| Author | Message | | Guest-cdbc | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:28 pm Post subject: JINSA (JEWISH) ZIONIST WROTE "AXIS OF EVIL" SPEECH |
| JINSA (JEWISH) ZIONIST WROTE "AXIS OF EVIL" SPEECH:
Subj: RECKLESS BEHAVIOR
Date: 2/8/03 9:55:52 AM Pacific Standard Time
Forwarded Message:
Subj: [eFreePalestine] RECKLESS BEHAVIOR
Date: 2/8/03 9:17:12 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: *********
Subj: Phil Inq 2-7-03 Ltters "Reckless behavior" (fwd)
Date: 2/7/03 5:53:27 PM Eastern Standard Time
Comment: Be Aware...
The one who wrote that infamous speech for President GW Bush, in which he
said, "be with us or against us" and also he mentined, "the axis of evil
are Iraq, Iran and North Koria", is David Frum. David Frum is a
notorious Jewish Zionist (originally from Canada and son of the
late Barbara Frum - host of the CBC's Journal in the 80s and early 90s)
presently resides in the US and probably has American citizenship.
He is also the author of a new book about President GW Bush, entitled,
"The Right President", published recently.
If one hears this David Frum talking, one can easily tell how this man is
full of hatred against Arabs and Muslims, as well as against every decent
American who dares to speak out against the Zionist lobby in the US and
the lobby's influences on the American foreign policies, particulalrly
when those policies are related to the Middle East.
Read below.
H.S.
Subject: Phil Inq 2-7-03 Ltters "Reckless behavior"
RE: Letters "Reckless behavior"
Philadelphia Inquirer <inquirer.letters@phillynews.com>
Dear Editor,
Bravo to Haverford College's Thomas Tritton, president and Gustavus T. Stadler,
assistant professor of English and the 64 other faculty members at the college for
speaking out so elegantly against the relentless war mongering that has seized our country
and filled so many minds and hearts with muddles of misinformation concerning the Middle
East.
"If you are not with us you are against us" keeps rattling through my brain and I cannot help but question the bully tactics that are scripting both our foreign and domestic policies so that patriotism has come to mean falling in line with a militant march towards a self imposed apocalypse.
America's honor and dignity are on the line right now, and it certainly doesn't help
our reputation world wide that we are aggressively focused in on destroying Iraq while at the same time we are fully funding and empowering Israel's racist war on the Palestinians.
The fact that Israel just murdered yet another Palestinian by blithely bulldozing her
home in on top of her is bad enough, but even more galling is the fact that our media
barely noticed. This type of atrocity should be front page news in bold headlines. We should be shocked and outraged. We should be stunned and disgusted.
We should be furious that our hard earned tax dollars are being usurped to support
Israel's state sponsored terrorism of the Palestinian people and we should be disgusted that Israel's sick delusions of democracy depend on the ethnic cleansing of the region to ensure that only citizens with certain religious pedigrees have full and equal rights.
We should be battling the gross injustice wrought by Israel's racist laws and policies by insisting that Israel fully implement United Nations Resolution 194, the Palestinian refugees right to return in accordance with international law... anything less and we are just another brick in Israel's ongoing apartheid wall, imprisoning not just the Palestinians but also our own future in an impoverished ghetto of despair.
Sincerely,
A. S. A.
http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/editorial/5124978.htm
Reckless behavior
In his State of the Union address, President Bush continued to incite
the
nation to support a U.S. war on Iraq.
We, the undersigned members of the Haverford College faculty, are
deeply troubled by the President's effort to use unsubstantiated claims
of
ties between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government to justify invasion as a
response to the 9/11 attacks. We are also very much concerned by the
administration's continuing threats to take military action before
having
allowed U.N. weapons inspectors to fully complete their investigations.
The administration's behavior betrays a recklessness out of line with
the
more carefully considered reservations of both the international
community and, as polls continually show, the U.S. public.
We urge the public to have confidence in their well-founded skepticisms
and to keep pressing the President, the administration and Congress to
speak to them in detail. We deserve real leadership on this issue, not
condescending single-minded rhetoric that plays to terrible fears.
Thomas Tritton, president
Gustavus T. Stadler, assistant professor of English
Haverford College
Haverford
This letter was signed also by 64 other faculty members at the college.
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Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2003 11:58 pm Post subject: The Axis of Incitement by Frum and Company |
| http://www.atimes.com/koreas/DC09Dg01.html
The Koreas
The Axis of Incitement
WASHINGTON - White House speechwriter David Frum, who coined the incendiary "axis of evil" moniker used by President George W Bush, is leaving Bush's employ for the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). It seems the perfect fit.
The phrase incited a diplomatic storm over Bush's next moves in his anti-terrorist campaign. Likewise, the AEI has long been a source of provocation, particularly for intelligence professionals at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
The staunchly unilateralist AEI, and its foreign-policy honcho, Richard Perle, have never been so powerful. Much to the frustration of Secretary of State Colin Powell and Washington's European and Arab allies, the Bush administration has embraced virtually all of the AEI's policy positions on the Middle East, including the right-wing Likud Party's opposition to the Oslo peace process for Israel and Palestine.
The "axis of evil" - and the policy consequences of that designation, including the option of pre-emptive military attacks against Iraq, Iran and North Korea - represents a major triumph for the AEI, which for years has denounced as appeasement US and European efforts to engage any of those three countries.
The AEI and especially Perle, who holds a unique position as both chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and as an independent commentator, have emerged as the keystone of an "axis of incitement" - a small but potent network of like-minded, ultra-hawkish officials, analysts, and opinion-makers.
Unlike the "axis of evil", members of the "axis of incitement" share a passionate belief in the inherent goodness and redemptive mission of the United States; the moral cowardice of "liberals" and "European elites"; the existential necessity of supporting Israel in the shadow of the Holocaust and in the face of the "implacable hatred," as Frum has written, of Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims; and the primacy of military power.
Their reach within the administration extends far. At the Pentagon, they include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, whose relationship with Perle goes back 30 years, and Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith, whose pro-Likud sentiments led him to denounce the 1978 Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt as an Israeli sellout.
They include Vice President Dick Cheney's powerful and outspoken chief of staff, Lewis Libby, and several senior members of the National Security Council staff. In Powell's State Department, the same network succeeded in imposing the AEI's then-senior vice president, John Bolton, as undersecretary for arms control and international security. He has used this top post systematically to destroy much of the existing global arms-control architecture.
Outside the administration, the axis includes like-minded policy groups with overlapping boards of directors, such as the Center for Security Policy (CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and the Project for a New American Century (PNAC); influential media outlets including the Wall Street Journal's editorial page and the Rupert Murdoch-financed Weekly Standard; and nationally syndicated columnists including Charles Krauthammer, A M Rosenthal, and Michael Kelly.
At the AEI, the most prominent players post-September 11, besides Perle, are Michael Ledeen and former CIA Mideast operative Reuel Marc Gerecht. They have used the Journal's and Standard's opinion pages to agitate for including Iran with Iraq in Washington's policy of "regime removal".
"Iran is ready to blow sky-high," Ledeen enthused in November, citing recent newspaper reports of pro-US demonstrations. "The Iranian people need only a bright spark of courage from the United States to ignite the flames of democratic revolution."
"On to Iran!" was the title of a recent Gerecht column in the Standard.
On North Korea, the AEI's Nicholas Eberstadt and another former CIA official, James Lilly, have been among the strongest voices here against US engagement of Pyongyang since then-president Bill Clinton signed an accord to freeze its nuclear program in 1994.
Ledeen, who later played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair, was a major proponent of the theory - first advanced by journalist Claire Sterling and heavily promoted by the Wall Street Journal and Rosenthal - that the Kremlin was behind the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, a notion for which the CIA could find no evidence.
More recently and in an ironic parallel, Perle, backed by the Journal, strenuously argued the case - advanced by another AEI associate, Laurie Mylroie - that Iraq was involved in the 1993 bombing by Islamist militants of New York's World Trade Center, for which the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also could find no evidence. Mylroie's argument was part of an all-out offensive to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorism and the September 11 attacks.
"Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes," Perle told reporters on the day of the attack. "I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments." By the end of the week, Perle and Wolfowitz had convened a two-day meeting of the Defense Policy Board to discuss ousting Saddam and to send former CIA chief James Woolsey, another active member of the neo-conservative network, to Europe to gather evidence of a Baghdad connection to September 11.
Over the following months, Perle and his comrades cited as proof of that tie reported meetings in Prague between Iraqi agents and one of the leaders of the September 11 attacks, the anthrax attacks, and new Iraqi defectors allegedly willing to testify about a secret compound in which non-Iraqi Arabs were trained to hijack commercial aircraft with knives and their bare hands.
Meanwhile, the CIA and the FBI concluded that Saddam had essentially halted terrorist operations against Western targets in the early 1990s.
By late December, Perle apparently realized he could not win the argument and changed gears. In a New York Times column, he gave much more prominence to the notion that, like Osama bin Laden, "Saddam hates the United States with a vengeance" and that his determination to obtain weapons of mass destruction was enough to justify pre-emptive action to remove him before "it is too late".
