American Twilight: A Memoir of Another War

American Twilight
A Memoir of Another War
(Online edition/2012)
By Steven Schmidt
2004
Green Institute Press
2|A m e r i c a n T w i l i g h t
Introduction
oday as we watch unfolding Greek and Shakespearian dramas, the players on stage
are much more than what seems evident in the media. For all the pomp, shock n
awe, American flags waved and music played, the outcome of a new era of war is far
beyond the vision of the current occupant of the White House. Without a declaration of war
from Congress, the nation goes to war beyond the horizon. The powers making historic
decisions have set in motion legacies, whether intended or not, and the consequences of
these decisions will have a reality far beyond the calculations of war colleges, generals,
academics or political punditry broadcasting from on high. A calculus of war or a physics
of peace that is the question we ask as the drumbeat from Washington D.C. has sounded
and the nations military might is marshaled and is in motion. The ripples of this war will
last far beyond our times as the actors leave the stage, their performances memorialized in
the history of American empire.
@The Green Institute, Washington DC, February 2004
ho is this fellow from Texas? Im thinking of power and money and a war lobby,
and the Presidents talking with God? I have time between jobs to follow this
story, follow the money trail and take a closer look at the President/Commanderin-Chief, wherever the story takes me I fire-up and log-on to my arrayed computer
workstation. Its time to go to work again. Having just left my position as head of one of the
larger digital agencies, I have a sense of how to deploy search tools. Ive got my own army
ready, favorite search engines and meta vehicles appear and I send them out and about,
algorithms kick in and I begin compiling strategic 10,000 foot views, then I begin
atomizing and drilling down to the battlefields, the war for hearts and minds. Soon Im
behind-the-scenes, in the weeds and begin to do intel looking to find the patterns that
tie-together the facts on the ground.
Steven Schmidt, 2003
St. Pete Beach, Florida
sjs@nets.com
American Twilight - A Memoir of Another War

Copyright 2004, Steven J. Schmidt
First Printing
1. Politics - United States 2. U.S. Culture 3. History 4. Autobiography
Statue of Liberty Image, courtesy of John Livzey, copyright 1983
Acknowledgements
The writing of American Twilight began early in 2003 during the run up to the war in Iraq
and was completed as the American public began to discover what was foreseen by some
and acknowledged by few.
My writing was angry with realizations put to paper in a flurry of words predicating longlasting ripple effects and aftershocks. My first draft of nearly a hundred thousand words
was completed in eight weeks. I wrote of government lies, flawed intelligence, hidden
agendas, covert connections, the Bush family, media monopoly and war fervor, the Mideast
and those evangelicals whose belief in the coming Rapture led to tens of millions of bestselling books about imminent Armageddon. I wrote of the useable nukes deployed to the
Mideast theater under new Bush Doctrine and first-use policies. In sum, I attempted to
paint the folly of perpetual war for perpetual peace as Gore Vidal speaks of in his slender
book of the same title.
My first draft was circulated to a few editors in the summer of 2003, before a flood of books
hit Bush administration policies and a pattern of lies and deceits gradually were revealed.
At the time, when my manuscript first circulated, few were willing to take a chance on an
angry anti-war book while post 9/11drums of war and revenge were beating loud. The
times have changed.
I would like to thank the brave souls who spoke up against the war, our generations
successors to Dalton Trumbo and D.H Lawrence. The aftermath of going to war is never
what is predicted and the consequences of American policy are generational. To those who
have stood up and spoken truth to power as best they can, I thank and commend
And to my extended family and friends, graci for putting up with me in these strange
days.
- Steven Schmidt
February 20, 2004, Rome, Italy
At the founding of the European Green Party
American Twilight
____________________________________________
1/ On the Edge of a New Frontier
Big Media
The Market as Religion
2/ Orders from Above
My Country, Right or Wrong
Invocations from the Pulpit
3/ Free Speech & the Fourth Estate
Ever Skeptical
View from the Lab
Independent Reporting & Independent Spirits
Connecting the Dots
4/ Personal Politics
A Roving Legacy of Attack Politics
Hardball
An Insurgent Campaign
A Pastrami Sandwich
5/ Seismic Shift
The 2000 Presidential Campaign
A Swing Vote
6/ Perpetual War
Unbalanced & Asymmetrical
Crisis of Opportunity
Beyond Words
7/ High Security
First-Use Policy
Clash of Civilizations
Calculus of War
8) Dreams of Peace
A Moral Force
A Physics of Peace
An American Prayer
Epilogue/ Ripple Effects
Resources / Online
Chapter One On the Edge of a New Frontier

________________________________________________________________________________
On January 14, 1862, Samuel Colt was laid to rest. At the time, he was Americas best known and
wealthiest inventor, a man who had dreamed an ambitious dream and made it come true. Colt had
raced through a life rich in controversy and calamity and left behind a monument the Colt gun
that was to pacify the western and southern frontiers the Colt Peacemaker
-- Ellsworth S. Grant, The Colt Armory
he road out of Albuquerque, New Mexico was a straight shot north across the desert
to Santa Fe. Approaching Poquaque Pueblo, a battered old truck swerved and the
native-Americans riding in the long-bed were thrown across the highway. Air
Cavalry Commander Steve Morrison, on his way to an assignment at the U.S. nuclear
laboratory in Los Alamos, drove up to a bloody scene in his station wagon. Jim Morrison,
four years old, going on five, peered out the back window as they slowed
He recalled vividly years later: Me and my mother and father were driving through the
desert at dawn and a truck load of Indian workers had either hit another car, or just I dont
know what happened but there were Indians scattered all over the highway, bleeding to
death so our car pulls up and stops. That was the first time I tasted fear. The reaction I
get now, thinking about it, looking back, is that the souls of the ghosts of those dead
Indians they just leaped into my soul. And theyre still in there.
Jim Morrison became different and wild that morning. The world turned on the way to the
Atomic City where the nuclear age came into being with the birth of the bomb. The
Morrison family lost a son on the road and Morrison became an old soul who would see the
world through new eyes. A strange and haunting world, the Jim Morrison of the Doors
would write, suggestive of a new and wild west.
The guy about to jump from the Hollywood high rise on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and
Vine Street drew a crowd of onlookers to the Crossroads of the World, the publicist-branded
intersection below Hollywood Boulevard. I stood across the street and watched the figure
tightrope along the roofs edge. I wondered if he was a failed star like those in the early
days of the movie industry whod throw themselves off the eight-story tall H of the
HOLLYWOOD sign above the Boulevards Walk of Fame. Was this small figure at the
crossroads of the world going to be a shooting star, a dream crashing down replete with
special effects and on looking fans waiting for a final curtain call?
I was reminded of Disneys singer of "When You Wish Upon a Star". At the moment I
couldnt remember his name, but he was the voice of Jiminy Cricket, that energetic
animated character from the Walt Disney studio who sang of high hopes. The cause was
true, hearts were good, Disneys vision was a dream projected across America then came
the business side of the business as the real voice of Jiminy sang a melody that continues
to reverberate across the screen almost every time a Disney products introduced:
When you wish upon a star makes no diffrence who you are. anything your heart desires
will come to you if your heart is in your dream when you wish upon a star, as dreamers
do Fate is kind a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through, when you wish
upon a star, your dreams come true.
Off-screen, the Disney studio dashed the dreams of the person whose singing inspired
generations and I read how the voice of Jiminy died destitute after a long, unsuccessful
struggle with the studio to receive royalties that could have brought a kinder fate to his old
age. I wondered how the voice that sang with hope over the decades could be left in old age
with no means of support while the Disney theme song continues to beat at the heart of
the worldwide Disney company. Maybe its business-as-usual, I thought, bottom-line
decision-making, everyones expendable, one day youre up, next down youre down?
The Hollywood building loomed over me and I begin to think instead of towering
spectacles, the filmed biblical sagas with casts of thousands. Cecil B. DeMille had lived
nearby in Los Feliz and the great showman-producer loved buildings and actors crashing to
the ground. He was powerfully biblical, playing out Old Testament justice and scripture,
prophecy fulfilled with vengeance and grandiose smiting as the Word of the Lord was
revealed.
On the tower, the figure, the actor threatening to jump, was tight roping back and forth and
emergency personnel arrived and rushed into the building. I continued thinking about
Disney. For some reason I saw myself as a little kid in my parents 55 Chevrolet station
wagon, riding in the back of the car along the new Santa Ana Freeway, looking for the
Matterhorn mountain, the first sign we were close to the new wonderful, amazing
Disneyland. I dreamt Id soon be in Frontierland at Tom Sawyer's Island, and riding Nemos
Nuclear Submarine and the train through the Grand Canyon and listening to Abe Lincoln
giving his Gettysburg speech on Main Street. The Magic Kingdom, Disneys dream is now
Hollywood world culture, a wonderful world of entertainment for a small world being
connected to American dreams.
My reverie gave way to emergency people making onto the roof. They inched closer, trying
to talk the jumper down. He stepped further out on a ledge. I turned away not wanting to
watch the next step. Around me the crowd looked up with rapture expecting to see the end.
The man looked down at me and the crowd, he hesitated, long moments passed then he
backed away from the edge and arms surrounded him. He was saved. The crowd,
disappointed it seemed, began to drift away. The on- the-edge question was answered.
As I got into my car, the emergency workers were escorting the sad man through revolving
doors to an ambulance. The music of the Doors was playing on the car radio. I recalled
distant days when I was there hangin in the Doors rehearsal studio on a stretch of little
Santa Monica Boulevard behind a parking lot, a couple miles west of Sunset and Vine. The
building used to have an Upside Down sign hanging on the front. Inside was the Doors
battleground and they fought a war and sang sex, love and rock n roll. The Doors music
opened Apocalypse Now, with Marty Sheen later to become the U.S. President on TVs
weekly West Wing. I remembered that fan over his bed, beating in the humidity and the
blades turning into the whoomping of Huey copters over Viet Nam and his losing control on
the way to an emotional breakdown and near death, on set heart attack. Francis Coppolas
direction for the star of this apocalyptic modern Heart of Darkness opened with pushing
Sheen to a breakdown and his slicing himself up with a broken mirror in a swirling dervish
of insanity.
Remember the scene? It doesnt easily go away. Coppola lets the cameras roll and the
broken mirror captures bloodied images of the life of a soldier in Vietnam. Eternal movie
images play over the sweat of Indochina and a spinning ceiling fan in the soldiers Saigon
room in synched percussion to the Doors song, The End. Morrison screams as Lieutenant
Kurtz sets about going up river to native land, Montagnard land, to find Joseph Conrads
antihero. Everyone is lost in the heart of darkness, war and western civilization masked by
nightmarish reality.
Im remembering Break on Through to the Other Side and When the Musics Over and
Unknown Soldier. Theyre not far away, I know, but Morrisons musics rarely played now
on the FM dial. These days, the beginning of a new decade and new century are of new
Strange Days and Horse Latitudes. Back then, across from the Doors studio, on LaCienega
Boulevard, was Elektra Records, the mega-recording company that owned the Doors
contract, their words and music, and looking back now I know Elektra determined their
fate.
South of the Doors' Upside Down studio, a few decades earlier, the 'boulevard' was a dirt
road wandering through fields that spawned the first glimmers of the American air war
industry. The area would come to be called the Miracle Mile and the oil that powered LAs
sudden wealth bubbled out of the ground in surface pools at the La Brea tar pits. In the
roaring 1920s, the fields became runways, then air hangers and manufacturing plants that
were to produce an Army air force, an echelon of an unrivaled military might -- and the
convergence of Hollywood dreams and Pentagon muscle.
The beginnings of the United States air force, avionics and aerospace industry is just a
generation removed from today as I recall my family members who worked in the industry
just a breath in time removed from my wanderings. Down the street, west in El Segundo,
the South Bay of Los Angeles, the Age of Airpower found its wings in the City of Angels.
Earlier, President Teddy Roosevelt had sent a powerful, new dreadnought U.S. naval fleet
on an around-the-world, flag-flying tour to announce America as a world power. A few
years later, after World War I, in a demonstration of wars perpetually shifting strategies
and capabilities, older battleship-class hulks were sunk off the Atlantic coast by biplanes
demonstrating an end to the Era of the Admiralty heralding the dawn of air superiority
over battleships. Jim Morrisons father was both Navy and Naval Air and no doubt taught
his son of the power of joint strike forces and naval air tradition, before he left for Viet Nam
as commanding Admiral of the carrier fleet.
Within a rocks throw of the Doors studio was one of the first LA airfields, laid out in bean
fields adjacent to the Brea pits which oozed oil, slime and tar and gave up the bones of
Mastodons, Saber Tooth Tigers and other extinct creatures who in the Pleistocene age had
been trapped when drinking from pools of shimmering attracting water hiding
entrapping oil just below the surface. Barnstorming stunt pilots had flown west after the
first great war in Europe, drawn by the opportunity to fly in the new Hollywood aviator
movies. Earlier Hollywood had rallied in support of General Pershing's World War 1 visits
to the new studios that were creating the film industry, pioneering sorts like Thomas Inces
Triangle, which became the plantation faade made famous in Gone With the Wind after his
death at the hands of W. Randolph Hearst, some said in a Marion Davis love triangle that
involved Charlie Chaplin. The historic Hearst who is credited with inventing yellow
journalism, drumbeating for war (which he got), supporting the Nazis in the 30s (the
beginning of the end for one of Americas richest men, inheritor of the fortune of the
California gold rush and most powerful news/media baron in America), was not out of
character in the Chinatown-like era of barons and land grabs, water steals and starlets,
dashing Romeos who emerged as Americas heroes and models.
It was a great era to be flying in Hollywood. Pilots wrapped scarves around their necks and
flew in some of the greatest Hollywood movies. The best pilots in the world choreographed
action sequences that shaped early images of the modern film industry and, as the publics
appetite for World War I flyboys faded, the barnstormers turned their aero stunt
businesses into plane factories.
Howard Hughes was a prototype of the style and times. Companies like Hughes Tools
geared up, began to design and manufacture planes for WW II, and quickly became Hughes
Aerospace as the new industry set its sights on an aviation world reaching far beyond the
Yankee Clipper and the War Departments multi-million dollars contracts. My family would
have involvement with Douglas in Long Beach, which became McDonnell Douglas; TRW
which designed and built state-of-the-art satellites and spy systems (and was the company
ripped off by Sean Penn in Falcon and the Snowman); and Skunk Works in Burbank, which
designed and built the prototype for the B-2 bomber, not far from Warner Brothers and
Disney Studios. Within a few decades, Hollywoods visions of flying daredevils had turned
to squadrons of air cavalry flying missions in every theater, capable of delivering nuclear
weapons to every GPS-monitored, metric-triangulated point on earth. How far we have
come, I reminisced.
In one generation, advanced flight technologies, weapons systems and the space industry
had designed and built the dominant air force, strategic and space command capabilities in
the world next door to Hollywood, with a shared history and imagination. It was a wild
ride, like Disneys Tomorrowland ride, a transformation from LA bean fields and biplanes
to piston engine fighter planes and bombers to advanced supersonic jets tested at desert
sites outside LA in the Mojave and Death Valley range and new generations of
intercontinental missiles tested in the Pacific range on the coast near Oxnard with the
10 | A m e r i c a n T w i l i g h t
Pacific laid out for its von Neumann, Edward Hall, LeMay, Bennie Schrievers crew of
geniuses and their satellite guidance and weapons of mass destruction capable of
destroying all life on earth. In one generation a remarkable feat of progress, a nuclear
movie that turned tomorrow into today and Fantasyland into reality.
When Jim Morrison arrived in Los Angeles in the mid 60s as the Vietnam War ratcheted up,
he was telling friends his father, the navy Admiral commanding a carrier in the Indochina
Sea, was dead. Morrison, about to become the one of the most famous rock n roll stars,
didnt know much about the history of LA or its being a center of war manufacturing. What
Morrison knew with certainty was the life led by his father, admirals and generals was not
the life for him.
He turned away and bailed out. He was no Officer and a Gentleman. He went to film school
at UCLA, the cross town rival of my school, USC. Our film departments pretty much looked
down on the other. We produced George Lucas and Star Wars after all. For that matter, we
graduated John Milius of Patton and Apocalypse writing fame. But they had Coppola, who
directed Apocalypse. The University of California at Los Angeles was laid out alongside a
Veterans Cemetery lined with thousands of white crosses and grave monuments. A few
miles to the west, Morrison's fate met a muse on a beach between Santa Monica and Venice,
not far from P.O.P, Pacific Ocean Park. In the distance, if he looked, he could have seen
satellite dishes on top of El Segundo buildings where encrypted messages were arriving
from the Pacific theater. As it was, he more probably was looking under a derelict rock club,
the Cheetah, where I first heard him perform The Lizard King and The End.
Morrison waved hand-written poems. He was skinny, longhaired, and had alabaster skin. I
remember him, skinny and lithe at the beginning and then bearded, slow and huge toward
the end. I still have the copy of his poem American Prayer that he gave me. It was a small
book that fits in one hand. Morrison saw himself in the grand tradition of raving Irish poets
and writers and thought he could be as famous as some of the greats. As a poet and
shaman, he refused to be broken. His independent, native-American spirit roamed wild
until his end in Paris. He saw his music as a performance of poetry, a way to freedom and
opposition to the war machine. He adopted Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception and free
ranging artists from Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht to Willie Dixon.
Six years after he broke in, Morrison was dead. In the few years he lived on the edge as a
rockpoet, he created a body of art that drove rock n roll. He walked the edge, literally, on a
hotel rooftop once on Sunset near the Whiskey. He didnt know his limits, as Eastwood
says. A man has to know his limits. He didnt. He drank, he drank hard as his poet was
contracted out. In the end, when the Doors went commercial, Morrison wasnt a survivor Jac Holzman was
President of Elektra Records, Jac discovered the band when Arthur Lee, front man for
Love, brought him to a Doors concert. Jac would say he discovered and signed the Doors at
the Whiskey a Go Go on Sunset Strip. Thanks to his telling of the tale, Holzman as a result
became A&R man, an artist and repertoire head honcho in corporate rock and rolls hall
of fame.
Years later at a little party at his grand home in upper Santa Monica, I asked Jac over hors
d'oeuvres about Morrisons performance in the overproduced, strings, violins and horns
Soft Parade. I reminded him of Morrison on the Ed Sullivan show, the arguments, and told
him I thought Elektra broke Morrisons back. Im thinking how I told him, how I
compared Jacs over-produced Doors to a Faustian bargain, not his soul for sale but
Morrisons. The poet went away, a broken man replaced him. Jac hired Paul Rothchild
(Rothchild!) to produce Jim and the Doors and Janis. The raw talent of Jim and Janis didnt
take to Rothchilds slick packaging violins, layers of accompaniment, lush pop
arrangements designed for the Top 40. The pop market crossover demanded by Elektra
and forced under the contract brought an end to the real Jim and Janis. I knew Jim and
Janis were wild spirits. They were tamed and then they died.
Jim wanted to be known as a poet When American Prayer had been published and first copies
arrived by mail in LA, I found Jim in his room, crying. He was sitting there, holding the book, crying,
and he said, This is the first time I havent been fucked.
Michael McClure
Therell always be flowers on Morrisons Parisian grave, although theres been talk of
kicking him out of the graveyard. Late night visitors have had a tendency to graffiti nearby
headstones, so disinterment may eventually be necessary. Morrison used to tell the band
they could be as big as the Beatles, but what he didnt want to be was a pop star marketed
like corn flakes. In my way of looking back, he cracked when forced to do the Soft Parade
album. The binge started soon after the Parade was released. The stories of Morrisons
excesses are no secret and I heard many at the time in 69 and 70 round the time I crashed
the Doors sound truck into the Hullabaloo. I think the voices were telling Jim he would
never be a great poet because he was under contract. American Prayer might have been his
self-published poetry, with no contract, but everything else in the oeuvre was under the
thumb of legal, smiling legal, clauses and dotted is and crossed ts.
The Admirals son was the star of his song Unknown Soldier. He was among the young men
lost during Vietnam while his father, admirals and generals orchestrated and ordered
troops to the front lines. Shortly before his death, Morrison walked through Pere Lachaise
cemetery and said it would be a good place to be buried. After all, hed be surrounded by
dead poets, writers and spirits like Balzac, Moliere, Oscar Wilde and Edith Piaf.
______________________
Online/Comments
Steven Schmidt - reflection on the end of Jim Morrison... http://www.doors.com/miami/one.html -Last night I was recalling another Jim Morrison story that I did not include when I wrote American
Twilight. The memory came back as a dream as I slept and this morning I'm deciding, as American
Twilight: A Memoir is now a digital book, I'll add this story as an update.... It was 1969 at USC, when a
group of us booked the "Living Theater" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Theatre - to
perform at Bovard Auditorium on campus. My budding relationship w/ the Doors would become a
serious relationship that led to LA Peace Day, the Stones, Gimme Shelter http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065780/fullcredits... - and more but that night at SC Morrison watched
w/ intensity as the Theater performed. Then the next night he was back and then again, he took it all
in, the open challenge of the Theater, the interaction, the stripping, the 'performance art' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_art (remember he always considered himself a "poet") then he left and went to perform in Miami.... everything was never the same... Miami was the end.... now
if, as an "Entertainment Com't" I/we hadn't booked the Living Theater, then would history have
changed? Would Jim have acted out on that Miami stage the way he did, performance theater, like the
Living Theater in the moment? Or if the LAPD hadn't shut down LA Peace Day would the Stones have
agreed to go to Altamont with the Gimme Shelter consequences. There's a credit at the film's end for
Steve Schmidt but no credit's deserved for 'the end' of Morrison or the Stones tour turn, their decision
after Los Angeles, another story, an end of an era, another day.
The Miami Incident
Without some assemblage of the events which culminated in Jim Morrison's behavior on the night of
March 1, 1969 at the Dinner Key Auditorium, one can only witness a small piece in a
turbulent puzzle. A shrewd historian could, most likely, trace all of the significant...
April 2, 2012
David Druker Incredible story
April 2, 2012
Steven Schmidt The Living Theater, as Morrison saw it in 69 @ USC, Paradise Now, raw -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF7_BdHi_NA
Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD trailer

PARADISE NOW: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD features rare, never-before-distributed films
(including "Paradise Now")
April 3, 2012
David Druker where did this video come from?
Steven Schmidt -- from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Cohen
April 3, 2012
Robert Carroll Great writing s
May 21, 2013
Steven Schmidt http://www.rollingstone.com/.../ray-manzarek-doors... am remembering asking him
why the Fender piano bass, why no bass player... and the explanation was simple, it's easy to carry like
the Vox and now as Manzarek passes thru the doors to the other side, I read the explanation of a foursided diamond, he said they were like a diamond and adding a bass player would of been five, a
pentagon, not good -- Ray was an original, no B40 for him, he had his sound, added w the 'flamenco'
guitar of Krieger (how else to describe it?) and jazz beat of Densmore, Manzarek was out there like
Coltrane in Light My Fire, best live, always changing, always new, expressions of his soul in his playing,
accompanying the poet M
Ray Manzarek Dead; Doors Keyboardist Was 74 | Music News | Rolling Stone
Steven Schmidt Just read interview in Rolling Stone, May 8, 2013 - scroll up to read what I wrote about
Elektra Records and the corporate side that changed Morrison and the band's edge, how Morrison and
the Doors music was forced into heavily produced (strings/horns etc etc) albums due to contract
obligations and more and what it did to beat him down -- Morrison was pushing back at the end and
Densmore has a point... Morrison's principles... the rock crew supporting Densmore at the trial sounds
like a politics of the Green Party platform, I'd add, and especially now looking back at what happened
to the Doors music as they were pushed to go 'Soft Parade' toward the end, this book (at least the
reviews/interviews) is revealing to me... I never blamed Manzarek but the book opens another chapter
why they were pushed to go pop and why Morrison added that clause about no commercial use of their
music -- unless all of them agreed -- I guess that's why Densmore prevailed in the court case
Chapter Two Orders from Above

