posted September 23, 2007 04:13 AM              

THE White House will ask Congress next week to approve another huge spending measure for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan totalling nearly $US 200 billion ($230bn), the Los Angeles Times has reported.

Citing unnamed Pentagon officials, the newspaper said on its website that if President George W. Bush's spending request was approved, 2008 will be the most expensive year of the Iraq war.

US war costs have continued to grow because of the extra combat forces sent to Iraq this year and because of efforts to quickly ramp up production of new equipment, such as mine-resistant trucks, the report said.

The Bush administration said earlier this year that it probably would need $US 147.5 Billion for fiscal 2008, but Pentagon officials now said that and $US 47 Billion more would be required, the Times said.

That would spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at about $US 195 Billion in fiscal 2008, which begins in October 1, an increase of around 12 per cent from the $US 173 Billion spent this year.

Secretary of Defence Robert Gates and other officials would present the full request at a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Wednesday, the report said.

When costs of CIA operations and embassy expenses were added, the war in Iraq cost about US 12 Billion a month, said Winslow Wheeler, a former Republican congressional budget aide who is a senior fellow at the Centre for Defence Information in Washington.

"Everybody predicts declines, but they haven't occurred, and 2008 will be higher than 2007,'' the paper quoted Mr Wheeler as saying.

"It all depends on what happens in Iraq, but thus far it has continued to get bloodier and more expensive.''

In 2004, the two conflicts together cost $US 94 Billion; in 2005, they cost $US 108 Billion; in 2006, $US 122 Billion, the paper said.

The new spending request was likely to push the cumulative cost of the war in Iraq alone through 2008 past the $US 600 Billion mark - more than the Korean War and nearly as much as the Vietnam War, based on estimates by government budget officials, the Times said.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,22466804-2,00.html?from=public_rss
Bush Seeks Another $230 Billion For Wars - Report

posted September 24, 2007 02:09 PM            

There are so many jobs in America we're having to import people to fill them.

Why aren't the poor working...and feeding themselves?

Just for your information, 52% of the US Federal Budget is tied up in entitlements...to the poor, seniors and those with medical conditions.

I know leftists would like to see 100% of the population become wards of the state...and therefore in need of their protection...which is a form of slavery.

It's not going to happen.

The United States was not formed to take care of it's citizens personal needs. US citizens are supposed to see to their own needs.

posted September 24, 2007 02:40 PM              

quote:

---

The United States was not formed to take care of it's citizens personal needs. US citizens are supposed to see to their own needs.

---

So what the hell is a government for? I hope you were on drugs when you wrote that.

So I guess they shouldn't bomb Iraq to PROTECT OUR FREEDOM? We can fend for ourselves.

Are you sure you what what type of life you want to live? LOL. You definitely gotta be sniffing something.

posted September 24, 2007 03:39 PM              

But as Jwhop rightfully mentioned, many people just want to stay back and whine! I do however agree there are under-privilleged all around, but we also have to acknowledge the people who just whines and cries!

posted September 24, 2007 03:51 PM            

Hint: Start by reading the US Constitution.

Nowhere does it say the govts job is to take care of people's personal needs - the constitution does however protect the rights of the individual to take care of his/her own personal needs (via their right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness").

And protecting our right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", via the ability to declare war, IS outlined in the constitution as one of the roles of the Fed. Govt.

posted September 24, 2007 03:55 PM              

The government is a government for a reason...the people want them for a reason...now if they aren't willing to take care of their own people then...they are not ready to be a real government.

posted September 24, 2007 03:58 PM            

I think that the entire education system, down to how it's organized, K-Post Grad, needs an overhaul. I think that we would need less "outsiders" to do jobs if we did that, but I also believe that we would still import labor if they could import a foreigner on a H1B visa to do the same job as an American for $3/hour less. But I guess that's an issue for another thread.

posted September 24, 2007 04:00 PM              

quote:

---

SM: I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but in the US, there are all sorts of programs for poor people to improve their lives...from food stamps and welfare to college grants, living assistance and job training. And that's just the government programs, that's not even taking into account private non-profit programs.

---

posted September 24, 2007 05:02 PM              

quote:

---

Bush Seeks Another $230 Billion For Wars - Report
From correspondents in Washington
September 23, 2007 03:40pm

---

Why don't we just call him Magog

posted September 24, 2007 05:27 PM              

quote:

---

Weird because I keep seeing homeless people all over the place.