One month later, Bush endorsed precisely that notion, arguing that the development of weapons of mass destruction alone by hostile regimes - the "axis of evil" - was on a par with the dangers posed by international terrorism. "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by as peril draws closer and closer," he said. Krauthammer called it "an astonishingly bold address".
Meanwhile, a minor controversy persists over the reason for Frum's departure from the White House. There have been allegations that it was the result of an e-mail apparently distributed by his wife, Danielle Crittenden, boasting about Frum's role in the historic January 29 speech.
"Dear all," said the e-mail, "I realize this is very 'Washington' of me to mention, but my husband is responsible for the 'axis of evil' segment of Tuesday's State of the Union address. It's not often a phrase one writes gains national notice, unless you're in advertising of course ['The pause that refreshes'] so I'll hope you'll indulge my wifely pride in seeing this one repeated in headlines everywhere!! [signed] D."
Frum has denied that his wife's e-mail had anything to do with his departure, saying he submitted his resignation notice before Bush delivered his State of the Union address. But the matter has provoked some glee in Frum's native Canada, where he is widely reviled for his ultra-conservative views and for supposedly scoring a successful journalism career on the back of his highly respected mother, the late Canadian Broadcasting Corp commentator and interviewer Barbara Frum.
"Even fellow conservatives can't stand him," Ellen Vanstone wrote last weekend in Toronto's Globe and Mail. "Progressive Conservative columnist Dalton Camp once attacked Frum as an 'idealogue who has previously declared himself as opposed to government welfare, public health care, all farm subsidies, student loans and government support of the arts and humanities - an avowed non-partisan [who] is, nonetheless, a devout supporter of the special interests he has served daily as the voice of an ultimate right-wing fantasy - a world of commerce living in uninterrupted splendor, with neither government nor taxes to disturb its uncommon weal'."
(Asia Times Online/Inter Press Service) | | | | Guest-98a3 | | Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2003 1:38 am Post subject: JINSA ZIONIST JEWS PERLE/WOLFOWITZ PUSH US TO WAR |
| Bush is intent on painting allies and enemies in the Middle East as evil:
http://www.independent.co.uk/story.jsp?story=332011
By Robert Fisk
10 September 2002
Just as Americans are recovering from the harrowing television re-runs of the 11 September attacks, their President is going to launch the biggest reshaping of the Middle East since the British and French parcelled out the Arab lands after the 1914-18 war. When he addresses the United Nations on Thursday, George Bush will be threatening not only Iraq – which had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes against humanity in New York and Washington – but Syria, Iran and, by extension, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.The Syrian Accountability Act, which accuses Damascus of supporting "terrorism", will come into force as President Bush is speaking and will follow only days after the State Department branded the Lebanese Hizbollah as the "A-team of terrorism", more dangerous even than Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida. Like Iraq, the Hizbollah had nothing to do with the 11 September attacks – indeed, they were among the first to condemn them – but the White House now seems set on painting allies and enemies alike in the Middle East as a focus of evil.Only The Nation among all of America's newspapers and magazines has dared to point out that a large number of former Israeli lobbyists are now working within the American administration and the Bush plans for the Middle East – which could cause a massive political upheaval in the Arab world – fit perfectly into Israel's own dreams for the region. The magazine listed Vice-President Dick Cheney – the arch-hawk in the US administration – and John Bolton, now under-secretary of state for Arms Control, with Douglas Feith, the third most senior executive at the Pentagon, as members of the advisory board of the pro-Israeli Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa) before joining the Bush government. Richard Perle, chairman of the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, is still an adviser on the institute, as is the former CIA director James Woolsey.Michael Ledeen, described by The Nation as "one of the most influential 'Jinsans' in Washington" has been calling for "total war" against "terror" – with "regime change" for Syria, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority. Mr Perle advises the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld – who refers to the West Bank and Gaza as "the so-called occupied territories" – and arranged the anti-Saudi "kernel of evil" briefing by Laurent Murawiec that so outraged the Saudi royal family last month. The Saudi regime may itself be in great danger as the princes of the House of Saud attempt to seize more power for themselves in advance of the depart-ure of the dying King Fahd. Jinsa's website says it exists to "inform the American defence and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East". Next month, Michael Rubin of the right-wing and pro-Israeli American Enterprise Institute – who referred to the outgoing UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson as an abettor of "terrorism" – joins the US Defence Department as an Iran-Iraq "expert".According to The Nation, Irving Moskovitz, the California bingo magnate who has funded settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories, is a donor as well as a director of Jinsa. President Bush, of course, will not be talking about the influence of these pro-Israeli lobbyists when he presents his vision of the Middle East at the United Nations on Thursday. Nor will he give the slightest indication that the region is, in the words of its own kings and dictators, a powder keg of resentment and anger. The tectonic plates of the Arab world are now grinding with increasing violence. Into this political earthquake zone, Mr Bush now seems intent on leading his country, with his loyal British ally. Most of today's Arab nations were fashioned out of the ruins of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in the aftermath of the First World War – and Palestinians still blame Britain today for supporting the formation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Both European nations stationed tens of thousands of troops across the region, suppressing Arab revolts in Palestine, Syria and Lebanon – itself created by the French at the request of its Christian Maronite community. The whole colonial framework led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives before both the British and French retreated from the Middle East.Now President Bush seems set on following the colonial powers into the region for another military and political adventure – ostensibly to spread "democracy" among those nations it most despises (Iraq, Palestine and Iran) but in fact more likely to increase American control of an increasingly anti-Western Arab world.The Arabs themselves warn that this will lead to massive instability and widespread violence. The Israelis – and their allies in the US administration – are hell bent on the whole shebang.
Included below is that "Men from JINSA and CSP" article from "The Nation" magazine which Mr. Fisk mentions in his article referenced above:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest&c=1
The Men From JINSA and CSP
by JASON VEST
[from the September 2, 2002 issue of "The Nation" magazine in the USA]
The Men From JINSA and CSP
by JASON VEST
[from the September 2, 2002 issue]
Almost thirty years ago, a prominent group of neoconservative hawks found an effective vehicle for advocating their views via the Committee on the Present Danger, a group that fervently believed the United States was a hair away from being militarily surpassed by the Soviet Union, and whose raison d'être was strident advocacy of bigger military budgets, near-fanatical opposition to any form of arms control and zealous championing of a Likudnik Israel. Considered a marginal group in its nascent days during the Carter Administration, with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 CPD went from the margins to the center of power. Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter Administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues--support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey and American unilateralism in general--into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core. On no issue is the JINSA/CSP hard line more evident than in its relentless campaign for war--not just with Iraq, but "total war," as Michael Ledeen, one of the most influential JINSAns in Washington, put it last year. For this crew, "regime change" by any means necessary in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority is an urgent imperative. Anyone who dissents--be it Colin Powell's State Department, the CIA or career military officers--is committing heresy against articles of faith that effectively hold there is no difference between US and Israeli national security interests, and that the only way to assure continued safety and prosperity for both countries is through hegemony in the Middle East--a hegemony achieved with the traditional cold war recipe of feints, force, clientism and covert action. For example, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board--chaired by JINSA/CSP adviser and former Reagan Administration Defense Department official Richard Perle, and stacked with advisers from both groups--recently made news by listening to a briefing that cast Saudi Arabia as an enemy to be brought to heel through a number of potential mechanisms, many of which mirror JINSA's recommendations, and which reflect the JINSA/CSP crowd's preoccupation with Egypt. (The final slide of the Defense Policy Board presentation proposed that "Grand Strategy for the Middle East" should concentrate on "Iraq as the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia as the strategic pivot [and] Egypt as the prize.") Ledeen has been leading the charge for regime change in Iran, while old comrades like Andrew Marshall and Harold Rhode in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment actively tinker with ways to re-engineer both the Iranian and Saudi governments. JINSA is also cheering the US military on as it tries to secure basing rights in the strategic Red Sea country of Eritrea, happily failing to mention that the once-promising secular regime of President Isaiais Afewerki continues to slide into the kind of repressive authoritarianism practiced by the "axis of evil" and its adjuncts. Indeed, there are some in military and intelligence circles who have taken to using "axis of evil" in reference to JINSA and CSP, along with venerable repositories of hawkish thinking like the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute, as well as defense contractors, conservative foundations and public relations entities underwritten by far-right American Zionists (all of which help to underwrite JINSA and CSP). It's a milieu where ideology and money seamlessly blend: "Whenever you see someone identified in print or on TV as being with the Center for Security Policy or JINSA championing a position on the grounds of ideology or principle--which they are unquestionably doing with conviction--you are, nonetheless, not