________________________________________________________________________________
War is peace.
-- George Orwell, Ministry of Truth, 1984
erry Hiken is an extraordinary actor. In a career of over thirty years hes performed
many classic turns and characters. Now he was talking about medieval nuns and
priests who went wild creating an orgy of chants and songs passed on to modern
music through the poetry of Carmina Burana. Fate was O Fortuna, a primal force that
sweeps all along on journeys over which we have little control, but within which we make
choices that influence how fate treats us. Feudalism and Church extremism, wars and
plague, had brought on dark times when the nuns and priests abandoned cloistered life and
chose to live life free of feudal walls.
Perhaps, Gerry ventured, these wandering minstrels at the fringe of the medieval church
knew a truer calling. They became well educated pagans, Gerry shared, their lyrics in
Carmina Burana speak of life lived fully. They didnt buy into the dogmas of kings divine
right and salvation within the Church. They went out into the forests and fields, built
bonfires and celebrated living. They left behind the verities of the day a belief in the
imminent end of the world de rigueur for the age, doctrinaire religion and sinewy
connections between church and state. They were protesters singing of life and fortune and
they took on the feudal lords and their minions, the priest and bishops, as sort of an early
version of John Lennons song, Imagine.
Id been collaborating on a musical with Gerry and Jef Labes, whod been performing and
touring with Van Morrison and was the keyboardist who played on the wonderful
Moondance album of spiritual blues. As we completed our musical, Gerry began work on
a West Los Angeles production of Eichmann on Trial written by Donald Freed whod just
finished a close-up expos of Richard Nixon directed by Robert Altman. Consider playing
Eichmann. Gerrys attempt to get into character was a traumatic experience. His Jewish
upbringing confronted his going inside a man whose role in the German WW II command
structure delivered the Holocaust, systematic death, to millions of European Jews and
others. Gerry was, as he reminded me, a trained method actor and getting into Eichmann
the thought of being and living the mental life of a mass murderer was almost too much
to bear.
Gerry began his research. Eichmann had been captured by Israeli agents in South America
and transcripts of his subsequent interrogation and trial were the primary source material.
We met at Gerrys house in the Los Feliz to talk about Eichmann, the man, his actions,
choices, explanations and defense, what conscience he could have had and the notion of
Will to Power, Wagnerian themes, Freud, Nietzsche and war.
Eichmann seemed in many ways to be a normal person Jerry added at one point, handing
me a photo close-up of his bureaucratic face and we talked of the banality of evil as seen by
Hannah Arendt, Professor at the Graduate Faculty at the New School in New York. Shed
written about Eichmanns trial and her book when published caused a storm of
controversy. She described Eichmann not as a monster but as a cog in a war machine, a
man who was banal in the extreme enabling a system that rationalized war and revenge.
Later, he claimed in his defense he was following orders and he couldnt be held
responsible, he was just doing his job. The German word was befehlsnotstand, orders from
above. After his capture, in interrogations and at trial, he objected whenever questioned
why he chose to sign the orders that delivered mass death.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him and that the many were neither
perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the
viewpoint of our legal institutions, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put
together.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Eichmann wrote to his sons from prison that he was accused of hideous crimes but it was
not true. He had only been a conscientious official who had done what he was ordered to do
but never killed anyone.
I received orders
Do what you will to me, because I couldnt help myself. I had orders.
Adolf Eichmann,
Pre-Trial Interview, Israel, 1960
The thought that there could be such a disconnect between ones life and a system
delivering death shook our beliefs in the underlying nature of the human condition.
I remembered Hannah Arendt walking into a lecture room, when in graduate school,
smoking a cigarette and talking about Western philosophy, fear, totalitarianism and death.
She spoke of her German background and addressed war, totalitarianism, the desire for
immortality and civilization gone bad. As a student, I was familiar with her writings of vita
activa, a life of action in the face of mortality. Humankind was not hopeless, although we all
face death and it takes a Promethean effort to find hope. Religious salvation and
resurrection were matters of faith, but within reason the human imagination produced
action as a way to find meaning. In politics, art and procreation, we mere mortals can find
meaning. Ideas and action take on new importance and questions of the call to life, eros,
and death, thanatos, capture the human condition, a struggle between life and death, peace
and war, dark and light.
When seen in light of 20th century wars and the deaths of tens of millions of people, the
results of Western civilization were dark and we talked about evil and definitions of evil.
In religious, philosophic and literary terms, the existence of evil is regarded as a fact of life.
Where does a bureaucrat fit into this schema of Western civilization, when someone who
claims to be simply doing a job, following orders and acting like anyone in their position
would be obligated to act? Someone who claims to not know the consequences of their
work and who talks of patriotism while refusing to see the consequences of their
patriotism?
What of the modern war machine, the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually to
produce weapons to fight wars against real and perceived enemies? What of a nuclear
Sword of Damocles hanging over civilization and life as we know it? What of nationalism,
country and oaths of loyalty, obedience and decision-making in times of war? I took an oath
to defend the nation What of those who say -- Im just doing my job... I have no choice.
My country, right or wrong The decision isnt mine, its the Presidents Flag-waving
support the Presidents decision Were at war, the homeland is under attack, the Nation is
at war, were fighting a world war... During wartime, we have no choice but to support the
war effort.
My Country, Right or Wrong
Gerry and I spoke of nationalism, technological and bureaucratic violence, systems of
warfare that led to the Holocaust and regimented IBM cards that Nazis used to manage
death camps a march, a martial beat, follow-orders, management techniques of Winslow
Taylor, apparatchiks and propaganda that spreads a message of fear and orders of
obedience to the cause [insert cause here]. Eichmann could be like someone anyone might
know, Jerry decided. Thinking back to Jerry, perhaps he was right. Eichmanns defense was
his country right or wrong. The nation is under attack, the supreme leader as commander
has called for extreme action to defend the nation. Thats all one needs to know. This was
the Eichmann defense
One needs to know a world more than this. The moral, ethical world in which we live goes
far beyond my country right or wrong and unquestioning obedience to orders. In
recognition of a higher law, the U.S. military holds each soldier to a standard higher than
obedience to orders. On the field of battle, orders of engagement do not sanction
following illegal or immoral orders. Each of us, as troops in the field or citizens at home,
have to conscientiously act. We cannot allow ourselves to be cogs in a war machine.
Unquestioning obedience to higher ups is not in the book of American patriots. The
Nuremberg Trials made clear that obedience to orders is no defense in crimes against
humanity.
In the spring of 2003, I reflect on the grave questions Gerry and I explored as I re-consider
a new world war, a fourth world war according to former CIA Director James Woolsey,
who announces during a speech at the University of California Los Angeles, one stop on a
nationwide tour to drum up support for mobilization, that the new global war will last a
lifetime and probably longer. This inheritance, it is said, will be a long lasting war fought to
protect civilization from evil. As a citizen, I consider the call to arms and, as an activist
who was at the gates during the bunker down days of President Nixon and his men, I think
Watergate and follow the money. Woolseys lines are only his part in a larger
production.
The lessons of the past, I realize, cannot be ignored except at our peril. While President
Bushs men speak of being welcomed with open arms in Baghdad and talk of soon-to-befound weapons of mass destruction, which have yet to be found, Vice President Cheney as
late as March 2003, continues repeating that the US is welcomed in Iraq. As the former
chief executive of war supplier Halliburton, the VPs words are suspect in the face of
Halliburtons self-interest and profits.
Why is it that so many of the nations war planners have personal financial interests in a
war-time economy? Mr. Woolsey in his speech neglects to mention his position on a Board
of a company that does almost a billion in war-related government contracts. What are the
connections to war among the Presidents men? I begin to look, tracking stories in the indy
media and alternative press. I begin to see outlines taking shape. The Vice Presidents
former company Halliburton and its subsidiaries like Brown & Root are embedded in over
a hundred countries, deployed under a new policy that privatized provisioning of military
services, a policy developed when Vice President Cheney served under President George
H.W. Bush. The new U.S. military now goes to war in partnership with the Halliburtons
who assemble a multi hundred billion annual industry of war. Under national security
restrictions enacted after the September 11th World Trade Center attack, the Pentagon is
not required to make public details of contracts to Halliburton and other companies, new
contracts running in the billions. The details are off radar for security reasons.
An interlocking web of interests from holding companies the President formerly directed
like Carlyle to companies that provide mercenary forces a new supply chain has been
created without public awareness. A multi-layered military-industrial complex along the
lines of what General Eisenhower warned against as he left the Presidency has been put in
place and the Iraq and Afghan wars in their part of the whole world war are, it now seems,
experiments in privatization. The entangling alliance of the U.S. Congress in a political
military-industrial complex (often the political hyphen in the military-industrial
complex term Eisenhower coined is omitted) has to be given its due from Eisenhowers
ominous farewell speech.
Todays political-military-complex web is far more complex in 2003 than the WW II
commanding general railed against in the 50s. This 50 state web (military production has
been sited across the nation to ensure across the nation congressional support) marries
money and performance. I think of the Tom Cruise line in the Jerry McGuire movie, show
me the money.
The juggernaut of military production spending is ramping up as words of war escalate, the
drama in the West Wing of the White House provides a dramatic pulpit for the Presidents
injunctions for war in Afghanistan, Iraq and global war against evil doers, for the forces of
good to be fielded against evil and at moments we hear he feels that hes been chosen by
God to lead the war against evil.
Having always had suspicions when I hear someone who talks as if God is in
communication with them, I decide to look more closely at the president. Who is this fellow
from Texas? Im thinking of power and money and a war lobby, and the Presidents talking
with God? I have time between jobs to follow this story, follow the money trail and take a
closer look at the President/Commander-in-Chief, wherever the story takes me
I fire-up and log-on to my arrayed computer workstation. Its time to go to work again.
Having just left my position as head of one of the larger digital agencies, I have a sense of
how to deploy search tools. Ive got my own army ready, favorite search engines and meta
vehicles appear and I send them out and about, algorithms kick in and I begin compiling
strategic 10,000 foot views, then I begin atomizing and drilling down to the battlefields,
the war for hearts and minds. Soon Im the behind-the-scenes, in the weeds and begin to
do intel looking to find the patterns that tie-together facts on the ground. I go after arcane
trade and government reports, data banks, business analysts and corporate calls. I begin
reading online source material, a few from the mainstream press, many from the
alternative media, non-profit public interest groups and blogs.
I read the international news and scan overseas news, translate local news, compare on the
ground news with public relations news. I visit sites like the Center for Public Integrity in
Washington DC which provides a trove of lobbying facts. I log data, charts and stats and
begin to take notes and citations and begin to wonder about the cast of characters who are
making decisions how to wage a _neo-cold war_ replacing the third world war waged
against the Soviets, a fourth world war to last our lifetimes.
I recall a rush to war and revenge, rash decisions made in heat of battle and the fog of war
soldiers described in past wars, the hubris of power and decisions made while rallying
around the flag, decisions to be questioned at a later time, if at all. I realize how in the heat
of the moment the U.S. Congress in 2001 voted near unanimously to give the President, as
Supreme Commander-in-Chief, open-ended powers to wage world war war wherever,
whenever the President should decide to employ forces, by air, sea, land or space, across
borders, across treaties, across constitutional rights as the President explains he is the
decider and wears a Commander-in-Chief insignia on his air uniform as he lands off the
coast of California during his Mission Accomplished appearance on the Abraham Lincoln.
_______________________________________________________
Adopted by the House and Senate on the 14th of September 2001
The president is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those
nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or
aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such
organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of International
terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
_______________________________________________________
Americas policy doctrine at the turn of the century projects a global frontier, preemptive
war, unilateral action, unmatched technology and dominant militarization. The new
policies are supported with near unanimity by Congressional Republicans and Democrats,
liberals and conservatives, neo-conservatives and neo-liberals, who agree in the aftermath
of the September 11th terrorist strike to support the President and administration policy
without hesitation. Debate is minimal, disagreement with the President rarely heard,
dissent marginalized. The response to 9/11 is a new era of massive spending and Big
Military plans for worldwide projection of U.S. dominance. War plans and budgeting are
given the go-ahead $100 billion immediately in new defense spending, year one, is
waved forward. A good defense is a good offense, the administration explains in terms
many sports-minded Americans understand. The mainstream press, if one reviews the
range of stories from the time, seems to forget the lessons of Imperial Presidency and
rushes to lend media support to a Bush doctrine-in-the-making.
Few references surface about the War Powers Act of 1973 when, as a result of the last
profound disaster of a war and Nixon resignation before impeachment, the powers of the
President were limited. The Congress would have to, constitutionally is required to, declare
the nation at war. One paragraph Resolutions (ala the Gulf of Tonkin resolution that
initiated the Vietnam war or the September 14th resolution that initiates a global war)
are not, expressly are not, what the War Powers Act considered constitutionally
appropriate, but what do I know? I dont sit on the Supreme Court, but I can say here and
now this war should not be declared as it was declared.
A world-wide war without debate? In effect, Congress has approved unparalleled new
Presidential powers. Lending additional force to the Presidents authority as Commanderin-Chief, Congress now establishes new precedents in surrendering check-and-balance
powers delineated in the U.S. Constitution. Closed-door Congressional hearings are the
order of the day. Security concerns are cited. Agencies of government pull back from the
public. Security concerns. A blank check came from the appropriations committees and
subsequent supplemental appropriation bills flies through the halls, $79 billion in one
round, the amount made public, $87 billion in another. Special ops and black budgets are
out-of-sight, out-of-mind. Clandestine spending accelerates, only witnessed occasionally by
way of reports of satellite launches and oblique references to spies in the sky and new
space age capabilities.
In the name of national security, more Congressional committees become increasingly

sequestered affairs; a massive Department of Homeland Security is created to coordinate
wartime security; the most massive data bank operation in history is initiated and where
laws proscribe the government from directly gathering private information, the
government hire a quickly booming private industry in data intelligence to provide services
to innumerable intelligence gathering operations within the government. More and more
information previously available to the public is removed from online sites and new
restricted access provisions put in place; information on citizens previously unavailable to
the government is made available to the government via Patriot Act provisions.
Due process, the Fourth Amendment and right of habeas corpus come under assault as the
Attorney General declares American streets are now a war zone. A war commences with
the U.S. President telling the world Youre either with the U.S. or against the U.S.. Most
allies push back as the president and vice president, war planners and machine ramps up
on multiple fronts with few questions asked. The nation rallies to support the President
and he warns a world audience that my words are not chit-chat to be ignored, using
language small town America readily understands, language readily reported in headlines,
and the President threatens retaliation on a global level to drive home his message he is
serious: We will be victorious., however long it takes.
The President as Commander-in-Chief orders a vast network of military and political
operations to action and the drumbeat of war becomes standard fare on the daily news.
The media delivered a message in such glowing terms as the bombs begin to drop on
Afghanistan and Iraq that the term militainment came into popular usage to describe
media-meets-the-military. Having learned PR lessons from Vietnam reporting that
skewered progress of the war, the military PR invents embedded reporting to send select
media journalists into the field accompanying the troops.
The American people watched breathlessly reported broadcasts of the rockets red glare
delivered into American homes. This doesnt last long as Baghdad quickly falls yet, even as
the broader disasters of the occupation begin to be seen, broadcast news overtly supports
U.S. military action with dissenting voices rarely aired. The dominant coverage Americans
continue to receive through Big Media captures only occasional glimpses of the rest of the
story.
On the home front, citizen patriots of all stripes are beginning to ask questions that will
need to be answered, if not by Congress then by historians. What was the U.S. Congress
thinking in not exercising its rights and obligations mandated under the Constitution? In its
rush to hand over war-making powers to the President, the U.S. Congress marked a
profound moment in history what now is the role of Congress in war oversight?
Whether an unbridled rush to war via command and control from space; a resurrected Star
Wars strategic ballistic missile defense against rogue nations; billions of dollars for new
weapon systems; what of the publics right to a deliberative decision on the gravest war
and peace questions? What of an independent press asking hard questions? Has the U.S.
Congress abandoned its responsibilities under the U.S. Constitution to declare war? U.S.
Representatives vow to uphold the Constitution and Bill of Rights as the highest law of the
land, yet the war powers of Congress seem, again, to have been set aside. For all the oaths
of office taken to defend the Constitution, did the U.S. Congress surrender its grave
Constitutional responsibility to declare war? In the aftermath of the attacks of September
2001, what was lost in Americas rapid response? Is the enabling language of the Historic
Resolution of September 2001 giving the President the power to exercise all necessary
and appropriate force whatever he decides worldwide against any and all perceived evil
doers both legal and appropriate? Consider the implications of a supreme commander
giving orders. or to be more dramatic, a finger-on-the-trigger policy thats Wild West
redux.
And the unprecedented war-making powers given to the President, what of his reasons for
pulling the trigger? As the nation went to war against Iraq early in 2003, this past year, how
much misinformation was fed to the Congress and public? To what extent was the case
made, disinformation? Was the case for going to war based on falsified intelligence reports
spun by administration spokespersons and delivered via Big Media?
Polling reports upwards of 75% of the American people were under the impression that
Iraq was involved in the attacks of 9/11. The Bush administration makes claims this is the
case, until September 2003 when the President announces there is no evidence for such a
conclusion. How did the American people come to such a conclusion? What of the
administrations case that Iraq was an imminent threat, a nuclear threat, possessing
weapons of mass destruction?
This was the legal cause for war, a casus belli, presented to the United Nations and
American people, justifying a preemptive war as self-defense. The American media
reported en masse the Bush administration position Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction and was prepared to use them against the United States and its allies. The
Presidents top security adviser spoke of mushrooms clouds and the President in his 2003
State of the Union speech went on record citing quantities of chemical and biological
weapons millions of pounds. Secretary of State Powell gave a presentation to the United
Nations Security Council, producing satellite imagery and communication intercepts to
prove his case. All was dutifully reported by Big Media with attendant print and televised
experts agreeing. Few dared to oppose the claims.
The NY Times ran a widely-syndicated and reported front-page story under Judith Millers
byline, immediately before the Congressional vote in October 2002 authorizing the
President to use military force against the continuing threat posed by Iraq, even as
historic worldwide demonstrations against preemptive war were occurring. Miller
reported on Iraqs weapons of mass destruction. Her sources had delivered the smoking
gun it was alleged, a clear and present danger to the United States of America.
The danger was imminent, the danger was nuclear, it was proven and the case was
immediately made by the Presidents national security adviser and Vice President Cheney
that the U.S. had to strike preemptively under Article 51 of the UN Charter allowing for self
defense. The threat identified was imminent. Nuclear materials and uranium was being
shipped from Niger to Iraq, proof of Iraqs nuclear capabilities. The President as
Commander-in-Chief watched Congressional support for war soar the case for war was
clear. It is also clear, in retrospect, how the Times piece, as discredited as it has become,
was disinformation. Big Medias impact in beating the drums of war cannot be discredited.
Credit is due the Times and Miller and her editor.
Less than a year later, the case for war has across the gamut fallen apart. In Iraq, the search
for weapons of mass destruction has produced no quantities of weapons and no imminent
threat to the U.S. Exhaustive searches continue, but it is clear that the case for war has
singularly set in motion another round of military build-up, weapons development,
proliferation, the largest since Reagan came into office railing against an evil empire, a
propped up aggregation of nations and territories soon to fall. The aftermath of war in Iraq
will not be similar to Moscows sudden demise. The enlargement of the war will involve
multiple nations and last for decades.
The media will no doubt run with it as it ran with the Iraq nuclear weapons story as frontpage, top-of-the-news, stoking the fires of war. Ratings went up. Few questions were asked.
Pack journalism was the order of the day and the administration delivered the message. At
a moment when hard questions demanded to be asked, they werent. In the case of the
supposed nuclear threat, a British college students plagiarized, graduate paper had been
cited and badly forged documents from Niger quoted there was no imminent threat, but
the President having been given the power, pulled the trigger. We now hear the President
and his advisers explain there were other reasons he had for going to war, other than the
ones he said at the time were the reasons he went to war
And presidential oversight by Congress? We hear Senator Warner, chairman of the Senate
Armed Services Committee, explain the committees oversight role that his top
responsibility is to strengthen America's military and, addressing those whove
questioned his unequivocal support of the president, he adds that his committee will
tolerate no investigations, or allow questioning of intelligence that led the nation to war.
As a result, months later, here we are and the American public continues to believe Iraq
had nuclear weapons and an arsenal, hundreds of tons, of chemical and biological weapons
though none have been found. Headlines and top-of-the-news stories are remembered
later corrections forgotten. Big Media effectively controlled mind share in making the
administrations case for war. The unanimity of the images and messages spoke loudly as
the nation went to war. And printed retractions? On-air admissions of false advertising?
Mea culpas are rarely heard or seen. The deed is done.
Today we watch a president unaccountably confident in his command of foreign affairs,

