Eric Margolis

TIME FOR CONGRESS TO ACT LIKE ROMANS

NEW YORK – President George Bush’s State of the Union address on 23 January was comparatively somber and restrained. There was little of the usual jingoism and flag-waving that normally characterizes these carefully staged nationalistic spectacles which always remind me of old Chairman Leonid Brezhnev’s harangues to the Soviet Central Committee, whose members, like many US legislators, would jump up at every cliché and clap like trained seals.

The reason for the somber mood was clear: the unfolding debacle in Iraq. There was no more, `bring’em on’ gasconading, though the president again sought to link the war he began in Iraq to his ongoing campaign against Islamic resistance movements and terrorists. Outside of the sticks of Alabama and Georgia, less and less Americans are buying Bush’s preposterous claim that pursuing the ugly war in Iraq is somehow fighting `worldwide terrorism.’ Most sensible Americans have finally understood that their nation’s invasion of Iraq has magnified, not diminished, anti-western violence.

As Bush was giving his speech, a remarkable new poll showed most Americans now believe Congress, not the president, should manage foreign policy. Hopefully, the long era of presidential pre-eminence in America might be nearing an end.

This is a remarkable sea change. Following Bush’s address, the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee politely rebuked Bush’s plans to send more troops to Iraq. A similar non-binding resolution from the full Democratic-controlled Congress is expected shortly.

But the real power behind Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, immediately sneered back, `it won’t stop us.’ His contemptuous retort illustrates the neo-totalitarian impulses that continue to grip the Republican Party’s far right. Cheney and pro-war neoconservatives closely linked to Israel’s far rightists are the prime exponents of imperial presidency, the Iraq war, and attacking Iran. They dismiss Congress and America’s courts as `little jabber houses,’ to paraphrase the notorious British imperialist, Sir Basil Zaharoff.

The stage is now set for what could become a major constitutional crisis between executive and legislative branches.

Under the US Constitution, the president, a position modeled on the consular office of Republican Rome, is military leader and holds primacy in foreign policy. The US Senate was patterned on the Roman Senate, whose bunched rods and ax insignia it bears on its wall on either side of the speaker’s dais. Congress declares war, controls pursue strings, levies troops, and confirms treaties. The Constitution is vague about Congressional power in foreign affairs. But, at minimum, Congress speaks for all Americans; particularly in wartime, and must not be ignored.

Bush’s last term marks the zenith of the long growth of the imperial presidency that began with Franklin Roosevelt, and the lamentable, concurrent decline of Congressional authority. When I was a boy – during the term of the man I consider modern America’s greatest president, Dwight Eisenhower, the leaders of the Senate and House were men of great power and distinction whose influence was almost equal to that of the president. The relentless growth of presidential power, and the slavish attention focused on the presidency by the media, steadily undermined the role of Congress and that other nearly forgotten arm of government, the judiciary.

The 9/11 attacks and a too obedient Republican majority, dominated by Southerners and Christian fundamentalists, turned Congress into a rubber stamp for Bush’s policies. In the process, most members of Congress demonstrated political cowardice and gross dereliction of their duty to defend the Constitution, the nation’s laws, and citizen’s rights.

Hillary Clinton and fellow Democrats who now piously denounce the Iraq war eagerly voted for it in 2002 out of sheer ignorance, war fever, or fear of being branded `anti-patriotic’ by Republicans. In 2008, American voters will hopefully censure those legislators who voted for this faked, totally unnecessary war, and then approved the administration’s growing use of torture, kidnapping, and secret prisons. Never, in my memory, has Congress brought so much shame on itself, nor sunk so low.

Congress is now belatedly trying to assert itself. But its so far timid pleadings for Bush to desist from his latest Iraq folly are not enough. The Constitution declares Congress the premier arm of government. It is Congress’ duty to demand President Bush and VP Cheney, who have gone dangerously astray, to cease and desist. Cheney’s views notwithstanding, America is not a monarchy, and he is not Richelieu.

