Human sacrifices - Editor's Note - commentary on Bush administration budget cuts and casualties in Iraq - Editorial

Progressive, The, June, 2003 by Matthew Rothschild

When Ronald Reagan and the first wave of reactionary Republicans swept into Washington, they had a motto: "Starve the beast." By that, they meant reduce the size of the federal government in almost every area--except the Pentagon and corporate welfare, of course.

George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cronies have set out on their own privatization mission with a vengeance that Reagan himself could only have dreamed of. And they are not content to defund the federal government; they want to defund state governments, as well. "Starve fifty beasts" seems to be the new motto. "I hope a state goes bankrupt," Republican strategist Grover Norquist told The New York Times recently. "We need a state to be a bad example so that the others will start to make the serious decisions they need to get out of this mess."

But almost every state has already made "serious decisions" that have inflicted pain. States are laying off workers, cutting funds for education, raising tuition by double digits, closing parks, and pinching on health care for the poor and the disabled.

These human sacrifices are worth it for the Republicans, though. Less government means less regulation, which means more profit.

The entire concept that we, as a community, have certain obligations to each other for food, shelter, health care, education, environmental preservation, and occupational safety is suspect in their eyes, as is the contention that democratic government is necessary to ensure those obligations.

This month, our cover story examines the environmental consequences of this callous approach.

George W. Bush's victory speech aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was something straight out of a Michael Deaver fantasy production for Ronald Reagan. But put the Hollywood setting aside, and examine Bush's false words.

Bush lauded the "precision weapons" of the U.S. military, and said, "It is a great advance when the guilty have far more to fear from war than the innocent." But were more guilty people killed in this war than innocent people? According to the Iraq Body Count (see iraqbodycount.net), the U.S. war killed between 2,197 and 2,670 Iraqi civilians.

Bush said, "Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home." Why, then, is Washington running the country, and why are U.S. corporations already cashing in?

Bush claimed again without evidence that Saddam was "an ally of Al Qaeda" and that this war against Iraq somehow avenges the nefarious attacks of September 11, a date he mentioned three times. And he used lurid phrases to remind us of those attacks, saying terrorists tried "to turn our cities into killing fields," and conjuring up "the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble."

This is Bush's trump card. And even though it's getting tattered because he pulls it out at every opportunity, it seems to work' for him: He has managed to hoodwink the American people into believing September 11 justifies any military action, which he promptly promised more of.

From a propaganda standpoint, Bush's speech, I suppose, was a great success. But it was so full of dishonesty and so stuffed with bellicosity that I fear for our republic.