
aren't executed, but are out looking for you, to drill holes in your knees, to
put a bullet in your head, or they've found some other innocent target and
you're caught in their crossfire or disemboweled by their bomb, or they're
raping your daughter or they've abducted your son, whose head is
roasting on a stake in your front yard. And the U.S. Army and Marines,
liberators now occupiers, can't find them, much less stop them. Every
week. "Nowhere is safe," said an Iraqi quoted by The New York Times,
"and you don’t know who anyone is."

And then there's the cost in American dollars. Lawrence Lindsey, Chief
Economic Advisor to President Bush, predicted that the war would cost
over $200,000,000,000. He was fired. The estimated cost then shrank,
courtesy of Bush's crony Paul Wolfowitz, to $40,000,000,000. A more
palatable sum, especially since we were told that it would all be paid back
with Iraqi oil. But Wolfowitz's pandering estimate was woefully low. The
cost so far, five years later? $510,000,000,000. And climbing, according to
The Three Trillion Dollar War, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winning
economist, and Linda J. Bilmes, at over $411,000,000 a day. Over
$12,000,000,000 a month, with Bush asking for nearly $200,000,000,000
for 2008 alone. And when we factor in $280,000,000,000 to return our
military to its pre-war strength, $590,000,000,000 in ongoing medical
costs for
tens of thousands of our troops and some 100,000 troops diagnosed with
mental-health conditions, veterans for whom Bush has already cut
benefits by some $10,000,000,000 over the next ten years, and some
$615,000,000,000 in interest over the next ten years, indebting our
children and our children's children, the current reassessment then comes
in at $3,000,000,000,000. And no, it is not being paid back with Iraqi oil. In
addition to Iraq’s struggling oil production, recent reports cite up to
$15,000,000 worth of oil per day that's being siphoned off by. . . someone,
while our national debt continues to grow at $1,470,000,000 per day and
has now passed $9,000,000,000,000. Meanwhile, 726,000 pounds of
mostly $100 bills for greasing the war machine that had been sent to Iraq
by the CIA during Paul Bremer's watch disappeared, never to be
accounted for.

Yet Bush forged ahead with The Surge, or the "Augmentation," as

Secretary Rice so academically put it. Bush forged ahead, staying the
course, the same course that General Zinni told us, in February 2006, was
"heading over Niagara Falls." Bush forged ahead with The Surge even
though the Baker-Hamilton Commission opposed it, with its bipartisan
elders, men who know both war and statesmanship, warning that the
state of war in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating." Speaking for the White
House, Richard Perle (one of those eighteen signatories of The Project for
the New American Century) dismissed the commission’s call to engage
diplomacy with Iraq’s neighbors Syria and Iran as "Total illusion." Bush
forged ahead even though General John Abizaid told him that he and
every commander on the ground in Iraq opposes The Surge (General
Abizaid was soon shown the door). Bush forged ahead even though
General George W. Casey Jr., General Anthony Zinni, and General Eric K.
Shinseki all opposed it (they were all soon shown the door). Even Henry
Kissinger, the architect of Viet Nam, said we can’t win the
Iraq war. And General Merrill A. Mc Peak, former Joint Chiefs of Staff
member, stated in his essay titled Victory Is Not an Option (February
2007) that "Even if we had a million men to go in, it’s too late now."

In the summer of 2007, though, Bush marginalized yet another general.

With his approval ratings continuing to tumble, he assured us repeatedly

that the much-touted September Assessment of The Surge's effectuality

was being written by General David Petraeus, Commander of the Multi-

national Forces in Iraq, and by Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq.