although having traveled only twice overseas before his election. His foreign policy rolls
out like a Hollywood western a Texas-blend of tough talking and straight shootin. Send
in the cavalry. The wild west is a place for decisiveness and action. Rich Texas oil men
whove shaped a worldwide oil industry and have got to protect it. The global frontier is
U.S. territory in this view and it requires a dose of what made the west tough men and the
cavalry.
In September 2002, Leon Fuerth, the former National Security Advisor to President Clinton
and no friend to the Bush policies, described the Bush cowboy rides in approach to world
affairs: The United States is at present deconstructing its alliances. Unilateralism,
triumphalism, exceptionalism and often simple arrogance now mark Washingtons
approach. It demonstrates by word and by deed that allies and alliances do not matter
America will end up operating alone in the world. The Bush administration aims to
fundamentally alter foreign policy. What is to be abandoned is the goal of a world system
based on multilateral institutions, underwritten by security alliances anchored in the
United States.
The picture projects a wild west on a global scale. American power under post-Reagan/
Bush doctrine rolls out in an order of battle that would please most all cold war warriors,
whether Reagans kitchen cabinet, hardliners in both Bush presidencies but especially
displaying battle readiness are the neo-conservatives passing around their beat sheets for
neo-cold war to replace the old-cold war. Out with the old, in with the new.
Invocations from the Pulpit
This generation may be the one that will face Armageddon.
Ronald Reagan, People Magazine, December 26, 1985
am beginning to hear the word, its on the streets, its in the pews, in the U.S. tens of
millions who believe in Armageddon. The End Is Coming Im told and my local bookstore
has books telling me the End is coming soon. Last year, some of Americas best-selling
titles trumpeted imminent Armageddon and arrival of Gods Rapture. Fifty-million copies of
the Left Behind series of books prophecy an imminent Armageddon and chronicle the
Rapture and Tribulations that will follow. Millions of Americans are preparing for The
Second Coming of Christ.
The politics of believers connect Gods word to U.S. foreign policy, so it was with
trepidation and wonder that I opened the doors and looked inside this world of deep belief.
With a vision of Armageddon, Biblical revelation and truth, old and new, millions of
religioU.S.ly conservative Americans speak of U.S. foreign policy that should support and
adhere to a prophetic religious perspective. We hear God is on the side of believers going to
war. The tragic irony is how many claim God, the same God, on their side as they war with
each other.
Confusion continues as believers in the Second Coming, profess that those who do not share
their beliefs will not be saved when the end comes. Everyone not a reborn Christian will be
left behind after the Rapture. Some who profess apocalyptic belief have gone so far as to
profess support of a Greater Israel to advance the day of Gods reckoning while
denying the children of Israel can be saved. As interpreted, the story of the Armageddon
and Second Coming is to begin in the north of Israel
Believers talk of a Day of the Lord, a struggle for global dominion that will pit armies of a
Christian West against a Union of Disbelievers, often interpreted to be Islamic Nations
and Eurasian allies from the East. According to popular interpretations of Revelation
prophecy, nuclear exchanges will occur between the West and East. Both sides will move
military forces in the Mideast and commence all out conflict. According to widely held
apocalyptic belief, Satan's demons will influence evil political and military leaders and
absent intervention of God the destruction of all living things will occur in a final nuclear
holocaust and aftermath.
Some interpretations of Revelations speak of Western leaders attempting to takeover rich
oil fields east of Israel. Others speak of armed forces will gather near Armageddon, around
15 miles from Haifa. Most interpretations profess that during the Rapture, Jesus will
"snatch up the deceased, the dead in Christ and they will rise into the heavens, then
believers who are alive will be caught up and rise in rapture to meet the Lord.
The story continues in great detail, as annual sales of tens of millions of apocalyptic books
in the U.S. attestGod may begin executing judgments against unbelievers during the
period called Tribulations. Nations will attack Israel and Jesus Christ will physically return
leading the Armies of Heaven. They will destroy everyone whos not a believer. Satan will
be bound up and Jesus will declare a Millennial Kingdom centered in Jerusalem. Jesus and
Saints will rule for a thousand years. During this period people will be born who are not
loyal to Christ. Satan will tempt the inhabitants of the Earth. Some will take up arms against
God and be defeated. Christ will judge everyone who has ever lived, rewarding some and
punishing others. Those who are destroyed will be cast into a Lake of Fire called Hell.
After eons of temptation and punishment, according to interpreted prophecy, God will
destroy heaven and Earth because of sin. God will create a new heaven and earth for those
who are saved and rule forever.
Revelations translated for a modern Christian audience is a story that fires a belief in
worldwide conflict a politics of believers and unbelievers. While a worldwide population
numbering a billion and a half Muslims grows faster than any world religion,
fundamentalist Christians look to conflict of religions, civilization and ultimate salvation in
the Second Coming of Christ.
Apocalyptic visions and religious politics in America are not to be ignored or lightly
considered. Many millions of votes and elections are dependent on religious conservative
thought. The lobbying power of religious groups challenges that of any special interest
group in Washington DC. The ties between conservative religious leaders and the White
House are close and intimate and Gods word provides more than an undercurrent in
foreign policy. Days before the Bush administration revealed a Road Map proposal, the
White House received a letter signed by a cross-section of well-known American religious
leaders opposing the Road Map peace plan.
The political clout of the Christian Right is potent, its express positions treated with great
deference, Armageddonists have risen to press their belief-as-policy. Many millions of
conservative American Christians follow the news in the Mideast with rapt attention.
I believe this is the beginning of the wars of the last years, says Pastor Elva Martin, leader
of the Word of Truth Assembly in Anderson, South Carolina. Martin refers to the New
Testament Book of Revelation and Old Testament books of Daniel and Ezekiel and points to
a direct link between biblical sites, passages and current conflict in the Mideast.
The war in Iraq is a sign world events are leading up to a final conflict between good, led by
Jesus and evil led by an Antichrist. First, explains Steven Hankins, dean of Bob Jones
University Seminary, the war in Iraq is relevant geographically in that the final events in
the history of the world as we know it center on the Middle East, so anything that happens
militarily in the political states in the Middle East is naturally a point of interest. Hankins
says the Iraq war may be relevant to end times prophecy, but its not the main event. If the
Rapture happens today, then we are seven years from Armageddon.
He points to the fifty million apocalyptic Left Behind books sold. Authors Jerry Jenkins and
Tim LaHaye offered their revelatory analysis of the Iraq war on their website Left Behind
Prophecy Club, while Jerry Falwells Liberty University broke ground on a Tim LaHaye
School of Prophecy. End Times magazine reports double-digit increases in subscriptions,
sales of books, magazines and audiotapes.
The Christianity of a nonviolent Jesus who preached the golden rule, do onto others as
you would have others do onto you, and putting away the sword, seems to be absent in
Revelations. Jesus pacifist teaching may be too radical for road maps as Gandhi called
Christ the most active practitioner of nonviolence in history. Yet, the core teachings of
Christ seem to have less impact on foreign policy than interpretations of the Book of
Revelations.
Even as injunctions from the pulpit and admonitions from the pews acted to influence the
course of U.S. foreign policy, communities of faith in the U.S. chose not follow the
administration to war. Churches, synagogues and mosques individuals, congregations
and ministries consciously and conscientiously opposed escalating cycles of violence and
war. Wars not inevitable. War in the Mideast is not a preview to Armageddon. Virtually
every major religion in the U.S. opposed initiating war against Iraq.

Religious denominations opposing the war:
(Alphabetically)
Catholic
We respectfully urge you to step back from the brink of war and help lead the world to act together to
fashion an effective global response to Iraq's threats that conforms with traditional moral limits on
the use of military force.
U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Letter to President Bush, Sept. 13, 2002
Ecumenical
As Christians, we are concerned by the likely human costs of war with Iraq, particularly for civilians.
We are unconvinced that the gain for humanity would be proportionate to the loss. Neither are we
convinced that it has been publicly demonstrated that all reasonable alternative means of containing
Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction have been exhausted. We call upon our
governments to pursue these diplomatic means in active cooperation with the United Nations and to
stop the apparent rush to war.
World Council of Churches, August 30, 2002
Episcopalian
The question for us now must be: what is our role in the community of Nations? I believe we have the
capacity within us to help lead our world into the way of justness and peace. The freedoms we enjoy as
citizens of the United States oblige us to attend not only to our own welfare, but to the well-being of
the world around us. A superpower, especially one that declares itself to be "under God," must exercise
the role of super servant. Our nation has an opportunity to reflect the values and ideals that we
espouse by focusing upon issues of poverty, disease and despair, not only within our own nation but
throughout the global community of which we are a part.
The Presiding Bishop's Statement on Military Action Against Iraq, September 6, 2002
Jewish
International cooperation is far, far better than unilateral action, and the U.S. must explore all
reasonable means of attaining such support. Non-military action is always preferable to military
action, and the U.S. must fully explore all options to resolve the situation through such means. If the
effort to obtain International cooperation and support through the United Nations fails, the U.S. must
work with other Nations to obtain cooperation in any military action.
Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Executive Committee Decision on Unilateral Action by
the U.S. Against Iraq
Lutheran
While we are fully aware of the potential threat posed by the government of Iraq and its leader, I
believe it is wrong for the United States to seek to over-throw the regime of Saddam Hussein with
military action. Morally, I oppose it because I know a war with Iraq will have great consequences for
the people of Iraq, who have already suffered through years of war and economic sanctions. I call upon
members of our congregations to be fervent in prayer, engaged in conversation with one another and
with our leaders. In the final analysis, we must stand unequivocally for peace.
ELCA Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson's Statement on Iraq Situation,
August 30, 2002
Methodist
United Methodists have a particular duty to speak out against an unprovoked attack. President Bush
and Vice-President Cheney are members of our denomination. Our silence now could be interpreted as
tacit approval of war.
Christ came to break old cycles of revenge and violence. Too often, we have said we worship and follow
Jesus but have failed to change our ways. Jesus proved on the cross the failure of state-sponsored
revenge. It is inconceivable that Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior and the Prince of Peace, would
support this proposed attack.
Secretary Jim Winkler of The United Methodist Church General Board of Church and Society, August
30, 2002
Presbyterian
We urge Presbyterians to oppose a precipitate U.S. attack on Iraq and the Bush administrations new
doctrine of pre-emptive military action. We call upon President George W. Bush and other leaders to:
Refrain from language that seems to label certain individuals and Nations as "evil" and others as
"good"; Oppose ethnic and religious stereotyping, Guard against a unilateralism, rooted in our unique
position of political, economic and military power, that perpetuates the perception that "might makes
right"
The General Assembly Council and the staff leadership team of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A),
September 28, 2002
United Church of Christ

With heavy hearts we hear once again the drumbeat of war against Iraq.
As leaders committed to God's reign of justice and peace in the world and to the just conduct of our
nation, we firmly oppose this advance to war. While Iraq's weapons potential is uncertain, the death
that would be inflicted on all sides in a war is certain. Striking against Iraq now will not serve to
prevent terrorism or defend our nation's interests. We fear that war would only provoke greater
regional instability and lead to the mass destruction it is intended to prevent.
UCC leaders, September 13, 2002
Despite dissent from major denominations, Bush's political connections to Christian

supporters of war is deep from Southern Baptists to apocalyptic and fundamentalist
ministries who, after the onset of war with Iraq, were reported to have had unprecedented
access to the President in exclusive White House audiences held after the March U.S.
invasion.
Shortly after Bush's "mission accomplished", "victory" in Iraq speech on the deck of the
Abraham Lincoln in May 2003, the Washington Post reports a private briefing held
between the President and 141 evangelical Christian leaders, two months earlier, on
March 27, 2003 to discuss the Iraq war and other subjects. Those invited included; Jerry
Falwell, who apologized last year for calling the prophet Muhammad a terrorist and
broadcaster Marlin Maddoux, who has proclaimed an irrefutable connection between
Islam and terror. Also invited were the President of the Southern Baptist Convention,
which is sending food to Iraq labeled grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ
and Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who said Iraqis
are desperately in need of the gospel.
On Easter Sunday in the spring of 2003, the President choose to celebrate the holiest day in
Christian belief, the resurrection of Christ, at Fort Hood, Texas, the home of the 4th Infantry
Division, described often by the Pentagon as the most lethal unit of the U.S. Army.
As religious supporters of the war were granted private hearing, ecumenical opposition to
the war was loud and carried far beyond mainline religions. In September of 2002, 100
Christian ethicists from major seminaries, divinity and religious schools challenged war on
Iraq as morally justified. They issued a simply worded statement, "As Christian ethicists, we
share a common moral presumption against a pre-emptive war on Iraq by the United
States." The U.S. Catholic Bishops conference voted overwhelmingly, 228-14, against going
to war. Pope John Paul II spoke against the war in unambiguous terms. "No to war!" The
Pope said during his annual address to diplomatic emissaries at the Vatican, referring to
Iraq. "War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity." The Pope went on to
refer to International legal codes.
"War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences
between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations organization and International law
itself reminds U.S., war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the
common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions,
without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the
military operations."
The Rev. Richard Cizak, Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the National Association
of Evangelicals, explains to a NY Times reporter: Evangelicals have substituted Islam for
the Soviet Union. The Muslims have become the modern-day equivalent of the Evil Empire.
As the President and his spokespersons speak in public about how he prays for strength in
war, the head of Bush's own congregation comes out against the war. Jim Winkler, the
general secretary of the Board of Church and Society for the United Methodist Church,
which the President attends, writes to his parishioner, the President:
"The Methodist Church rejects war as a usual means of national policy Methodist
scriptural doctrine specifies war as a last resort, primarily a defensive thing. And so far as I
know, Saddam Hussein has not mobilized military forces along the borders of the United
States, nor along his own border to invade a neighboring country, nor have any of these
countries pleaded for our assistance, nor does he have weapons of mass destruction
targeted at the United States." President Bush refused to meet with the Reverend.
In the end (of times) each of us (the US) chooses, not much unlike German Eichmann how
to act. Our choices are individual and several, ethical and moral, the "morality" of war is
our morality. Until the heavenly trumpets blow, back here on earth, every one of us, every
government, every religion will struggle with moral choices, civil and international law,
identifying self-protection and just cause for going to war. The Jesuits arguments on just
cause are the ones Im most familiar with, recalling parochial high school and Brothers
demanding reasoned thought. Now, on the web, I am reading arguments that a war of
civilizations is inevitable; others are professing just war theories that look to the greatest
good for the greatest number the collateral lives lost in the Iraq (or any) war must be
seen in the context of a greater good. I see the point, its an old story updated
Its neo-manifest destiny that demands we act against neo-Indians, those without faith,
primitives, evil doers. The Commander-in-Chief saddles up with Bible-in-hand to ride a
global frontier, bringing Western justice, 9/11 revenge and good works, under force of
arms. The President explains, often, how often he prays before speeches, before decisions,
perhaps before he goes to bed for all I know, reminding me that hes in touch with his god
and I seem to recall, what verses were they, how ostentatious praying and pray-makers
were not looked upon favorably in Testament biblical accounts of Christ, the Prince of
Peace.
Still, religious or secular, were forced to ask as Bush doctrine sets in motion a legacy of war
that will no doubt resonate generation-to-generation, are we acting justly, are we acting to
enhance national security? Or are we sowing seeds of conflict, reciprocated revenge as
with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, hatred and fear, blowback, bloated military spending,
space war and death from above? Is this our generations legacy to the next?
CIA director Woolsey:
World War Four has begun over the years, over the decades to come we will make a lot
of people very nervous. this Fourth World War will last considerably longer than either
World Wars One or Two did for us.
When the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency invokes a specter of generational war
against those opposed to the U.S policy an axis of evil, enemies, extremists, religious
zealots, fascists, Islamic fundamentalists, WMD threats, regional threats, security threats,
Iranians, Koreans, Venezuelans the list is long he sees danger and decades of war. Like a
heavy metal rock band on tour, Woolsey launches his World War 4 Tour. City to city,
Woolsey delivers his own version of fired up, modern brimstone, multi-front war
asymmetrical and unconventional, secret war and front-page war, war that will be
conducted unilaterally, not a measured response but at the choice, place and time
determined by the U.S. Woolsey could have tried to sell World War 4 tour t-shirts to take
home and remember what the ticket buys worldwide war, global reach, deadly weapons,
high technologies, preemptive strikes, black budgets, secret operations, assassination
squads all this and more to bring security and peace.
______________________________________
Online/Comments post publication
http://www.gallup.com/poll/26677/among-religious-groups-jewish-americans-most-stronglyoppose-war.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opposition_to_the_Iraq_War
>There are additional religious denominations that should have been added:
http://www.beliefnet.com/News/2003/03/Faith-Groups-Positions-On-War-With-Iraq.aspx
Chapter Three - Free Speech & the Fourth Estate

________________________________________________________________________________
Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly." Asked why he
would call the well known reporter "a terrorist", Perle explains that "he sets out to do damage and he
will do it by whatever innuendo, whatever distortion he can look, he hasn't written a serious piece
since My Lai."
Richard Perle, Chairman of the Defense Departments Policy Board
CNN interview in response to a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh, March 17, 2003
vividly recall the first time I met Seymour "Sy" Hersh. My thought was Who is this
disheveled guy? His looks didnt fit his reputation for intelligence, his sharp edge. I
quickly discovered he was wound up, constantly moving and spared no one. He was
type A or type something, but whatever he was, he was the type of investigative journalist
you dont find much anymore, an up-from-the-streets reporter with amazing courage to
follow a story wherever it led.
Sy came out of Chicago where hed been a beat reporter. His job was to expose the mob,
when the mob was the mob, not a hit TV series on cable TV. Sy didnt spare the mobsters or
the citys political machine tied to the underworld. Sy learned his chops and he barely
missed a beat moving from the world of gangsters to investigating the Pentagon and
reporting the darker reality of the war in Vietnam. I knew him in Washington DC before he
left to expose Central Intelligence Agency failures as a NY Times investigative reporter
later to add a public expos of Israels nuclear weapons, the Samson Option, perhaps one
of the most ominous books of its time, before moving on to cover the G.W. Bush
administration.
Sy is, in whatever language, a mensch, a tough guy whos an unlikely (and often unliked)
hero, though he doesnt think of himself in terms most of us would understand. I used to
think Sy was an irascible genius who was going to change the world. He did change the
world and, when it came time to do so, David Obst made it possible. Sys reporting of the
war in the rice pads of Vietnam, the massacre in My Lai, changed the American publics
view and the course and outcome of the war as a result.
Dispatch News Service was the conduit for Sys My Lai story and David Obst ran Dispatch.
David was a moving force that took Dispatch News to places the mainstream press refused
to go in the late 1960s. I helped David pitch and distribute the My Lai investigation and
learned as I went forward how independent journalism brings a hard reality that keeps us
sane and democratic. Sys ideas drove him into arenas that supposedly sane men wouldnt
go. Sy had a family, Sy had death threats, Sy was loathed, tracked, slandered. He reported
the truth as he discovered and saw it and wasnt, as far as I could tell, ever dissuaded. The
field of investigative reporting was never the same after Sy ventured forward.
As a Pentagon reporter, he knew how endemic war propaganda was and you could tell how
affronted he was covering whitewashed Pentagon news stories of Vietnam success. He
quit his Pentagon job to freelance and after hearing from a public interest lawyer whod
heard from a friend about an Army investigation into an incident. He ran into a Pentagon
contact who denied Calley didnt kill anyone. Sy went to work tracking down the details..
Like a possessed Leonardo daVinci constructing fine point illustrations in staggering detail,
Sy brought facts together facts, obsessive with detail, and painted pictures of people and
events, previously untold, often purposefully hidden and often overlooked.
The story of how he got to Lieutenant William O. Calley Jr. and set in motion Dispatchs
distribution of Sys My Lai investigation is a story of upside-down reading, as DaVinci
purportedly could do. When Sy was interviewing Lieut. Calley's lawyer, a Mormon named
Latimer in Salt Lake City, not sure if there was a story on the soldier just back from Viet
Nam. He plied the attorney, talking about other cases first, then shifted to Calley and the
attorney briefly showed Sy an army document, not made public, investigating Calley with
the killing of "111 Oriental human beings". Sy later said, as the document sat on the desk,
he copied every word upside-down in his notebook as Latimer carried on.
So began the beginning of the My Lai reporting and later, after Dan Ellsbergs Pentagon
Papers revelations hit the news, the end of the war came into sight. Sy didnt think about
this, he said, but it was the story he was following. Off to South Carolina army base, using
his AmEx card, to find Calley, whom he found living in the senior bachelor officers
quarters nobody wanted the story Sy wrote, newspapers across the country turned it
down, but David was persistent and the attorney in Salt Lake who was tracked down gave
the claims credibility and eventually it ran, beginning with thirty five front page articles
(Davids selling of the story, paper by paper, began with phone calls to each and a quick
word from David along the lines of its running in [St. Louis], if you dont say yes now and
take it, youll lose the biggest story of the war.)
A Case of Carrying Out Orders
It wasnt the biggest story of the war, but it showed the war. Before Sys story came out via
alternative Dispatch News, the U.S. military was seen by most Americans as far off and
necessary. Until My Lai and the up close stories that followed, the killing fields were out of
sight, as was close-up war. One could read of deaths, but My Lai was different. One could see
brief flashes of Huey copters, B-52s and cutaways to carpet bombings that were TV
spectacles nightly on network news but the brutality and hundreds of thousands of dead
were not seen on the home front. The brutality of the war on the ground was no secret to
the troops in Vietnam who were fighting for a losing cause, hoping to survive day-to-day
horrors.
Vietnam was a long way from World War II but few now claim it was a good war fought
for a good cause. The case has often been justly made that WW II was a good war
the madness of Hitler and madness of fascism brought just cause to the allies. Later,
Stalinesque gulags and Soviet state totalitarianism were countered in the cold war to
relegate them to historys ashes to salvage human rights. But who can say now that the
victories of good wars brought peace? They have brought more military Military
capabilities have increased and expanded in every U.S. budget since 1945, nuclear
expansion being the most lethal expansion. The modern era of U.S. military budgeting
traces to the Dulles-era of American foreign policy in a direct line from policy dominoes
to profound disaster, decimation and death in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Like the British Empire sending its best and brightest to fight trench warfare in France in
WW I, an American generation went to war as a result of a policy that read of empire and
deception, not justice and rights. The Gulf of Tonkin incident set off a war commenced by
Executive Order, not Act of Congress. The nation went to war with barely a glance at the
Constitution. The nation was under attack, our President claimed and, like 9/11 and Iraq, a
quick Congressional vote followed giving the President broad war powers to be used at his
discretion as Commander-in-Chief. National security demanded war, the nation was
informed. Later, both times, the people discover the President lied and the nation went to
war without just cause and remained at war without just cause.
The wars kept the young men and women of the armed forces engaged in far-off conflict
that brought death to more than a million civilians in Vietnam and millions more in
Cambodia and Laos and another million war-related deaths have been estimated in Iraq
over the course of the two American invasions and interim.
In Vietnam, U.S. casualties are in the tens of thousands, with hundreds of thousands
wounded. The aftershocks continue nearly a half century later. The war commenced, as the
Pentagon Papers and other documents would later reveal, with deception. As with the war
in Iraq, the public was misled and our nation attacked a country that had not attacked the
U.S. The dj vu all over brings no relief, for it comes too late for millions. In a way, nothing
was learned and most everything was forgotten.
Back then, Americans rallied around the flag, at first. The war expanded from secret forces
to assistance then provocation then defense then near all out war (we had to destroy
the village (or Falluja) to save it, theyre lucky we dont just nuke em). Former Secretary
of Defense Robert McNamara later would write in his memoirs that U.S. involvement in
Vietnam was based on official lies. The American people went to war in Vietnam having
been handed a fraudulent bill of goods. The U.S. had not been under attack; there was no
imminent threat, the Vietnam war never rose to the occasion of a formal declaration of
war, the U.S. Constitution was set aside as Congress voted for imperial presidential
powers. War production ramped up Congress appropriated billions of new dollars
without tax increases. The economic price of war would be felt by future generations.
Sound familiar today?
View from the Lab