---

i could not have said it better myself!

read this thread for real statistics:
http://www.linda-goodman.com/ubb/Forum16/HTML/003591.html

-kyle

posted September 24, 2007 09:31 PM              

quote:

---

Just for your information, 52% of the US Federal Budget is tied up in entitlements...to the poor, seniors and those with medical conditions.

---

Sources please.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
http://www.sensiblepriorities.org/budget_analysis.php

Setting the Priorities Straight

The Priorities campaign believes that America can solve, or start to seriously address, many of the most difficult problems we face. We can create a national budget that is responsive to domestic and international needs. And we can do it without raising taxes or creating new ones.

How? By insisting that Congress create sensible budget priorities. By reducing government waste and using the savings to strengthen American families and communities.

The Priorities campaign focuses on Pentagon waste for two reasons:

• Because a panel of career military experts says cutting the Pentagon budget not only would not harm our defense, but might enhance our national security, and

• Because the $463 billion Pentagon is so unaccountable that not only could the Dept. of Defense not pass an audit, its books are in such bad shape that an audit cannot be performed. See Financial Mismanagement in the Department of Defense Report.

These are problems that Congress created and has allowed to fester because political candidates benefit politically (as in more jobs in their districts) and monetarily (as in campaign contributions) from military manufacturers. Because the men and women in Congress benefit from this broken system, we can't expect them to fix it until Americans demand it, elect new leaders, or both.

Where is the waste?

About three-fifths of the federal budget covers expenses that are written into law, including payment on the national debt, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. This is usually called “mandatory” or “entitlement” spending.

The part of the budget that the President and Congress create each year is called the discretionary budget. In the just-concluded fiscal year, more than half of the discretionary budget for a toal amount of $463 billion was spent by the Pentagon. These dollars don't include funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan , nor do they include most homeland security programs, which are paid for in other areas of the budget.

In contrast to the $463 billion spent by the Pentagon bureaucracy, look at what we're spending on federal programs that politicians often describe as too expensive:

• $38 billion on K-12 education ,

• $50 billion on children's health insurance,

• $13 billion on humanitarian foreign aid,

• $6 billion on job training,

• $2 billion on renewable energy research,

• $8 billion on the Environmental Protection Agency.

When presented with these facts, two-thirds of Americans would change these budget priorities, shifting funding, as we propose, away from the Pentagon and into programs that benefit communities and families. See the Program on International Policy Attitudes

Our prestigious panel of high-ranking retired military and Dept. of Defense officials says $60 billion can be trimmed from the Pentagon budget without putting our troops at risk, weakening our national defense, or hurting our ability to fight terrorists. According to Dr. Lawrence Korb, who served as President Ronald Reagan's assistant secretary of defense, the savings would come primarily from cutting obsolete Cold War weapons and excessive nuclear weapons from the defense budget. See Korb Report for more information.

Even after trimming $60 billion from the Pentagon budget, America would spend nearly as much on defense as does the rest of the world combined. We would spend more than triple the amount spent by Russia , China , and the Axis of Evil combined.

Where is the waste?

Here's what America could accomplish with that $60 billion. We could:

• Provide health insurance to 9 million American kids who lack it

• Rebuild or modernize our public schools over 12 years

• Retrain a quarter million workers

• Cut our reliance on foreign oil in half over 10 years

• Restore recent cuts in life-saving medical research

• Invest wisely in Homeland Security by inspecting cargo containers entering our ports

• Save 6 million children who die of hunger-related diseases in impoverished countries annually

• Begin to reduce the deficit

Our nation could make these investments year after year—at no additional taxpayer expense.

That's our vision of what we could accomplish, a vision embodied in our Common Sense Budget Act . But ours isn't the only vision. It's amazing what we could buy at the local level with the dollars wasted at the Pentagon. An allied organization, the National Priorities Project, has worked out when New Hampshire could buy with the tax dollars that instead go to ballistic missile defense, nuclear weapons, and the war in Iraq . Check out the National Priorities campaign for more information.

Resources

Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/archives/002244.php

WAND

National Priorities Project

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

posted September 24, 2007 09:49 PM              

-kyle

posted September 24, 2007 10:01 PM            

I for one approve of our high military spending. I know, let the demonization begin: I'm a war monger, evil, unenlightened, blah blah blah.

But I sleep damn well at night knowing that we make things like F22 Raptors, the Phalanx gun system, and anti-missle weaponry.

