By: David Rozelle  

My conscience tells me that George W. Bush's desire for war makes sense only as senselessness. It is, in a word, monomaniacal - fueled by a phantasmagoric mixture of greed, vengeance, evangelism, imperialist cravings, and personal insecurity. Worst of all, perhaps, his fixation on waging war reveals, for all the world to see, the shameful indifference of an American President to life's preciousness - most especially, Muslim life. As Thoreau might have said about Bush's predilection for bloodletting, "under the name of Order and Civil Government, we are all made to pay homage to and support our own meanness".

The fault lies in a failed system of government for which President George W. Bush is a perfect example. The beneficiary by birth of unimaginable material advantage, a perennial ne'er-do-well dependent on his father's coattails, a superficial man devoid of interest or curiosity about our world - he became in 2001 the puppet President of America's rich.

By: Peter Lee  

So what does Bush do when his promises of a just, urgent, humane, swift, and welcome invasion are revealed as a hypocritical fraud?

Fight like a cornered rat. Which is to say, pave the way for extreme and indiscriminate exercise of force by demonizing Iraqi soldiers as murderous, human-shield brandishing, chemical-weapon spewing terrorists. Wave the bloody shirt of atrocities against our PoW's. Hint darkly about "Mrs. Germ". Play the al-Qaeda card. Lean on the media to make sure only U.S.-approved war images reach the American people.

And bring out his human shields, our soldiers. Those soldiers whose courage and contributions we would supposedly be mocking by continuing to oppose this war and the third-rate fool who spawned it.

By: Paul Krugman  

They considered themselves tough-minded realists, and regarded doubters as fuzzy-minded whiners. They silenced those who questioned their premises, even though the skeptics included many of the government's own analysts. They were supremely confident - and yet with shocking speed everything they had said was proved awesomely wrong.

No, I'm not talking about the war; I'm talking about the energy task force that Dick Cheney led back in 2001. Yet there are some disturbing parallels. Right now, pundits are wondering how Mr. Cheney - who confidently predicted that our soldiers would be "greeted as liberators" - could have been so mistaken. But a devastating new report on the California energy crisis reminds us that Mr. Cheney has been equally confident, and equally wrong, about other issues.

"What does it matter to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?"

- Mahatma Gandhi

By: Alan Bisbort  

My sense of Bush as a despot was confirmed when it was noted by a Knight Ridder correspondent that, just prior to addressing the nation on March 20, he was pumping his fist in the air, mugging for cameras and saying things like "feels good".

This, my fellow Americans, is a sick man. I can't prove it, of course, and my charge can easily be dismissed as partisan demonizing (something the right wing does so much better than I do). But I know this in my gut. It's just palpably, undeniably there, if you have the stomach to look for it.

But let me share a hopeful little secret: Their power, their arsenal, their illegal searches and seizures and intimidations, and so on and so forth, all of it ultimately is within our means to control. As Jim Morrison once so perfectly put it: "They've got the guns but we've got the numbers."

"You can fight a war on terrorism and do it legitimately and do it without sacrificing civil liberties in the United States, but it requires a certain intelligence and sophistication be brought to the table. So maybe we ought to start grading presidential candidates for an IQ."

- Gen. Merrill A. "Tony" McPeak, retired former chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force

By: James Webb  

Visions of cheering throngs welcoming them as liberators have vanished in the wake of a bloody engagement whose full casualties are still unknown. Snippets of news from Nasiriya give us a picture of chaotic guerrilla warfare, replete with hit-and-run ambushes, dead civilians, friendly fire casualties from firefights begun in the dead of night, and a puzzling number of marines who are still unaccounted for. And long experience tells us that this sort of combat brings with it a "downstream" payback of animosity and revenge.