The U.S. armed forces initially attempt to destroy the North Vietnamese command and
control, to behead the leadership and interdict supply lines. The bombings that
approximated the tonnage dropped during all of World War II, were ultimately
unsuccessful and led to the development of new weapons after the war. Years later, in Iraq,
during the first invasion the Pentagon was also unable to cut off the command and control
system of Saddam Hussein, whod used German engineering to build an underground
system of bunkers and communication. The result was a resurrection of U.S. tactical
nuclear weapons development to refine bunker-penetrating nuclear warheads. The U.S.
national lab in New Mexico at Los Alamos is given the task. Tested in Alaska, a new
generation of illegal-per-treaty mini-nukes designed, developed and tested to behead the
enemy in any future regional/theater conflict, whether in Afghanistan, Korea, Iraq, Iran,
Libya, Syria, Pakistan, China, Russia, former Soviet states, anywhere on the globe.
Vietnam, although few considered it a lab, was a laboratory for weapons of war, next
generation war. New bombs were deployed from the states gas droplets released over
rice paddies to be ignited in gigantic balls of flaming death bomblets and bombs-withinbombs, time-release bombs, cluster bombs, fragmentation bombs anti-personnel bombs
defoliant bombs Agent Orange bombs... systematic eradication of life support system
bombs. And bomb-making personnel who developed this ordnance have gone on to bigger
and better things.
Carpet-bombing has given way to smart bombing, bombs that cruise to targets
pinpointed by GPS, lasers and satellite tracking coordinated with in-air and on-ground,
real-time computer networks. Now, cell phone communications and locations are traced
and insurgents or rebel leaders talking on mobile phones are tracked via wireless locators
and precisely beheaded by a Hellfire missile.
You want a SCUD-busting, next-generation Raytheon-Lockheed Martin anti-ballistic, nearorbit missile defense system? Theyre tested and now available as a result of the first Iraq
war. New precision and tank-destroying Joint Direct Attack Munitions, JDAMs, developed
fin kits to turn dumb bombs smart. They have now been successfully been lab- and
field-tested during the second Iraq war, this is the first generation version. Inexpensive at
$20,000 a bomb, JDAMs are upgrades designed and engineered to fix problems
encountered during the Kosovo campaign during the Clinton presidency where tanks hid
from U.S. airstrikes. Now, command and control directs this GPS-oriented ordnance from
space as if playing a deadly pinpoint, remote-operated video game. The weapons dealer-ofdealers, the U.S. is unrivaled in war upgrades because it/we have had more opportunity
to field test and upgrade. War is good for weapon testing. Now, the latest is next-gen
guidance. The digital universe of on-and-offs, ones-and- zeroes, is ready made for a next
generation of personalized, smart weapons. The work of todays senior engineers is to turn
the productive to the destructive.
The invention of a digital language is powering the modern world of war. The acronyms are
multiplying crazily, as fast as funders of digital war buy/modify/design/develop and
customize the latest, greatest computer software to track/filter/sort and guide ordnance
onto targets. At core, Digital Video War Games are upgraded WYSIWYG (wizeewig)
systems. What You See Is What You Get software launched an era of visual language for
computers and guidance of bombs remotely via satellite carries on the tradition.
The world of video war games traces its lineage to GUI and Steve Jobs, who adopted the
visual language invented in Silicon Valley at the Palo Alto Research Centers Parc complex
by Xerox software engineers The graphic user interface/GUI this satellite office envisioned
and coded was a quantum leap in the digital world but east-coast Xerox headquarters
didnt appreciate the west-coast software it pioneered and, in a business decision that
rivals 20th Century Fox giving George Lucas merchandising rights in perpetuity to the Star
Wars franchise or IBM giving Bill Gates the exclusive license to provide software to desktop
computers, Xeroxs top management shut down the WYSIWYG project, letting Apple and
later Microsoft run with it. Steve Jobs was first to go, he had visited the proud progenitors
of the new operating system at an open house and, upon returning to his Apple campus,
gave orders to abandon their initial OS and go with GUI. The Apple programming design
team was happy to take over the visual concept, since few PC users apart from hardy math
types could master the strings of letters and characters that comprised the initial
DOS/digital operating systems. Microsoft, a DOS shop, and friend-of-sorts with Jobs, soon
borrowed the visual operating system brought to market by Apple and then survived a
multi-year infringement lawsuit brought by Apple (Bill Gates father was a very talented
and connected Seattle attorney). The resulting graphic user system, with Xerox roots,
Apples genius and Microsofts muscle, have shaped a WYSIWYG-world.
The military is fond of WYSIWYG and its capability to power visually remote, smart
guidance systems. Why drop two bombs when you can drop one, precisely, right on target,
day or night, in any weather with the pilot/plane dropping the bomb being operated
remotely in facilities including Florida by Air Force personnel sitting behind computer
monitors in an air conditioned building. Across the bay from where I write this at this
moment is CENTCOM, one of the headquarters responsible for U.S. military operations in
the Mideast. What we are being conceived with remote-guided drones, as within a Central
Command, is not altogether dissimilar to what James Cameron envisioned in his Skynet
intelligence system in a future war scenario. Computer-guided war against human targets.
In the 1980s and 1990s, teams of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumann
and other designers of Pentagon systems worked around the clock to translate the U.S.
military strike capabilities into the digital world. The possibilities were endless, the funding
bottomless. The first Iraq war demonstrated successes of locked-on-target, laser-guided
precision bombing. It also demonstrated the extent of in-field failures. The most notable of
these was the failure of the failure to locate mobile launch systems for Saddam Husseins
SCUD missiles which moved from underground sites to launch pads in the desert then
unleashed volleys toward Israel. The Patriot defense, anti-missile systems didnt perform,
according to spec and expect, again hearing this from the Patriot engineer and
understanding I was getting only a small part of the picture. It was evident, however, that
much money would follow to upgrade and the senior engineer would be in Israel often.
The goal after the 1991 war was to digitally upgrade across all systems. The second Iraq
war has proven the strategys success. In the 1990s, the U.S. militarys capability was
transformed into a digital, high-tech world. Favored allies, like Israel, received the results.
Picture the best digital video game imaginable and more, and youve got an idea of what the
Army and Air Force can do and what they did in Iraq, and what the future of warfare will
bring.
Jack Spencer, Senior Policy Analyst at the Washington D.C. Heritage Foundation talks of the
new military: Its the digital innovations developed over the past decade these
technologies that differentiate the forces of Operation Iraqi Freedom [second war in Iraq]
from Desert Storm [first war] the fact that everything [sic] worked out very well simply
reaffirmed the requirement to continue in the same direction. Raytheons new intercommand communications network, called CEC for Cooperative Engagement Capability,
was designed and manufactured after the 1991 Desert Storm campaign to enhance joint
command capabilities. An out-of-the-box billion-dollar appropriation guaranteed the rapid
development and deployment of the system, which draws from every source of data in the
field to create a visually comprehensive picture of surrounding airspace.
According to the military, the system will be upgraded post the events of Operation
Freedom. Well get the tapes and look them over but the system is functioning the way
its designed. Jack Spencer agrees: Most important was getting these systems into the
theater of battle [emphasis added] and seeing how all the technology worked together,
versus a controlled environment.
New digital war capabilities are being closely monitored by the top echelons of joint
command structures. The U.S. and NATO are operational moving to joint deployment of
Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data Systems. AFATDS software brings the world of
video games to the battlefield, using lasers, database number crunching and neural
networking to identify and rank targets, select the best weapon and best delivery system
to attack targets and within seconds deliver visual information to commanders. The Third
Infantry Division reported shooting all its artillery fire using AFATDS during the second
Iraq war, Operation Freedom. Explains Lt. Col. Dan Hughes: Its a quantum leap from
where we were in Desert Storm in terms of situational awareness and fire support. AFATDS
gets the job done faster and far more efficiently with fewer rounds. Especially in close
combat in cities, AFATDS lets you take time to verify and do a second check to make sure
youre not doing collateral damage or that there are friendly troops in the area. It lets you
get the right mission out at the right time.
The attack system is installed on laptop computers, communicates securely to central
command and control and, according to Pentagon reports, was used at more than 300
locations via small mobile satellite dishes and latest digital generation of field radios. The
digital video, mobile-linked, satellite tracking, data base enabled, smart attack system was
developed with an initial quarter billion dollars and is seen as a necessary element of all
rapid deployment force projection in theater warfare. AFATDS is just one bit of data on a
dynamic screen of command and control systems
Digital War Is the Name of the Game

The digital age of precision video game attack systems and support infrastructure is in
theater and offering decades of industrial development to follow. Space is being militarized
with satellites aimed and tracking digital targets, relaying command and control
communications and networking interlocked firing systems. At unnamed remote, secure
24/7/365 facilities, highly trained (young) military personnel watch colorful luminescent
monitors and, alongside their superiors in a chain-of-command, make standoff life and
death decisions in a digital world. No one should be surprised when, before the second Iraq
war formally concluded, Sony Video Game Systems had already filed to trademark the term
shock and awe next generation video game action products. The boys role playing their
video games in effect are prepping for future seats in virtual planes, delivering real-world
ordnance.
Network-centric warfare is the name given by Department of Defense futurists to digital
war planning and systems. These planners have reason to continue their work with all due
speed their creation is now the wave of the future, impacting every command system.
Looking back, before WYSIWYG came on the scene, is DARPA 4 DoD, the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency for the Department of Defense. The digital age was
spurred forward as a result of Defense Department efforts during the height of the Cold
War. In little known fact, the Internet itself was born of DARPA. Digital communications
were developed to prevent an electronic beheading of U.S. nuclear command and control.
This story for the most part still remains untold. In retrospect, perhaps much than Reagans
negotiations and hard line politics, the digital systems rolled out first in the eighties can be
seen as having accelerated the demise of the Soviet Union. The Soviets were unable to
match U.S. next generation technological advances, as their weapons systems were trapped
in a vacuum tube, transistor world. The Soviet state planners attempted in economybusting, spending splurges, a futile effort from the start, to match advanced U.S. digital
weapons and communication systems across the gamut of military capability. It can be said
that the Soviets needed to match the West in military capabilities and went bankrupt
trying to compete in the digital age. The Soviets were good at huge, controlled, top-down
systems. They were a failure when it came to agile, fast, diverse, responsive new systems.
The genius of nerds, geeks and tech hippies, like those who called New Mexico home
between Los Alamos-Santa Fe-Sandia (where Bill Gates first came after college to set up
Microsoft) and the Silicon valley between Stanford and adjacent San Francisco and
Berkeley, provided the spark that came out of the sixties in a rush of sci-fi futuristic
thinking.
Although, within the military, secrecy prevailed as a Darpa-network was developed, we
now know that the original digital network systems were designed and prototyped in
New Mexico, a hub of ex-Manhattan Project physicists/engineers and younger long-haired

junior physicists/engineers and high desert dreamers. In fact, the highest per capita
concentration of physicists in the world resided between Albuquerque and Los Alamos in
the 50s/60s and into the 70s and 80s. During the 1950s, at Kirtland Air Force Base in
Albuquerque, scientists from Sandia National Lab secretly worked to create a redundant
system of command and control that was not reliant on electrical transistors. A window of
vulnerability had to be closed U.S. command and control, relying at the time on
transistorized signal transmissions, could be fried by high altitude thermonuclear blasts in
a preemptive Soviet nuclear attack. If the electromagnetic/EMP pulse was strong enough,
and projections were that a series of just a few high altitude explosions arrayed over the
continental U.S. would be strong enough, then transistors that relayed electronic joint
command signals would be disrupted and, in one stroke, U.S. capability to respond to any
sudden nuclear strike by the Soviets would be eliminated.
As a result, along came DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Within
months the beginnings of todays Internet were born, like the first atomic bomb, in the
Western desert. The key to the new military communication system was transistor-less
fiber optic digitized light sent over fiber optic networks. This system was designed so that
it could not be taken out by thermo-nuclear blasts with their electromagnetic pulse. While
American worried in the 50s about nuclear bombs and in the 60s about backyard bomb
shelters, the original nerds-in-the-desert were hard at work. The first tests at Kirtland Air
Force base, adjacent to the Albuquerque airport and next to an extensive under-mountain
nuclear weapon storage facility, were conducted utilizing a multi-story trestle constructed
without any metal to prevent spurious results and then EMP tests were conducted.
First were existing electronic systems, then varied new fiber optics and digital light
systems were rolled onto the trestle structure and bombarded by high-energy
electromagnetic waves. Voila, light not tubes were the future and communication systems
were quickly and quietly put in place, one of the first connecting NORAD/Colorado Springs
to its early warning radar and Midwest underground missile silos. The Kirtland/Sandia, Los
Alamos and national lab/DARPA project scientists at Livermore/Berkeley, the University of
California and Defense Department were a first shot fired and tested. The public record of a
new internet came with a test between UCLA and Berkeley and the rush to development
was on the digital world and digital war had arrived, first as a defense communication
system and then over time as a network of digital communications, operating systems,
networking, hardware and software powering war command and control.
In Berkeley, a hot-bed in the 60s and 70s, Wozniaks and Wozgarages were gelling.
Groups of academics, engineers and tinkerers began to play, like garage bands, tinkering
with DIY, American genius and do-it-yourself projects brought home from the U of
Bezerkeley. The beginnings of the Silicon revolution shared among themselves the latest,
greatest breakthroughs. Home- and garage- built computers in the 1970s were soon tech
transferring, start-ups began to multiply and by mid 1980s personal computing and digital
networking were a booming private sector business. Stanford kicked in with a blast of
world-class intellectual development, while nearby San Joses orchards were turned into
research parks and high tech firms. IBM was an anchor tenant in the whole mosh up and
the start ups were soon creating fortunes, with the largest venture capital firms arriving on
scene like a modern gold rush that was re-creating the Golden State.
Bill Gates left Albuquerque and returned home to Seattle after his father provided funds to
bail him out of a legal dispute (speeding in his Porsche) on the condition hed move
his start-up back home to Seattle. The Albuquerque law firm Bill Gates approached for
representation rejected stock in Microsoft to pay for legal bills and so they too entered a
Biz Hall of Fame but not in a way memorable for foresight.
The incubation of New Mexico, national labs and U.S. government money set the Internet
on its way and now we witness the software of Microsoft and other more versatile firms
and hundreds of thousands of programmers race forward. The beginning of the Internet
infrastructure, the DARPA command and control system, is long forgotten in the rush, but
DARPA and an initial pipe between Los Alamos and Albuquerque were the first bits in a
digital backbone of the digital age. Russian scientists and programmers, as well as every
nations military, are now attempting to play catch up as the U.S. consolidates and deploys
the latest generation of precision digital systems that have field tested, battle proven.
While the former Soviet, now Russian, engineers attempt to upgrade their outmoded MIR
space station or develop competitive weapons (without in-theater, field testing), the U.S.
military moves aggressively to maintain its vast superiority in warfare. The rumbling
Soviet tanks deployed to Afghanistan and their lumbering and loud helicopters that were
easy targets for Mujahideen/Taliban fighters, as the Soviet empire collapsed in one last
futile and bankrupting military struggle from 1979 to 1988, foreshadowed the fall of the
old ways of the cold war.
New network-centric advances planned as part of an estimated $500 billion U.S. defense
budget in 2004 (not including black budget, secret spending, related executive
department spending) include: The Forrester Project, also called no more Vietnam, which
is a series of system upgrades to deal with the problems of jungle warfare. The Forrester
system uses slow moving, low flying drones/remote operated vehicles and roto-craft with
low frequency radar. Target identification drones called Jigsaw and SPI-3D provide
precision 3-D digital imaging of targets Forrester sensor systems detect allowing
commanders to apply simulations and order real-time, smart attacks.
Missile-carrying drones are also intended to prevent the U.S. from falling into the trap the
Soviets fell into in theaters like Afghanistan remote operated vehicles, ROV's in the skies
above Afghanistan can fire on demand, are quiet and near-invisible to the eyes on the
ground and can peer through weather and provide high-resolution images that nearly
identify individuals by the shape of their images and bio-metrics.
The Armys Future Combat System reportedly plan to link manned and robotic ground
units with unmanned aircraft in a rapid deployment units that can be deployed anywhere
in the world within 96 hours. Dr. John Arquilla, who helped invent the Forrester concept
in the mid-90s as a think-tank researcher at Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, CA, a center
of war research and development from the Vietnam-era forward. Arguilla adds a caveat:
Advanced information technology makes us tremendously efficient, but it also makes us
tremendously vulnerable. The Pentagons planners anticipate the threats of war hackers,
who would electronically attack their systems and they have deployed layered rings of
backup systems that, if hacked and degraded, will go down gradually while on-line
redundant systems kick in as needed.
Automatic repair and reconfiguration of network-centric systems are components of the
new digital systems, according to Arquilla. Satellite transmissions can repair programs on
demand. The first Iraq war was an analog war using pre-digital communication and
command/targeting systems carried over from the seventies and eighties. The second Iraq
war, system-wide, was digital. The current war in the region is testing the latest, greatest
digital, with overhead ROVs being among the most valued search and destroy assets.
Space-command and Central-command are each monitoring their forward-deployed
systems and orchestrating rapid response from afar. Precise information digitally delivered
and communicated on the battlefield has never been more important, explains Dr. Allan
Steinhardt of DARPA. The warfare of the future is being tested today, a cyberwar where U.S.
dominance and vast superiority increases by the second in a 24/7 /365 world. Our
fascination with everything digital, from digital high definition broadcasting to the digital
game industry has been effectively translated to the science of war and in this digital
universe, few reporters are reporting on the home front what war continues to be not
digital blips but real bodies.
Independent Reporting and Independent Spirits
During the Vietnam war, stories like Jonathan Schells New Yorker expos describing the
destruction of the village of Ben Suc had been published prior to My Lai, but were not
widely distributed. Of the hundreds of accredited correspondents in Vietnam, few cabled or
sent back video footage covering wars impact on civilians and conduct of the war apart
from the wars progress, weapons used and estimated enemy body counts. When the My
Lai story was distributed by independent, foundation-funded Dispatch News Service, did it
result in broader media coverage of the reality of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos? Absolutely
not. In fact, the shock of war, the atrocities, death, destruction and lies as a real picture
emerged, the mainstream American press retreated.
The number of correspondents accredited by the MACV (Military Assistance Command,
Vietnam) dropped every year, from 600 plus in 1968-69, to less than 300 by 1972. In mid1974 only 35 correspondents remained. Although there were major escalations of the war
between 1969-73, creating some 3 million new refugees, Americans were being told that
the war was winding down, while the numbers of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians
being killed, maimed and made homeless were at record levels. In 1971, more civilians
were killed and made homeless than any comparable time in history, according to
international organization reports. The American people heard next to nothing about this.
While killing was at its height, the news coverage was at its worst. U.S. editors and TV
producers, and their parent companies, had decided there wasnt going to be spending on
any additional series of investigative stories covering the character of the war machine. The
goal of announced U.S. policy was the destruction of the rebel economy and social fabric
and pacification of the people in the countryside. The Air Force carried out over 12,000
raids a month in 1969. Few in the worlds most advanced societies ever got their minds
around what it meant to deliver death and destruction on such a level. At a time when
nearly every structure in North Vietnam, outside Hanoi and Haiphong, was being targeted
and/or demolished, one could find the U.S. press quoting McGeorge Bundy that the U.S.
bombardment was the most restrained in modern warfare.
Perhaps, given this madness, it took a film like Apocalypse Now to render the horror into a
vivid reality that could be felt with a semblance of understanding, albeit years after the war
had ended. I remember John Milius, the films writer in 1969, who at USC film school was
well known for a glory-of-war point of view. His scripts over the years created classic
American war heroes, but when Francis Ford Coppola took the original Milius Apocalypse
screenplay and turned it into a journey up river, into the heart of darkness, it was less
Milius and more a snapshot of strange days. Martin Sheen plays Captain B.A. Willard, 4th
Recon Company, 10th Battalion, 173rd Airborne Brigade. Colonel Kharnage, played by
Robert Duvall, strides into view and orders Gunners Mate Third Class Lance Johnson, from
Malibu, to surf as mortar shells fall. Duvall is impervious to the danger, appreciating the
smell of Napalm in the morning. The front cover of Life magazine shows Marlon Brando,
Kurtz in the movie, in super close-up with pockmarked face, lifeless eyes and shaved head.
The film that opens with Jim Morrisons song, The End, closes with cascading acts of horror.
Perhaps future generations who watch this vision of hell in Vietnam will momentarily
understand the sickness of war. The terrible physical and psychological wounds of veterans
who return home do not begin to account for the damage of war on body and soul. As the
U.S. Veterans administration under serves returning troops, we watch a new generation
who know little to nothing about the Vietnam war as it was initiated and fought, go to war
without much reflection on the consequences of war for tens of millions of people a few
decades earlier, an incalculable level of destruction that will carry on for generations. We
do not see how war from afar is conducted, we do not feel the concussion, hear the booms,
smell the results and typically our eyes glaze over when we read the statistics, but some at
home can project the consequences.
Nixons attorney general, John Mitchell, before he went to jail, had it right to think there
were conspiracies. There was a network of people who rose up against the conspiracy and
paranoia in the offices and underground bunkers of the White House. When the President
and his men violated the laws and Constitution, few Americans objected, they believed the
stories emanating from the White House until they learned the extent of the lawlessness.
For years, as the war escalated, the American people wanted to believe what they were
being told, of the necessity of war, the righteousness of the cause, the truths they believed
because they were the words of US Presidents and leaders. It took the revelations of Sy
Hersh, Dan Ellsberg, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to set the record straight and turn
Americans toward a road of skepticism leading toward impeachment of a sitting president.
Years later, I watch the pattern again. Weve learned little about how power can corrupt.
The founders of the nation were sensitive to concentration of power and consciously
attempted in the drafting the Constitution to prevent the abuse of power through checks
and balances. In 1973 the U.S. Congress passed the War Powers Act responding to the
abuse of power and actions of the President in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger in his book The
Imperial Presidency would write of presidential power so specious and peremptory as to
imply a radical transformation of the traditional polity.
Roger Morris, who served in Nixons White House as a national security advisor, resigning
in protest with Anthony Lake and Bill Watts when Kissinger-Nixon launched the secret
invasion of Cambodia, also has written extensively of the imperial presidency and
recalled in an April 2003 column entitled From Republic to Empire that by the mid 1970s,
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Nixon had left Washington in disrepute. Congress reasserted itself in
the War Powers Act, which limited the unilateral power of the president to go to war and
take certain other steps. Presidential authority shrank under Gerald Ford and Jimmy
Carter. As Capitol Hill and the White House divided between Republican and Democrats,
the traditional shifting balance between the legislative and executive branches continued
throughout the 1980s and 1990s under the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton. An imperial presidency seemed the relic of a bygone era. Now George
W. Bush has sharply reversed that history. His empire began with the surrender of
Congress, a collapse almost as sweeping as the fall of the Baghdad regime the White
House was ceded sovereign authority to justify and launch full-scale hostilities a right
vested by the Constitution in the Congress precisely to prevent such fateful power falling to
any one president and a handful of advisers.
[Update: Roger Morris and I share political affinities Weve collaborated and Rogers
analyses of Mideast and Near-east conflict is hard to match in its depth. His political
biographies are award winning. Weve co-authored a wide-ranging national security policy
piece for the Green Institute Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for A
New World a foundation for the 2006 conference in DC entitled Surviving Victory.
Conference participant/contributors included Roger, Winslow Wheeler, Charles Pena, Susan