I sleep well at night knowing that if anyone messed with us we could wipe them off the map if we so choose.

That's called deterrent.

On the other hand, I don't want the US to turn into Mumbai w/ the beggar pimps.

There are so many items in the budget that could be moved to say, improving funding to mental hospitals, since a large % of homeless people actually need psychiatric care, while still maintaining a healthy defense budget.

But I've also met homeless people who WANT to be homeless. Or they CHOOSE not to go into a shelter because the doors close at 8pm and they'd rather get a 40oz and sleep outside.

It's never as simplistic as people want to try and portray. Like, we just eliminate military spending and magically we'll have no poverty or homeless people.

And I agree about much of what you said floyd about the real estate market and the economy. I'm no economist, but I'm concerned. But I don't see how defense spending can fix that, other than to reward people for getting into loans they couldn't afford, or rewarding subprime lenders for writing bad loans, or rewarding people who charge up BS on their credit cards, by bailing them out.

Seems to me one of the few things the United States Govt is really good at, is making sure we have the most badass military on the planet. I'm willing to let them keep on doing what they're good at.

posted September 24, 2007 10:54 PM              

I won't call you names. That's not productive.

Are you saying this doesn't concern you in the slightest that our military spending is so outpaced to other needs?

In contrast to the $463 billion spent by the Pentagon bureaucracy, look at what we're spending on federal programs that politicians often describe as too expensive:

• $38 billion on K-12 education ,

• $50 billion on children's health insurance,

• $13 billion on humanitarian foreign aid,

• $6 billion on job training,

• $2 billion on renewable energy research,

• $8 billion on the Environmental Protection Agency.

And in addition for all our military spending they were unable to prevent attacks on our country in 2001. Not much of a deterrent in my opinion.

I'm not stating that if we eliminate some unneeded spending, on outdated weapons and such there will no longer be any poverty and homelessness. That would be unrealistic to expect that. What I am saying is that this does not sit well with me that we spend so much money on things to kill people, and yet when it comes to spending money on things that improve peoples lives, it's like the worst thing ever, and it's TOO expensive. It just is very hypocritical to me. When you say that the government only causes problems when trying to fix things, you think that that is not including the military? The books are so bad they cant' even audit them. How much money is being wasted do you suppose?

I am not suggesting that we cease having a military, that too is unrealistic. How can we have effective use of our money if we have no idea how and where it is being spent?

posted September 25, 2007 03:17 AM            

I don't agree with any form of nationalized healthcare, including federally paid "health insurance". As far as I'm concerned, all you need to do is go visit your local county-run hospital to see what happens when the gov't tries to administer healthcare. I won't argue that it's not a bad thing that so many people are uninsured...but I don't think nationalized healthcare is the solution, and because I don't really know what is the solution, I tend to stay off the subject.

I have mixed opinions on "humanitarian foreign aid".

Job training is not the responsibility of the Federal Govt IMO.

Maybe they can switch the children's health insurance budget w/ the budget for renewable energy research, I'd be for that. That probably sounds horrible, but it goes back to the nationalized healthcare thing I mentioned above.

I'd rather see more money go to say, the Parks Service, than to the EPA.

And it says alot about our military, that the 9/11 attackers had to sneak like weasels to attack us because they know they can't take us on like men. When they do, they aim badly or run away. Or shoot civilians. There also hasn't been any attacks in the US since we acknowledged the situation.

I just don't think it is the Federal Government's job to do a lot of the things you would like to see done.

posted September 25, 2007 08:21 AM            

quote:

---

I just don't think it is the Federal Government's job to do a lot of the things you would like to see done.

---

Exactly. I'm a big believer in charity/philanthrophy but not in being forced by law to pay for other people's things. It gets sticky when we're talking about children's healthcare ... no child should have to suffer a lack of adequate medical attention because of their parents unfortunate(?) circumstances but don't let's encourage people to have children because someone else will pay for their healthcare or anything else.

You know, here in Japan, you pay for what we'd consider a high school education. And if you can't afford it, you don't go. Not one Japanese person I've spoken to thinks that their government should force them to pay for other people's children's education or most anything else ... and Japan seems to be doing pretty well on a global scale.

Sure, I'd like to see less spending on War. I'd like to see no war ... worldwide. But unless you've found a magical way to stop people from being angry, bitter, violent, etc. you're going to have to deal with conflict eventually. I don't think any kind of tax spending will accomplish that. And I don't think handing out money to people is going to make them get jobs or even want to get jobs (or an education), either. (The minimum wage issue is an entirely different topic ...)