White House defenders claim Congress had no constitutional right to interfere in the detailed conduct of war. They claim being in a war gives the president the right to ignore or violate the Constitution, America’s laws, and citizen’s civil rights.

This is not true. The essence of America’s political system that has been a beacon to the world for two centuries is the remarkable system of checks and balances conceived by its founding fathers to prevent the emergence of an autocrat, despot, or monarch. A president run amok, or one with monarchist ambitions, was the greatest fear of the founding fathers who had just waged a bitter national struggle to free themselves from the rule of King George III.

It is precisely Congress’ vital duty to stop a president and vice president who have lost touch with reality, violate the Constitution, and are taking America over a cliff. Besides advising and consenting, Congress must, in rare times of peril, confront. In Republican Rome, the Senate had the right to remove a consul who failed to win wars, behaved shamefully, dishonored the republic, or violated the Senate’s orders.

Congress must cease its timidity and stop entreating the president as if he were king. He is only chief executive of the republic, one man among many. Congress is the board of directors. The president, in spite of his supporter’s efforts, is not the sacrosanct embodiment of America; that role belongs to Congress.

Congress bears heavy responsibility for the debacle in Iraq and the ruin of America’s good name around the globe. It’s time for the new US Congress to begin doing its job by acting like Roman Senators and stop acting like a bunch of obsequious courtiers.

copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

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RED GHOSTS HAUNT EASTERN EUROPE

Soon after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, I interviewed newly liberated Poland’s Deputy Minister of Defense. He pointed to the ceiling of his office and to two lamps, put his fingers to his lips in a universally understood gesture, and suggested we take a stroll in one of Warsaw’s beautiful the parks.

As we walked, I asked the obvious question, were the Communists still a threat? He stopped, and whispered, `they are gone, but they are still here.’

His words have always haunted me.

Two weeks ago, we witnessed a striking example of what the minister meant. Warsaw’s prominent archbishop, Stanislaw Wielgus, was forced to resign after revelations he had informed for decades on his fellow clergymen and countrymen for Poland’s brutal Communist secret police, the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or SB.

Many other senior Catholic clergymen are also being exposed as informers or outright SB agents. Two legislators in this ultra-Catholic nation recently tabled legislation calling for Jesus Christ to be named president of Poland. As may be imagined, Poles are in national shock over the Wielgus scandal.

This is also the latest faux-pas in Pope Benedict’s accident-prone reign that began with his foolish, medieval slurs against Islam. He had appointed old friend Wielgus archbishop, and defended him when the scandal first broke. Questions were immediately raised about how many other former SB and East Germany Stasi agents there might be in the pope’s entourage.

Most of the former Soviet Union’s Orthodox clergy were KGB agents; so was the entire Muslim religious establishment of the Soviet Central Asian republics. KGB also planted numerous highly-placed agents in Poland’s Catholic Church and in the Vatican. Many still remain active today, reporting to KGB’s successor, Russia’s FSB.

KGB and Soviet military intelligence, GRU, were everywhere.
For example, KGB general Pavel Sudoplatov, who organized Trotsky’s murder, even claimed GRU and KGB had three agents in President Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime White House. The late French Socialist Defense Minister, Charles Hernu, was exposed in 1996 as a longtime KGB agent. So effective was KGB that western intelligence for a time feared that the prime ministers of Britain and Canada, and the chancellor of West Germany, might be enemy sleeper agents.

The sinister residue of Communist-era intelligence and security systems still infects Eastern Europe and Russia. After Communism’s collapse, its former intelligence agents and their precious files were simply absorbed into Europe’s new security agencies, or retired on full pensions. A similar process occurred after the fall of Nazi Germany: its intelligence agencies and files were divvied up between the Soviets, Americans, British and French.

After the fall of the Soviet Empire, many former KGB and other East Bloc agents became `businessmen,’ notably in Russia, where they grew rich from blackmail, extortion, and protection, like the former KGB/FSB agents now being investigated in Litvinenko murder case.

In East Germany, one in five citizens became informers for Stasi, the ubiquitous, efficient security police. In Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania, their communist era secret police, Securitate, DS, and Sigurimi, still terrorize these nations.