Rice (in 2009, Ms. Rice was to become U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, then National
Security Advisor in 2013); Julia Sweig and Steve Clemons of the Washington Note.]
Looking back today to the war in Vietnam, for years few stood up to challenge the
escalation and flag waving positions of the media. Few spoke of the civil war or the historic
opposition of Vietnam toward China. During the war in the Far East, opposition from
Congress was rare. A handful of brave senators, count them on one hand, William Fulbright
and Eugene McCarthy, Congressmen such as George Brown, Jr. and Wayne Morse did speak
out.
Speaking out in the mid-sixties against a war that was sold as a war against a monolithic
Communist empire came, of course, with a high price. The Cold War was being waged and
Vietnam was a battle in a multiple-front war against godless communists. Later, just a few
years after the Bay of Pigs and a nuclear showdown where the two nations came close to
mutual annihilation during the Cuban missile crisis, the U.S. escalation in Vietnam and
deaths of hundreds of thousands and public opposition finally moved Congress to reluctant
opposition to the policies of Johnson, McBundy and Rostow, Nixon and Kissinger. Brave
young men and women stood up to oppose a government that had lied about cause of war,
reasons for war, intelligence for war and had, as result, broken its trust with the people.
What went missing were the facts of the war. In June of 1971, the Pentagon Papers
corrected the record and the N.Y. Times and Washington Post began to publish these
documents. The initial volley was a battle of freedom to publish, a constitutional crisis, in
fact, as the U.S. government brought its full weight and authority against one man and his
attempt to publish a history of the Vietnam war. The Nixon administration would resort to
censorship, censorship prior-to-publication, setting aside the First Amendment and arguing
national security demanded that the history of the war, to be revealed in Ellsbergs
document, now being called the Pentagon Papers, be enjoined, stop the presses
The government clearly had reason to block publication the Pentagon Papers revealed the
multiple deceptions of the war as it was, in fact, initiated and waged. The papers proved
conclusively that Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon, the State Department, the Pentagon, all were
involved in a cover up. Dan Ellsbergs personal, whistleblowers decision to declassify the
papers was an act of conscience and courage. He chose to stop following orders (he was
working to compile a primary source history of the war at the order of Robert McNamara)
and he acted to release the facts to the public in an attempt to bring democratic discussion
and debate to the gravest of subjects war and peace. The American people and
community of nations, as a result, came to see the war as misguided policy waged within a
deceitful web of lies
The cold war mentality ran deep. The nation was at risk of attack, it was alleged Vietnam
was connected to China which was connected to the Soviet Union, and harsh measures
were justified war was called for in the halls of Congress as if Vietnam was an imminent
threat to the US. Let the domino of Vietnam fall and next it would be the United States at
risk of falling Amazing that the argument held sway, looking back now, but there it is, fear
and loathing. Yet in times of perceived threats and the drums of war, theres no greater
need for an informed public. The war in Vietnam, undeclared by Congress, should have
been debated for what it was. The facts needed to be put in front of the American people,
yet the facts of war were rarely communicated. We went to war knowing little of the
region, history, cultures, the ancient rivalries, antipathy between Vietnams people and the
Chinese, not alliance with the Chinese, the conflicts between ethnic groups, tribes and
religions. The war in Southeast Asia brought home war as it is being waged again today
with little knowledge and much disinformation about the Mideast and Near-east or the
history, the internal conflicts, the level of threat. The layers of risk the U.S. places itself in is
comparable in a way to the Soviet spending in Afghanistan over a decade of failed war. We
spend like mad men as we attempt to subjugate peoples that have not been subjugated
throughout history. How many Americans care of know about the complexity of our
current wars and whether our efforts, as they are, are worth the price being paid today and
tomorrow?
I miss it, the Cold War. It gave you a reason to get up in the morning.
Harry Rabbit Angstrom, Rabbit at Rest, John Updike
The right to speak out on war and peace is without doubt what the founders had in mind
when they drafted the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Criticizing government is
fundamental to democracy. Under the First Amendment, as the highest law of the land,
there is no greater offense than censorship and prior restraint. If Benjamin Franklin were
alive today, hed tell you as he wiped inked-stained hands on his printers apron: the
protection of the right of free speech derives from rights that form the foundation of a free
people in a democratic society. There could be no more dangerous action than to grant the
government overarching rights to unlawfully control free speech and freedom of the press.
I.F. Stone, the incorruptible commentator and writer of an unmatched investigative news
journal, put it bluntly: The first rule of journalism is that governments lie. George Seldes
wrote of the bedrock need for strong, unwavering truth tellers. His In Fact publication
regularly spoke to this need for facts - for Sy Hersh-style reporting as a foundation for
democratic decision-making.
Democracy demands independent watchdogs, investigative reporters, prying questions,
open eyes and healthy skepticism. Going back to the American Revolution, dissenting
voices were the power that threatened the King and delivered a democratic Republic.
Conservative Tories supported the crown and business-as-usual while writers and
patriots, courageous voices and pamphleteers like Tom Paine stood up to King George and
the dominance of the British Empire to proclaim, Give me liberty or give me death!
Freedom of speech was not proclaimed from a soapbox but from dissent and activism, the
sine qua non of democracy in action. Dictators and kings, generals and British imperialists
were confronted by a vox populi speaking truth to power. The American revolution, and a
radical tradition, was born of dissent, committees of correspondence and pamphlets
printed within shouting distance of the Liberty Bell.
____________________
Chapter Four Personal Politics

____________________________________________________________________________________________
My country right or wrong; when right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
Carl Schurz, Major General, Civil War, Secretary of the Interior
I dont know why we think, just because were mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might
for right Were going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to peace...
U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, Oregon
he climate of sunny California was ripe for politics as practiced by young University
of Southern California politicos like Don Segretti and Dwight Chapin. Hollywood,
Beverly Hills, Disneyland and a famously trendy Southern California lifestyle
contributed to a sense of entitlement. A politics of image was invented in this arena, not
just with the image-making of Ronald Reagan but in the creation of a Spencer-Roberts style
of campaigning that plays again every time a president goes before the cameras and acts
with Reaganaire flair. The torch has been passed, person-to-person, from Southern Cal
politicos to the inner circles of D.C. politicos running the world with professional
Hollywood skills.
Before Reagan was Nixon politics, a different Southern California image, dark and sweaty
under TV lights, tough and vengeful as if the hard-boiled private dick novels and films of
Raymond Chandler and Robert Towne came to life. Nixons legacy of politics got a start at
USC, my alma mater, a few degrees separated from SCs Reagan money and power brokers,
but in Hollywood-time the Nixon 50s was an eon of separation from the Reagan 70s. USCs
Pat Nixon became the Presidents wife. Herb Kalmbach became his attorney. Ex-fraternity
row, SC political operatives were hired on by the Nixon team to do what needed to be done.
They were the dirty tricksters. Don Segretti developed his stock-in-trade and bag of toolsand-tricks long before he and the plumbers were busted in the Watergate complex and
the clock began ticking toward Nixons resignation. In an up-close and personal way,
Segretti left the scene-of-the-crime but before he exited stage right, he shared his political
skill set with two men responsible for shaping the modern face of American politics as it is
now practiced Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
Politics is personal. Look behind the scenes, whats going on back stage, the back-stories of
the players. Look for the motivations and then follow the money trail, itll tell the tale at the
end of the day. No pay, no play is the driver. Follow the politics and political financing, the
handoffs between political ops, the payoffs and you will begin to see the story arc, the
principals, operations, the drama and, when dots are connected, a fleshed-out story.
Lets look back at the beginnings of a story, at the University of Southern California. The
four years I was at USC was an anomalous blip in the late-60s when, apart from a hundred
or so years of conservative leanings, SC became a center for California college students