Other reports corroborate the direction that the war, as well as its aftermath, promises to take: Iraqi militiamen, in civilian clothes, firing weapons and disappearing inside the anonymity of the local populace. So-called civilians riding in buses to move toward contact. Enemy combatants mixing among women and children. Children firing weapons. Families threatened with death if a soldier does not fight. A wounded American soldier commenting: "If they're dressed as civilians, you don't know who is the enemy anymore."

These actions, while reprehensible, are nothing more than classic guerrilla warfare...

By: Chisun Lee  

On Friday - as the U.S. began suffering combat fatalities, and the terror alert on whitehouse.gov glared orange for "high" - Justice Department spokesperson Mark Corallo confirmed to the Voice that such measures were coming soon. Exact details are confined to "internal deliberations", he said, but the proposals "will be filling in the holes" of the Patriot Act, "refining things that will enable us to do our job".

But a new, comprehensive review of Bush's growing presidential power hardly reveals any "holes". Rather - using court positions, internal policy changes, and secret decisions as bricks - the administration has built the executive branch into a fortress, nearly invulnerable to the checks of the judiciary and Congress. Most alarming, according to the watchdog authors of the 96-page report, Imbalance of Powers, the complexity of this historic expansion continues to mask its true proportions.

By: Pierre Tristam  

The gothic novel has its real-life equivalent in geopolitics. Instead of a helpless, persecuted bombshell, you have a beleaguered, persecuted country that dreams of deliverance. Deliverance may come, but The End doesn't conveniently follow. The story must go on. The next chapter often reads like a morgue manifest.

I speak of experience here. When I was a boy in the early years of Lebanon's civil war, all we dreamed about was some kind of savior to liberate us from mayhem. In 1976 we got the first in a series. The Syrian army marched in to keep us Christians from being slaughtered by a coalition of Palestinians and Muslims. We welcomed the Syrians with the ritual rice-throwing, although it was probably minute rice, not something fancy like Basmati: We didn't trust the Syrians.

Sure enough, a minute later, relatively speaking, they turned their guns on us and became the occupying army they have remained ever since...

By: Sue Pleming  

Police arrested two Nobel Peace prize winners along with more than 60 other people protesting on Wednesday near the White House against the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Police handcuffed Mairead Corrigan Maguire, who won the prize in 1976 for peace activism in the Northern Ireland conflict, and Jody Williams , a 1997 winner for her work to ban land mines, after they refused to leave Lafayette Park opposite the home of the U.S. President.

The Nobel laureates were detained along with religious leaders and Vietnam-era protester Daniel Ellsberg as they sat in a circle in the park and chanted "Peace, shalom". They held roses as well as gruesome posters showing civilian casualties from the war.

By: Bob Herbert  

With our attention riveted on the death and destruction in Iraq, and the continued threat to Americans in the war zone, the other very serious problems facing the U.S. get short shrift. We knew last fall that the proportion of Americans living in poverty had risen, and that income for middle-class households had fallen.

We know that unemployment, especially long-term unemployment, is a big problem. And we've known that the states are facing their worst budget crisis since the Great Depression, a development that has led, among other things, to drastic cuts in education aid that are crushing the budgets of local public school districts.

These issues aren't even being properly discussed. The Bush administration sounds the alarm for war and blows the trumpet for tax cuts, and Congress plunges ahead with the cuts in domestic programs that must inevitably follow. The voices of those who object are effectively silenced by the war propaganda and the fear of seeming unpatriotic.

"I've been all the way through this desert from Basra to [Nassiriya] and I ain't seen one shopping mall or fast food restaurant. These people got nothing. Even in a little town like ours of twenty five hundred people you got a McDonald's at one end and a Hardee's at the other."

- Marine Sgt. Sprague, from White Sulphur Springs in West Virginia, commenting on Iraq's lack of 'amenities'

By: Tad Bartimus  

Bush has sent more than 250,000 Americans into harm's way, a place where he's never been. Innocents have suffered. Homes have become rubble, disease will spread, hunger will kill, hatred will breed, revenge will be sworn, and rage will swell the ranks of al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Islamic terrorist groups vowing retribution.