But a month later, administration officials announced that the assessment

would be written instead by the White House, "with inputs from officials

throughout the government." And on 10 September, in his face-to-face

report to Congress, General Petraeus read us the same cherry-picked

statistics we'd been hearing from Bush for six months. When Senator John

Warner (R-Virginia) asked Petraeus if our war in Iraq was making us safer

at home, Petraeus testified that he didn't know. The Powers That Be must

have been chortling into their bourbons. And so too the CEOs of

Blackwater, Brown and Root, Kellogg, Parsons, L-3 Communications, Titan,

DynCorp, Transatlantic Traders, and others, corporations whose 163,000

contractors are immune and impervious to not only Iraqi and American law

but to our own military law, while employed throughout Iraq as

So did The Surge work, is The Surge working? Its expressed purpose was
to bring stability
mercenaries, to Iran,
armed and police
guards, particularly to Baghdad
trainers, (where
helicopter pilots,most
and of the
Surge's 30,000 troops were deployed), and to provide a level, non-
threatening playing
interrogators, field where
each making up toIraqi leaders
$30,000 a month, versus the $30,000 a

year for each of our troops.

could finally undertake the business of resolving their sectarian
differences, addressing the inequities in oil revenue sharing and the
balance of power among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds, and building a truly
representational government. Yet the violence and mistrust among Iraq's
leaders continues. They have yet to address their differences. And The
Surge hasn't quashed the violence or driven it out, it's merely suppressed
the carnage, the death count of troops and Iraqi citizens, to the
unacceptable levels of 2006. And while the White House boasts that some
Iraqis have been returning to their homes, those returnees are "mostly
from Syria," according to Time magazine (24 December 2007), "which has
introduced tough new visa regulations designed to send back Iraqis and
turn away new waves at the border." Nine months into The Surge, The
Surge that Bush said would be a sixty to ninety day operation, Lieutenant
General Ricardo Sanchez, former commander of American troops in Iraq,
said (The New York Times, 13 October 2007), "After more than four years
of fighting, America continues in its desperate struggle without any
concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-
torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism." And he called
our continued involvement in Iraq "a nightmare with no end in sight."

Our invasion of Iraq was never about inspiring democracy or spreading

freedom. Nor was it about al Qaeda, which had no presence in Iraq before
we invaded and has never since then represented more than 2% of the
combatant forces in Iraq. And there is no Bush strategy for victory in Iraq
because his intention from the beginning was to occupy and hold. The
Bush Doctrine is about advancing capitalism, with The Powers That Be
holding all the cards, fueled by religious and cultural sanctimony, an
insistent socio-political sense of superiority, and greed. We invaded Iraq
for its oil. With America
holding 3% of the world's oil reserves, we burn 20% of the world's black
gold. And with the emergence of China and India as this century's new
economic and potentially military superpowers, and all of us competing
for dominance over the world's resources and markets, it is the nation
that has the oil that will not only compete but control. Bush has already
abandoned the Iraq War to our next president. The question is not about
winning or losing in Iraq. The bottom line is we can't win or lose their civil
war. There is no triumphant solution. Countless more will die if we
withdraw our troops; countless more will die if we stay. The question is
Who has more oil and who is in our way of getting it.

Enter Iran. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hosted an Arabic

conference celebrating his claim that the Holocaust was a fiction, has

threatened to "halt oil supply to the last drop from the shores of the

Persian Gulf via the Straits of Hormuz," the straits through which pass

some 17,000,000 barrels of oil per day, 85% of the supply from the gulf

region. Reliable evidence says he's sending weapons and combatants in

support of factions in Iraq, a ploy that demands from us a measured

response. And he's continuing to develop Iran's uranium enrichment

program. This last, Iran's growing potential for developing nuclear

weapons, is a global concern, one that could rally powerful nations to our

side, a coalition that would surpass in breadth and might even the allied

nations of World War II. Nations that recognize Iran as a worldwide threat

that requires a worldwide solution. A real coalition, one that would offer

Iran genuine diplomacy, offer Iran what General Wesley Clark, former

Supreme Allied Commander of NATO Europe, refers to as "the carrot and

the stick," the choice between international cooperation or the most

stringent sanctions against them.