informed that they're also providing a sort of cover for other ideologues who just happen to stand to profit from hewing to the Likudnik and Pax Americana lines," says a veteran intelligence officer. He notes that while the United States has begun a phaseout of civilian aid to Israel that will end by 2007, government policy is to increase military aid by half the amount of civilian aid that's cut each year--which is not only a boon to both the US and Israeli weapons industries but is also crucial to realizing the far right's vision for missile defense and the Middle East. Founded in 1976 by neoconservatives concerned that the United States might not be able to provide Israel with adequate military supplies in the event of another Arab-Israeli war, over the past twenty-five years JINSA has gone from a loose-knit proto-group to a $1.4-million-a-year operation with a formidable array of Washington power players on its rolls. Until the beginning of the current Bush Administration, JINSA's board of advisers included such heavy hitters as Dick Cheney, John Bolton (now Under Secretary of State for Arms Control) and Douglas Feith, the third-highest-ranking executive in the Pentagon. Both Perle and former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey, two of the loudest voices in the attack-Iraq chorus, are still on the board, as are such Reagan-era relics as Jeane Kirkpatrick, Eugene Rostow and Ledeen--Oliver North's Iran/contra liaison with the Israelis. According to its website, JINSA exists to "educate the American public about the importance of an effective US defense capability so that our vital interests as Americans can be safeguarded" and to "inform the American defense and foreign affairs community about the important role Israel can and does play in bolstering democratic interests in the Mediterranean and the Middle East." In practice, this translates into its members producing a steady stream of op-eds and reports that have been good indicators of what the Pentagon's civilian leadership is thinking. JINSA relishes denouncing virtually any type of contact between the US government and Syria and finding new ways to demonize the Palestinians. To give but one example (and one that kills two birds with one stone): According to JINSA, not only is Yasir Arafat in control of all violence in the occupied territories, but he orchestrates the violence solely "to protect Saddam.... Saddam is at the moment Arafat's only real financial supporter.... [Arafat] has no incentive to stop the violence against Israel and allow the West to turn its attention to his mentor and paymaster." And if there's a way to advance other aspects of the far-right agenda by intertwining them with Israeli interests, JINSA doesn't hesitate there, either. A recent report contends that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must be tapped because "the Arab oil-producing states" are countries "with interests inimical to ours," but Israel "stand[s] with us when we need [Israel]," and a US policy of tapping oil under ANWR will "limit [the Arabs'] ability to do damage to either of us." The bulk of JINSA's modest annual budget is spent on taking a bevy of retired US generals and admirals to Israel, where JINSA facilitates meetings between Israeli officials and the still-influential US flag officers, who, upon their return to the States, happily write op-eds and sign letters and advertisements championing the Likudnik line. (Sowing seeds for the future, JINSA also takes US service academy cadets to Israel each summer and sponsors a lecture series at the Army, Navy and Air Force academies.) In one such statement, issued soon after the outbreak of the latest intifada, twenty-six JINSAns of retired flag rank, including many from the advisory board, struck a moralizing tone, characterizing Palestinian violence as a "perversion of military ethics" and holding that "America's role as facilitator in this process should never yield to America's responsibility as a friend to Israel," as "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield." However high-minded this might sound, the postservice associations of the letter's signatories--which are almost always left off the organization's website and communiqués--ought to require that the phrase be amended to say "friends don't leave friends on the battlefield, especially when there's business to be done and bucks to be made." Almost every retired officer who sits on JINSA's board of advisers or has participated in its Israel trips or signed a JINSA letter works or has worked with military contractors who do business with the Pentagon and Israel. While some keep a low profile as self-employed "consultants" and avoid mention of their clients, others are less shy about their associations, including with the private mercenary firm Military Professional Resources International, weapons broker and military consultancy Cypress International and SY Technology, whose main clients include the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which oversees several ongoing joint projects with Israel. The behemoths of military contracting are also well represented in JINSA's ranks. For example, JINSA advisory board members Adm. Leon Edney, Adm. David Jeremiah and Lieut. Gen. Charles May, all retired, have served Northrop Grumman or its subsidiaries as either consultants or board members. Northrop Grumman has built ships for the Israeli Navy and sold F-16 avionics and E-2C Hawkeye planes to the Israeli Air Force (as well as the Longbow radar system to the Israeli army for use in its attack helicopters). It also works with Tamam, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries, to produce an unmanned aerial vehicle. Lockheed Martin has sold more than $2 billion worth of F-16s to Israel since 1999, as well as flight simulators, multiple-launch rocket systems and Seahawk heavyweight torpedoes. At one time or another, General May, retired Lieut. Gen. Paul Cerjan and retired Adm. Carlisle Trost have labored in LockMart's vineyards. Trost has also sat on the board of General Dynamics, whose Gulfstream subsidiary has a $206 million contract to supply planes to Israel to be used for "special electronics missions." By far the most profitably diversified of the JINSAns is retired Adm. David Jeremiah. President and partner of Technology Strategies & Alliances Corporation (described as a "strategic advisory firm and investment banking firm engaged primarily in the aerospace, defense, telecommunications and electronics industries"), Jeremiah also sits on the boards of Northrop Grumman's Litton subsidiary and of defense giant Alliant Techsystems, which--in partnership with Israel's TAAS--does a brisk business in rubber bullets. And he has a seat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle. About the only major defense contractor without a presence on JINSA's advisory board is Boeing, which has had a relationship with Israeli Aircraft Industries for thirty years. (Boeing also sells F-15s to Israel and, in partnership with Lockheed Martin, Apache attack helicopters, a ubiquitous weapon in the occupied territories.) But take a look at JINSA's kindred spirit in things pro-Likud and pro-Star Wars, the Center for Security Policy, and there on its national security advisory council are Stanley Ebner, a former Boeing executive; Andrew Ellis, vice president for government relations; and Carl Smith, a former staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee who, as a lawyer in private practice, has counted Boeing among his clients. "JINSA and CSP," says a veteran Pentagon analyst, "may as well be one and the same." Not a hard sell: There's always been considerable overlap beween the JINSA and CSP rosters--JINSA advisers Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Perle and Phyllis Kaminsky also serve on CSP's advisory council; current JINSA advisory board chairman David Steinmann sits on CSP's board of directors; and before returning to the Pentagon Douglas Feith served as the board's chair. At this writing, twenty-two CSP advisers--including additional Reagan-era remnants like Elliott Abrams, Ken deGraffenreid, Paula Dobriansky, Sven Kraemer, Robert Joseph, Robert Andrews and J.D. Crouch--have reoccupied key positions in the national security establishment, as have other true believers of more recent vintage. While CSP boasts an impressive advisory list of hawkish luminaries, its star is Frank Gaffney, its founder, president and CEO. A protégé of Perle going back to their days as staffers for the late Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (a k a the Senator from Boeing, and the Senate's most zealous champion of Israel in his day), Gaffney later joined Perle at the Pentagon, only to be shown the door by Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci in 1987, not long after Perle left. Gaffney then reconstituted the latest incarnation of the Committee on the Present Danger. Beyond compiling an A-list of influential conservative hawks, Gaffney has been prolific over the past fifteen years, churning out a constant stream of reports (as well as regular columns for the Washington Times) making the case that the gravest threats to US national security are China, Iraq, still-undeveloped ballistic missiles launched by rogue states, and the passage of or adherence to virtually any form of arms control treaty. Gaffney and CSP's prescriptions for national security have been fairly simple: Gut all arms control treaties, push ahead with weapons systems virtually everyone agrees should be killed (such as the V-22 Osprey), give no quarter to the Palestinians and, most important, go full steam ahead on just about every national missile defense program. (CSP was heavily represented on the late-1990s Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which was instrumental in keeping the program alive during the Clinton years.) Looking at the center's affiliates, it's not hard to see why: Not only are makers of the Osprey (Boeing) well represented on the CSP's board of advisers but so too is Lockheed Martin (by vice president for space and strategic missiles Charles Kupperman and director of defense systems Douglas Graham). Former TRW executive Amoretta Hoeber is also a CSP adviser, as is former Congressman and Raytheon lobbyist Robert Livingston. Ball Aerospace & Technologies--a major manufacturer of NASA and Pentagon satellites--is represented by former Navy Secretary John Lehman, while missile-defense computer systems maker Hewlett-Packard is represented by George Keyworth, who is on its board of directors. And the Congressional Missile Defense Caucus and Osprey (or "tilt rotor") caucus are represented by Representative Curt Weldon and Senator Jon Kyl. CSP was instrumental in developing the arguments against the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Largely ignored or derided at the time, a 1995 CSP memo co-written by Douglas Feith holding that the United States should withdraw from the ABM treaty has essentially become policy, as have other CSP reports opposing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the International Criminal Court. But perhaps the most insightful window on the JINSA/CSP policy worldview comes in the form of a paper Perle and Feith collaborated on in 1996 with six others under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. Essentially an advice letter to ascendant Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" makes for insightful reading as a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto. The paper's first prescription was for an Israeli rightward economic shift, with tax cuts and a selloff of public lands and enterprises--moves