Acting in my name - and yours - on orders from our President, our troops will win the battle for Baghdad but lose the hearts and minds of 1 billion Muslims, who see our attack on an independent Arab state as an assault on Islam. As a jihad escalates against us abroad and at home in years to come, we will look back on this time and wonder: How did it happen?

One answer is that the man giving the order for war was a C student who didn't like history, never served in combat and, until he became President, had never traveled outside his own country. He was raised in privilege, elected in controversy, surrounded by his father's advisers, and spun by experts...

By: R.C. Longworth  

Fear has finally given Bush the popular backing for the war that had eluded him since he first began campaigning for it. Less than six months ago, barely 20% of Americans told pollsters that they would approve a war on Iraq without the backing of allies or the U.N.. Now that support is more than 70%, even though the U.N. has refused its backing and the allied support ranges from the plausible, like Britain, through the symbolic, like Iceland, to the ludicrous, like Azerbaijan or Eritrea.

Most of the rest of the world remains unconvinced, not out of affection for Hussein but out of conviction that Bush and his neoconservative advisers have manufactured an unneeded war, for reasons of their own, and are leading an America that, with its power and lack of restraint, is more dangerous to world order than Hussein ever could be.

By: Chris Floyd  

Long before Genghis W. Bush and his Boardroom Horde launched their campaign of rapine against the clapped-out Iraqi regime, there was a little incident involving hijacked planes, famous buildings, and the mass slaughter of innocent people on American soil that caused a good deal of commotion at the time. You might remember; it happened on September 11 a couple of years back.

This week we saw how the national amnesia induced by the Bush blizzard of bull is serving another useful purpose for the unelected junta: obscuring its hugger-mugger strangulation of the "Independent Commission" appointed to investigate the September 11 attacks.

Of course, Genghis long resisted any outside probe into the catastrophic failure of his beloved secret services to thwart the plotters - not to mention the Horde's strangely tepid response to the attack itself. Even after severe public pressure forced Bush to convene an independent panel, he tried to sandbag the proceedings by appointing accused war criminal and self-proclaimed master of the public lie, Henry Kissinger, as chairman. But Hank exited the scene rather than submit to disclosure rules that would have revealed the extent of his role as bagman for the Saudis and other interested parties.

By: Gene Lyons  

Look at a world map. The U.S. can't fight everybody from Morocco to Pakistan. Shock and awe notwithstanding, there are too many of them, too few of us, and too much territory. There are already signs that ideologues who talked an ignorant, easily manipulated Bush into this global game of "Risk" had no idea of Iraq's determination to fight. The joyous mobs they foresaw greeting U.S. troops haven't materialized. Retired U.S. generals are telling reporters that precisely as they'd warned, American and British forces are in danger of becoming overextended and having their supply lines interrupted. For patently political reasons, the war began before sufficient force was assembled. The outcome's not in doubt, but it's looking like a far longer, bloodier struggle than anybody wanted.

"The U.S. has stirred up a vast amount of hatred against itself by this swaggering arrogance of the intellectually limited President, roaring like a bull in a bomber jacket in aircraft hangars to young men and women of the American armed forces who, although they know very little of the world, are ready to get out there and kill."

- British MP George Galloway

By: Paul Krugman  

Why would a media company insert itself into politics this way? It could, of course, simply be a matter of personal conviction on the part of management. But there are also good reasons for Clear Channel - which became a giant only in the last few years, after the Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed many restrictions on media ownership - to curry favor with the ruling party. On one side, Clear Channel is feeling some heat: it is being sued over allegations that it threatens to curtail the airplay of artists who don't tour with its concert division, and there are even some politicians who want to roll back the deregulation that made the company's growth possible. On the other side, the Federal Communications Commission is considering further deregulation that would allow Clear Channel to expand even further, particularly into television.