organizing Vietnam war protests. Featuring the oldest, largest fraternity-sorority social
scene west of the Mississippi, SC has won more national collegiate championships than
any university and is well known for more than its sports teams and illustrious graduates
like John Wayne, Pat Nixon, Tom Sellick, George Lucas and O.J. Simpson.
In the 1960s Donald Segretti was a frat rat who played exceptional hard hardball politics
on the SCs fraternity row. His frat buddies called their style of politics ratfucking. The
deal was to hit the other guy hard, using inventive, over-the-top dirty tricks and laugh
about it, because all is fair in love and war, and war is politics by other means. Take no
prisoners, dont forget payback, do whats necessary to win. This style of politics has
created a legacy thats has come to dominate current American politics. Its hardball Nixon Hollywood Reagan marriage.
Before Reagan, Southern California power brokers had Richard Nixon as their man. His
inability to speak to the camera, or directly to the audience behind the camera, was
unworkable in an age of broadcast television. The Nixon drama was also behind-the-scenes,
a different style of hardball politics that was accurately captured in Roger Morris awardwinning biography, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the Rise of an American Politician. Rogers
investigative reporting is similar to Sy Hershs in depth and intensity. Working briefly with
him during his research of Partners in Power, the Clintons and Their America, was a lesson
in the importance of going after the story in the shadows. Characters like Donald Segretti,
who honed a tool-kit of dirty trickster skills, took them on the road and passed them on to
others, who passed them on to todays political operatives, play pivotal roles in
understanding whos who in presidential politics. Politics, as practiced by the Nixon,
Reagan and Bush teams, and also by devotees of Bill Clinton, marry personal politics and
big money. The combos big box office.
Opposition oppo politics is hard-hitting politics, political tricks, behind-the-scenes
wheeling dealing money massive amounts of money, 365 day, constant campaigning
electioneering messaging, mixed with Hollywood image-making public relations, focus
groups, push polling, spin and delivery. Each has its place in the Karl Rove operational
playbook. Segretti got the ball rolling and passed the game plan to Lee Atwater, Karl Rove
and Roger Fox Aisles.
Dirty tricks and enemies lists went full bore with Nixon. In retrospect, Segretti can be said
to be a shot heard round the political world. He revolutionized politics before he and the
Watergate plumbers were flushed out of the shadows. Dirty politics cant take the
sunshine, Jim Hightower might say, but the legacy of pay-for-play, insider politics was
primed and the trigger pulled. The Nixon crew worked best behind-the-scenes, folks like
Murray Chotiner, special counsel to the President, who invented the political attack tactics
that helped shape an era that went over the top in the early 70s.
In the 80s, college Republicans and Young Republican leaders like Jack Abramoff of later
infamy, adopted the tactics of not playing by the rules and reveled in a self-righteous
attack politics of true believers. The tactics of dirty politics was enshrined in the Reagan
era. Young Republican politicos became believers, railing against forty years of
Democratic party corruption. Government is the problem was their rallying cry,
Democrats are the enemy. Beginning in Texas, Segretti took the attack message and shared
what he knew in a close, personal working relationship with Lee Atwater and Karl Rove.
Atwater went on to become the strategist who, with Roger Aisles, got Dukakis during the
1988 campaign, which led to war room politics and an instant response mentality that
carried over into the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign. The ripples of Lee Atwater produced a
counter-hardball style of politics within a Democratic Party that fought back by hitting the
Republican Party using an alternate brand of Atwater-Ailes-Rove tactics and tools. So it
goes, attacks and counterattacks
When the Democratic Party candidate, Michael Dukakis, told the 1988 campaign staff in
response to a series of revolving door Willie Horton attack ads, that he was above the fray,
repeating I am what I am and would not stoop to low level campaigning, he went down
hard. He didnt counter attack when his record was erroneously portrayed and mocked. He
took a high road of his own choice and his tracking poll numbers plunged daily. Soon he
and George H.W. Bush were running neck and neck.
Dennis Thomson, a close friend with whom I worked on the campaign and who was deputy
chief of staff to Governor Dukakis, shook his head in disbelief, as did George
Stephanapoulus, James Carville, Susan Estrich and all the campaign staff none of us would
ever again sit still when fired upon. The lessons learned in 88 were critical in the success of
Bill Clinton when he came under fire in 1992 and was proactive, not reactive, in his
response to attacks on his character and campaign. [An instant response to attacks
strategy was also carried by me into the 1992 Brown for President campaign.] Another key
learning of the Dukakis campaign that carried forward was about image-making. The
Reagan team had migrated to the Bush team and brought their image making, media
messaging skills with them. They would set up a photo op overlooking Boston Bay and, as
Reagan had done on the brim of the Grand Canyon when graphically projecting an image of
environmental protection (although his words and record belied the powerfully
communicated pro-environment images), George H.W. Bushs public relation team
communicated through the assembled media with cameras and lights and background
perfectly positioned, then followed up with a Boston Harbor ad that ran nationwide.
When a group of Dukakis staffers pushed for him to wear different suits, to try some
makeup under the lights to not look pasty and washed out by the spots, to pay attention to
his photo and camera opportunities by having professionals come in, those pushing this
(myself included) were called Hollywood types and dismissed by Ivy League types.
Michaels pasty complexion on camera was not reassuring, nor were his stooped shoulders
accentuated by old suits from a Boston Back Bay wardrobe. Bottom line, Dukakis didnt
learn from the success of Reagan-style presentation politics and wasnt ready to confront
oppo tactics. He was asleep at the wheel and by the time he took his helmet off (the
televised clip showed the Governor sitting in a U.S. Army tank, looking out the hatch) and
changed course, it was too late.
Although toward the end of his campaign, he agreed to fight back and pay attention to his
image as he barnstormed across the country, it was a lesson in futility and foreshadowing
of the future of U.S. party politics.
The Republican image-makers handled the Democrats with ease in 1988. The low road Lee
Atwater traveled (and was later to disavow what it brought to American politics) has
become the norm. Karl Rove, who carries tactics personally passed to him from Donald
Segretti and Lee Atwater, has gone on to become George W. Bushs chief tactician and
strategist, the acknowledged power broker and man behind the curtain in shaping the
White House political operations.
Focusing in closer, behind the scenes, the stories are dramatic even as they shape the
history of the nation. Advisors to President George W. Bush exercise unprecedented globeshaking power, access and influence. U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a member of the
inner circle who has a close, personal relationship with the president, explains that
President is mindful of the importance of the moment and knows he is making historychanging decisions, but doesnt keep a diary or other personal record of the events that
will form his legacy. Aides take notes, but theres no stenographer in most meetings, nor
are they videotaped or recorded. The story will be told anecdotally later on, but not now.
There will be no transcripts of what Vice President Dick Cheney advises, or what Dick
Cheneys roundtable of energy industry advisors is advising, or neo-conservatives,
religious groups or counter-terror experts are advising. There will be no transcribed
record, so it seems, of what Karl Rove is politically orchestrating on all fronts as the
President shapes his own, the nations and worlds legacy.
The Nixon Watergate tapes, with their hateful words and moves against his enemies list,
will not be repeated. John Dean, who with Alexander Butterfield acted to break the word on
the Nixon tape recording when he was White House Counsel to the president, warned in
2003 that if the Bush administration intentionally manipulated or misrepresented
intelligence to get Congress to authorize and the public to support military action in Iraq,
that that would be worse than Watergate If Bush has taken Congress and the nation
into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of
national security intelligence data, if proven, could be a high crime under the
Constitutions impeachment clause. Recall that when Richard Nixon resigned, he was
about to be impeached by the House of Representatives for misusing the CIA and FBI. After
Watergate, all presidents are on notice that manipulating or misusing any agency of the
executive branch improperly is a serious abuse of presidential power.
The decisions of the president remain out of sight. Carefully orchestrated appearances are
now the norm. Where Tony Blair, a partner of the president, must goes before the British
Parliament to explain and defend his policies to front- and back-benchers, the President of
the United States has held few press conferences and fewer debates. He has spoken of his
faith, his prayer, his firm confidence in his judgment and, from the beginning of his first
term to the day of his Executive Order to commence the war in Iraq, hes given fewer
opportunities to the press to question him since presidents first began giving televised
press conferences.
Yet, the President has set a record for more campaign fundraising trips than any president
in U.S. history and in 2003 the re-election team announced a $200 million goal for the 2004
campaign. The President stands as the all-time record holder for most corporate campaign
donations. His biggest lifetime contributor, Ken Lay, former CEO of Texas-based Enron, also
presided over the largest corporate bankruptcy in history.
Fundraising for the 2004 Bush campaign is bringing a frontier feel and big payday. To join
the presidents Pioneers club you had to raise $100,000 and up. Over 600 corporate
execs, lobbyists and developers signed up to be Pioneers. Meet and greet cash cow
barbecues featured collectable Texas mementos passed out to donors and friends. The
best barbecue events were at the ranch of the president in Crawford, Texas, which had its
own commander-in-chief, president labeled barbeque sauce passed out to all. There were
Silver Star, State of Texas belt buckles and more access, appointments to government
boards, legislative favors. If you wanted to move up from being a Pioneer, then be a
Ranger, by raising $200,000 and more. The Texas-size Bush money effort has brought
big-time success the $200 million raised has doubled the Bush 2000 campaign and is near
10 times the size of the Clinton 1996 budget.
Its the most cold-blooded and efficient way of raising money in the history of politics,
said Chuck Lewis at the Center for Public Integrity. These arent your average Americans.
Theyre the most well-healed interests with vested interests in government. Greg Palast
nails down the point: its the best government money can buy. In 2004, over a billion
dollars is on target to put Democrats and Republicans in office. Virtually every dollar
carries strings attached influencing and controlling the agendas of Congress and state
legislatures.
With the least amount of Congressional oversight of any modern president, the Bush
administration governed with authority. Government and big money went hand-in-hand,
regulations were rolled back as the president and his backers realized few Americans had
the time or energy to pay attention. Money bought access, power and unprecedented inside
trading and privacy while business is conducted behind closed doors, the public is
swayed through carefully orchestrated media messages and press relations, the rare press
conference carefully scripted and rehearsed. The White House press corps, with few
exceptions like Russell Mokhiber of Public Citizen, offer up softball questions. Ask the
wrong question or follow-up a question too hard and expect to lose your access. The rules
are clear. Karl Rove guides, sets ground rules and arranges the game plan on all fronts
scheduling the Presidents perpetual campaign with carefully orchestrated photo ops and
speeches with Reagan set pieces, backgrounds and lighting, pushing campaign fundraising
every day, week, month scheduling, setting agendas, rewarding and punishing with
undisguised political zeal.
Bushs guide, who is credited with putting the president into the governors seat before
orchestrating the 2000 squeaker of an election, is a specimen of American politics at the
summit and in the trenches. In the beginning, as a 21-year old Young Republican in Texas,
Karl Rove worked for Don Segretti, learned from the master as it were, and later hooked up
with incoming Republican National Committee/RNC chair, George H. Walker Bush. Rove's
litany of tricks on behalf of the 1972 Nixon campaign put him on the national stage as an up
n comer. His political pranks were relished by the dirty tricks crowd who saw him as a
rising star. He led the campaign to paint World War II B-24 pilot, George McGovern, a
decorated war hero, as a nave peacenik. In his mid-level career, Rove was known for
Atwater like disinformation maneuvers. Rove went after presidential candidate McGovern,
Tom Eagleton, Ed Muskie, George Wallace, Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Walter Mondale, Al
Gore, Shirley Chisholm, Paul Tsongas, Michael Dukakis, Joe Biden, Bob Dole, Bill Clinton,
Ross Perot, John McCain all felt the bite of Segretti-Atwater-Rove attack politics.
A Roving Legacy of Attack Politics
Lee Atwater recanted his attack political legacy as he was dying from brain cancer. He had
been the hitman for the Reagan-Bush team and shaped how politics was practiced. In
college in Texas hed managed a campaign for Karl Rove against Terry Dolan, who went on
to become one of the inventors of soft money campaigning that created a veritable
politics-for-payola bartering system and Atwater had formed the National Conservative
Political Action Committee before he died of AIDS complications in 1986.
Dolan and Rove were close allies of Charlie Black, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone who, in
direct succession to Spencer-Roberts pioneering work for Reagan in the 1970s, became the
chief public PR/political consulting firm for Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign. Atwater
had joined Black, Manafort and Stone after the 1984 election and with Dwight Chapin and
another of Nixons dirty tricksters, Fred Malek, were key in directing the 1988 Bush-Quayle
campaign. In 1980, Karl Rove had been the first person George H.W. Bush hired for his
presidential campaign. At the time, Atwater was chairman of the Republican National
Committee and with Rove as intermediary became one of Bush's closest political advisors.
In 1981, after Bush became Ronald Reagan's vice president, Rove had set up his own
political consulting firm, Karl Rove & Co. His initial client was Bill Clements, the first
Republican in a century to become Texas governor. In 1984, Rove shaped the far-right
campaign of Texan Phil Gramm, who defeated Democrat Lloyd Doggett in the race for U.S.
Senate. He sank his teeth into the Reagan-Bush direct mail campaign and made his name on
the national scene, while his hard charging political stratagem for Texas was successfully
turning the Democratic state into a Republican bastion. Rove became George W. Bushs
strategist when he announced his candidacy for Governor in November 1993. By the end of
January 1994, Bush had spent $613,930 on the race against Governor Ann Richards. Over
half, $340,579, went to Karl Rove.
Roves influence in Texas politics and political muscle became the stuff of Texas legend. In a
state that had been dominated by Democrats, mostly right-wing, the Rove-led Republican
stampede captured every statewide elected office by 1999 and Texas-size helpings of state
legislative seats and law and order judgeships. As Governor, George W. Bush went on to
prove his law and order bent by signing more execution orders than any governor in U.S.
history, making Texas the death penalty capitol of the nation. The governors tenure is not
open for public review, however. His papers have been deposited, under seal, in the Texas
library of George H.W. Bush.
While Democrats on the national scene duck-and-run, lacking a strong platform and
direction, Rove hits them hard as they run. His wedge issue approach to prying swing
Democratic voters away from the Democratic Party was unstoppable as the Democrats
moved politically away from their traditional base and failed to match the hardball tactics
and image-making of the Reagan years. Segretti-Atwater-Rove, one after another, had the
formula down and it hasnt changed much over the years. Control the agenda, control the
message and messenger, hit hard, hit first, dont look back, stay on message...
War went to the top of the agenda after 9/11/2001. Rove knows the power of the flag, the
rallying cry of the Alamo, the deep and abiding American support for U.S. troops in harms
way. The official campaign, Rove decides, will begin with a September 2004 date for the
Republican Partys Nominating Convention, in New York, the latest date its ever been held
before the general election, but near the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. According to the
Rove-drafted timeline, the President is to wage a brief, targeted campaign. The plan? To
spend the $200 million campaign war chest in concentrated fire over the course of ninety
days. War and homeland security are held out to be the key issues in a victorious campaign.
Roves political agenda for the 2004 presidential campaign, leaked to the press at the end of
2002, lists Campaign Signature Issues and top of the Rove-Bush reelection strategy is
War on Terrorism; number two on the list is Protecting the Homeland.
The campaign will focus on rallying around the flag and American patriotism. Bushs war
policies will be front stage center. But in September, Rove is faced with Congressional calls
for a special prosecutor to investigate his role in White House leaks outing a CIA agent,
Valerie Plame. The story grows as its learned that Plames husband, Joe Wilson, is at the
center of the main claim used by the administration to launch the Iraq war secret nuclear
weapon development by Iraq claimed to be a proven fact, the evidence, uranium imports
from Niger. Plames husband, as an acting ambassador, had been given the assignment of
investigating the Niger claim and he debunks it. Rove claims he has no prior knowledge of
Plames CIA role, even as the administration, led by the Vice Presidents chief of staff,
attempts to rebut Wilsons claim that the war is being foisted on Americans. Claims that the
administration is manipulating intelligence are denied and the President says for the
record he knows Karl isnt involved. Administration supporters rally to explain, as Ben
Stein does on MSNBC, that he knows Karl, and Karl is a patriot and circumspect, that its
not like Karl to be involved in such deeds. What does one say to such inanity (though Stein
has made a career playing inane characters)?
The White House vehemently denied Monday that Karl Rove, the Presidents top political strategist,
exposed the classified identity of a CIA officer who is married to a key critic of the Adminstrations Iraq
policy Rove wasnt involved, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. The President
knows he wasnt involved. Its simply not true Democrats said they doubted the ability of Attorney
General Ashcroft to conduct a credible investigation of the White House and called for an
independent investigation [by] special counsel.
Knight Ridder, September 30, 2003
Texan Molly Ivins doesnt buy it and doesnt buy the Administration line that varies from
mushroom clouds to WMDs being delivered "over the U.S. east coast" by unmanned drones
(incredibly, a case was made that balsa wood drone airplanes, along the lines of a few
models that were discovered in Iraq after the first war, could bomb America.) It takes this
type of nonsense to get Molly Ivins inspired and Ivins was 'inspired' by watching Bush and
Rovian politics for years, and writing them up. One of journalisms greats, she doesnt just
know where the bodies are buried in Texas, she skewers deserving politicos with a wry
eye. Her columns are bullseye accurate and the Rovian era in Texas provided material by
the bucketful. Off-shore corporate havens were a favorite. She points to tax shelters the
Texas oil industry loves, talk about Dallas and Houston, take the profits elsewhere, its
Enron-time as moneys moved in bushels, millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions,
billions. Some brave souls in Congress, noticing the budget deficit, trade deficit, national
debt, attempted to effect what Ivins pegged and under the Wellstone Amendment, one of
Senator Wellstones last acts, American corporations who receive homeland security
contracts would have to pay U.S. taxes, not dodge paying taxes with off-shore, foreign
addresses. Republicans, led by Texan Dick Armey, majority leader, block the amendment,
the cost to the Treasury an estimated $50 billion. Ivins chips in: If this is what Republicans
want to stand for, fine with me. Their leadership has thwarted all efforts to have a debate
on a separate bill, the Corporate Patriot Enforcement Act, a bipartisan bill to deny benefits
to corporations that flee to tax havens. In Texas, the home of the blunt, we call legislators
who sell out the people in order to kiss the butts of their campaign contributors whores.
Ivins doesnt stop there, she zeroes in on personal politics behind the scenes. And why
would Republicans do such a despicable thing? Well, lets look the lobbyists hired to fight
the offshore provision: former Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole (paid by
Tyco), former House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Archer, Bush family confidant Charlie
Black, former House Appropriations Committee Chair Robert Livingston, former Sen.
Dennis DeConcini (of the Keating Five) and Reagan White House chief of staff Kenneth
Duberstein. Heres the good news: If the people ever put up enough money, we could get
exactly the same team to argue for our side. Thats what I mean by whores. The Homeland
Security bill was 35 pages long when President Bush, who had long opposed it, did a 180
in the summer [before the midterm election] and pretended he invented it. He decided to
support it instead of ignoring the proposal by the Democrats (one of those down the
memory hole moments of the DC press corps, which keeps announcing the bills passage is
a major victory for Bush.
Roves political decision to embrace homeland security, as a patriotic act, and his
positioning it as an administration proposal, when it wasnt, did produce a Republican
Congress in 2002. He also took the Patriot Act into the center of the campaign. There was
virtually no discussion or scrutiny of the Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 in response to
9/11, and though its provisions enabled an unprecedented level of government collection
of data on American across all electronic channels of communication, who could argue,
without having an opportunity to argue, that the bill profoundly violated constitutional
rights to privacy. The Act was positioned, brilliantly by Rove, as anti-terrorist. Thats
memorable, that fit his strategic campaign talking points to a T. Nonstop campaigning
across America by the Commander-in-Chief repeat, stay on message Homeland Security,
Patriot Act, Homeland Security, Patriot Act the campaign kicked off and was carried
across the country on behalf of Republican candidates and we see how orchestrated
patriotism led to Republican dominance in Congress the votes to enforce its agenda and
Committee chairs and hearings to support the run up to war in Iraq. The American people
had responded to the flag and calls for patriotism. Roves post 9/11 political message
delivered the goods. Rove on his part, according to the Washington Post, has Michael
Ledeen as his on- call International Affairs specialist. Ledeen is a fixture of the neoconservative community and close associate of Richard Perle, chair of the Defense Policy
Board. Ledeens also an out front proponent of an expanded war on multiple fronts.
Not many former insiders whove left the Bush administration are willing to talk on- or offrecord about Karl Rove and his political influence on Bush administration domestic and
foreign policy. Roves influence over the White House political agenda and policy extends
personal politics into every office and agency and, to the extent there has been objection to
administration policy, traitors have been seen to the door and exiled. The show is tightly
run, this is not an administration that tolerates discussion or debate that is off-message.
"Theres no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a
complete lack of a policy apparatus," say John DiIulio. In a controversial interview with
Esquire Magazine, a former White House favorite who headed up Bushs initiatives to fund
religious organization, John DiIulio, talked about the state of the White House: "What
you've got is everything and I mean everything being run by the political arm. It's the
reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis Besides the tax cut. the administration has not done
much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage,
on domestic policy. There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that
might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called
compassionate conservatism Karl is enormously powerful, maybe the single most
powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post
near the Oval Office."
Another senior White House official, not willing to have his name go on record, offers a
more colorful assessment Karl went from prime minister to king. Amazing and a little
scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or take him on or contradict him. Pure
power, no real accountability. Its just listen to Karl and everything will work out That
may go for the President too.
Roves advice and counsel to the President clearly doesnt end at the oceans shore. Dirty
tricks politics provides a background to the run-up to war, the administrations political
waging of war, and its aftermath. Roves hardball political advice underpinned hardball
U.S. foreign policy, antagonism toward the U.N. and payback to countries not supportive of
Bush policy. Roves political advice played out in the merging of Bush administration
politics and war politics.
Academics like Peter Trubowitz, in Defining the National Interest, and Charles Kupchan, in
The End of the American Era, have looked at the underlying causes that impact foreign
policy, national security decisions, and economic eras. Complicated, academic analysis, but
what if policy has character as destiny? To what extent did the political agenda developed
by Karl Rove become a force behind a U.S. foreign policy tied to domestic political victory?
Rove made no bones about reshaping and creating a new American political landscape. He
reveled in a his professed wedge strategy, peeling off traditional Democratic and
independent voters attracted to patriotism and bellicose war policies. Rove played the
Republican base in the American heartland post 9/11 and Roves beating the drums of war
will be felt far beyond his time. Under Roves guidance, the presidents policies and politics
shaped new contours within the Republican Party. Conservatives redefined themselves and
their platform. No longer do we see tendencies toward isolationism and aversion to
nation building, the Republicans are now unilateralists with a new conservative vision,
reshaping nations to an American image. The new-conservative, Texan-styled Republican
Party has taken on Manifest Destiny and noblesse oblige, a sweeping political vision of a
perennial national security state qua western frontier.
And what of George W. Bush? Before the war hes quoted saying Saddam Hussein tried to
kill my father. Character as destiny? What could be a deeper motive for a payback?
Bushs early years have deeper themes, a patriarchal grandfather drawn toward fascism, a
father who went on to become Director of Central Intelligence before becoming President.
A father who, as Vice President, was closely connected to 80s era support for Saddam
Hussein when the U.S. supplied Iraq with chemical weapons and precursors to biological
weapons. Maybe its too complicated to look back at the deeper currents, the personal side
of politics, but perhaps not. Perhaps the presidents past foretold wars to come, a reality
waiting in the wings for a time to march onto historys stage. Perhaps the Bush family
surrounded by roaring fans at the University of Texas, images of the mascot Longhorn
goring opponents, a stadium on its feet with fingers extended in a gore em, left a mark, a
Texas tradition thats in the air to be breathed in. Im thinking how little booms can become
big booms. A friend of young George recalls their childhood with regret: We were terrible
to animals. When it rained, thousands of frogs would come out behind the Bush family
household. Everybody would get BB guns and shoot themWed put firecrackers in the
frogs and throw them and blow them up. Maybe the cruelty was a warning of things to
come. More serious is a view of life and death thats self-righteous and not self-reflective as
decisions affecting life or death are made. In a telling moment, David Cogswell who
interviewed George W. when he was Governor for Talk magazine, wrote how the Governor
mocked a woman on death row whod pleaded for mercy. Cogswell reported, he screwed
up his face and, impersonating her plea, mimicked her: Please dont kill me.
A number of reports have been published since the Governor left office, talking about how
quickly he made life and death decisions. Reportedly, he rarely spent time going over the
details of the filings and paperwork and according to staff never spent much more than 15
minutes deliberating the cases, even as other states like Illinois were moving to place
moratoriums on the death penalty, given errors, prosecutorial misconduct and new DNA
technology. Governor Bush pressed ahead and presided over more executions than any
American state governor. Texas, the death-by-injection capitol of the nation. Perhaps the
governors striding confidence, shoulders back, jaw set, eyes serious and non-wavering,
was how he was meant to be. He had a job to do and he did it. It was a rough job being
governor in the wild west state of Texas.
Hardball
George W. Bushs electoral victory in 2000 was razor thin and, depending on the evidence
examined and ones political point of view, can be seen as an election fairly won, stolen or
swung Ralph Nader polled nearly 100,000 votes in Florida where the Bush margin of
victory, after recounts, turned on a contested 500 plus votes. Democrats railed against the
Nader campaign, many blaming him for Al Gores loss in Florida and the as a result, they
claimed, the national election. Democrats refused to mount a challenge in Congress to the
Florida vote count and irregularities. Only one U.S. Senator was required to stand and
question the results and, as Vice President Gore presided, not one U.S. Senator stood to
support the U.S. minority caucus representatives who had come, one by one, before
assembled members of Congress to ask for and demand a formal inquiry. None followed.
President George W. Bush was the outcome.
The reporters, writers and news organizations that examined the race and later recounted
the disputed electoral results came to varying conclusions. What if Al Gore had demanded a
statewide recount? What if the Florida Supreme Court had not been overturned by the U.S.
Supreme Court. What about Ohios swing vote, narrow margin, voting irregularities that
could have swayed the election? The what ifs lined up and it seemed like everyone
weighed in with an opinion. There were swing votes for Patrick Buchanans Reform Party
candidacy in Miami-Dade County, a Democratic Party stronghold with high numbers of
Jewish voters who were viscerally opposed to the Buchanan message. Flawed ballots were
blamed for the snafu, where a vote for Al Gore went into the Buchanan column. The
infamous dangling chads invalidated paper ballots when voting slips were not punched
all the way through a chads. Then there were the seventy thousand Floridians
improperly removed from the voting rolls by action of the Presidents brother, Governor of
Florida, Jeb Bush. The investigative research of Greg Palast provided a backdrop to the
decision of the Florida Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, to expunge tens of thousands
voters, mostly Democratic-leaning, prior to the election. Eric Alterman represented some
on the left who simply cursed Nader and the Greens for running at all, to hell with the idea
of building a third-party in America. The bottom line in this turn-of-the-century election
the vote of a conservative U.S. Supreme Court was the margin of victory. The Presidents
election brought no mandate to govern left or right, but the newly elected President
claimed a 500 vote mandate and off he went, to reward the far right
Looking back now at the consequences of the Florida vote, it continues to strike me how
personal politics can turn pages in history. I was personally responsible for any number of
acts that played into the 2000 Florida result, realizing with grief at times, how the outcome
was in part an unintended consequence of my well intended thousands of hours of Green
political initiatives... The consequences of the election result, as I consider the history and
sequence of events and larger picture and Bush administration and its failures, has at times
been more than enough to push me into therapy, but I didnt go and havent gone. The
reasons for the election of George Bush go far, far beyond my actions, or Naders or the
Green Partys. I can live with my decisions, but I do wonder how history would have turned
with Bushs defeat.
All politics is personal and my personal decisions made or not made, could have and were
intended to have different consequences and I cant help thinking about if the election had
turned toward Al Gore. Carrying the speculation forward what would Gore have been
like as president/commander-in-chief and Joe Liebermann as VP? Would their
administration have acted, from January 2001 to September 2001, before 9/11, as the Bush
administration did when intelligence reports surfaced about al-Qaida threats on the U.S.?
Another 2000 presidential candidate, Senator Bob Graham of Florida, the ranking
Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and arguably the most knowledgeable
foreign policy opponent of the president, would charge there were a series of national
security blunders by the Bush team out of the gates as the new administration attempted to
separate itself from Clinton administrations policies. The incoming and outgoing members
of each team were off-stride and the foreign policy-national security portfolio was not
handed off cleanly, the baton was dropped. Would Gores intelligence team have picked up
the trail of the terrorists planning the World Trade Center attack and not missed what the
Bush team missed, could the Gore team administration preempted the attack? In the early
nineties, in meetings with Steve Emerson in D.C. at his place on Connecticut, reviewing
research for his PBS special, Jihad in America recalling how the FBI didnt follow up the
first bombing as it should have, didnt pursue the leads as they should have after the first
World Trade center attack in 1993.... Would a Gore team, his appointments, carryovers, FBI,
have acted to stop the 9/11 Trade Center attack before the terrorists struck? The
questions, all speculative, were enough nevertheless to send me into moods of depression,
considering the coulda-woulda-shouldas, but always coming back to realizing politics is
personal and our actions go beyond us in a ripple effect. I could speculate all I want, but the
fact is November 2000 happened, Bush was elected, 9/11 happened, the World Trade
Center and Pentagon building were attacked.
According to Senator Graham, who chaired the Senate intelligence committee investigation
into the events and government actions leading up to 9/11, the results of the investigation
deserved public airing, but the administration blocked releasing the report. Graham and
others countered that the report could be edited to protect national security and the
studys summary, conclusions and recommendations should be placed in the public arena.
The report wasnt released, the details of what was known and when was it known,
missed opportunities and security failures that led to 9/11, remain known unknowns.
What is known is that in the Bush administrations first year in office, the President set an
all-time high for days on vacation, including the entire month of August 2001.
George Bush's victory in 2000 began with controversy and continues to produce shock
waves. Money, the cost of campaigning and a byzantine set of state election laws keep
independent politics from flourishing, yet the 2000 election exemplified the power of
independents, a swing vote, unpredictability of a third-party candidate and a decipherable
movement away from two-party, Democratic-Republican, control of government.
Americans are anxious about their government.
Unlike most all democratic, advanced nations, the U.S. electoral system offers few ways for
independent voters to vote for independent candidates. Voters are forced to go either
Republican, Democrat or to a marginal position. The U.S. electoral system has little
incentive to get deep into electoral politics or attempt to make a career, if you happen not
to support the Democrats, Republicans, their candidates and platforms. You can
demonstrate, you can organize, you can go for a bite to eat, but you cant run as an
independent or third-party candidate, or have legitimate support or raise much money
when youre symbolic, a long-shot, independent, third-party candidate. Americans are
practical people, were pragmatists for the most part, and we dont want to waste our vote
on a long-shot who has little chance of winning, much less delivering the goods and
accomplishing the goals of the voter and candidates campaign. The Green Party in 2000
was an exception that perhaps augers more to come from independent movements left and
right who are disaffected with incumbents and insider-politics. But alternatives to the
Democrats and Republicans are gathering strength as the Internet spreads into
communities, networking, providing social spaces, tools, new opportunities for voters to
connect, organize and exert pressure. Two-party entrenched politics, backroom dealmaking and politics-awash-with-corporate-money will have to change in course as the
public changes. Polls today indicate approximately 35% of likely voters describe
themselves as independent, up from about 20% in the 1970s. The 1992 election of
President Clinton can be attributed to this swing vote. Ross Perots Reform Party took 17%
on Election Day and post-election analysis projected a Clinton loss, H.W. Bush victory if
Perot hadnt run. The Take Back Our Country campaign motto of Perot resonates especially
with me, since it was a direct rip-off our Jerry Brown 92 campaign motto Take Back
America.
Im thinking that when Perot saw how well we were doing in our campaign with
independents, around the time of Colorados primary, which we won, he decided to see his
banker, make a withdrawal and throw his hat into the ring, aiming for the same bloc of
voters disaffected with the Ds and Rs. Ross had charts, graphs and arrows and the money to
buy long-form national TV ads. If he hadnt jumped in, George Bush the seconds father
probably wouldve been elected for a second term. If Jerry hadnt stepped up, Ross
probably wouldnt have stepped up. All politics is personal, outcomes unpredictable.
My personal insight into both the 1992 and 2000 campaigns is a small reminder of how one
person can make a difference, even running up against powers that be, but perhaps not
making the difference one imagines one will make. After the 1992 campaign, I hoped to
bring an independent serious and credible independent party into being. The 2000 Green
Partys presidential campaign, in one sense, goes back to the 1992 Brown for President
campaign, which goes back roots in the civil rights and environmental rights movement of
the sixties.
Reagans antipathy for the sixties movements is there in the books too. Edmund G. Jerry
Brown was in Jesuit seminary at the time. As Reagan stepped onto the political stage,
defeating Jerry Brown's father, Pat Brown, the younger Brown set about his post-seminary
career. With a law degree, he ran for school board in Los Angeles about the same time
Reagan and his attorney general, Ed Meese, began deep budget cuts that began a
dismantling of the California university system. Nationally, the Democratic Party was
attempting to strengthen its minority outreach and the Republican Party of Richard Nixon
was melting down. Within the Republican Party, Ronnie Reagans star rose. When the
Democrats nominated George McGovern in 1972, a dour-faced man, World War II hero, he
veered off track soon. Instead of a campaign promising honorable withdrawal from
Vietnam, McGovern spoke of the war as a policy disaster. He offered little in the way of an
alternative national security policy. I reflect back to 1971, when working for the McGovernchaired Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, I was offered a position in
the campaign as a national coordinator of Students for McGovern and declined to Gary
Hart, his campaign manager and a future Senator, national security expert and another
failed presidential candidate.
When McGovern went down to historic defeat in 1972, losing in nearly every state to Nixon
and the Nixon campaign defense of the war and promise of a plan to end the war. Gary Hart
went on to attempt to redefine the image of the Democratic Party the party was an
amalgam of interest groups, multiple spokespersons and mixed messages. They were no
match for Ronald Reagan and the singularly organized and polished image-making of the
Republican PR machine. In the 1980s, Reagan drove a basic political message right through,
over and around the Democrats a media-savvy messenger counts more than the message,
the key to power is winning and the key to winning is the media. The Democrats
floundered with multiple messages, messengers, caucuses, acrimonious conventions and
economic fallout of the Vietnam war and the Mideast oil embargo during the Carter
administration. If the Democrats were to become electable on the national stage it would
have to be with a new Reaganesque look and feel and a Democratic Leadership Council
rose up opposing the diversity of the Democratic issue groups and their mixed message and
the DLC set out to win back the Reagan democrats with conservative ideas and the
photogenic, energetic, public speaker who could speak for hours, Bill Clinton. The other
critical part of the new strategy was to outdo the Republicans in fund-raising and probusiness politics. The stage was set. Just as the political team of Segretti-Atwater-Rove
stepped up to manage the new Republican strategies, the Democratic Partys new team
stepped up to the plate.
Chuck Manatt of Manatt, Phelps, Rothenberg and Tunney, a powerful Century City, LA law
firm with deep connections and pockets, was appointed chair of the Democratic National
Committee. His first job was to redo the party rules and get rid of the diversity caucuses
and McGovern 72 reform commission vestiges. The party turned right and Manatt drove
hard. A focus on fundraising brought in the big money, which seeing the Democrats move
to the right would begin to split its tens of millions in campaign contributions more evenly
between D's and R's. Having pushed back diversity and having opened the door to big
money, Manatt was achieving the goals. The Democratic party had reformed party rules,
there were fewer messages and the main message was pro business, globalization as more
money flowed in from corporate America. Tony Cuelho as chair of the DNC, came to
personify the new partys fundraising style. I sell access, he said matter-of-factly.
When Ron Brown was chosen new chairman of the Democratic national party in 1989, the
train was already moving fast. Bill Clinton, the Democrats messenger, was media- and
money-attuned and Ron Brown assured Bill hed get the job done on the money train. His
main job was pulling in contributions. Backstage, the war room was ready thered be no
more Dukakis moments. If the Bush team or press lobbed softballs or fired broadsides, the
Stephanopoulus-Carville-Begalia war room would be ready to fire back.
The party of the Democrats going into the 1992 presidential campaign was a hungry party
ready to do whatever it took to beat Bush and end the Reagan era. The Democratic
Leadership Council and its policy institute made a dramatic move to the right as the
Democrats rewrote their platform. Despite opposition from the Brown campaign at the 92
platform hearings, the Democrats looked away from traditional constituencies. Corporate
America would become the engine of progress as the D's signed up neo-liberal freetraders and espoused open markets, deregulation and competitiveness. The traditional
union support wavered, but found no place to go as the D's and R's both looked to moving
right and going after votes in the south and sunbelt states. The 90s run up in the market,
historic budget surpluses and overseas expansionism in the form of a neo-liberal new
world order made it all seem like the D's were back. Historic nuclear weapon treaties with
the Russian and former Soviet states were put in place by Strobe Talbott, deputy Secretary
of State responsible for the Russian portfolio. The drawdown of nuclear warheads and
delivery systems accelerated, as the U.S. military began shifting its resources away from the
Cold War to a new mobile, global projection force, with forward bases and rapid response
being the new marching orders for U.S. armed forces. The new Democrats seemed on a
roll, but to where was the question.
An Insurgent Campaign
The Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton became the voice of the national
Democratic Party, but not before fending off an unexpectedly strong challenge in 1992 by
the Jerry Brown for President campaign. Having worked with Governor Brown earlier, I
joined up with the national campaign and went about helping organize the national
headquarters operations, as well as coordinating the campaign in New Mexico and assisting
in Colorado. Most important to me were my efforts with Jerry to put together our
campaigns platform.
The Brown campaign, which would finish a close second to Bill Clintons "Comeback Kid"
campaign, started on the steps of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Brown announced an
insurgent campaign to Take Back America. The campaigns message from the first
speech had a steady beat there had been a hostile takeover of American democracy by
big money and corporate interests. It was a historic moment, an attempt to breathe new life
into Americas democratic experiment. The speech set out a political landscape we were
entering: In reality there is only one party: Its the Incumbent Party. There are, of course,
two major political organizations with different names, but at their core they are the same.
They share the same worldview and they serve the power of the same private interests
which, in return, finance the campaigns of both. When there are no substantial differences,
there is no choice to be made. Without choices, there is no democracy and when there is no
democracy there is no freedom; only a system which entertains us with illusions.
Governor Jerry Brown quoted Thomas Paine from the Revolutionary pamphlet The Crisis.
These are the times that try mens souls. He quoted General Washington and the dark
hour before the dawn when Washingtons winter soldiers rallied when faced with
imminent defeat. I run for President because I believe America is at a crossroads For 200
hundred years, each generation has earned the title American by following a simple moral
command: that we give our children better than we received; that we pass on a greater
future with more freedom and more opportunity If we, right now, are prepared in the
spirit of our ancestors to join in common cause, putting principle before party and
patriotism before profits, then we can reclaim for ourselves and our children the idea and
promise of America. The hour has rung for us, we the people, to rise up and take back our
democracy and our country!
Browns We the People/Take Back America" campaign was scoffed at by party
fundraisers. Money talks and most of the media predicted a quick demise for our campaign.
A campaign contribution limit of $500.00 was set and most professional politicos and
pundits said wed shot ourselves 'in the foot' for no good reason. Where would the money
to finance the campaign come from? If not corporations and big spending interests, who
would pay for a Brown campaign? By campaigns end wed raised over ten million dollars
from independent contributors and unconventional sources.
The campaign opened its national campaign office in Los Angeles, where I spent time
helping organize the Media and Issues departments. Efficient turnaround to press requests
was key. Next order of business was funding and Jerry announced a "new media" idea that
hed make ubiquitous a toll-free 800 phone-in number that hed hold up to the camera
and announce every time and everywhere he spoke. Millions of dollars poured into the
Brown campaign coffers. The professional campaign consultants, political insiders and big
money donors were astounded. The Clinton campaign ignored the Brown campaign at first,
and refused to debate or address issues Brown was raising. They invoked the sobriquet
"moonbeam" to describe Jerrys far-out programs as Governor of California for example,
establishing a California Department of the Environment.
Jerry Brown was a serious threat to the Clinton campaign, the DLC and Democratic Partys
"get-back-the-Reagan-Democrats" strategy. In his two terms as Californias governor,
succeeding Reagan, he had one-upped the great communicator with budget surpluses
(which in turn had led to Proposition 13, a hugely popular tax cut which was to have future
repercussions, but set the stage for more fiscally prudent proposals by the Governor.) As
former head of the California Democratic Party fundraising, Brown knew the downside of
insider trading. Under Browns tenure, California contributions to the national party and
candidates ranked number one in the nation. For some reason, known only to him, Brown
had a conversion somewhere along the way and, instead of continuing to collect
contributions and make promises in return, he quit the money game and began to speak
out against unholy barter. He saw a light, left the fundraising-game-as-it-was-played and
decided to run for president. He chose to keep big money interests at arms length and
pushed back to make way for individual contributions. By the time the campaign arrived in
New York, we were running ahead of the Clinton campaign by some estimates, having won
primaries, while forcing the Clinton campaign to up-the-ante with attack ads and their
fundraisers to look quickly elsewhere for deep pockets, which eventually came back to bite
their campaign in a fund-raising scandal.
Why didnt Jerry Brown choose to welcome more money into the campaign, big money
contributors that another big-time political Californian, Jesse Unruh, famously called the
mothers mile of politics? Jerry Brown believed he could shape a different way than
politics-as-usual. An independent mix of fiscal conservatism, social liberalism and
environmental vision, Brown grew up surrounded by a political world and deal making. He
knew the rules of the game but chose, purposefully, to have a showdown, western style,
with the new big money of the Democratic Party. Quoting Texan Jim Hightower: You can't
clean up the creek unless you get the hogs out of the water.'' The Brown campaign was
out to clean up the two-party system by pushing big money back as a step toward
accomplishing a broad-based reform agenda.
Surprising the media/press/political pundits, the Brown campaigns ideas found growing
popular support and the series of electoral victories took Brown from back-of-the-pack, in
racing terms, to neck-and- neck with Clinton going into the final primary season stretch.
The New York election would decide whether Clinton or Brown was the Democratic
nominee. Campaign advisors pressed Brown with several strategies after his Connecticut
primary win going into New York. My personal advice was to shift gears, that the
campaign now must articulate how we would govern if elected. Patrick Caddell and
others counseled that the campaign had to continue on as an insurgent campaign, to speak
of Washington D.C. as ungovernable and that Browns campaign had to emphasize getting
rid of influence peddlers. The Clinton campaign was nearly out of money and, for the first
time, agreed to debate. In the meantime Brown announced, surprising many in the
campaign, that he was considering choosing Jesse Jackson as his vice presidential running
mate. His election surprise fell flat.
The pushback was immediate. Although Mario Cuomo, the N.Y. governor, continued to
express support of Browns candidacy, a Brown-Jackson ticket was dead on arrival in New
York. The Jackson decision, N.Y. Times editorials by Abe Rosenthal blasting a campaign that
had the chutzpah to say D.C. is ungovernable (then why are you running?), and a Paul
Tsongas 'bounce', foretold the N.Y. primary results. It was the end of the race for the
nomination but not, we thought, the end of the party platform debate and general campaign
planning The individually funded, reform effort of Brown went down in Manhattan but
the campaign had received deep and broad support from reform-minded Americans. Wed
carry the campaign message through to nomination at the Democratic convention. The
Democrats and the nation could benefit if real reform was put forward, money pushed back
and doors opened to change the way the peoples business is conducted.
Few party officials were focused on how the Brown reform message resonated however.
The end of the primary season, instead of bringing Democrat focus on our campaigns
"Take Back America" message brought a flurry of interest, excitement and popular
outpouring for an unlikely "Take Our Country Back" message put forward by a Texan
billionaire. Ross Perot, founder of a data processing computer company that had made
most of its money from government contracts, announced in February on Larry Kings
syndicated TV show that he was giving some thought to running a reform campaign for
president and that 'folks' should let him know if they wanted him to run and hed seriously
consider running if he could get his name on all fifty state ballots. The performance and
sound bites led to the United We Stand/Reform Party and his "Take Our Country Back"
presidential run.
He drew from our issues papers, white papers and speeches. I was astounded at times, for
example, once when I debated the Perot campaign manager at the Humphrey School of
Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and listened to near-verbatim lines taken from
our criticisms of the North American Free Trade Agreement, but with the famous Perot
tagline describing NAFTA as a great sucking sound. The Reform Party was hardly a
popular movement. It was Perots campaign and Perots money. When Perot and his money
went away a few years later, the party quickly split up but not before it influenced the
balanced budget debate. Today the post-Perot Concord Coalition is still going strong in the
face of George Bushs escalating deficits. In 1992, the 19% Reform Party vote for serious
reform was the swing vote, the decisive margin in defeating George H. W. Bush and electing
Bill Clinton. As the smoke cleared on Election Day, Clinton was president. His first one
hundred days in office loomed. The Brown campaign's reform ideas that gave rise to the
Perot 'reform' campaign, that led to defeat of the Bush campaign, was nowhere to be seen.
What happened?
A Pastrami Sandwich
What is it with food and politics? Food and political arguments? Just when we think its safe
to venture out, here comes food and culture, food and civilization, food and history. It was a
pastrami sandwich that changed everything with me and turned my personal life around
again. Until my lunch at the Democratic platform hearings, I was still holding out hope for
politics in the Democratic Party. After lunch, it was time for a new course.
I recall the ingredients. On the plate was "jobs" as the first course, then "lobbying reform"
as a springboard to healthcare insurance and then wed move on to the main course, the
"first one hundred days" of the new Administration. Thats it. I wasnt looking for
sweetness and light. The Clinton campaign was hoping to win and the Jerry Brown
campaign was hoping to take our success and add a bit of bite to the convention and the
national campaign that Democratic national chair Ron Brown and their team were
planning. Id been fortunate to be able to help shape ideas in Jerrys campaign and it was
time to talk turkey with the Clinton campaign. The message of the Brown campaign had
resonated among younger voters, independents, workers and environmentalists,