The chief of Bulgaria’s top secret intelligence archives that were due to be shortly released, was found dead last November. He was officially listed as a `suicide.’ Two other Bulgarian security archivists have also `killed themselves.’ These deaths were clearly aimed at preventing exposure of Bulgarian intelligence in the 1981 plot to kill Pope John Paul.

It was very easy for Communist regimes to enlist informers and agents. The socialist state controlled every aspect of life: housing, medical care, education, pensions, travel, employment, food ration coupons, even marriage licenses. `

Each apartment building, city block, factory section, and school had government informers and party security apparatchiks. Any `anti-state’ or `deviationist’ activities were immediately reported to the party.

Those accused of wrong-doing risked losing homes or jobs and their parent’s pensions. Their children’s futures would be ruined. This efficient totalitarian control system ensured everyone became their own little secret policeman and reported relatives, friends, and co-workers. Informing brought job advancement, better apartments, foreign travel and access to western goods.

In the 1980’s, I faced one of East Europe’s most vicious Communist secret police, which threatened my distant relatives with prison and torture in an effort to get me to write articles attacking its enemies. I adamantly refused, but it was a frightening, ugly business. I finally managed to end it by threatening to kill the specific agents menacing me. I was never bothered again.

Poland’s Prime Minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has tabled legislation to exclude former Communist agents from public jobs and reduce or end their state pensions.

More important, the law declares the SB and its former agents `a criminal organization.’ PM Kaczynski and his twin brother, Lech, Poland’s president, vow to purge all remaining Communist agents.

Poland should be hailed for finally exposing Communist criminals and their pawns. Now, it’s time for East Europe’s other nations, Ukraine, and Russia to do the same, though it’s highly unlikely Moscow will ever prosecute its surviving Soviet era mass murderers. The European Union should enact legislation similar to Poland’s, defining the Communist secret police and their political leaders as the criminals they were.

Endlessly repeating mantras about Nazi evils while totally ignoring even greater crimes of the west’s former Communist allies is obscene and profoundly dishonest. Poland’s conservative government has taken a major step in the right direction.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

SOMALIA: CRUSADE NUMBER FOUR

NEW YORK - `The US has opened a fourth front in the war on terrorism’ the Pentagon announced last week, as if the US did not have enough failing wars on its hands with al-Qaida, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

In a striking irony, F-18 fighter-bombers from the carrier `USS Eisenhower,’ deadly AC-130 gunships from the US base at Djibouti, and Special Forces units attacked Somalia from sea, air and land. Other US units and FBI agents deployed on the Kenya-Somalia border. As America’s latest foreign war began with air strikes from the giant carrier that bears this great president’s name, no one seemed to recall President Dwight Eisenhower’s magnificent farewell address in 1961 to Americans in which he warned against foreign entanglements and the growing political influence of the military-industrial complex.

Very few Americans understood their nation had just invaded another in an act worthy of the late, unlamented Chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

Much of Somalia has already been occupied by Ethiopia’ powerful, US-financed army which invaded that defenseless nation, with Washington’s blessing, under cover of the Christmas holiday.

It is an open secret in Washington that the Somalia operation is to be the Bush/Cheney Administration’s new model for war against recalcitrant Muslims. The White House failed to convince India or Pakistan to rent their troops for occupation duty in Iraq, but it has succeeded in using Ethiopia’s army in Somalia. Ethiopia’s repressive regime was only too happy to invade Somalia and received large infusions of aid from Washington. The Administration is duplicating the British Empire’s wide scale use of native troops(`sepoys’ in India; `askaris’ in East Africa) in colonial wars.

But is Somalia really a `hotbed of terrorism’ as Washington claimed? The US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia was sparked by last fall’s defeat of corrupt Somali clan warlords. They had recently been armed and financed by the CIA to fight the growing popularity of local Islamists.