that would also engender support from a "broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders." But beyond economics, the paper essentially reads like a blueprint for a mini-cold war in the Middle East, advocating the use of proxy armies for regime changes, destabilization and containment. Indeed, it even goes so far as to articulate a way to advance right-wing Zionism by melding it with missile-defense advocacy. "Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state," it reads. "Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel's survival, but it would broaden Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense"--something that has the added benefit of being "helpful in the effort to move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem." Recent months in Washington have shown just how influential the notions propagated by JINSA and CSP are--and how disturbingly zealous their advocates are. In early March Feith vainly attempted to get the CIA to keep former intelligence officers Milt Bearden and Frank Anderson from accepting an invitation to an Afghanistan-related meeting with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld at the Pentagon--not because of what the two might say about Afghanistan, according to sources familiar with the incident, but likely out of fear that Anderson, a veteran Arabist and former chief of the CIA's Near East division, would proffer his views on Iraq (opposed to invading) and Israel-Palestine (a fan of neither Arafat nor Sharon). In late June, after United Press International reported on a US Muslim civil liberties group's lambasting of Gaffney for his attacks on the American Muslim Council, Gaffney, according to a fellow traveler, "went berserk," launching a stream of invective about the UPI scribe who reported the item. It's incidents like this, say knowledgeable observers and participants, that highlight an interesting dynamic among right-wing hawks at the moment. Though the general agenda put forth by JINSA and CSP continues to be reflected in councils of war, even some of the hawks (including Rumsfeld deputy Paul Wolfowitz) are growing increasingly leery of Israel's settlements policy and Gaffney's relentless support for it. Indeed, his personal stock in Bush Administration circles is low. "Gaffney has worn out his welcome by being an overbearing gadfly rather than a serious contributor to policy," says a senior Pentagon political official. Since earlier this year, White House political adviser Karl Rove has been casting about for someone to start a new, more mainstream defense group that would counter the influence of CSP. According to those who have communicated with Rove on the matter, his quiet efforts are in response to complaints from many conservative activists who feel let down by Gaffney, or feel he's too hard on President Bush. "A lot of us have taken [Gaffney] at face value over the years," one influential conservative says. "Yet we now know he's pushed for some of the most flawed missile defense and conventional systems. He considered Cuba a 'classic asymmetric threat' but not Al Qaeda. And since 9/11, he's been less concerned with the threat to America than to Israel." Gaffney's operation has always been a small one, about $1 million annually--funded largely by a series of grants from the conservative Olin, Bradley and various Scaife foundations, as well as some defense contractor money--but he's recently been able to underwrite a TV and print ad campaign holding that the Palestinians should be Enemy Number One in the War on Terror, still obsessed with the destruction of Israel. It's here that one sees the influence not of defense contractor money but of far-right Zionist dollars, including some from Irving Moskowitz, the California bingo magnate. A donor to both CSP and JINSA (as well as a JINSA director), Moskowitz not only sends millions of dollars a year to far-right Israeli settler groups like Ateret Cohanim but he has also funded the construction of settlements, having bought land for development in key Arab areas around Jerusalem. Moskowitz ponied up the money that enabled the 1996 reopening of a tunnel under the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, which resulted in seventy deaths due to rioting. Also financing Gaffney's efforts is New York investment banker Lawrence Kadish. A valued and valuable patron of both the Republican National Committee and George W. Bush, Kadish helps underwrite CSP as well as Americans for Victory Over Terrorism, an offshoot of conservative activist William Bennett's Empower America, on which he and Gaffney serve as "senior advisers" in the service of identifying "external" and "internal" post-9/11 threats to America. (The "internal" threats, as articulated by AVOT, include former President Jimmy Carter, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham and Representative Maxine Waters.) Another of Gaffney's backers is Poju Zabludowicz, heir to a formidable diversified international empire that includes arms manufacturer Soltam--which once employed Perle--and benefactor of the recently established Britain Israel Communication and Research Centre, a London-based group that appears to equate reportage or commentary uncomplimentary to Zionism with anti-Semitism. While a small but growing number of conservatives are voicing concerns about various aspects of foreign and defense policy--ranging from fear of overreach to lack of Congressional debate--the hawks seem to be ruling the roost. Beginning in October, hard-line American Enterprise Institute scholar Michael Rubin (to Rubin, outgoing UN human rights chief Mary Robinson is an abettor of terrorism) arrives at the Pentagon to take over the Defense Department's Iran-Iraq account, adding another voice to the Pentagon section of Ledeen's "total war" chorus. Colin Powell's State Department continues to take a beating from outside and inside--including Bolton and his special assistant David Wurmser. (An AEI scholar and far-right Zionist who's married to Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute--recently the subject of a critical investigation by London Guardian Middle East editor Brian Whitaker--Wurmser played a key role in crafting the "Arafat must go" policy that many career specialists see as a problematic sop to Ariel Sharon.) As for Rumsfeld, based on comments made at a Pentagon "town hall" meeting on August 6, there seems to be little doubt as to whose comments are resonating most with him--and not just on missile defense and overseas adventures: After fielding a question about Israeli-Palestinian issues, he repeatedly referred to the "so-called occupied territories" and casually characterized the Israeli policy of building Jewish-only enclaves on Palestinian land as "mak[ing] some settlement in various parts of the so-called occupied area," with which Israel can do whatever it wants, as it has "won" all its wars with various Arab entities--essentially an echo of JINSA's stated position that "there is no Israeli occupation." Ominously, Rumsfeld's riff gave a ranking Administration official something of a chill: "I realized at that point," he said, "that on settlements--where there are cleavages on the right--Wolfowitz may be to the left of Rumsfeld."
Turkey, Israel and the US (JINSA Zionist Extremists Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz mentioned in this article as well):
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest20020823
JINSA (Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs) Planned Iraq 'Regime Change' before Bush Presidency:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/31/bush-planned-iraq-regime-change-before-becoming-president.php
JINSA Behind Drive To Cover-Up Israeli Spy Scandal:
http://www.rense.com/general18/JINSA.htm
PNAC Group: The List of Players:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/01/31/pnac-group-the-list-of-players.php
Too Many Smoking Guns to Ignore:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/01/28/too-many-smoking-guns-to-ignore-israel-us-jews-iraq.php
Oil Shouldn't Be the Only Reason for Opposing This War:
http://www.counterpunch.com/christison01212003.html:
Washington Post article: Israeli Attack on the USS Liberty (US Double Standard with Iraq):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/uss-liberty/2003/02/01/the-attack-on-the-uss-liberty.php
BBC 'Dead in the Water' Documentary (about USS Liberty attack) to Show in D.C.
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/uk-and-europe/2003/02/06/bbc-dead-in-the-water-about-uss-liberty-to-show.php
9/11 Hijacker Attended US Military School:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2002/12/31/9-11-hijacker-attended-us-military-school.php
Israeli Mossad Assassinations on American Soil
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/middle-east-and-asia/2003/01/21/israeli-mossad-assassinations-on-american-us-soil.php
War Without End Message Board (Click on "War on Terror" after Arriving to get to the 'Israel' and 'UK Involvement in War' message boards via the following URL):
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk
Colin Powell Used Plagiarized Student Essay at UN:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/uk-and-europe/2003/02/07/colin-powell-used-plagiarized-student-essay-at-un.php | | | | Guest-98a3 | | | | Guest-98a3 | | | | Guest-98a3 | | | | Guest-98a3 | | | | Guest-98a3 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2003 6:39 am Post subject: THE TRUE STATE OF THE UNION |
| The following is the short version. A longer version including more domestic policy detail is available on the web site www.rmbowman.com/ssn
Bob Bowman
THE TRUE STATE OF THE UNION
January 2003
by Dr. Robert M. Bowman
I wrote my first State of the Union Address in 1992 as an alternative to the one given by the first President Bush. This 2003 State of the Union Address has nothing to do with my possible candidacy for President of the United States. It is just the truth as I see it, and it contains proposals which I sure wish some president, some day would present to the American people and the Congress. In the off chance that these words give somebody an idea, I am sending copies of this to all the presidential candidates of both major parties. They are welcome to use these ideas as their own. Please email comments to bob@rmbowman.com .
I now ask you to suspend reality and pretend (just pretend, remember) that I am speaking to you as President of the United States and giving my State of the Union Address.
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Mister Speaker, Madam President, distinguished Members of the Congress, honored guests, and my fellow Americans: Not since Gerald Ford rose from obscurity to become president following the resignations of Agnew and Nixon has something like this happened. Gerald Ford rose to the occasion, raised this nation from the depths of confusion and despair, and became one of our better presidents. I hope to do likewise.
I've been told that it doesn't take a rocket scientist to be president. Nevertheless, I am one. I'm also a career military officer, the father of seven children, and the grandfather of twenty-one. I've been a corporate engineer and executive, a song-and-dance man, a stuffy college professor, an itinerant preacher, a fighter pilot, a radio talk show host, and a husband to the same wonderful woman for 47 years. One thing I have never ever been is a politician -- and I don't intend to start now. Heck, I'm not even a lawyer. I came to Washington to restore power to the people. Once that's done, I'll go back to being a part-time rocket scientist, a part-time bishop, and a full-time troublemaker.