progressives and a broad base of traditional democratic interests. Why shouldnt the
Democrat party and Clinton campaign want to broaden its vote and reach out. Our platform
was a way to send a message.
As the Brown campaign gathered momentum, I recommended to Jerry and campaign
manager Jodie Evans that we had to assemble our key positions into a more specific "We
the People" platform. Time would demonstrate that many of our key positions were on
target in the primaries, but at that moment what I was attempting to do was just get it in
writing. At first, Jerry was unconvinced that the campaign needed a formal platform.
Running strong and fast, he couldnt slow down but agreed the campaign needed to get
prepared for the longer run.
I worked with Jerry and the campaign to assemble our ideas into a working platform. Id
organized position papers for the Media, Issues, and Correspondence departments and,
with staff at the national headquarters, began compiling an ad hoc platform document as a
start. Wed been recording audio tapes and making transcriptions of Jerrys speeches as he
raced across the country. These transcripts were organized into issue areas (and were very
useful for instant response media and press requests.) We then began editing the speeches,
analyses and policy proposals as whitepapers. By the time of the Democratic platform
hearings as a result, Brown had a detailed, robust Platform in-Progress which contained a
reform vision for consideration by the Democratic Party. It rekindled the message Jerry
first announced at Independence Hall. The overarching campaign motto was to Taking
BackAmerica on behalf of We the People.
The message of the Governors campaign was, we believed, strong and forceful enough to
act both as a shield against Rove-Bush attacks, as well as offering a proactive point of view,
a vision of how political election/lobbying/finance reform would pave the way to

significant legislative initiatives, beginning with healthcare. We would make a case that our
reform message should become a key ingredient in the D's future plans. It was time to talk
with Ron Brown, the DNC chair and Clinton campaign rep.
A private luncheon meeting was arranged. I was to meet with Ron to talk about the
direction of the party and the first 100 days in office. I carried a letter from Governor
Brown summing up expectations. It was not auspicious in its setting. Ron was sitting at the
table eating a pastrami sandwich while we talked. The gist of the conversation was If you
agree to push positions from the We the People agenda, an endorsement from the Brown
campaign could be on the table.
Ron was impeccably dressed, two assistants stood behind the table, watching. His pastrami
sandwich was waved at me he wiped Thousand Island dressing away from his mouth as we
spoke. He said OK to talking about the Democrat's campaign platform but he wasnt open to
talking about NAFTA and "globalization." He cut me off when I talked about Jerrys position
and I referenced our briefing book and campaign debate. I began to talk campaign finance
limits, an agenda pushing back lobbying interests in order to pass needed health care,
trade and tax reform, environmental standards. First things first, one cant be
accomplished without the other, I told the Chairman, the health insurance industry has to
be kept at arms length before the administration can expect to pass real health reform
legislation. I made the point tens of millions of Americans dont have health insurance or
adequate health care security. Start with lobbying reform then move onto health care
legislation, where debate in Congress would have a chance to reflect the publics call for
basic health care insurance and thered be real chance of passage. Ron looked
uncomfortable. I referred to Texas-style populism and Jim Hightowers Texas hill country
and tried to be humorous to lighten up the moment You can't clean up the creek unless
you get the hogs out of the water'' but this wasnt what Ron wanted to hear.
We talked a little longer, then with an abrupt wave of his sandwich, he leaned forward in
confidence so his two associates standing in the background couldnt hear: "We don't need
Jerry's endorsement, we don't want it pass that along to him. Your campaigns put us in a
financial hole, one we didnt need to be in and we dont intend to unilaterally disarm
remember Willie Horton? You think the Republicans are going to disarm and limit their
fundraising? Were going to match them dollar for dollar. He then told me in conclusion to
go [deleted] yourself.
The rest of the meeting was a long good-bye. I'll spare the reader my response to the
Chairman's tough talk. When he talked about the money game, I thought of World War I
generals locked into trench warfare. Trench was what they knew and this was how they
fought, locked in a death struggle. I thought about Lee Atwater and how he died apologizing
for the type of political warfare he worked to set in motion and how he had, in so many
ways, prevailed. It was a money game, there was no backing down. I thought about dirty
tricksters and bagmen, the currencies of the realm.
Ron Brown saw himself and the Democratic Party at war and vowed not to unilaterally
disarm. He was responsible for money and access. The game was Democrats versus
Republicans, partisan warfare now, with rich spoils to the victor. This is the way it is, this is
the way it will be. Rons responsibility was to raise the millions needed to prevail and he
would do what he had to do with relish. Campaign fundraising and spending limits,
lobbying reform and governmental openness were off the table. I watched the scene
almost as if I was watching a Hollywood film. It was like an old friend Id played half court
basketball against, Jeremy Larner, who went on to write Redfords Candidate, was there
taking notes. Now what are you going to do?
I realized my years within the Democratic Party were over. It was time to move on, to be
independent, shift gears, time to challenge the Republican and Democratic parties. Not long
after my lunch with Ron, I joined the New Mexico Green Party, took what I knew and set
out to build a serious, credible, platform-based independent party. I would accomplish
what I set out to accomplish, an alternative political party would become a nationally
recognized party in a matter of years with nationally standing with the Federal Election
Commission in 2001.
And Ron Brown? He went on to become Secretary of Commerce touring the world on behalf
of American corporate interests and dying tragically in Bosnia when his government plane
crashed into a mountain. He was under Federal investigation for financial irregularities at
the time. Serious charges had been brought involving lobbyists and payoffs. A series of
inquiries were made as to the circumstances of the plane crash. The circumstances were
challenged. With Ron Browns death, there would be no federal indictment and no further
investigation of the money trail.
Perhaps Ron got too close to the money he saw as ammunition and wherewithal. Perhaps if
Ron Brown had ordered chicken soup and with President Clinton and Al Gore had some
faith in a more independent Democratic party, without addiction to big money, it could
have been a different outcome at the table that day. Perhaps the Democrats would not have
suffered historic election losses during the eight years of Clintons presidency with more
state and local seats turned over to Republicans than at any time since the Gilded Age of
the late 19th Century. Perhaps it could have been free trade with fair trade provisions,
worker rights and environmental protections American health care could have come
about, enhanced revenues too, a new definition of national security, civil liberties, electoral
reform a government that reflects a broad, diverse cross-section of America.The list is
long and growing longer what could have been and should have been.
If the Democratic Party hadnt attempted to become Republican as Harry Truman so
famously quipped when he reminded rightward leaning Democrats that voters given a
choice will always vote for an outright Republican instead of a "masquerading Democrat",
perhaps President Clinton wouldnt have had to quip in a Convention speech about
Democrats aiming for "a good life", like "Republicans live."
__________________________________
What used to be called liberal is now called radical;

What used to be called radical is now called insane.
What used to be called reactionary is now called moderate,
and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking.
-- Tony Kushner
__________________________________
The political spectrum has shifted far to the right now with Democrats and Republicans
outdoing each other to play the big money game. The distinction between the D's and R's is
narrowing everyday on the issue of pay-to-play politics. If Ron Brown, Bill Clinton and Al
Gore had been open to campaign finance and lobbying reform, perhaps the nation would
have embarked on a different path, accruing many of the benefits of the 1990s without the
scandal, money-hustling mix of policy and insider-wheeler-dealer trading. Perhaps the
deregulation frenzy that will bring consequences would not have been, perhaps decades
long protections like Glass-Steagall wouldnt have been abandoned, perhaps the financial
services business wouldnt be driving the bus and the checks and balances would be
kicking in. Perhaps Al Gore wouldnt have been accused, tainted by money-hungry, politicsas-usual and might even be President of the United States.
Perhaps we wouldnt have seen George W. Bush striding, deciding, a decisioner
Commander-in-Chief. Who knows? The argument can be made a number of ways and at the
end of the day I realized how a personal choice, a sandwich and a lunch can be a game
changer, a conversation can shape a campaign, one moment can be a bit-a-history.
Chapter Five Seismic Shift

________________________________________________________________________________
Shane is a simple western a symbolic myth: the age-old story of the duel between good and evil.
Greatest Films, American Legends
I am but a footprint on the earth, a wing against the sky, a shadow in the water,a voice beneath the
fire. I am one footstep, going on.
Navajo song
y father, who flew B-17 and B-24 bombers during World War II, told me, Never
give up; never, ever. He was paraphrasing Winston Churchills speech in defiance
of the German bombardment of London. My fathers words were broader in
meaning than Churchills speech to the young men at Harrow, where he addressed the
British nation under assault. While Churchill spoke of the honor of war, my father never
considered war to be honorable. He was a man of few words, a strong and kind man. His
words of advice were delivered with a tone and voice that said, Listen carefully. He
shared life lessons with me with seriousness, tenderness and great love. His children came
first and lifes lessons were explained carefully: Dream big dreams. Build a strong
foundation that can stand the test of time. Never give up; never, ever give up.
My father was, in many ways, a prototypical Kansas Republican, from a tough-minded
Kansas farm family and the Eisenhower wing of the party. He was no friend of big
corporations and big government. He grew up near Dodge City, not far from the start of the
old Santa Fe Trail. My father reminded me of Alan Ladd in Shane, with his quiet way and
stubborn, altogether capable strength.
Years later, living near the end of the Santa Fe Trail, I looked out the window of an old
adobe house on Camino del Monte Sol. Across the street was a cloistered monastery where
the monks were chanting matins. Sun Mountain was illuminated in early morning rays
streaming across the Great Rift Valley of the American continent, the Valle Grande of
northern New Mexico. Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb and home to a
fraternity of scientists charged with maintaining and upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal,
was across the valley. St. Johns University, a small campus and liberal arts school was a
stones throw away, teaching a Great Books program adjacent to the monks residence.
I recall Michael Riccards, the President of St. Johns, how he brought me in to help him as a
consultant to build a library. Our efforts led to the papers of Robert Hutchins and his
founding of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara. We had an
agreement to acquire the papers from Hutchins' widow to be a key collection but the
Annapolis contingent of St. Johns blocked us (they were not enamored of Hutchins' antiVietnam war positions and activism) and, shortly thereafter, my efforts shifted to A
Childrens Agenda, which Michael had carried to education circles throughout the
state. Education is a key to political freedoms, I always thought of myself as Jeffersonian in
this sense, and so, when my political efforts within the Democratic party turned on a
sandwich, back-room conversation, I came to think education could be the ticket, its time
for a change, a big change a new politics, a platform to educate, a new national political
party.
Beginning in Santa Fe in the spring of1993, I set out to build the foundation of new serious,
credible, platform-based U.S. Green Party, remembering and following my fathers
construction, engineering background and his words to his eldest son: Build a strong
foundation first. A Green platform would have to stand the test of time. The foundation
must be based on values and principles. Values statements will be expressed. The partys
positions would, with integrity, apply Green values to the issues of our time and propose
principled solutions, not bartered solutions, to problems we face as a people, as a nation, as
a world community.
The founding pillars of the Greens were peace and nonviolence, a reaction of young
Germans in the 1970s and 1980s who watched the confrontation between the Soviets and
the Americans escalate into deployment of multi-warhead strategic and tactical nuclear
weapons poised minutes from each other. Petra Kelly, co-founder of the German Green
Party, and front-liners to the Cold War had set in motion an international Green
movement, beginning with passionate concern about the necessity for peace. At the heart
of Green values I saw the links among peace, democracy and nonviolence. Growing a
political force conceived in opposition to war would not be easy; patriotic fervor is easier,
in whatever language any nations leaders speak when they call citizens to rally around the
flag, patriotism and war. But there is no doubt of the need for coherent and thoughtful
opposition to war an independent party with a serious, credible platform.
Nearly a decade after my meeting with Ron Brown at the end of the 1992 primary, the
Federal Election Commission (FEC) approved the Green Partys application for national
party standing. Working with a small group of Green attorneys, and after years of
organizing and navigating election laws, I had stood at a post office counter and placed near
three hundred plus pages of filing papers in the mail. Despite pushback from those who did
not want to see a Green Party, we had prevailed. The Green National Committee of the
Green Party was legal and ready for a fight. The Greens had come on the scene fighting
election codes, political access, campaign funding and partisan traditions stacked against
third parties and independents; and a two-party system on guard, protecting exclusive
claims to prerogatives and power.
Green politics took initial steps in New Mexico in 1992. After Jerry Browns We the
People/Take Back America primary campaign of 1992, I had returned my focus to New
Mexico. I joined the Green Partys gubernatorial candidate, Roberto Mondragon, as the
candidate for lieutenant governor. The 1994 New Mexico campaign was a statewide
success; the results, unprecedented. For the first time in the states history, a third party
became a qualified major party, with statewide ballot access and primaries. The Green slate
of candidates had taken their message across the state and on election day overall voter
turnout was higher than usual. The Democratic senator, Jeff Bingaman, narrowly defeated
his Republican opponent as a direct result of the increased turnout (and, according to the
Senator, my public endorsement of his campaign). Roberto Mondragon and I received near
11 percent of the vote. The Green Party slate ran strongly up and down the ticket. It was
one of the most successful independent campaigns in the United States in nearly four
decades.
After the election, I turned to forming a national party based on our organizing success. I
was convinced that the New Mexico model was a strong beginning that could be exported
to other states. In 1994, Cris Moore was elected to the Santa Fe City Council with 37
percent in a three-way race. In 1996, Fran Gallegos, candidate for Santa Fe municipal judge,
won with 44 percent of the vote. In May 1997, in a special election to fill Bill Richardsons
U.S. House of Representatives seat, Carol Miller received 17 percent of the vote. In 1998,
Cris Moore was reelected with 59percent of the vote. In June 1998, Bob Anderson, the
Green Party candidate in New Mexicos First Congressional District race, received 15
percent of the vote in a special election to fill Representative Steven Schiffs seat. The
platform positions of the New Mexico Greens found traction; the party was gathering
motion and pushing local, state and national organizing efforts.
In 1998, Micah Sifry, writing for Nation, noted the growth and energy of the New Mexico
Greens on multiple political fronts. Third parties always do well among newcomers and
New Mexico has seen an influx of young people attracted to its physical beauty. Many are
impressed by the partys platform, which encompasses everything from renewable energy
to immigration rights to helping small businesses create jobs. Astutely, in a state that has
the highest percentage of residents without health insurance and much of whose large
Native American and Hispanic population is trapped in poverty, the Green Party has
focused its efforts around social needs, like property tax relief for low income families,
higher wages for hotel workers and universal health care. And because the Greens have
qualified under state law as a major party [in November 1994], their candidates and
platform are given near equal coverage by the media something no other third party has
achieved anywhere in the United States.
I thought it was fitting, New Mexico out in front, a small state, nurturing the beginnings of a
grassroots movement and political party. Beyond the movement I had envisioned a 40state organizing strategy which led, two years after being proposed to a Green gathering in
New Mexico in 1995, to the first Green presidential convention, platform and presidential
campaign nomination convention in Los Angeles. In November 1996, Greens founded an
Association of State Green Parties (ASGP), the forerunner of the national Green party
(GPUS), which was recognized by the Federal Election Commission in 2001. A growing,
diverse, broad-based U.S. Green Party came from many well-springs, New Mexico joined
with Green political roots in the great American west, the open central plains rising up to
meet the Rocky Mountains. The upper Midwest Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa added
populist energy; and Texas, a Hill Country revolt. The presidential campaign in 96
energized the organizing efforts and soon there were more than 40 states in the national
association and the resonating voice of a true opposition party that traced ideas and values
to the revolutionary expansion of rights a greening of American ideas and values.
[I wrote of this political organizing in a history of the founding of the US Green Party. Many of
us thought we were well within the meaning of founders of the nation who spoke of
generational change. The United States was founded on ideas and expressions that rang of
revolution and natural rights defined as inalienable. For the first time in history, a nation
was born with a sacred pledge to protect individual human rights, life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness. When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to revolt against
the king, certain truths are declared self-evident and it is a duty to act to secure these
rights. Revolutionary ideas and action to protect constitutional rights ride deep in the
American genes. Green thought, at core, carried a duty to act. Rights and the protection and
expansion of rights civil, human, environmental, worker were at the heart of the message.]
The Green Partys ideas, in fact, as I was there taking out the Great Books from my
collection and re-reading, trace back directly to the American revolution and the
enlightenment era before. The revolutionary patriots shared their ideas among
themselves, originally sending them by horseback as Committees of Correspondence,
which the original Green political organizers in the U.S. chose to designate themselves as
Green Committees of Correspondence. Today, our ideas are sent along a digital backbone,
location to location, person to person, as digital packets, home to home, along computeraccessed networks as an electronic Internet serving a wired world. I knew I was fortunate
to be there at that moment and I was in a cyber caf, drafting and marking up a founding
platform and preparing for digital delivery.
The Green Party was spreading its message at the same time the World Wide Web was
rolling out in the 1990s. In New Mexico, the Internet had gone from computer kits to highspeed computer networks, (ed: high speed for the 90s!) from cottage industry to global
industry at the center of global commerce. Intel and even Microsoft itself, as its beginning,
set up shop in New Mexico and they provided a smart core to go along with the lab types.
I remember reading something along the lines of the area had more PhD than anyplace on
the planet due to Los Alamos-Sandia national labs. Id later work to convince the Intel
fabricating plant in Albuquerque, which was international home to the Pentium chips, to
donate motherboards to New Mexico public schools when I was the tech point person as a
member of the New Mexico Board of Education responsible for policy, management and
oversight of public education. In Santa Fe, in 1994, I went online with a high-speed (dialup kilobyte speed;) modem whirring away and connected to outliers who were plugging
in reaching new Greens, initiating strings of communications networks and participating
in a first generation of electronic networking. My goal was straightforward to create a
founding document, a platform of ideas and set a political party in motion and into being.
Revolutionary email packets began to speed across America.
The platform of the national Green Party was drafted with an eye toward the presidential
campaign in 1996. The American revolutionary experiment could use an update and a
good place to start was a renewed declaration of rights and emphasis on Jeffersonian
democracy in action.
My online home base, Zumas ElectronicC@fe, was a whirlwind of teenagers, action video
games and loud zapping of bodies, a cacophonous background for the Green platforms
drafting. In the mid-1990s, ultra-violent video war games were the rage, like IDs Doom,
where you could track opponents and digitally eliminate them with spectacular visual
effects and audio blasts. Boom, gone I didnt know the banks of computers were a virtual
harbinger for future warfare, electronic battlefields, far-off remote guidance and drones,
but we were. You got points for killing opponents and with the points you got to upgrade
your online weapons arsenal. Go from a handgun to scoped rifle, to rocket-propelled
grenade launcher and more... The front room of Zumas was packed with consoles and
Dooms explosions rocked the place so I paid the cyber caf a few extra dollars a month and
they gave me a desk in a back room to do my Green platform work.
Going online, referring to notes from platform meetings, researching, corresponding,
compiling, organizing, redacting and drafting, I worked on the founding platform from
1995 until the first Green convention in 1996 and then after up until the 2000 Platform,
which became the official founding platform of the new national Green Party organization.
In 1996, the draft Green Platform was sent to Ralph Nader. Greens were online and for the
first time, and at times acrimoniously (netiquette flying out the window), electronically
organizing for a national party. Nader would soon commit to running for president in 1996,
stating publicly that he was running because of the Green platform.
We were players in a political wave of the future that I knew had been set in motion with
the digital systems originally designed by the U.S. Department of Defenses DARPA project.
How ironic, how appropriate, right here in New Mexico I thought, within a leisurely trek of
the original fiber, those optic circuits running from Sandia Lab to Santa Fe to Los Alamos
Lab, connecting atomic bomb designers, Department of Energy and military, we were
creating a rainbow of a different generation, not a gravitys rainbow with warheads on
Pynchon-like missiles, but a resilient survival strategy, a policy thats not MAD or SAD or
any other Pentagon acronym. DARPAs offspring was now in my hands employed by a
political platform drafter in Santa Fe, who was aiming to challenge the bomb builders and
their policies.
What were some of the ideas that inspired the Green Party platform? The starting point
was the ten key values, questions that emerged from an initial meeting of Greens in St.
Paul in 1984. Charlene Spretnak and a cohort of activists, principally far-sighted women,
wrote of a spiritual politics and John Rensenbrink, a Maine Yankee academic wrote of a
Green transformational politics that transcended political borders. Local Green platforms
were consulted, as Green thought extended across the political spectrum. On one wing, leftleaning Greens argued for a social progressive coalition. Other Greens emphasized deep
ecology. Community activists advocated for social justice, while other Greens connected
to democracy in action at the local level and advocated local economics. Discussion and
debate, online and offline, produced a series of ad hoc meetings and conferences, phone
calls and a steadily increasing stream of email.
Sources for the original national Green Party platform that I also consulted and drew from
ranged from Green documents to the Federalist Papers, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of
Rights; from Jesse Jacksons 1988 Rainbow Coalition platform to the 1992 Brown
campaigns We the People platform, which includeda 1992 environmental call for a new
ethic in a world scientists Warning to Humanity [update: noting California Governor
Browns 2013 Proclamation on Earth Day] and Ralph Naders Concord Principles. Santa Fe
Greens such as Cris Moore, Roger Morris, Patricia Wolf and Greg Mello contributed ideas.
Kenny Ausubels publications for Seeds of Change and the Bioneers were rich resources.
Jeffrey Bronfmans encouragement and words of wisdom and Richard Grossmans
profound analyses of corporate America were vital.
I revisited dog-eared pages in William Greiders Who Will Tell the People; Paul Wellstones
markup for the U.S. Senate energy bill that he shared with me; the Lost Gospel of the Earth
by Tom Hayden and creation spirituality works from New Mexicos Bear and Company
Press; Aldo Leopolds Sand County Almanac and Sam Smiths Great American Repair
Manual; John Nichols On the Mesa for earth thoughts and Nicholas Negropontes Being
Digital; James Gleicks Chaos and related dynamics research materials from the Santa Fe
Institute; The Hannover PrinciplesDesign for Sustainability by William McDonough; Paul