The warlords had kept Somalia in turmoil and near anarchy for 15 years. Last year, a group of Muslim jurists and notables, the Union of Islamic Courts, managed to defeat the warlords and impose a rough form of law and order on many parts of chaotic central and southern Somalia. Northern Somalia is ruled by a secessionist government based around the strategic port of Berbera.

The conservative Islamic Courts were sympathetic to pan-Muslim causes. But there is no evidence so far that they were involved in anti-American jihadist movements and had no identifiable links, as Washington claimed, to al-Qaida. Now, Somalis are seething with anger at America, providing yet more volunteers for jihadist operations. In fact, the Christmas US-Ethiopian invasion of Somalia threatens to ignite violence across the Horn of Africa.

A handful of African Al-Qaida suspects in the 1998 bombing of US Embassies in East Africa may have been in Somalia, but going to war against a sovereign nation to try to assassinate or capture a handful of suspects is like using a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat and is sure to generate more anti-US violence. Air strikes by carrier- based US F-18’s and AC-130 gunships killed between 50-100 Somali civilians but, apparently, no al-Qaida suspects. The real aim of the US air attacks was to destroy remaining fighting units of the Islamic Courts and clear the way for the US-imposed Somali figurehead government.

The invasion and occupation of defenseless Somalia is the latest – but probably not the last – example of the increasing militarization of US foreign policy. VP Dick Cheney’s new Pentagon golden-haired boys, Special Operations Command, elbowed aside the humiliated CIA and the feckless State Department and vowed to `drain the Islamic swamp’ in Somalia.

Thus begins President George Bush’s fourth war against the Muslim World. Invading dirt-poor Somalia is Bush’s last stab at military glory and a final effort to convince disgruntled American voters the so-called `war on terror’ is a success. So also continues Washington’s preference of only invading small nations that cannot offer much initial resistance by conventional forces: Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia. Afghanistan has only 29 million wretched people; Iraq about 26 million- two thirds of them in rebellion.

The administration is again recklessly charging into a thicket of tribal politics in a remote nation it knows nothing about. US policy in Somalia is being driven by neoconservatives seeking war against the entire Muslim World, and self-serving advice from ally Ethiopia. Israel, which has maintained close intelligence, military and economic links to Ethiopia’s regime, is also discreetly involved: it has long conducted covert operations in the Horn of Africa and the Red Sea’s western littoral.

Eritrea’s 1993 secession took away Ethiopia’s natural access to the sea, leaving it landlocked. Ethiopia’s strategic goals in Somalia may be to seize one or more deep-water ports, turn Somalia into a protectorate, and crush any Islamic movements that might enflame its own voiceless Muslims, who comprise half of Ethiopia’s 73 million people.

America’s attack on Somalia recalls Afghanistan. The US is again blundering into ancient clan and tribal conflicts, using foreign troops and local mercenaries to defend a puppet regime without any popular support. US-Ethiopian intervention in Somalia is certain to re-ignite the murderous clan rivalries that brought it to the current state of anarchy.

Like Afghanistan, Somalia was easy to invade, but may prove very difficult to rule, or eventually leave. Many Somalis saw the now scattered Islamic Courts militias as their best hope for stability and normalcy. Now they are back to zero – or worse.

Like Afghanistan after the US invasion in 2001, Somalis have been slow to oppose invasion. But in time they could mount serious resistance to the new US-Ethiopian condominium over Somalia.

From 1899 to 1930, Somali mujahidin waged a fierce resistance struggle against the British, who killed a third of the native population. In 1954, Britain handed the Somali ethnic region of Ogaden to Ethiopia, thus assuring continued hostility between the two old foes.

Now we have a new war, in a faraway place, could become yet another annoying, intractable headache for the west and yet another incubator of revenge-minded jihadis.



copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

SADDAM’S GOODBYE CURSE

The Bush/Cheney Administration has never concealed its sneering contempt for international law or world public opinion. Even so, the lynching of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq established a new nadir for America and shocked the entire globe.

This sordid act, which grossly violated international law, the Geneva Conventions, and basic human decency, provoked a well-deserved storm of criticism around the globe against the Bush/Cheney Administration. It also rekindled demands for an international abolition of the death penalty.