I have been your president for but a short time, and I still have much to learn. I hesitate to act in haste, and yet the times cry out for change. We can never know for how long we are privileged to play our role in life's drama, and this thought gives me a sense of urgency. Lord knows the ponderous machinery of this government has a momentum of staggering proportions. To change its direction is not an easy task. Yet change, I believe, it must, and I will therefore speak plainly and with candor.
My talk tonight will have three main parts. In the first I will attempt to describe the current state of our Union and how we got to where we are today. In the second, I will propose concrete steps toward resurrecting the American dream. And in the third, I will discuss our new relationship to a changing world.
CURRENT STATE OF THE UNION
We're Number One:
I'm here tonight to declare to you that the United States is number one in the industrialized world: number one in our use of the world's resources, number one in the production of pollution, number one in the gap between the rich and the poor, number one in deaths by gunfire, number one in teen pregnancy, number one in poverty among the elderly, number one in citizens without health coverage, number one in child poverty, number one in homeless veterans, and number one in citizens behind bars. And all that was true before "W" came in and made things even worse. In the two years of his failed presidency, George II turned a $236 billion per year surplus into a $157 billion dollar deficit -- and the 2003 budget I inherited is over $300 billion in the red. In these two years he did away with 1.7 million American jobs, saw 1.4 million added to the uninsured, and had more than a million more Americans falling into poverty each year, reversing three decade-long trends. He saw bankruptcies soar 23% to the highest level in history and stocks (including all our private retirement funds) lose over $6 trillion in value. His policies resulted in the first rise in serious crime in a decade. He slashed education funding by $90 million, while giving huge tax cuts to the corporations and wealthiest 1% of us. His most recent tax proposal would have given this same elite a tax cut averaging over $30,000, while the average working family would have gotten $289. As a result, we are again (as we were under his father) the world's #1 debtor nation, #1 in the creation of new billionaires, #1 in school dropouts, #1 in poverty, homelessness, hunger, divorce, suicide, and (oh yes) #1 in military force, nuclear weapons, and military spending -- almost as much as all the other nations in the world combined. This also makes us the number one object of fear and hatred and therefore the number one target of terrorists (along with our friends in Israel). We also lead the world in the number of hours worked per family, since it now takes two wage-earners and three jobs to provide the income earned with one 40 hour per week job in the 1950s -- this despite soaring productivity. If it wasn't for corporate control of our government and the resulting trickle-down economics, ordinary workers could support their families with one job … working two days a week! If worker pay had kept pace with executive pay, the average worker would now be making a million dollars a year!! and the minimum wage would be $143 an hour!
What do you call a country whose principal exports are wood pulp and scrap metal, whose principal imports are manufactured goods, and whose fastest-growing industry is building and operating private prisons? A third world country. That is the US today. We just happen to be an extremely rich third world country. (Only one fourth of our preschoolers live in poverty.) That is the state of the union we have inherited.
We are without doubt number one in military power. But what about the other measures of a nation? In our drive to protect the far-flung financial interests of our multinational corporations, we have abandoned our principles and fought wars of aggression against small countries. We have overthrown popularly-elected leaders and installed puppet dictators who sell out their own people to our global robber barons. We have squandered the good will purchased by the blood of our youth in the defense of democracy in World Wars I and II. In our unilateralist arrogance, we have abandoned the ideals championed by our forebears who founded the United Nations. We have violated the legal framework established by our greatest generation at Nuremberg. In our phony war against the terrorists our policies have created, we have overturned the Constitutional protections given us by our founding fathers in the Bill of Rights. In our drive toward a corporate New World Order, we have sold out our workers, our families, our environment, our children's futures, and the American dream. This too is the state of the union we have inherited.
What Has Led Us To This State?
We are also probably the most blessed nation on earth. We have a bounteous and beautiful land, a skillful and creative work force, and an inspired Constitution. With the wealth and power we had at the end of the second World War, and the productivity gains made since then, we have had the opportunity to create a land without want. What went wrong? Why are our workers paid such a tiny percentage of their true worth? Why are we the only major nation without a national health program? Why are our high school graduates two years behind their counterparts in other countries? Why are we hated by so many around the world? Why do we have hundreds of thousands of troops patrolling foreign lands and supporting foreign dictators? What is going on here?
The answer is that we have lost our republic. Legislators no longer represent the people who elect them, but the corporations who finance them. They answer not to their constituents, but to the lobbyists who line their pockets and fill their campaign coffers. In return, government officials have undone decades of hard-fought victories against the robber barons of the nineteenth century. The courageous efforts of the Roosevelts -- one Republican and one Democrat -- to control the corporations and monied interests have been undone by Reagan and his successors.
For years now, through both major political parties, the world's billionaires have directed U.S. policy for their own personal profit. This has included agreements (NAFTA and the WTO) falsely portrayed as supporting free trade, but in reality promoting free investment, overturning U.S. laws, and putting American workers in competition with those in the Third World. It has also resulted in a series of wars, from Iraq to Bosnia to Kosovo to Afghanistan to Iraq again -- wars which are never in the interest of those fighting them, or of the families left behind … wars which only serve the insatiable greed of the global investor class.
Corporate power over our political system, over the media, and over most aspects of our lives is the greatest danger we face today. Curtailing this power and restoring it to ‘We the People’ is our greatest challenge. Until this is done, nothing else of great value is possible, especially real ‘reform.’ Those of us who dedicate our lives to peace, economic justice, and environmental preservation can make little progress in our struggles so long as ultimate power is in the hands of those who profit from war, poverty, and pollution. We must reassert the sovereignty of ‘We the People’ over the billionaires and their hireling bureaucrats in the Corporate New World Order.
Well, I didn't get here tonight by taking corporate millions. I didn't get here by selling myself to the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies, and all the other global robber barons. To be quite honest, I'm not sure how I got here! But here I am, and as long as I am president, this government will serve the needs of the people, not the greeds of the wealthy elite.
RESURRECTING THE AMERICAN DREAM
Turning things around won't be easy. What our Constitution empowers me to change, I shall. But for much of what needs doing, I will need the cooperation of Congress, and I ask for it tonight.
Media Reform:
The first thing we need to do is to sever the connection between money and political power. This means electoral reform and media reform. The latter can be done now. I am ordering the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate equal time rules for both radio and television and to reimplement the ban on multiple ownership. Monopolistic media corporations will be given reasonable time to divest themselves of excess holdings. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, which in turn depends on a variety of news sources. A free press is incompatible with corporate domination of the media.
Electoral Reform:
Electoral reform requires the participation of Congress and the States. The most important reform is the adoption of Instant Runoff Voting at all levels. I ask the States to adopt IRV for all statewide elections, including that for President of the United States. The second is Proportional Representation. I ask the States to consider PR for electing their Congressional delegations. I also ask them to follow the lead of Florida and eliminate burdensome petition requirements for qualifying third party and independent candidates for the ballot. Finally, I ask Congress to enact true campaign finance reform, banning the use of corporate, union, or other organizational funds completely, and funding campaigns with public money. Granny D is right. Corporations are not people, and money is not speech. The first amendment right of free speech was not intended to give corporations the right to control electoral politics with their money. If the Supreme Court disagrees, then I will introduce a Constitutional Amendment which states that corporations and other fictitious entities are not people and have no rights and privileges under the Constitution. I also ask Congress to declare Election Day a national holiday with the polls opening and closing simultaneously in every state from Maine to Hawaii. Whatever it takes, we must once and for all sever the connection between big money and political power.
This is not a partisan issue. It is a people's issue. It is necessary to save our republic. I ask the members of Congress to cooperate and pass the necessary legislation. If you don't, I am going to ask the American people to vote you out, regardless of your party affiliation. We must, and we will, have a Congress that serves the people and not the corporations.
American Rights:
Once that is done, everything becomes possible. In this richest of nations, we can and we will guarantee every American a good education, a decent job at a living wage, health care, and the undiluted protections of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
In accordance with respect for the rights of Americans, I am ordering a review of all cases identified by Amnesty International of U.S. citizens being imprisoned for political offenses. I envision granting pardons to many, as I did at my inauguration for Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abu Jamal. I am ordering that U.S. citizens detained after 9/11 be either charged in accordance with law or released. Immigrants who have been indefinitely detained will be either charged, legally deported, or released. Those captured in Afghanistan and detained at Guantanamo Bay will be accorded the rights of prisoners of war. Fear of terrorism is not going to make this country a police state!
Education:
Access to a good, high quality education must be recognized as a right, not just for the affluent in the suburbs, but for all Americans. We cannot tolerate a literacy rate which is lower than that of Iraq. Probably the two greatest problems are lack of money and lack of discipline -- not necessarily in that order. Teachers should be paid in accordance with their great value to society, and they must be given the authority to maintain discipline.
Living Wage:
Perhaps the most important right we can give American families is the right to a decent job at a living wage. Not three jobs, but one job; not a minimum wage, but a Living Wage. If both husband and wife choose to pursue careers, they should have that right. At the same time, they shouldn't be forced into the workplace. Every family with children should have the option of one parent staying home and just being a parent. One wage earner with one job should be able to comfortably support a family. To help make this possible, I'm asking that NAFTA and the WTO be renegotiated to provide protections for workers and the environment, not just here in the United States, but in all nations involved. Should this not succeed, we will withdraw. American workers should not be forced to compete with Chinese slave labor.