Anybody have some stats easily accessible regarding how much improvement we've had nationwide since we've been spending money on "welfare"?

posted September 25, 2007 09:41 AM              

quote:

---

But unless you've found a magical way to stop people from being angry, bitter, violent, etc. you're going to have to deal with conflict eventually.

---

stop bombing the hell out of them...that would be a start....

stop destroying their countries and governments in order to steal their resources.....might help....

stop the deliberate genocide of indigenous people....

posted September 25, 2007 09:47 AM              

Welfare reform limited food stamps, yet the real culture of dependence continues in agri-business.
May 19, 2007

IF YOU THINK the U.S. government is too generous to the poor, try surviving on the food stamp diet, as four members of Congress pledged to do this week. They have to feed themselves on $21 a week, or $3 a day, which is the average payout to food stamp recipients.

For most families on food stamps, that amount hasn't changed much since 1996, when Congress undertook a major welfare overhaul and added restrictions to the program aimed at cutting the number of people who could qualify. Because the key formula for computing food stamps for most families isn't indexed to inflation, the amount one can buy with them has been falling for the last decade.

Congress is now negotiating the 2007 farm bill, a five-year blueprint for the nation's agricultural supports that also includes the food stamp program. The pairing is a relic of the Depression era, when food stamps were created as a way of feeding the poor using American farmers' surplus crops. Though that's no longer the case, farm subsidies and food stamps still have one thing in common: Both are forms of food welfare. The difference is that while the poor and hungry are losing ground, wealthy agribusiness giants continue to hog their billions.

The average monthly household income of the 26 million Americans who receive food stamps is $648. Two of the members of Congress taking the food stamp challenge — Reps. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) and Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) — have introduced a bill that would provide for small yearly increases in the payout and would revive benefits for some of the groups excluded in 1996. This would add about $4 billion a year to the $33-billion annual cost of the program. Such an increase could be offset by breaking the culture of dependence of a group that is genuinely getting fat off the government trough: farmers.

The U.S. spends about $20 billion annually on agricultural subsidies, the vast majority going to large commercial operations, not family farms. These payments distort trade, heighten poverty in the Third World and raise food prices for U.S. consumers. Continuing this porkfest while the neediest Americans go hungry is more than nonsensical — it's immoral.

posted September 25, 2007 01:51 PM            

That's the discretionary part of the budget for the United States...that part of the budget which can be cut or increased by Congress.

The overall budget of the United States shows the discretionary part of the budget...2006, totalled $914,000,000,000, that's 914 billion dollars. That's the part of the budget which includes military spending.

The MANDATORY part of the budget of the United States...2006, that part which is composed of entitlements for social security, welfare, medicare and all the other MANDATED social programs on the books totalled $1,416,000,000,000. That's 1 trillion, 416 billion dollars.

Your argument is full of holes...if one knows trillions are larger than billions.

If the "discretionary" and "mandatory" budget numbers are added up, they total 2 trillion, 330 billion dollars. Of that total, the MANDATORY social services part of the budget is 1 trillion, 416 billion dollars...or 60% of the total budget of the United States...2006.

You can find that here:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2006/tables.html

posted September 26, 2007 10:17 PM            

Dorothy Thompson:
Peace has to be created, in order to be maintained. It is the product of Faith, Strength, Energy, Will, Sympathy, Justice, Imagination, and the triumph of principle. It will never be achieved by passivity and quietism.

Dorothy Thompson:
Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict -- alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence.

John Harricharan:
Peace is not achieved by controlling nations, but mastering our thoughts.

Maria Montessori:
Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:
True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

Ramona L. Anderson:
People spend a lifetime searching for happiness; looking for peace. They chase idle dreams, addictions, religions, even other people, hoping to fill the emptiness that plagues them. The irony is the only place they ever needed to search was within.

Thomas a Kempis:
First keep the peace within yourself, then you can also bring peace to others.

The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness:
We can never obtain peace in the world if we neglect the inner world and don't make peace with ourselves. World peace must develop out of inner peace. Without inner peace it is impossible to achieve world peace, external peace. Weapons themselves do not act. They have not come out of the blue. Man has made them. But even given those weapons, those terrible weapons, they cannot act by themselves. As long as they are left alone in storage they cannot do any harm. A human being must use them. Someone must push the button. Satan, the evil powers, cannot push that button. Human beings must do it.