Washington professed surprise and denied blame for this disgusting spectacle. More lies. Saddam had been under US guard in a US-run prison in Baghdad’s US-run Green Zone. He was transferred under US guard to a US-run execution prison. What did US officials think would happen when they turned him over to a raging lynch mob of vengeful Shias? A parade?

The United States has already been heavily criticized for stage-managing the Soviet-style show trial and rigged kangaroo court that condemned Saddam and two of his closest henchmen.

It’s clear Iraq’s deposed leader was hurriedly executed to prevent him from revealing embarrassing details about his long collusion with the US, Britain, and Arab states.

Saddam’s principal crime was launching an unprovoked war against Iran that cost over one million casualties. This crime was never mentioned in President Hussein’s trial because, at the time, his principal accomplices were the United States, Britain and the Arab oil monarchs. Dead men tell no tales.

Ironically, Saddam’s courage and dignity on the gallows will reinforce his claim to martyrdom and make him the hero in death that he certainly was not in life. This process has already begun.

By contrast, the UN’s new South Korean secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who was maneuvered into office by Washington, shamefully supported Saddam’s execution even though the UN has long opposed the death penalty, and its human rights chief, Louise Arbour, had condemned the brutal execution . This was an inauspicious start for a timid yes-man.

This week, the Bush/Cheney Administration is widely expected to announce plans to deploy another 20,000 or more troops to Iraq and allocate billions more for the war effort and economic reconstruction. This will be George Bush’s petulant reply to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group’s wise proposal that all US combat forces withdraw from Iraq within a year.

Senior American generals charged with Iraq, including Gen. John Abazaid and Gen. George Casey, openly disagreed with Bush’s plans for a `surge’ in US troop deployment. These able officers told media they didn’t need more troops. They warned additional US troops would deter Iraq’s Shia regime from developing its own security forces and keep it dependant on the US and death squads.

These statements were a shocker. American generals are not supposed to publicly disagree with the president. Both officers have just been replaced in command. Gen. Abazaid, who speaks Arabic and understands Iraq, is retiring early, in disgust, say friends.

Casey and Abazaid follow another fine officer, former Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who choose duty to America over career. He was forced to retire by the White House after publicly stating a minimum of 300,000 US troops would be needed to pacify Iraq. The 140,000 US troops currently in Iraq, and the 80,000 or so mercenaries(`civilian contractors’ in Pentagon and media doublespeak) supporting them, are stretched to the breaking point and hard pressed to defend their own bases and vulnerable supply lines.

Iraq’s western Anbar Province has become a Ft Apache for the US Marines, who are barely able to defend their own besieged bases. Iraq’s Sunni resistance forces have almost defeated American forces there in spite of massed US air, artillery, and armor support.

Many US senior military officers privately say it is small wonder Bush, who styles himself the `war president,’ is so deficient in military experience and knowledge. A few months in the Texas Air National Guard evading wartime military service during Vietnam certainly did not prepare him to wage two wars. The real power behind the throne, VP Dick Cheney, also avoided military service, claiming he was `too busy.’

Responsible presidents know when to listen to their generals, and when to retreat from stalemated or lost wars. If Bush does send thousands more troops to Iraq, he will be risking more American lives in a desperate, 11th-hour political gamble to show voters he has a new plan to resolve the horrible mess in Iraq that he created.

The White House’s last gamble may call for stationing the new troops in and around Baghdad to end the anarchy in Iraq’s capitol and reinforcing embattled US units in Anbar Province.

But most of the new troops will come from US units currently in Iraq that were due to be withdrawn, or are US-based troops slated for deployment to Iraq. Morale among US occupation forces is already rock bottom. This news about delayed departures and accelerated deployments could ignite the same kind of malaise and indiscipline experienced by US troops in the later part of the lost Vietnam War. It could also get yet more US troops stuck in the Iraqi quagmire.