One of the ways we will achieve a Living Wage in the United States is a simple change to the tax code. We will tell corporations, "This is a free country. You can pay your executives anything you want. But we don't have to give you a tax deduction for it. From now on, the tax deduction for executive compensation is limited to twenty times the salary of your lowest paid worker, including contractors and subcontractors." You'll be amazed how fast workers' wages will go up.
The second small change we'll make to the tax code is to say that any wages paid to a worker making less than a Living Wage are not deductible to the corporation.
If that doesn't work, we'll change the minimum wage to equal the Living Wage of $14.42 per hour (indexed for inflation), with exceptions for teenagers and seniors receiving Social Security, who can be paid as little as two-thirds of the living wage or $9.61 per hour (also indexed for inflation).
One big effect of better wages will be that fewer families will feel they need two or three jobs. So there will be fewer job-seekers and less competition for jobs. This will be a step toward full employment.
Health Care:
A major disincentive to hiring is the soaring cost of employee health insurance. We intend to eliminate that cost altogether, completely severing the connection between health care and employment. Every American deserves good basic health care, with decisions made not by HMOs or insurance companies or government bureaucrats or hospital accountants, but by their doctor. It's time to end the patchwork of band-aid programs like Medicare, Medicaid, VA, and private insurance which leave out forty million Americans. Instead of adding yet another band-aid to cover prescription drugs, we need to perform radical surgery on the system. About half of every healthcare dollar, instead of paying doctors and nurses, goes to insurance companies for overhead and profit. It’s time to kick the bloodsuckers out of the health care business, break the stranglehold of the for-profit hospital conglomerates and HMOs, and finally join the rest of the civilized world. It's time for a doctor-run single-payer national health system.
Full Employment:
Our main export under NAFTA has been jobs. No more. Those companies that moved to Mexico can start giving their Mexican workers the same protections for their health, their safety, their environment, and their right to organize as we demand for American workers; or they can move back to the United States; or they can continue saving money by exploiting poor Mexicans, but they will not be allowed to import their junk into this country. Under my fair trade plan, the standards for Mexican workers will gradually be raised to those we enjoy here. Under NAFTA, American standards were being dragged down to match those of Mexico. No more.
Another step toward full employment will be taken by doing away with taxes that penalize companies for providing jobs -- payroll taxes. This will relieve employers of a financial burden, make hiring workers cheaper and easier, and eliminate a mountain of paperwork. By only taxing businesses on their profits instead of on their payroll, we make it easier for entrepreneurs and startups to succeed.
The so-called "service economy" is a fraud. Of course, we've always had nonproductive segments of society, earning money but not producing anything. But we can't all be politicians, investors, and lawyers. Somebody has to build something! People want to build a better, richer America for their children. Fortunately, there are lots of such jobs just waiting to be done. Here are just a few examples:
(1) We need to build a new energy system for our country. Our dependence on fossil fuels is causing us to have to sell off pieces of America to pay for foreign oil. It is causing us to maintain huge military forces and a militaristic foreign policy in order to guarantee access to oil that doesn't belong to us. It is causing us to pollute our air with toxic smog and kill our forests and lakes with acid rain. And it is causing us to hasten global warming and the inundation of coastal cities, including our own. It is slow suicide. Nuclear is no better. We still don't know how to get rid of the radioactive waste, much of which will remain deadly for thousands of years.
We know how to get energy from the sun, the wind, and the tides. We know how to use these renewable sources to produce electricity and hydrogen from seawater. We know how to use electricity and hydrogen to run cars, trucks, tractors, combines, and boats. New non-polluting power plants and distribution systems are needed. We know how to build them. I'm asking Congress to work with the Secretary of Energy to develop new policies which will hasten the changeover from the energy of death (oil). We're going to put people to work building a clean, green energy future for America.
(2) We need to build a non-polluting transportation system for our country. Using the renewable energy I've already described, we need electric cars and trucks, non-polluting mass transit in our cities, magnetically levitated (MagLev) trains, and automated intercity highways. In general, we know how to do it. But it's going to take more than just bending tin and laying concrete. It's going to take research and development ... and the scientists and engineers no longer needed for MXs and such. We're going to put the defense industry to work building a new transportation system for America.
(3) We need to build a reinvigorated civilian space program for our country. Why waste all our space scientists on useless "Star Wars" weapons? We need a Rescue Mission for Planet Earth, with satellites monitoring global change, tracking sources of air pollution, water pollution, acid rain, and deforestation. We need to better measure and understand the hole in our ozone layer, the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet, and the greenhouse effect. We need a replacement for the Space Shuttle system with its 1960s technology. It has been a marvel of creativity. Even with its two spectacular failures, it has served us well. But there are now better, cheaper, safer ways of doing the job. It's time to move on. We're going to put NASA to work building a new space program for America and for the global environment we must share with the rest of the world.
(4) We need to build new green versions of old industries. We are going to quit subsidizing the polluters and rapers of the land, so they will have to put people to work building new, clean, non-polluting industries for America.
(5) We need to build a new infrastructure for our country. Our roads, bridges, water supplies, and sewer systems are decaying. Schools, hospitals, and libraries are in need of renovation. We're going to put people to work rebuilding America.
Tax Reform:
My domestic proposals are extensive, and they will cost money. At the same time, we intend to end the Bush deficits and return to budget surpluses which will allow us to pay off the nearly seven trillion dollar debt run up primarily by Reagan and the two Bushes. How are we going to do this? (1) by administrative savings gained by the elimination of hundreds of patchwork programs and taxes, (2) by collecting income taxes from multinational corporations and rich investors who currently escape taxation completely, and (3) by utilizing a peace dividend achieved by eliminating military spending made unnecessary by the adoption of a constitutional foreign policy. The details are in my budget.
The Secretary of Defense, The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I have defined four missions for our armed forces: (1) deterring anyone from attacking the United States with weapons of mass destruction, (2) defending our shores and borders from foreign invasion, (3) assisting the UN Military Committee in defeating aggression, maintaining freedom of the seas and airlanes, and performing peacekeeping functions, and (4) engaging in humanitarian and relief efforts at home and abroad.
We have determined that, for the foreseeable future, these four missions can be accomplished with about a third of our current forces and for about a fourth of the cost. This will, after a few years of transition, result in a peace dividend of over $200 Billion per year. This is my number one domestic priority -- the transition from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy without a single person joining the ranks of the jobless.
Most of the peace dividend will come from lower operations and maintenance costs and from the cancellation of weapons programs. We intend to cancel the space weapon portion of National Missile Defense and return the remainder to laboratory research, a savings of about six billion dollars the first year. We will cancel about 30 other programs, for an annual savings of 40 billion dollars. I have told the management of each of the major contractors involved that other contracts, for civilian systems, will be coming. During the transition, we will pay them to retrain their work force, provided there are no layoffs. One more time: we don't want anybody becoming jobless because peace has broken out. If we can pay farmers not to grow crops, we can pay engineers and machinists not to build weapons.
I am, effective immediately, cancelling the stockpile stewardship program of subcritical and computerized nuclear testing. We have also ordered a halt to the production of weapons-grade fissionable materials and the permanent closing of facilities involved in the production of nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy, which has been spending 80% of its budget on nuclear weapons, will now have only two jobs: (1) clean up the radioactive and toxic mess created by half a century of weapons production, so that at least a portion of the land involved can be returned to productive use, and (2) what their name implies: energy. Their primary mission will be to develop clean, renewable, safe, non-polluting sources of energy for this country and to improve energy efficiency.
OUR NEW ROLE IN A CHANGING WORLD
In half a century, the United States has gone from savior of the civilized world to the most feared and hated nation on earth. This in turn has made our citizens, at home and abroad, the prime target of thousands of desperate, fanatical terrorists. With our belligerence, our arrogance, our name-calling, our overwhelming military superiority, our unilateralism, and our troops stationed in 150 different countries, we have driven other nations to develop nuclear weapons to deter us from attacking them. We have then used their weapons developments to justify our further belligerence in a never-ending cycle toward disaster. The end result of all this is that despite spending more than a billion dollars a day on military power, the American people are less secure than at any time since the end of the Civil War. Tens of billions of dollars for "Star Wars" weapons, thousands of nuclear weapons, hundreds of thousands of troops, and the expenditure of ten trillion dollars since World War II have brought our people only more insecurity, massive debt, and the loss of many of the cherished rights enshrined in our Constitution.
It's time for the cycle to end. It's time to end the belligerence, bring home our troops, and rejoin the family of nations. And that's exactly what we're going to do. Now let's get to some specifics.
Nuclear Weapons and Materials:
My predecessor rejected a Russian offer to destroy nuclear warheads removed from use in arms control agreements. I have contacted the Russians. Their offer is on the table and I am accepting it.