Would it only be so. But early on, Cheney informed us how The Powers

That Be roll: "We don't negotiate. We dominate." And the Bush

administration continues to scoff the Baker-Hamilton Commission's advice

of diplomacy "without preconditions," demanding instead that Iran meet

our goals of diplomacy as a precondition to any diplomacy. This is the

mindset that never doubts or questions itself. The mindset that pits them

against anyone who just doesn't see the world the way they do. The

arrogant inflexibility that pits us against each other. That accuses us of

being unpatriotic if we are not proud of their war. That spies on us. That

flouts international law, the Geneva Conventions, and our own

Constitution, keeping prisoners in Guantanamo indefinitely without legal

representation or due process. The mindset that Ann Coulter brandished to

a roomful of cheering fans when she suggested we should march into the

Mideast and "convert who we can and kill the rest." The mindset of

absolute brute force that Cheney stated so clearly when he explained to

us, "We're going to have to spend some time on The Dark Side, if you will,"
And upping the ante from a mushroom cloud to Armageddon, on 17
October
exploiting 2007, Bush and
our fears declared, "Iranour
degrading would be raising
ideals, the risk
committing of a World
extraordinary
War III, if it came to possess nuclear weapons." At his behest our congress
has classified
rendition, the Iran's army,
ferreting theofRepublican
away suspects inGuard, a terrorist
the night organization,
to foreign lands
handing Bush the carte-blanche dominion to bomb Iran without any
further authorization.
where others And "Thefor
do our torturing Way
us. Forward" is clear: Bush and Cheney
continue to reject the European Union's urging of direct talks with Iran,
Syria,
Turkey, and Russia, Iran's largest and most powerful trading partner,
going it virtually alone. Again. When we shouldn't be going at all.

Bush has deployed a carrier strike force in the Persian Gulf, equipped with

Patriot missiles, to "send a message to Tehran." In May 2007, Cheney

delivered a speech from the deck of one of those carriers, the U.S.S. John

C. Stennis, ramping up the case for war with Iran: "With two carrier strike

groups in the gulf, we’re sending a message to friends and adversaries

alike. We’ll keep the sea lanes open… we’ll stand with others to prevent

Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region." (We'll

keep the sea lanes open and yet the only one who's threatened to restrict

them, the only one in the region with more than a token navy, is Cheney).

And there would be three carriers in the Gulf, right now, if Admiral William

J. Fallon had not stood up against Bush's order to send a third one. Fallon

told the Defense Department, in February 2007, that he opposed as

unwarranted any further buildup in the Gulf, demonstrating what

CommonDreams.org, on 15 May 2007, called "an apparent readiness to

put his career on the line to prevent it." And Fallon vowed privately, as

reported by CommonDreams.org, that there would be no war with Iran as

Crazies. According to The Man Between War and Peace, an article in
Esquire (February
long as he 2008)
was chief by Thomas
of CENTCOM, P. M.
that anBarnett,
attack on a respected military
Iran "will not happen
analyst, Admiral Fallon was the lone man, apparently, standing against
the president's
on my contemplation
watch." Asked of a "strategically
how he could unsound
be so sure, Admiral war"replied,
Fallon with Iran.
And Fallon stated in an interview with al Jazeera, in the autumn of 2007,
that "This
"There areconstant drumbeat
several of us tryingoftoconflict.
put the .crazies
. is not back
helpful and
into thenot
box."
useful." The lone man standing up to Bush. But then Admiral
Fallon took early retirement on 11 March 2008.

And what of the Iranian people, the citizenry. They have their own

delusional president, but what are they like? In a recent poll, 73% of them

oppose the Iranian system of government, at the risk of imprisonment,

torture, and death, and 80% of them want to normalize relations with the

United States. They’re raising their voices, they’re marching in the streets,

in direct opposition to their leaders. They like us better than the majority

of Europeans do, less than 10% of whom rate Bush favorably. Would God

have us blow them all to kingdom come for their valor in defying their

mullahs? Or would God have us join with other free nations to bring global

The best prognosticator

pressure of the futuresupporting
on Iran while aggressively being the its
past, do wecoming
citizens’ have any
revolt

reason to believe
for justice or hope that Bush will behave any differently toward
and freedom?