But 20,000-30,000 more US troops thrown into the cauldron of Iraq will make little military difference. One hundred fifty thousand or more might, but the US has run out of soldiers. Even massive reinforcements will not resolve the basic problem of Iraq’s post-Saddam political instability and the inability of its component groups to forge national consensus.

If Bush pours more troops into this a lost war, he will fall into the trap of many bad gamblers who double up their bets in a reckless effort to recoup previous losses.

Bush continues ignoring his generals while still heeding the siren song of the pro-Israel neoconservatives around him. Their goal is not a stable Mideast, but total destruction of Iraq, then Iran.

Current Republican presidential front-runner Sen. John McCain has joined Bush and Cheney in urging more troop be sent to Iraq. All three have clearly lost touch with reality and America’s basic values.

Call it Saddam’s curse.


copyright Eric S. Margolis 2007

SADDAM HUSSEIN

SAN FRANCISCO – On my first visit to Iraq in 1976, `Israeli spies’ were being hanged in front of my Baghdad hotel. While covering Iraq just before the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s secret police threatened to hang me as an American/Israeli spy.

I always considered President Hussein, who was hanged on Friday, a sadistic bully and a loathsome megalomaniac. He liked to call himself `the Arab Stalin.’ But he was no Stalin. Just a horrid Arab dictator.

No one can accuse me of sympathy for Saddam or his fellow thugs who terrorized Iraq. But I was thoroughly disgusted and ashamed by the kangaroo court created and stage managed by the US that condemned Saddam. It was a disgraceful farrago of Soviet-style show trial and judicial circus. Washington, which claimed to be bringing the fruits of democracy to the benighted Arab World, put on a sinister legal farce worthy of Saddam’s courts.

Iraq’s deposed president, whom Osama bin Laden called `the worst Arab despot,’ should have faced real justice at an international legal tribunal like the UN Hague Court. That would have served warning to other despots who violated human rights and committed aggression. The United States did right to hand over Serb tyrant Slobodan Milosevic to the Hague. But Saddam had to be quickly silenced before he told the world about his long collusion with the United States. Dead men tell no tales.

Saddam’s biggest crime was not killing rebellious Kurds or Shia. As ruler of the unnatural, British-created Frankenstein state Iraq, Saddam was forced to keep putting down rebellions.

When the sainted Winston Churchill was a British government minister, he authorized the RAF to bomb Iraq’s rebellious Kurdish tribesmen with poison gas – exactly as Saddam later did. Saddam’s most brutal repression of Kurds and Shia occurred when they revolted during Iraq’s wars with Iran, then the US.

President Hussein should have faced trial for his unprovoked 1980 aggression against Iran that ended up causing one million dead and wounded.

But in this crime, Saddam was covertly backed by his principal accomplices, the US and Britain. Donald Rumsfeld even went to Baghdad to offer Saddam arms, finance and intelligence. Hanging Saddam would eliminate the main witness.

Saddam was helped into power by CIA which was delighted to see him slaughter Iraqi communists and Nasserites. The US and Britain, as I discovered in Baghdad in 1990, supplied Saddam with poison gas and germs to make battlefield weapons (these were not `weapons of mass destruction.’ The germs were never successfully weaponized).

So long as Saddam was killing and torturing people America and Britain did not like, he was `our SOB.’ But when President Hussein grew too big for his britches and invaded Kuwait, he went from being the west’s regional bullboy to devil number one. Once he touched the west’s oil in Kuwait, he was marked for death.

The tame US media has been spinning Saddam’s execution as a justification for the Bush/Cheney Administration’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq, without ever asking why Saddam was an ally in 1988 yet a devil in 1991.

Nor has media reporting that under Saddam, Iraq became the Arab World’s most industrialized nation, a leader in women’s rights, medical care, education, and public projects.

Back in 2003, I predicted that once the US got rid of old pal Saddam, it would look for another Saddam-clone to replace him. The mutant state of Iraq and its feuding peoples can only be ruled by an iron fist. Saddam’s greatest error was believing he had frightened Iraqis into national unity that would support invasions of his neighbors. He was dead wrong.