We have two related problems. (1) The world is awash in plutonium and highly enriched uranium from surplus and obsolete nuclear weapons. Safeguarding this material and keeping it from falling into the hands of nuclear wannabes and terrorists is a continuing problem, especially in Russia since my predecessor slashed the Nunn-Lugar funds authorized for safely carrying out and monitoring disarmament in the former Soviet Union. This most important piece of the defense budget was cut in half. I am immediately reprogramming funds from cancelled weapons programs to restore and then double again Nunn-Lugar. (2) We have a mountain of Depleted Uranium (DU). Much of it has been made into munitions. Tons of it was used in the first Gulf War and again in Bosnia and Kosovo and Afghanistan. Scientists and physicians say that the radiation from these munitions is extremely hazardous, both to the soldiers using it and to civilians coming into contact with it, even decades later. DU has been implicated in the cancer deaths and deformity of thousands of Iraqi children in the last twelve years. It may also be responsible for the disabling Gulf War Syndrome inflicting tens of thousands of our own Gulf War veterans.
The solution to these two problems is fairly simple. Fissionable plutonium and uranium will be mixed with DU making it useless for nuclear warheads, similar to natural uranium as it comes out of the ground. The mixture will be glassified and disposed of as safely as is humanly possible. All DU munitions in our possession will be destroyed. Never again will America endanger its own troops and despoil a target nation by the use of radioactive munitions. We propose a worldwide ban on the production of DU munitions and fissionable materials, and we begin by unilaterally implementing such a ban on ourselves.
Land Mines:
Reflecting our new cooperative relationship with the rest of the nations of the world, I will sign the anti-personnel land-mine treaty and submit it to the Senate for ratification. All U.S. stocks of land mines will be destroyed, and we will cooperate with and assist other nations in the cleaning up of land mines we have deployed, including those in the Korean DMZ. Hopefully, we can reduce the number of innocent civilians maimed and killed by these terrible weapons.
ABM and other Treaties:
We will also sign a series of other treaties which have languished all too long without U.S. support. Among them will be the Kyoto Accords, The Law of the Sea Treaty, The International Criminal Court, and the Treaty on the Rights of the Child. During the last administration, one of our most valuable treaties was lost -- the ABM Treaty. Since the U.S. withdrawal from that treaty was a unilateral presidential action taken without the advice and consent of the Senate, I am disavowing that action. I hereby declare to our Russian treaty partners and to the rest of the world that I am ordering the cancellation of all programs in violation of the letter and spirit of the ABM Treaty. This administration will spend no money and take no action which would be in violation of the ABM Treaty were it still in force. I call on President Putin to do likewise.
Weapons in Space:
I commend Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio for his Space Preservation Act and accompanying treaty. This new treaty builds on the successful 1967 Outer Space Treaty which prohibited the stationing of weapons of mass destruction in space. The Space Preservation Treaty bans all weapons in space, including directed energy weapons like lasers and particle beams and kinetic energy weapons such as High Frontier, Brilliant Pebbles, and the like. This treaty will forestall a new arms race beyond the earth's atmosphere and preserve space for peaceful uses on behalf of all humankind.
Kosovo:
I have presented to the Congress a separate document which outlines the history of the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo and documents U.S. responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia. The American people have been told many lies about the causes and conduct of this affair. I am appointing a blue-ribbon panel to take the report which I have prepared and do a full investigation. If indeed, as I suspect, American troops were sent into harm's way to secure an oil and gas pipeline from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean, and not to protect the human rights of Kosovars, then the American people deserve the truth. It is only by exposing the truth behind such events that we can prevent them from happening in the future. The truth shall make us free.
Korea:
As a military officer and fighter pilot, I was stationed in Korea twice. I developed a fond love of the Korean people, especially the children. What we must remember is that the Korean people, North and South, are the same. The artificial division of their country divided families down the middle. Yes, their governments are very different, but the people are the same.
In an article published in June, 1994, I said, "Without North Korea as the designated bad guy, how would the American oligarchy justify continuing to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars a year on 'defense'? After all, we have already trounced Iraq, whose defense budget is three times that of North Korea. In return for a verifiable end to their nuclear program, we should offer North Korea a peace treaty, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea, support for reunification talks with the South, open trade and tourism, diplomatic recognition, and normalization of relations."
The issue at the time was North Korea's nuclear reactors, almost their only source of electricity. These relatively primitive reactors produce fissionable plutonium as a byproduct. The U.S. was concerned about North Korea separating the plutonium out of the spent fuel rods, and using it to make nuclear warheads. I thought at the time that if we gave North Korea another way to generate electricity, and if we tossed in a bunch of diplomatic goodies, we could get them to stop operating their reactors.
It turns out that President Carter was able to obtain such a deal much more cheaply. All he had to give the North Koreans was some light-water nuclear power plants (which do not yield fissionable material as a byproduct), and (until they were built) some oil to satisfy their meager need for electricity.
That deal held throughout the Clinton years, although the Americans and Japanese got further and further behind in building the promised power plants. Then when George W. Bush became president, our government quit talking to North Korea. Still without a peace treaty to end the Korean War, and faced with an intransigent superpower, the North Koreans began to doubt that they would ever get those reactors. Then, in his first State of the Union Address, my predecessor named North Korea as part of an "axis of evil." That did it. Now they were faced with a superpower that was more than intransigent; it was downright belligerent. They started hedging their bets and preparing to restart their own nuclear power program. In response, the U.S. halted oil shipments to North Korea -- their only means of generating electrical power. In continuation of this deadly tit for tat, the North Koreans kicked out the monitors from the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA). The North Koreans now want a promise that we won't attack them without provocation. I'm willing to make that promise. I'm asking President Carter to once again go to North Korea to defuse the situation. We must try to bring North Korea back into the family of nations. As soon as this crisis is resolved, I will order our 40,000 troops home. We will do all we can to help the Korean people find a path to reunification, but it is something for them to decide, not for us to impose.
Iran:
In our dealings with Iran, some are tempted to criticize them for not being democratic. Let us remember that it was the United States who deposed their last democratically elected leader (Mohammed Mossadegh) and replaced him with the brutal Shah … for oil profits. After the Shah was finally deposed, we helped Saddam Hussein kill millions of Iranians in his war of aggression against Iran. If some Iranians hate us as the Great Satan, it is not without reason. If we want an improved relationship, if we want to eliminate Iran as a source of terrorists, we must earn the respect of the Iranian people. This will not be done by "axis of evil" talk, but by respectful diplomacy.
Iraq:
Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. I don't know anyone who disagrees with that. He's a bad guy now. He was a bad guy in 1990 when April Glaspie of the State Department gave him the green light to invade Kuwait. He was a bad guy in the 1980s when Donald Rumsfeld sat down with him for a chat while he was gassing the Kurds. He was a bad guy in 1977 when Zbigniew Brzezinski met with him and proposed the invasion of Iran. And he was a bad guy in the 1960s when the CIA hired him to assassinate Iraqi leader Abdel Karim Qassim and then helped him take over Iraq. But he was always our bad guy. Right up to 1990, official DoD documents praised Saddam for vastly improving the education, medical care, and standard of living of his people. His regime was called one of the most enlightened, progressive governments in the region.
But there was a problem. The Berlin wall had come down and the Soviet Union had collapsed. The first Bush White House had to find another bad guy -- fast. In May 1990, a National Security Council white paper stated that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were (and I quote) "the optimum contenders to replace the Warsaw pact as the rationale for major military expenditures." Two months later, on July 20, 1990, General Norman Schwarzkopf conducted training exercises simulating exactly the contingency of an Iraqi attack on Kuwait. Five days later, Glaspie gave the green light, and a week after that Saddam fell into our trap. He marched his troops across the undefended border into Kuwait. Almost immediately, the U.S. deployed as many troops and twice as much materiel as was moved for the Normandy invasion. (Could they have done that without a lot of advance planning?) Then President Bush gave Saddam an ultimatum and wouldn't take "yes" for an answer. The first Gulf War was on. We dropped over 300 million pounds of high explosives on Iraq, devastating the country and killing a quarter of a million people -- most of them civilians.
This was the war the first Bush administration wanted, the war they planned for, the war they instigated, the war they salivated over, the war that Saddam's unconditional withdrawal wasn't going to deny them, the war that would show off our smart bombs better than a hundred trade shows, the war that would prove George wasn't a wimp, the war that would make billions for the future president George W. Bush, who had exclusive rights to offshore oil in the Gulf, the war that would kill the "loser" image from Vietnam once and for all.
Why all this ancient history? Because it is so eerily familiar. The second President Bush wanted his Gulf War too. Planning for it started long before 9/11, even before he was elected president. The outline is contained in a September 2000 document ["Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For A New Century" authored by Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Lewis Libby for Project for the New American Century (PNAC). You can read it on the PNAC web site.]. The document sets "regime change" in Iraq as a primary objective of US foreign policy should Bush be elected. It makes clear that the purpose of moving against Saddam is to set the stage for occupying the entire Middle East (and therefore controlling its oil, no matter who's in power, especially in Saudi Arabia). The document says "even should Saddam pass from the scene, bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait will remain permanently." As long as he was president, George W. Bush wasn't going to be dissuaded from having his war.