******

Just some quotes I find inspiring about bringing, imo, real peace to the world. It is not the outer world that will grant you peace for nothing but your mastering of your own self, your thoughts, emotions and actions and by understanding unity that will earn you peace. If everyone took responsibility for themselves in this way, violence would not be a problem ... for who would attack others knowing they'd be attacking themselves? Yet, I see no simple way to get people to take responsibility for themselves this way ... there is always violence, anger, agression etc. because "someone else created it for me and I'm responding as is my right". Very well, we will have a world as we have chosen it, each of us individually, to be.

posted September 26, 2007 11:24 PM              

quote:

---

...Weapons themselves do not act. They have not come out of the blue. Man has made them. But even given those weapons, those terrible weapons, they cannot act by themselves. As long as they are left alone in storage they cannot do any harm. A human being must use them. Someone must push the button. Satan, the evil powers, cannot push that button. Human beings must do it.

---

"human beings" are using these terrible weapons under the guise of the bush administration and this phony, manufactured war/genocide.

it seems that the problem with the buddhist monks protesting the military government in Myanmar is that they do not have enough self-mastery or peace in their hearts as well. i suppose they could choose not to respond to the injustice and violence that they are protesting.

perhaps we'd all be better off having the self-mastery of Barbara Bush ~

quote:

---

But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that.

---

posted September 27, 2007 12:11 AM              

Today no other nation can match the United States in overall military spending. Its military budget of over $400 billion is more than the combined defense expenditures of every other country in the world. Since no external enemy could possibly pose a threat justifying this level of militarization, it becomes reasonable to suggest that what drives it is not security but aggression.

The Pharisee’s Fire Sermon: Terror, Perpetual War, and the Holy Empire

Not having had a chance to listen to the inaugural speech (1), I read it in transcript and was struck like everyone else by those ominous, symmetrical allusions to fire in it:

“After the shipwreck of communism came years of relative quiet, years of repose, years of sabbatical -- and then there came a day of fire.”

“By our efforts, we have lit a fire as well -- a fire in the minds of men.”

“It warms those who feel its power, it burns those who fight its progress, and one day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world.”

In Bush’s religio-political theater, fire isn’t a damp metaphoric squib but a powerful symbol, the leitmotif of the soaring neo-conservative soundtrack -- fire consuming the twin towers, fire as inspiration, and then fire as “freedom” crackling over the globe, warming its friends and incinerating its enemies.

This isn’t vague bombast. The meanings are precise and meant to resonate with deep-rooted themes in American culture.

In the Gospel, cloven flames descend at Pentecost and the disciples burst out in unknown languages. Pentecostal preachers still call this “speaking in tongues.” (2) This is fire “lit in the minds of men,” inspirational. But when fire descends on Sodom and Gomorrah (3), it burns the sinful cities to cinders. Fire warms and burns, inspires and destroys and its double potency is what makes it the object of man’s first fear and wonder, his first religion. From the Egyptian sun gods Ra and Amon (4) to the Vedic fire-god Agni (5) or the Greek Hephaestos (6), fire is the divine source of warmth and life.

Terror
But it’s the terrible destructive power of fire more than its fecundity that inspires religion. The “untamed fire” to which Bush refers pulses with the force of divinity. The Bush team, high priests of the American state, are also magi conjuring with signs and wonders in the sky. They experiment with tactical nuclear weapons; they call down firebombs that melt flesh in excruciating envelopes of flame; they write their will in fireworks in the skies that terrify whole populations. The 21,500-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (MOAB) (7) is the largest conventional bomb in history and was built as much to induce paralyzing fear as to destroy. Napalm-like MK-77 firebombs (8) have been used against Iraqi forces and a Pentagon official who confirmed the use defended it as legal and necessary. The MK-77 is filled with a mix of incendiary chemicals different from napalm but causes the same sheet of fire that penetrates dug-in infantry positions. “The generals love napalm,” (9) a soldier was quoted as saying. “It has a big psychological effect.” Recent accounts from Fallujah describe civilians incinerated by a napalm-like cocktail of poisonous gases. Two major military theorists of the administration -- Albert Wohlstetter (10) Andrew Marshall (11) -- make protracted nuclear war the centerpiece of their strategic thinking. For Charles Krauthammer(12), a prominent Bush publicist, “power is its own reward.” and classicist Donald Kagan (13), father of the prolific neo-conservative ideologue Robert Kagan, adds, “People worried a lot about how the Arab street is going to react. Well, I see that the Arab street has gotten very, very quiet since we started blowing things up.”