Iran than he has toward Iraq? "The President," Bob Woodward wrote in

Bush at War, based on his face-to-face interviews with Bush, is "casting

his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's Master

Plan." And Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to

President Carter, (speaking on The Daily Show, 14 March 2007) said that

"He (Bush) has a vision. . . the notion that somehow or other he is leading

the forces of good against the empire of evil. The notion that somehow or
We have arrived at a moment in history, We the People, where the
evolution of our
other, in that technological
setting, ability
the fact that wetoare
destroy all superior
morally life on earth has us
justifies
surpassed our spiritual evolution, our sense of humanity. "If we do not
learn to live immoral
committing togetheracts."
as friends" said Martin Luther
King Jr., "we will die apart as fools." America, as our founding fathers
envisioned and built it, as generations of our ancestors fought and died to
preserve it, the right of a free people to create their own destiny, was until
the last five years the beacon of hope for downtrodden peoples across the
globe. And with the 2008 election mere months away, we are under a
sacred conviction to reclaim that heritage, to rise up as an informed and
inspired electorate, to be shaken by a religious awe in the face of eternity,
and choose a leader who stands for the most profound truth that God
Bless America also means God Bless the World. That our vital interests are
the world's vital interests. A leader who will engage all nations who would
join us in conquering the real enemies of freedom, in Afghanistan and
Waziristan (where bin Laden is purported to be) and around the world. A
leader of enlightened judgment who will uplift all of humanity to a true
revolution of awareness, to the divine law that all men are our brothers
and all women are our sisters. And yet electing a visionary president will
not suffice. Polls show that Americans are most concerned about the
economy, health care, immigration, and the Iraq War. In that order. The
war takes up just 4% of our daily news cycle. We don't consider that it is
the war and its egregiously escalating cost that makes it impossible to
solve all the rest. There must be an essential sea change in the American
consciousness. The dialogue among us, among We the People, everyday
Americans, has to change.

We must distribute the cure, the alms of truth to the misinformed, to our
families, our friends, our colleagues, the stranger beside us. We must
break through the fear and divisiveness this administration has sown
among us, and enlighten those who scorn and smear all Democrats or all
Republicans, all liberals or all conservatives, who think only in terms of
either/or, with us or against us. We must search within ourselves, past of
our
narrow perceptions, finding not the god we use to rationalize our self-
righteous arrogance and lust for vindication but the God who knows our
bigotry the instant we think it. For there is one God, of a thousand names,
perceived by us from 6.6 billion points of view, just as there is only one
family of man. We must enliven the spirit that alone has the power to
change the world, raising our voices, overwhelming every think tank and
political action committee, every newspaper, magazine, and blog, every
television and radio station, every congressional office, the White House,
and The Powers That Be, driving an irresistible avalanche of passion,
overcoming those who confuse conviction of principle with their own
relentless delusions, who are chronically driven by self-preservation and
rule, who are on a mission to wage war not for peace and freedom but for
power, privilege and profit. And we will show the White House, the
Congress, the presidential candidates and the world just which way the
winds of change are truly blowing.

Imagine us coming together as all the scriptures exhort, each of us all of

us the Everyman, rising above the challenges of the world. Imagine an
America that would never rush into further escalating World War III, but
would return to the genuine war on terrorism, inspiring a truly global
coalition, a global offensive, an America that combines our military might
with wisdom, diplomacy, dignity, and humanity. Imagine handing a more
glowing legacy to our children than our parents handed to us. Imagine if
we tuned our daily lives to the virtues that await our notice within every
heart, drawing from the endless wellspring of goodness within our
collective soul, the one soul that will save us from ourselves, that binds us
together as one people. A fellowship that spans every sea and border, that
respects our differences yet bridges the dogmas that set us apart.
Imagine