The problems with starting a preemptive war against Iraq are several: (1) It's immoral and would probably be judged illegal by the World Court. (We are already responsible for many hundreds of thousands of deaths from the first Gulf War, from the Depleted Uranium we left there, and from our sanctions. Do we really want to kill thousands more innocent Iraqis?) (2) It's costly, in terms of American lives and in dollars. (The number of lives could be anywhere from a few dozen to many thousands, depending on whether we have to fight our way through the streets of Baghdad. The dollar cost will be on the order of $200 billion for a short war -- much more for a long one.) (3) It would require us to keep troops in Iraq indefinitely, until an acceptable democratic government was installed and in control. (Since Iraq has no history of democracy, this could take a very long time indeed. The occupation would also cost money.) (4) An unprovoked invasion of Iraq will incense the Arab world, probably causing the downfall of friendly governments who cooperate with us (like Saudi Arabia and Turkey). It will also cause an enormous increase in the terrorist threat to Americans at home and abroad, providing Osama bin Laden with thousands of new recruits ready to die in a Holy War against the evil Americans. It might even cause World War III between the Muslim countries of the world and their allies against the Western powers. Win or lose, such a conflict would be an unthinkable tragedy. One of the great ironies is that if such a conflict had happened before 1990, Saddam Hussein and his secular Baath government of Iraq would have been on our side.
These four considerations are enough for me. There will be no preemptive attack on Iraq on my watch.
Yes, like most of the CIA hirelings that we have installed to run countries for us and for our oil companies, Saddam Hussein is a bad guy. We need those inspectors there, if only to keep him from using what he's hiding. But preemptive war in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg principles, and our own Constitution isn't the answer. I am cancelling all deployment orders and directing the Secretary of Defense to start bringing our troops home, starting with those in Saudi Arabia. When I ran for president in 2000, I promised to get our troops out of Saudi Arabia. If that had been done, there likely would not have been a 9/11 tragedy. The presence of our troops in the Muslim Holy Land was the excuse Osama bin Laden used to get 15 young Saudis to commit suicide in our hijacked airliners. We're having enough problems protecting the American people from those who already hate us. It is senseless to keep doing the things that we know create terrorists. And we won't.
Terrorism:
Terrorism is both a short-term problem and a long-term problem. In the short term we must protect the American people from the terrorists we have already created. This means enhancing port security, beefing up cockpit doors, strengthening the border patrol, introducing computerized tracking of aliens, funding local communities for first response activities, shoring up the Coast Guard, and improving communications between intelligence agencies. These we will do. It also means developing new ways of detecting and neutralizing weapons of mass destruction. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, is doing important work in these areas and will be given my full support. At the moment, this is probably the most important part of the Department of Defense.
In the long term, we must stop making more terrorists. That means stopping policies and actions which make people fear and hate us. It means listening to the legitimate grievances of peoples we have wronged, and then changing our ways. Only one thing has ever ended a campaign of terror -- separating the terrorists from the larger community which supports them. This is done by ending the feelings of desperation, hopelessness, and powerlessness afflicting the people. It is done by listening to them and then actually making their lives better. It is not done by revenge and retaliation, which may feel good, but only create more terrorists. If retaliation worked, the Israelis would be the world's most secure people. In the end, we can have revenge or we can have security. We cannot have both.
The way I read the Constitution, my job is not to make the American people feel good. (That's a job for a queen, not a president.) My job is to make the American people secure. To do that, we must change our government's ways so that we are no longer feared and hated. So that's exactly what we will do. (Besides, it's the right thing to do!)
We have at times had a government with bad policies. But we are a good people. What we need is a government which reflects the values and goodness of the American people.
School of the Americas:
Our values and goodness are not reflected by a government which uses your money to train death squads in the techniques of torture, intimidation, and assassination. The School of the Americas (by whatever name they choose to call it) has been responsible for unspeakable atrocities wherever its graduates have gone. It must and will be closed. As Commander-in-Chief, I am ordering that the students presently attending the School be shown the movies "Romero" and "Panama Deception" and then sent home. It's the right thing to do.
Cuba:
Our values and goodness are not reflected by a government which gives Most Favored Nation status to the butchers of Tienanmen Square and places an illegal secondary embargo on the impoverished people of Cuba. I ask Congress to repeal the Helms-Burton law. We are ending the embargo of Cuba and entering discussions toward the normalization of relations.
It's the right thing to do.
Central Intelligence Agency:
We desperately need good advance information on the activities of Al Qaeda and those who wish to do us harm. But our values and goodness are not reflected by, and our security is not enhanced by, an organization which promotes instability, insurrection, tyranny, torture, terrorism, murder, and war around the world in our name and with our money. If the CIA won't stick to gathering intelligence, I will abolish it. It's the right thing to do.
Arms Sales:
According to Oscar Arias, every jet fighter sold by an industrialized nation to a developing country costs the schooling of three million children. The cost of a submarine denies safe drinking water to 60 million people. In the 1997 fiscal year, the United States exported $8.3 billion in weapons to non-democratic countries. Our values and goodness are not reflected by a government which promotes and subsidizes arms sales around the world to dictators who use our weapons to control their own impoverished people. Archbishop Oscar Romero pleaded with us to stop sending weapons to the right-wing government of El Salvador. His pleas went unheeded. The arms trade is wrong. It must stop. And it just did. It's the right thing to do.
The Role of Our Military Forces:
Earlier I outlined four missions for the Department of Defense. These missions are notable for what they do not include. They do not include protecting the worldwide financial interests of multinational corporations. And we won't. If the global robber barons insist on using force to subjugate third-world peoples, at least they can use their own ill-gotten money and hire their own mercenaries. Why should American taxpayers provide their own sons and daughters and then get stuck with the bill?
Our values and goodness are not reflected by a government which sends its youth around the world to kill the sons and daughters of working people in other countries. Our values and goodness are not reflected by sending our children to the Middle East to kill Arabs so the oil companies can profit from selling the oil under their sand, making us the target of terrorists.
Ask my wife about war. Her father fought in World War II. He commanded the engineering battalion that built the first bridge across the Rhine. He was gone for almost 3 years. Her two brothers were Marines. The oldest was at the Chosin reservoir in Korea when the Chinese flooded across the border into the war. And of course she had to take care of our seven children by herself while I flew 101 combat missions in Vietnam. She wasn't aware of the specific times that I came very close to not coming back. But she lived with the possibility every day. One of our sons was in the Army, and one of our grandsons in the Marines. I'd say she's given enough. We have another twenty grandchildren. If you ask her, she'll say, "Enough is enough. You're not getting them too."
And I agree. This country owes a huge debt of gratitude to our combat veterans. We also owe them medical care for life, and I intend to see that they get it. We owe it to them not to squander the liberties they purchased with their blood. We owe it to them to resurrect the American dream. But the best thing our government can do for its combat veterans is to quit making more of them. No more Iraqs. No more Kosovos. No more El Salvadors. These are not isolated incidents of stupidity. They are part of a long, bloody history of foreign policy being conducted for the financial interests of the wealthy few. It is a new colonialism. It endangers our national security. It must stop … and it just did.
As president, I will use the men and women in our Armed Forces to protect our borders and our people, not the financial interests of Folgers, Chiquita Banana, and Exxon. With nearly sixty years having passed since World War II, and with the Cold War long since over, there is no reason why we should still be occupying Germany and Japan. I have ordered the Secretary of Defense to look at all our overseas deployments and identify any which must continue. With the exception of these special cases, I will begin the process of bringing our troops home. We will continue to provide peacekeepers when requested by the United Nations. The rest of our global military presence will end within two years. This is not isolationism. It is common sense. It is in the interest of our people. And it is obeying our Constitution for a change. Every president in recent memory has violated our founding documents with foreign military ventures. At my inauguration, I swore to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. Lip service isn't enough. We must treat the Constitution as if it mattered. I intend to do just that.
Instead of a worldwide military presence, we are going to have a humanitarian presence. Along with the other wealthy nations of the world, we shall initiate a new Marshall Plan, providing funds to rebuild the Middle East as we rebuilt Europe after World War II. We will also take the lead in complete debt forgiveness for the poorest countries, starting with those in Africa. If we are once again to be a great nation, we must first be a good nation.
We must build an America at peace with the world and with its own people … an America that seeks not to be king of the hill nor subservient to the World Trade Organization, but to be a responsible sovereign member of the family of nations … an America that is free of the threat of terrorism because it is no longer feared and hated … an America that leads the world -- not just with military might, but with its vision, its compassion, its democracy, its productivity, its freedom, its standard of living, its treatment of its own people, and its goodness. That's the kind of America our people deserve. And -- working together and with God's help --that's the kind of America we will become.
It is customary at the end of these talks to say, "God bless America." He already has. Now we must do our part. Thank you, and good night. | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