To the Bush team absolute power confers virtue and perfect virtue wears fiery terror on its sleeve nonchalantly.

Take Bush’s phrase, day of fire, which seems at first a curious way to describe the attack on the twin towers which literally produced as much smoke as fire. It’s a profoundly evocative phrase and calls to mind, intentionally I am sure, some well-known lines:

Dies irć, dies illa,
Solvet sćclum in favilla:
Teste David *** Sibyllâ

The day of wrath, that day
which will reduce the world to ashes,
as foretold by David and the Sybil

Dating back to the 14th century, the Dies Irae (14) is a Latin hymn used in Roman masses for the dead, of which Verdi’s and Mozart’s are famous examples and the Day of Wrath it talks about is Judgment Day when the final reckoning of the soul is made. As the hymn states, dies irae is prophesied both by the Hebraic and pagan traditions of the west, by the Jewish King David as well as by the Hellenic Sybil, prophetess of Cuma and the most popular oracle consulted by the Romans.

Bush’s Day of Fire is a subliminal invocation of this prophetic western tradition. We’re invited to reprise the attack on New York as an inaugural of fire, a commencement of apocalyptic days, a quickening of history into the end times of judgment.

In the sermons of Jonathan Edwards (15), Cotton Mather (16) and the other great Puritan preachers of America, judgment day is a paroxysm of fire and despair. In 1741 in the most famous of hell and brimstone sermons, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” (17) Edwards wrote,

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you,” “he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight.

Heaping up rhetorical horrors, Edwards describes a spectacular torture intended to impress the angelic realm with the power of the almighty in an early form of shock and awe:

You shall be tormented in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb; and when you shall be in this state of suffering, the glorious inhabitants of heaven shall go forth and look on the awful spectacle...

Edwards suggests that this divine horror show is about many things, from the just punishment of man for the vileness of his nature to the furnishing of a salutary example to sinners and saints, but it’s pretty clear from his text that what he revels in most is the absolute differential in power between his spiteful deity and the pitiful creatures who are “dry stubble”, “chaff”, “grasshoppers”, “spiders”, and “worms” in comparison. What inspires his awe is man’s total subjection to overwhelming power and the “exquisite horrible misery” it inflicts.

That first adjective tells us that there’s something aesthetic at work here that goes beyond ideas of mere justice.

“He will have no regard to your welfare, nor be at all careful lest you should suffer too much in any other sense, than only that you shall not suffer beyond what strict justice requires. Nothing shall be withheld, because it is so hard for you to bear.”

One part of this aesthetic of superfluous suffering is straightforward. Fire overawes us not only for its power to do evil and good but also for its supernal beauty. After all, the indwelling fire of God, the Holy Spirit, is feminine not only in Christianity but in the mystical texts of Judaism where she is the Shekinah (18), the divine glory, which guides the Israelites as a pillar of fire at night and a cloud by day and hovers over the Ark of the sacred covenant between Israel and God. The similarity of Shekinah to Shock and Awe, I suppose, is simply one of those peculiar un-meanings which sometimes points us where meaning refuses to take us.

But fire as the visual correlative of absolute power has another aesthetic, one a lot more disturbing, in which it's precisely the abjection of the victim that's pleasurable and invites a gloating triumph:

He will crush you under his feet without mercy; he will crush out your blood, and make it fly -- no place shall be thought fit for you, but under his feet to be trodden down as the mire of the streets.

There’s a sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain, a gratuitous, wanton blood lust running through this pornographic picture of suffering that lends an ecstatic tone, a rapture, if you will, to the whole piece. It’s echoed in Bush’s words and actions:

As president, Bush pumped his fist in the air and muttered, “feels good,” just minutes before publicly announcing the start of the war on Iraq. As a governor, he snickered while mimicking a plea for mercy from a repentant multiple killer, Carla Faye Tucker, who had been sentenced to death. (19) As a child, he led his friends in shooting frogs with BB guns and would even “put firecrackers in the frogs and throw them and blow them up,” recalled Terry Throckmorton, a close friend of Bush. And despite denying it for a year, FBI memos released in December from a Freedom Of Information Act Request by the ACLU indicate that he signed executive orders directly authorizing the torture of prisoners. (20)

How can power be conceived as absolute, virtuous, beautiful, and supernal and yet at the same time also unnaturally cruel? The answer lies in the philosophical dualism driving Bush’s political thinking and underlying his use of fire imagery.

