Why is Our Future Such a Mystery?

Leaders lead by example. Real leaders have clear convictions, and can spell out exactly what they mean, in both words and deeds. Most of all leaders always have a plan. No one in this White House could be ever be accused of having had any kind of plan, since 911, at all! Beyond their lack of planning, there were also goals to be achieved, and larger purposes to be accomplished – yet none of that appears to those who question.

Bush told a veteran’s group in Tennessee: “I don’t think you can win” the war on terror. One day later he said: “We are winning and we will win.” This is our leader? According to Bush himself: he has never wavered, never made a single mistake, and always been completely clear about his mission and his goals: which is all a pack of lies.

His campaign says that what Bush should have said was: “That unlike a conventional war, the current conflict is unlikely to end with a climatic surrender or an easily defined conclusion.” So, if he’s the leader, why didn’t he just say that! John McCain said: “What he meant was, we’re never going to have a peace signing on the Missouri, we’re never going to have a signing at Panmunjom,” referring to the cease-fire in Korea. What no one has yet mentioned is the way we left Viet Nam, in pandemonium from the rooftop of the US Embassy, we ran away under fire, and we lost that war.

The last US president to claim title to “War President” was Lyndon Johnson. And although he inherited that one from JFK, Viet Nam became his war. LBJ also maintained that the USA could have both guns and butter. He too used the National Guard (not the troops but their equipment), to hide the real losses we were suffering over there. He too tried to divert attention from his war by draining the treasury. He tried to use The War on Poverty to hide the War on Viet Nam - he failed at both.

The parallels between Iraq and Viet Nam are staggering in their similarities – yet no one in the DOD, the Pentagon or the White House seems to be aware of the obvious comparisons. Both wars began with lies. Neither directly involved the security interests of the United States or contained any real value when measured against the true price that would need to be paid to win either conflict.

Militarily the two wars are virtually identical, except in terms of troop commitments. In Viet Nam we expended over 500,000 troops, our full and intense application of major Air Power, with combat air support, Sea Power with Naval and Marine aircraft as well as the best of the Army and Marine ground forces throughout – not to mention the CIA, our secretive elite forces, along with heaps of intelligence types as well as black ops, and psy-ops agents.

The Vietnamese had a lot of small arms, millions of people, a thorough knowledge of the jungle and as a people they were imbued with the determination to be rid of us. They had no air force of their own, no sophisticated missiles, and a small navy of little consequence militarily. They lost millions of people, yet they won their war against the USA.

Iraq similarly has no air force, no navy to speak of, no missiles of consequence, no weapons of mass destruction, yet they have re-ignited this war for their country. They know the desert that is their world, just as the Vietnamese knew their jungles. They have hundreds of thousands of fighters and millions of people - that thanks to our actions have now become determined to be rid of us: but they are not giving up, they’re digging in and beginning to take back their country.

In both cases the USA went to war based on a narrow definition of how everyone else should live. This misbegotten notion is a leftover from the Cold War that was, at least in part a war over ideology. The War in Viet Nam was fought to benefit the military-industrial complex, which it did - just as the War in Iraq was intended to change the fortunes of several major players which it has, except that it was so poorly thought out, they may yet lose it all in the end. The Viet Nam War was over thirty-five years ago—it appears that we have learned nothing in all that time. We lost 57,000 plus people. The Vietnamese, the Cambodians, and the Laotians lost millions upon millions of people. We used Agent Orange to clear the jungles and left hundreds of thousands of our surviving troops damaged by that tactic—just as we’re now using Depleted Uranium throughout the Middle East, and leaving a wasteland behind us that will never heal.

War is supposed to be a last resort against an attack upon this nation. In neither case was the USA attacked by Viet Nam, or Iraq—yet our troops are still dying in Iraq in ever increasing numbers, and security is now a joke instead of a reality. Worst of all there is still no plan. Where is Rumsfeld? Where is that cynical barbarian who thinks that war is GREAT and why isn’t he running his foul mouth about how gloriously successful we are now? Was it the trials of Abu Ghraib that silenced him, or just the loss of his unplanned war that’s got his tongue?

Cheney-Bush is now running for election, as it appears that a second “appointment” by the Supreme Court is now out of the question. What will this steadfast leadership of the Sharon-Bush Brigades bring us in the next four years, if they can manage to hold on?

On August 11, 04 Agence France-Presse wrote: “The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorize 500 million dollars for building a network of friendly militias around the world to purge terrorists from "ungoverned areas" -- and warned Muslim clerics against providing "ideological sanctuary" to radicals.” And the article continued: “Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday the money would be used "for training and equipping local security forces - not just armies - to counter terrorism and insurgencies."

What this means is that “the plan” now seems to be to create terrorists of our own around the world. $500 million more, to further destabilize what’s left of normalcy around the planet. Let’s back up to Viet Nam.

The thinking then was that if we lost in Viet Nam a “Domino Effect” would instantly sweep through all of Southeast Asia, and a red tide of communist governments would soon threaten the free world, and ultimately life in these United States. Did that happen? Of course not, because the only word we had for that came from the questionable ravings of the CIA at that time. Today that same agency has been even further degraded by all the lies surrounding the War in Iraq, even before we launched it.

What is being sought here and now is one world government, by the multinational corporations, for themselves alone. To do this, all those who might oppose their dictatorial ways will need to be marginalized or eliminated – that is the purpose of this War upon the World. The War on Terrorism is as phony as was the war on Viet Nam. How many more of our sons and daughters will need to die to prove this simple point?

The so-called election is supposed to be about “leadership and the direction this nation will take in the future, both at home and abroad. Bush claims to be a take-no-prisoners tough guy. He’s about as stable as a West Texas tumbleweed in a sandstorm. Bush is claiming toughness without a single example of his ever having achieved anything at all. That tends to happen when ever one has no life experience beyond the platinum spoon. However whenever Ariel Sharon speaks Bush does as he is told, despite his Texas tough talk, and all the theater he creates around the idea of American independence. Israeli policy will be fulfilled by American blood before this is all over! Consider this from William Pfaff in which he discusses our coming October Surprise.

Why and how does this continue to happen? The powers that be, the elites that own the companies and the resources that are key to both war and government policies worldwide, are also the same people who own the media. Because of their extensive reach though conglomerate ownership of so many areas of business and enterprise, they have been able to direct the public’s interests, guide public discussion, and control future funding as well as the public's agenda. They are the ones who want these wars to continue because it is great for their businesses, and that is not an agenda that most people in the world can share in.

Because of the above collusions, when the Warlords of America speak, their will is what gets done, and we shall have nothing to say about that, so long as no changes are made to this far too cozy arrangement.

If this process is to ever be interrupted or forced to yield to a different outcome, then Americans need to get beyond the slogans and the simple-minded dialogue. We need to question everything – so that when that time comes, we can change what needs to change, for all of us.