Or perhaps the quid pro quo is more narrowly focused. Experienced Bushologists let out a collective "A-ha!" when Clear Channel was revealed to be behind the pro-war rallies, because the company's top management has a history with George W. Bush. The vice chairman of Clear Channel is Tom Hicks, whose name may be familiar to readers of this column...

By: Brian Reade  

With every passing day it becomes clear that the muddled thinking behind this illegal assault on Iraq is based on lies, greed, and ignorance.

That the argument for the invasion is so morally weak and the objectives so vague, that the only justification left is that it has to be right because Our Boys are there.

How patronising and incalculably dangerous that logic seems, especially if your loved one is now scrambling through the desert.

What an admission that the war is being packaged in myth and sold by deceit. And nowhere has that become more clear than in the language used to flog it.

By: P.M. Carpenter  

The Bush administration's pathology of deception continues unabated. Its most recent outbreak of conning the already conned public is the claim that the United States' illegal, virtually unilateral, and unprovoked military aggression against Iraq is but a partial expression of widespread international accord. France, singularly, is made out to be the global bad guy and martial party pooper; not the world's majority voice of opposition to America's depraved conduct abroad.

Why shoot, says the administration, we've got allies up to our eyeballs. The count has, at times, been a bit fuzzy - how odd for this customarily precise White House when it comes to mathematics, especially on fiscal policy - with diverse officials spouting diverse numbers. Aside from today's principal party line of 45 allies (which really means 30, because one-third, in a display of true solidarity with the U.S., prefer to pretend they've never heard of us), we have also been treated to allied counts of 35 and 40. In any case, all the estimates are within a comfortable 33% margin of error, a considerable improvement over the administration's budget forecasts.

Editorial from:  

The American and British military are prepared to fight a war against a resistant enemy, and they insisted yesterday that everything was on or ahead of schedule. But the public had reason to expect something different. The Bush administration had conveyed the impression that the Iraqi government was shaky, that much of the army was not likely to fight, and that the Iraqi people would welcome the invasion force with cheers and flowers.

While some of those things may still occur, so far the people greeting American troops have been much cooler than many had hoped. Some analysts still believe that if American forces can smash the first Republican Guard division they engage in full-fledged combat, the others may be less inclined to fight to the end. But it is sobering to remember that in the first gulf war, the Republican Guard units generally fought rather than surrendering.

Five PoW's are mistreated in Iraq and the U.S. cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?

By: George Monbiot  

Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world; but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. Defence Secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".

His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The U.S. government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71), and parcels of food and books (72).

By: John Daniszewski  

The U.S. war strategy has counted in part on separating the people of Iraq from the government of Hussein. But the deaths and injuries from misdirected or errant bombs, or from shrapnel and fragments that spray into nearby homes even when the munitions find their intended target, are making more and more people believe that the United States is heedless of the Iraqi public. The danger to coaltion forces is that when the decisive battle comes, many will rally to Hussein and take up arms against the U.S. and British troops.

Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf said Monday that 62 civilians had been "martyred" in the last 24 hours across Iraq and that hundreds had been injured. Although his figures could not be independently verified, the perception among Iraqis is that civilian as well as government and military sites are being deliberately targeted by the Americans.

Editorial from:  

The country is facing plenty of financial problems: the economy, the cost of the war on terrorism, and the war in Iraq. Stunningly, Congress is preparing to make things far, far worse with more than $500 billion in tax cuts for the upper 1% of taxpayers. To finance these spoils for the wealthiest Americans, House leaders - who have taken the lead in hammering a budget together - plan deep cuts of $475 billion in vital programs for the bottom 99%. These direct hits will range from Medicaid to child care, education to food stamps, environmental protection to emergency doles for the poor.

This plan, in the form of a budget resolution tied to a firm tax-cut mandate, is moving forward on Capitol Hill even as lawmakers' boilerplate speeches resound with calls for shared wartime sacrifice by all Americans. How an average $90,000 tax cut for each millionaire counts as sacrifice is only one of many unexplained mysteries...

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