Perpetual War
In the dominant forms of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Plato’s spirit-matter dualism expresses itself not only in the separation of God from nature, but also of man from nature and man from his own self. For dualistic man, nature - his own as well as the lavish universe outside him - exists only for the sake of his “inner” and “spiritual” self. Nature is a “fallen” image of the perfect world of the spirit. Despite this, however, in traditional Christianity, as formulated by Augustine and Aquinas, there's no evil principle inherent in nature itself. (21) Evil is simply a lesser form of the good, an absence of good. Evil is part of a continuum with good, not radically separated from it.

Bush’s imagery of fire develops this traditional Christian dualism into something quite different, something closer to the religion of ancient Persia, Zoroastrianism, where fire has a central role and where good and evil are localized and embodied. The good follow a solar deity and have fire as their symbol while the evil follow a serpent god; the battle between the two divides all creation. In this pre-Christian monotheism, the world is torn by perpetual war, evil is embodied in a devil, man has free will, and there is a physical resurrection, a day of judgment, and a fiery hell. Zoroastrian beliefs influenced the Old Testament and Talmud (22) when the exiled Israelites came under the rule of the Babylonians and the Persians, and many think that the name of the Jewish sect that professed the new beliefs, Pharisee, is a transcription of Pharsi or Persian. (23) Apocalyptic Christianity, with its emphasis on the Old Testament, converts this deeply ethical Indo-Aryan dualism that was meant to be a tool of spiritual self-mastery into something more fatalistic and literal than the original teachings. The apocalyptic version grafts the dualistic moral struggle onto history itself and searches for its resolution in the drama of states and nations. It’s from here that Bush’s combative, militarized political vision springs and it’s also from here that the fiery cruelty of his policies stems. He knows who the evil are and he’s certain he’s going to get them.

Two of these mutant dualistic beliefs have powerfully manifested in Bush’s policies:

Eternal strife as the condition of existence

With the War on Terror replacing the Cold War and before it the World War against Fascism, the US enters its 7th decade of post-war militarism. In the corporate body of mainstream American politics, there's no serious alternative to the militaristic vision of America.
“The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations,” runs the inaugural speech echoing Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who has declared the war on terror a “long, hard, slog.” (24)

“This is a long, long war,” said Bush during the second presidential debate. (25)

Super-hawk James Woolsey has called the new war “the long war of the 21st century” and “World War Four” and has argued that it “will last for decades. For the younger people…it will be to your generation what the Cold War was to mine. It will probably last the rest of your life.” (26)

Today no other nation can match the United States in overall military spending. Its military budget of over $400 billion is more than the combined defense expenditures of every other country in the world. (27) Since no external enemy could possibly pose a threat justifying this level of militarization, it becomes reasonable to suggest that what drives it is not security but aggression.

Evil as what defines the self

In neo-conservative dogma, perpetual war is inseparable from the pure evil of the enemy.
Just after 9/11 Bush called terrorists “evil-doers” and declared, “Every nation and every region now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” (28)

On January 29, 2002 he made the much-publicized speech in which he lumped Iraq, North Korea and Iran into an “axis of evil.” (29)

On September 23, 2003 he affirmed the “clearest of the divides … between those who seek order and those who spread chaos…. Between these alternatives there is no neutral ground.” (30)

It’s because Bush’s theo-political vision can’t articulate America in positive terms that it has to articulate it in negative ones, defining it against what it’s not and because his vision is so radically dual, those definitions have be “pure”, uncontaminated by radiation from the other.

Holy Empire
But where does he get this purist vision of the American state? The inaugural has a profoundly disturbing answer wrapped in what seems at first like the usual pabulum:

“Self-government relies, in the end, on the governing of the self. That edifice of character is built in families, supported by communities with standards, and sustained in our national life by the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the Mount, the words of the Koran and the varied faiths of our people.”

Starting with uncontroversial assertions about character and communities, Bush goes on to found the nation's life directly on religion, starting with the Old Testament followed by the New Testament and then the Koran. Leave aside the fact that agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Hindus, deists, pagans, and those of any number of other persuasions are uncomfortable to see themselves shunted aside in a specious moral hierarchy by state-sanctioned monotheism, what about the founding fathers who were themselves conspicuously rationalistic? Until now, we’d thought that the founding law of this country was the constitution, but it turns out that those were only “the laws of the land.” America, the state, gets its founding constitution in a fiery blaze directly from Mount Sinai. Not only does Bush give the nod to monotheism as the predominant religion of the new theocratic state, the Mosaic Law is at the head.

