Is the Military Our Last Hope?

Is the high command of the US military breaking ranks with the Bush Regime?
By Paul Craig Roberts
Feb. 15, 2007

With the “mainstream media,” that is, the government’s propaganda ministry, bombarding the American public with “news reports” from unidentified sources that the US government has proof that “the highest reaches of the Iranian government” is supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency, Marine General Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demurred. General Pace told the Voice of America on February 12 that he has no information indicating that Iran’s government is supplying weapons to the Iraqi insurgency.

General Pace said that “Iranians are involved,” but “what I would not say is that the Iranian government, per se, knows about this . . . I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit.”

Unlike the New York Times, Fox “news,” CNN, and the TV networks, General Pace refused to lie for the Bush Regime.

Perhaps America could regain its reputation if General Pace would send a division of US Marines to arrest Bush, Cheney, the entire civilian contingent in the Pentagon, the neoconservative nazis, and the complicit members of Congress and send them off to the Hague to be tried for war crimes.

But he did the best he could and refused to lie for warmongers.

There is absolutely no doubt that Bush-Cheney and the neoconservative nazis are planning revenge against General Pace. We can only hope the general does not have a wife who works for the CIA.

Bush’s support stands at 30% or less of the American population; Cheney’s at 20% or less. How can “leaders” who are not supported by public opinion or by a single fact escalate a war that is entirely based on lies while starting a new war that is entirely based on lies?

Is America any longer a democracy where failed leaders are held to account? Obviously not.

What has America become while it has been in the hands of the Bush Regime?

How can any patriotic American support a regime that has shredded the US Constitution, ignored the separation of powers, violated the Geneva Conventions, forced through a law legalizing torture, launched a war of aggression that has produced 26,000 American military casualties in service of a lie, murdered tens or hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians, destroyed an entire country, and planned an attack on Iran, perhaps with nuclear weapons?

Patriotism is loyalty to country and to the US Constitution, not loyalty to a criminal regime.

This criminal regime is in the hands of a tiny cabal of fanatical ideologues who would risk the very existence of human life for their perverted ideology that has no higher value than American and Israeli hegemony.

Bush and the congressional sheep say “support the troops,” by which they mean, of course, “continue the war.”

But Bush does not support the troops. On February 12 the Associated Press reported: “The Bush administration’s budget assumes cuts to funding for veterans’ health care two years from now--even as badly wounded troops returning from Iraq could overwhelm the system.”

Bush is an ignorant warmonger. He doesn’t care who pays the price as long as the American people let him sit in the Oval Office and play Napoleon.

MoveOn, an organization that, unlike the Bush Regime, has redeeming virtues, is making a terrible mistake in trying to collect half a million signatures in behalf of saving federal funding for NPR and PBS.

I cannot imagine a surer way of adding NPR and PBS to the Bush Regime’s ministry of propaganda.

NPR and PBS desperately need to be totally independent of government and dependent only on their listeners. Any organization dependent on government money belongs to the government. Such an organization has no independence. Just ask the many physicists who cannot express doubts about the 9/11 Commission Report because their careers depend entirely on federal government grants.

We have witnessed a decline in the integrity of NPR reporting over the past six years. The Bush Regime put an ideological commissar in charge of NPR and the result is that NPR sounds increasingly like Fox “news.” The few people with integrity that America has left in the news business desperately need their independence.

On February 13, I listened for two hours to NPR and did not hear a single report of General Pace’s contradiction of Bush/Cheney propaganda about Iran’s leaders. But I did hear a neoconservative from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a propaganda institution in Washington D.C., push the buttons for war with Iran.

The Clinton Administration permitted the destruction of independent news in the US when it allowed the extraordinary concentration of the media. The American media is no longer run by journalists with a commitment to truth but by advertising executives who seek to protect profits by avoiding “controversy” and who seek to protect the value of the conglomerates, a value that depends on government-granted broadcast licenses, by accommodating the government’s line, whatever it might be.

The only free and independent media in the US is online. The best thing that could possibly happen to NPR is to lose all federal funding and to become totally independent of Washington.

Then we could trust it again.