There are plenty of other brutal regimes across the Mideast and Central Asia that rival Saddam’s Iraq for nastiness. Most are close US allies. As Henry Kissinger once quipped, being America’s ally is far more dangerous than being its enemy.

After jubilation among Shia and Kurds over Saddam’s execution subsides, Iraq will return to its daily bloody chaos. Saddam called himself a martyr. In years to come, many Arabs will forget his many crimes and remember him as a flawed hero and martyr who dared challenge the United States and Israel, and paid the price of his audacity.

30 MARGOLIS

HEROES AND VILLAINS OF 2006

HEROES

*The Amish farm families of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After a sadistic lunatic murdered five of their young daughters in a schoolhouse, they forgave the attacker, comforted his family, and bore their unspeakable loss with a quiet dignity and gentleness that deeply moved the nation and taught us all a profound lesson about the meaning of true Christianity.

*Jimmy Carter. The finest American ex-president in modern times. He devoted his post-presidential years to helping the poor, working for fair elections around the globe, and championing the rights of the oppressed. His courageous new book on the plight of the Palestinians made him the target of intense abuse and slander. President Carter is an outstanding example of the quiet virtues and basic decency America used to represent.

*Evo Morales. Bolivia’s new president, a plain-spoken worker president with a big heart but little experience who must tackle Bolivia’s severe economic and social problems. He is the first full-blooded native Andean Indian to win office and is now the champion of millions of Latin America’s long-neglected, exploited native peoples.

*Deng Xiaoping. China’s little giant died in 1997. But the spirit of China’s revolutionary economic liberator and greatest modern leader continues to preside over his nation’s near miraculous growth and return to power. As supreme leader, Deng’s only title was chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association. But everyone knew he was boss. Deng unleashed a free market tsunami in China that has brought its people growing prosperity and pride after three centuries of poverty and misery.

*Maher Arar. Condemned to kidnapping, torture and frightful imprisonment by stupid, malevolent Canadian and US officials in egregious violation of their nation’s laws. Arar has conducted himself with dignity and forbearance in the face of disgraceful attempts by senior officials to evade responsibility for this crime and Ottawa’s craven failure to take Washington to task.

VILLAINS

*George Bush & Dick Cheney. The axis of blunderers, faked an illegal war against Iraq that will cost up to $2 trillion before it is lost. They created a calamity for the US and set the Mideast afire. The lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will undermine US global influence. Their advocacy of aggression, torture, and kidnapping has blackened America’s name everywhere and made them the most detested men of our era.

*Tony Blair. Ruined his once brilliant career by acting as a mouthpiece for George Bush and promoting lies about the Iraq War.

All, claimed Blair, to retain Britain’s influence with Washington, leading a senior British diplomat to nastily quip, `who needs the monkey when you can talk to the organ grinder.’

*Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. By vaunting his rudimentary nuclear program and calling for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state, Iran’s foolishly bombastic president has made his nation a target for US and/or Israeli attack, and left Iran seem a bigger menace than it actually is. Even Iranians are getting nervous.

*Ehud Olmert/Hassan Nasrallah. They stumbled into a totally unnecessary war that killed over a thousand civilians, caused billions in damage to Lebanon and Israel, brought worldwide condemnation of Israel’s disproportionate response, and dealt a humiliating military setback to its vaunted military. At least Nasrallah emerged a hero to Arabs, while Israelis are calling for Olmert’s thick head.

*American televangelists. These charlatans, mountebanks and fraudsters invoke the name of god to dip into your pockets, while advocating hatred of other faiths and meddling in politics. Many claim all non-born again Christians and other faiths will be roasted alive during Armageddon. Send cheesy hate-mongers and promoters of Islamophobia like Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberston, the loathsome John Hagee, and Franklin Graham back to Alabama. Almost 90% of America’s Christian evangelicals energetically backed George Bush’s illegal war in Iraq. What ever happened to `love they neighbor’ and `turn the other cheek?’ They should go study true Christianity in Pennsylvania.

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copyright Eric S. Margolis 2006