That’s the clue to the purism of the newly baptized American state, which relentlessly hunts out the non-self to destroy it. The Mosaic fire is God’s own Law, double-edged like a sword, purifying the good and incinerating the evil. When holy Law itself founds the nation, why bother with the constitution, the uniform code of justice, or international law?

The Bush vision of freedom and democracy conflates them with the American state conceived virginally, unmixed with ambiguity, and intolerant of shades of gray. American freedom warms the good and incinerates the evil with napalm. The good get the Geneva Conventions; the evil get Guantanamo. The good, Israel, gets to keep its nuclear arsenal; the evil, Iran, gets to lose them. The good, Pakistan, gets military aid; the evil, Syria, gets bombed. Confusing what's good with what's good for the corporate-state might sound like cutting-edge Straussian sophistication but to most people it's old-fashioned hypocrisy.

And hypocrisy was exactly the charge hurled at the legalistic Pharisees, Bush’s theological ancestors, whom Jesus charged, “cleanse the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of extortion and self-indulgence…. full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.” (31)

Since World War II, when has the American state not been engaged militarily somewhere? When has the American state not been without an absolutely evil enemy?

“History has an ebb and flow of justice, but history also has a visible direction, set by liberty and the author of liberty,” says the new pontiff, echoing Zarathustra again as he affirms that history has broken out of the ancient cosmic cycle of eternal rise and decline and is marching toward an ultimate triumph of the good. But marching toward what?

“It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture,” he insists.

But in the period that he characterizes as spreading democracy, here are some of the democratic movements subverted by the secret action of the United States:

1948, Italy, the CIA corrupts democratic elections.

1953, Iran, the CIA overthrows the democratic government of Mossadegh and replaces it with the dictatorial Shah.

1954, Guatemala, the CIA overthrows the democratic government of Arbenz.

1958, Hungary, the US incites but then abandons the democratic uprising that is then crushed by the Soviet Union.

1957-1973, Laos, the CIA tries to overthrown the democratic government almost every year, and then failing that, bombs Laos into a country of refugees.

1959, Haiti, the US military installs the murderous dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier.

1961, Ecuador, the CIA- backed military forces the democratically elected President Velasco to resign.

1961, Zaire, the CIA assassinates democratically elected Patrice Lumumba, leading to four years of chaos.

1963, Dominican Republic, the CIA replaces democratically elected Juan Bosch with a military junta.

1964, Brazil, the CIA overthrows democratically elected Joao Goulart and replaces him with a military junta whose death squads are trained by the CIA.

1965, Indonesia, the CIA over throws the democratically elected Suharto and replaces him with the mass murderer Sukarno, who kills between 500,000 and 1 million civilians with the CIA in the role of informant.

1971, Bolivia, the CIA overthrows President Juan Torres, leaving chaos and terror in his wake.

1973, Chile, the CIA overthrows the democratic government of Salvador Allende, which is followed by the brutal General Augusto Pinochet.

1974, Australia, the CIA topples the democratic left-leaning government of Edward Whitlam.

1975, Cambodia, the CIA overthrows popular Prince Sihanouk and paves the way for the rise of the murderous Pol Pot regime that kills millions of its own people.

1990, Haiti, the CIA overthrows the popular government of President Aristide. (32)

This abbreviated list ignores the US involvement in Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq and many other coups, civil wars, assassinations, and other subversions of democracy, not just abroad but even in the US itself. The list also ignores what's happened in the former Soviet Union and many of it former communist allies where the comfortable narrative of freedom has been marred by the criminality and ugly economic chaos of the new politics.

The Pharisees of the new American corporate-state like to preach the law when it’s on their side but the truth is they rip it to shreds whenever it opposes them. The dangerous brushfires they light around the globe threaten to usher in decades of bloodshed and violence masquerading as liberation and peacekeeping. Stripped of its democratic platitudes, Bush’s fire sermon is nothing more than a war-like invocation to his fire-god, a dangerous and hypocritical manifesto of arbitrary state-terror.

by Lila Rajiva
http://www.dissidentvoice.org
January 26, 2005

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan05/Rajiva0126.htm