Hawkens The Ecology ofCommerce; Eco-JusticeLinking Human Rights and the
Environment by Aaron Sachs; Sixteen Weeks with European Greens by Mike Feinstein; Diet
for a New America by John Robbins (food and health were coming forward); Diversity of Life
by Edward O. Wilson; Ralph Naders Civics for Democracy; Robert Heilbroners Worldly
Philosophers; A New Democracy by Gary Hart; electoral reform, instant runoff voting and
minority representation works by the Center for Voting and Democracy (now FairVote),
John Anderson, SteveHill and Rob Ritchie; (a foreboding)The End of Nature by Bill
McKibben and The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell.
I reread, thought, listened, argued, advocated, balanced, moderated, facilitated and drafted
language. The process led to the Greens first national platform and nominating convention.
The Greens first presidential candidate, Ralph Nader held up the platform document at the
Green convention at UCLA and began his acceptance speech again saying that he was
running because of the platform. We had set about the task of democratic renewal.
American Twilight
Post publication/Comments Online
Steven Schmidt Founding platform of the Green Party of the United States Green Party of the
United States - http://www.gp.org/platform2000.shtml
It feels good to look back and realize that each of the words of the founding platform
document came from my keyboard and grassroots process that was uniquely democratic. The
Key Values/KVs also, a uniquely Green foundation for a national political party, were revised
and reformatted from the original 1984 KV questions. I presented the following key value
language to the 2000 Green Convention http://www.gp.org/tenkey.php and the KVs were
approved along with the official national GP Platform.
Steven Schmidt: The Federal Election Commission ADVISORY OPINION -- the Green Party of
the United States (the National Green Party or Party) is a national committee of a
political party for purposes of the Federal Election Campaign Act http://saos.nictusa.com/aodocs/2001-13.pdf

Looking back now, Naders 1996 campaign and 2000 campaign, to be altogether honest,
was not what I had in mind when we convinced the reluctant candidate to place his name
on the March 1996 primary ballot in California as a first step toward a serious campaign
effort. The 40-state Green organizing model that we put forward was serious politics. The
goal was to stay on message and build the Green Party as a credible force in American
politics. The campaign had a tough time though with a candidate who was not a Green, but
a lifelong independent who chose to run his campaign within extreme limits, a narrow
strategy. It was a campaign that Ralph Nader determined was appropriate and, like his
2000 campaign, was set forth by the candidate himself without much input from the Green
Party organizers.
The Nader campaign did act, despite the odds, to put a strong foundation of ideas and
integrity in place and spoke of a toolkit for democracy. Nader challenged organizers to go
out and campaign. As Linda Martin wrote in her book Driving Mr. Nader, documenting the
1996 campaign, Greens followed a roadmap distributed by party-building campaign
organizers to activists in every state. Richard Winger, a legal expert and editor of Ballot
Access News, was an indispensable source as the new national party navigated the currents
of election codes stacked against third-party candidates and campaigns. Ideas beyond the
Democrats and Republicans narrow range of debate entered the fray, but Nader was often
off message. He refused, at first, to discuss war and peace issues, saying he was not
conversant enough and needed more time before he would be ready. We pushed the
reluctant candidate to extend his reach, to address domestic and foreign policy issues, to
carry the Green platform and shared positions across America. Even as the campaign
ended, the Greens realized 2000 would be the next challenge and tell a tale whether the
Green Party was ready for prime time.
Time magazine later described Ralph Nader as the most dangerous man in America and
the U.S.s toughest customer referring to his political runs and to his long career as the
foremost protector of consumers on the national scene. He doesnt back down, as corporate
interests have learned over forty years and Vice President Al Gore would learn when he
attacked Nader during the 2000 campaign and refused to meet with Nader or find common
ground. What Nader brought to the national debate was integrity, to the point of alienating
those close to him as he did what he wanted, when he wanted, how he wanted. Not an ideal
candidate, but he was independent and independent is where we were going.
Nader and tens of millions of U.S. citizens declared that theyre neither Republicans nor
Democrats; theyre independents and third-party supporters who want the major issues of
the day aired out in the open. Ross Perot and Jerry Brown had carried this independent
message in their 1992 campaigns. Voices far beyond the Washington, D.C. beltway, could
see the price of influence peddling, campaign cash, the need for money at the scale it had
become in politics, in the billions of dollars each election cycle, and they echoed our
campaign message of reform, to push back the back the two-party duopoly and pay-toplay politics. Arianna Huffington wrote, in How to Overthrow the Government,
Theres no more important question for the future of American politics than whether we
will ever get out of the two-party sandbox. A third or fourth party introduces debate of a
system corrupted by the need for millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars,
to be considered legitimate, credible and worthy of being considered for inclusion in
debates. The Republicans and Democrats and media were acting to push back candidates
and ideas we were acting to include a range of candidates and new ideas. Nader, for all his
issues, brought credibility, name recognition and advanced many of our ideas into the
debate. That was the idea for his campaign to introduce a vigilant light, to challenge a
broken system. What transpired, however, led to unanticipated consequences in 2000.
Unanticipated consequences would be an understatement.
Drums of War and Voices of Dissent
n 2003, across the globe, people and political parties take notice as a great American
empire beats drums of war and threatens to unleash shock and awe. One political
movement stands up to raise questions, a movement that is organized in near 80
nations [ed: in 2012 in over 100 countries], the Greens, a unique political arch of shared
interests, pays special attention given its origins.
In Europe, Green parties have gone from an emergent political party created at the fault
lines of the Cold War to a force to be reckoned with at all levels of government policy. A
Green, Joschka Fischer, has been foreign minister of Germany in the Social Democrat
government and acting president of the U.N. Security Council. In many meetings with the
United States involving foreign policy issues, Fischer was point person for the Germans.
Greens were instrumental in bringing rival Afghan leaders to the Great Hall of St.
Petersburg in Bonn to put together the beginnings of a representative government after the
2002 U.S. military campaign against the Taliban. By 2003, the Green European Federation
included 32 Green parties in 29 countries, with ministers in various countries overseeing
national policies affecting the environment, nuclear safety, consumer protection,
transportation, food and agriculture, budgets and foreign affairs. Greens have moved to the
forefront in the European Parliament and participation in drafting the Europeans new
constitution.
In the wake of the second Iraq war, the European Union would met in Athens. There was
almost unanimous agreement that the European Union should have a foreign policy
ministera single security policy director. This was one effect of the war, a move by
European nations and Greens to grow stronger in relation to Americas preemptive and
unilateral exercise of foreign policy.
Andrew Bacevich writes of an American Century in American Empire an era of
American ascendance shifting to military force as a preferred instrument global power
projection, not protecting the homeland, he writes, dictates the size and capabilities of
U.S. forces and justifies a budget dwarfing that of the next 10 largest military powers
combined. He points out that Americas reach for global preeminence was created in the
first great anti-imperial revolution. Then Bacevich adds: The traditional narrative of our
history teaches that our greatness was thrust upon us, that we did not want to sit at center
stage in world affairs but that we were drawn there reluctantly, contrary to our traditions
and preferences we were a reluctant superpower. Now, at the turn of the century, this is
no longer the way it is, we are no longer reluctant, military might is no longer a necessary
evil, entrusted to American hands, it has become invaluable. As a matter of policy one to
which Republicans and Democrats alike subscribe the United States is committed to
maintaining its present military supremacy in perpetuity. Perpetuity, no longer reluctant,
committed to supremacy forever and ever, perpetuity well to dwell on these words, for a
moment or two.
At the Athens meeting of the European Union in April 2003, Prime Minister Tony Blair, the
only active coalition partner in the second Iraq war, calls for a president for the European
Union and a single voice on foreign policy. In May 2004, the European Union adds 10
new countries. the 15-nation bloc will become 25 nations, the largest expansion in the
European Unions 50-year history. Relations between the United States and Europe are
strained. After the attacks of 9/11, the United States received an outpouring of support. No
longer, the Bush doctrine has alienated around the world and particularly among former
allies, a counterforce to the U.S. and pushback from nearly everywhere on the Continent.
While the United States proclaims a coalition of the willing for its actions, word spreads
that it is more a coalition of the coerced; that the 'coalition' is being assembled not
through popular support but with the use of strong-arm tactics, hardball politics and
money. Spying scandals erupt as the United States is accused of tapping into the
communication systems of its allies with surveillance and intelligence used to close deals.
In 2003, a series of polls tracked U.S. relations and image abroad. One survey, by the Pew
Global Attitudes Project, found that a majority of the public in each of eight nationsGreat
Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, Poland and Turkeycontinued to oppose the
invasion of Iraq.
Many people find themselves in a state of despair these days, and with good reason. Yet we must not let
our voices, our no to war and yes to peace, be silenced. What has happened? The stone that we pushed
to the peak is once again at the foot of the mountain. But we must push it back up, even with the
knowledge that we can expect it to roll back down again.
Gunter Grass, Spring 2003
Polling found that positive attitudes toward the United States have plummeted in all the
countries, while disapproval of President Bushs approach to foreign policy has soared.
Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and
director of the project, was quoted saying, This is the most negative [international] public
opinion about America and an American president that Ive ever seen. I think the divide
between the way America looks at and deals with world problems and the way our allies
look at them is something very significant and is here to stay.
The importance of international relations increases in proportion to a new U.S.
unilateralism. In the United States, Greens have been at the forefront of alternative policy
recommendations, asking hard questions about the consequences of war policies
supported with salutes from Democrats and Republicans, as the two parties position
themselves to outpatriot each other with strategies for war, homeland security, billions
for weapons, and endless visions of regional and world conflict. Little attention is paid to
post-conflict civil reconstruction or conflict resolution. War is the road to peace, and a man
of war is described as a man of peace. In this twilight of perceived perpetual threat, the
ascendancy of militarism and escalation promises new fault lines, a redefined geopolitics in
defense of globalization.
Its a dangerous time for democracy and democratic values, peace and prosperity. Yet some
people are willing to step forward and challenge a rush to judgment that seems incapable
of calculating the price of perpetual conflict and war. In the arena of international politics,
the Greens are unique: The U.S. Green Party has counterparts who carry a Green party
name and share common values in some 80 countries. [ed: as of 2014 Green parties are in
over 100 countries]
Never before has there been an international, global third party.
Never before has there been an international grassroots movement like the Greens.
Never before have worldwide threats to peace and security been so dire, as nations
realign their interests in the postCold War threat environment.
The U.S. Green Party itself has developed in response to an east-west war, a war waged on
the environment, human rights and the third world. The U.S. Green Party stands in
opposition to a new world order led by transnational corporate interests. The Green
Party response to war has been to advocate for alternatives to war; for broadened human
rights and liberties; nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; a sane, effective defense strategy
that leads to real security, not escalating conflict.
In 2000, a "Common Ground Platform" that I proposed, drafted, and shepherded along was
approved by the U.S. Green Party and the European Federation of Green Parties (EFGP),
articulating common interests and envisioning a path to peace as an alternative to global
conflict and war. The following is an excerpt from the platform:
Peace and International Relations
We believe the ever-growing expansion of unregulated, inappropriate-scale profit-making
interests, the limits of the resource base that these interests are trying to control, and the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction pose a dire and imminent threat to world peace.
As technology and commerce increase the depth and complexity of global relations, individual
nations need to work together to develop multinational responses to global issues that spring
from shared values of peace, justice, community, democracy and ecological sustainability.
We call for international relations that favor cooperation and support over competition and
exploitation. We believe that, as a matter of principle, considered diplomacy should always be
favored over recourse to military intervention and violence.
We support the formation of international alliances and nongovernmental organizations to

work to find peaceful and sustainable solutions to the global problems of war, environmental
degradation, oppression and poverty.
We support immediate decommissioning of all nuclear weapons production facilities, datespecific destruction of all nuclear weapons, and the signing of oversight treaties calling for
drawing down of nuclear stockpiles.
We call for a ban on the development, production, sale and use of land mines, chemical and
biological weapons, and other weapons that bring indiscriminate destruction to civilians and
the environment.
We oppose the use of economic sanctions that bring suffering and death to innocent civilians.
A Green vision was captured in a speech given by Bill Moyers at the Take Back America
conference in Washington, D.C., in June 2003. Moyers spoke of growing up and the oldest
story in America: the struggle to determine whether we the people is a spiritual idea
embedded in a political reality one nation, indivisible or merely a charade
masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their
own way of life at the expense of others.
Moyers looks back: Hardly a century had passed since 1776 before the still-young
revolution was being strangled in the hard grip of a merciless ruling class. The large
corporations that were called into being by modern industrialism after 1865 (and given
personhood in an interpretation of a California federal court ruling) had combined into
trusts capable of making minions of both politics and government. What Henry George
called an immense wedge was being forced through American society by the maldistribution of wealth, status, and opportunity.
Moyers adds a side note: We should pause here to consider that this is Karl Roves
cherished period of American history. It was as I read him the seminal influence on the
man who is said to be George W.s brain. From his own public comments and my reading of
the record, it is apparent that Karl Rove has modeled the Bush presidency on that of
William McKinley, who was in the White House from 1897 to 1901, and has modeled
himself on Mark Hanna, the man who virtually manufactured McKinley. Hanna had one
consummate passion: to serve corporate and imperial power. Great wealth was to be
gained through monopoly, through using the state for private ends; it was axiomatic,
therefore, that businessmen should run the government and run it for personal profit.
Any who opposed the oligarchy were smeared as disturbers of the peace back then they
didnt bother with hollow euphemisms like compassionate conservatism to disguise the
raw reactionary politics that produced government of, by, and for the ruling corporate
class. They just saw the loot and went for it.
Moyers quotes historian Clinton Rossiter, who described the period as the great train
robbery of American intellectual history: It would take great effort to turn democracy,
progress and opportunity around and regain a progressive, independent voice. Ideas have
power, Moyers says. Im remembering now how Ralph Nader spoke about the turn of the
last century, when Roves hero, Mark Hanna, was orchestrating and the oil barons were
"Robber Barons" and war was in the air Im remembering how Nader stood before
thousands and called our founding platform the best political platform since 1892, which
was the beginning of the revolt against the great train robbery of corporate monopolies,
trusts and the Gilded Age. The truth is I never gave much attention, while drafting
platform documents, to 1892 but I did give much time to going for it, to carve out a
political platform, to deliver a different tomorrow. Going for it, when I was growing up, was
the highest level of striving to be excellent, to make it, going to the edge and surviving the
big waves.
Democracy is not a lie. the eight-hour day; the minimum wage; the conservation of natural
resources and the protection of our air, water, and land; womens rights and civil rights; free trade
unions; Social Security and a civil service based on merit all these were launched as citizens
movements and won the endorsement of the political class only after long struggles in the face of
bitter opposition and sneering attacks. Its just a fact: Democracy doesnt work without citizen
activism and participation Trickle-down politics doesnt work any better than trickle-down
economics... Whats right and good doesnt come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it as
if the cause depends on you, because it does. So go for it. Never mind the odds.
- Bill Moyers, We the People, 2003
Chapter Six Perpetual War

________________________________________________________________________________
Kill em All and Let God Sort em Out. I Support the War on Iraq
Front and Back of a T-shirt Worn by a Pro-war Supporter, April 2003, Tallahassee, FL
ax Cleland was in his wheelchair. He was a graduate of Stetson University,

Floridas first college, whose motto is Pro Deo et Veritate for God and Truth, then
Max went away to war in Vietnam where in 1968 during the battle for Khe Sanh a
grenade exploded under him and doctors amputated both of Cleland's legs above his knees
and his right forearm. He was 25 years. Thirty plus years later, as a U.S. Senator from
Georgia, he was accused of supporting Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. His
campaign opponent was Saxby Chambliss. The Osama-Saddam Chambliss TV ad campaign,
another 'milestone' in dirtbag politics, was eventually pulled but not before doing the
damage it set out to do was done. There was hardly a shred a truth from Chambliss when
he pointed at Cleland for not supporting the Homeland Security Act, which was opposed
initially by Republicans not by Democrats like Cleland. Up can be down in a Karl Rove- led
campaign and the big lies of Chambliss/Rove worked. The patriotism of Cleland was
slandered and Chambliss walked away with a Senate seat. The 2002 political defeat of
Cleland summed up the sickness within politics and it sent, as planned, a message that no
one was immune from attack politics and money in politics. [update: Karl Rove's SuperPAC
going into the 2012 campaign is reported to be raising and spending upwards of $200 to
$300 million.]
The research grant was distributed to the famous west coast university for advance study
of bio-chemical responses of rats exposed to chemical agents. The paperwork was all in
order, the checks were cut, the scientists, researchers and graduate assistants dutifully
went to their labs. The results of this work, years later? Approximately 23,415 tons of
liquid Sarin nerve agent, an improved nerve liquid called VX and exotic toxic variants,
designed by a scientific community making a living. Following directives and with budgets
appropriated by Congress for defense, a weapon of mass destruction banned throughout
the world is now hoarded in the U.S., forty six million pounds of chemical WMD, one
teaspoon enough to kill or maim hundreds.
Looking at the public record, all we really can know is the extent of these exotic weapons is
unknown. The black budget weapons, intelligence and special ops are hidden from most all
Americans, and most all in Congress but a select few on select committees who exercise
tenuous oversight of top-line allocations, hold occasional, closed-door hearings, and
periodically interview military officers in the deadly arts. The black budgets of the armed
service branches, to the extent they are revealed, can be gleaned to an extent by
extrapolating from what is revealed in public documents. So add a few orders of magnitude
to above- and below-line figures. Were awash in toxic gas as a start. Most of these weapons
are stored at eight U.S. sites, waiting to be rendered harmless by the Army. Until that day
comes, the Federal Emergency Management Agency/FEMA has been distributing chemical
protection hoods for nearby residents who live in threatened pink zones. Sirens are set to
go off, pressurization engines have been placed in schools to increase air pressure,
designed to keep airborne agents out. Underground emergency management bunkers are
in place in case theres a chemical weapons emergency to manage. The Armys director of
the chemical demilitarization program, in the meantime, is attempting to figure out how
best to defuse and destroy 77,000 M-55 rockets filled with Sarin or VX.
In President Bushs 2003 State of the Union speech, he cites specific intelligence that
confirm Iraq chemical, biological and nuclear Iraq weapons of mass destruction:
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime
continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised It is up to
Iraq to show exactly where it is hiding its banned weapons, lay those weapons out for the
world to see and destroy them as directed biological weapons sufficient to produce over
25,000 liters of anthrax materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of
botulinum toxin materials to produce as much as 500 tons of Sarin an advanced nuclear
weapons development program Questions are raised as none of the above are found by
inspectors or invading troops how does the US know what stockpiles Iraq has had? A
follow-on question, as the U.S. was in military alliance with Saddam during Iraqs lengthy
war with Iran, what was the extent of the relationship between the U.S. and Iraq in the
1980s when military cooperation and weapons sales were a going business?
In the decade before the Gulf War in 1991, the Reagan-Bush administration extensively
supported Iraq in its eight year war against Iran. Irans Shiite government was seen as a
threat to U.S. interests in the region and the administration, according to Riegles
investigators, supplied numerous weapons and multiple sources of intelligence to assist
Iraqs war efforts. The Iraqi goal was to acquire a deepwater seaport, which the British had
denied them after World War I when Western powers divvied up the Ottoman Empire and
created Iraq and Kuwait.
Iraq and Iran disputed the boundary between their two countries and Iraq viewed the
colonial borders and exclusion of a seaport as a punitive effort to landlock it and deny its
economic emergence. In the 1980s the U.S. supported Saddams ambitions to increase its
capability to pump oil and ship oil. Iraqi oil principally flowed through overland pipelines
that were vulnerable to attack and U.S. demand for oil was growing deeper. Cheap Iraqi oil
was an answer and increased oil production was a vital interest in U.S. calculations. Weeks
prior to the Iraqs move across the Kuwaiti border, Saddam Hussein held talks with the U.S.
Ambassador and it was reported that the official U.S. statement to the Iraqis did not
oppose armed confrontation with Kuwait.
This was a turning point, coming after Americas support for Iraq during the years of the
Iraq-Iran war. Following the Iran war, when it did not achieve access to a deep water port
for its oil exports, Iraq initiated negotiations with Kuwait over deep water oil tanker access,
which Kuwait held, and access to oil fields which both countries tapped into. The
negotiations failed and Iraq, with U.S. assent some claim, went to war over oil.
This background ledger could have been penned by Mephistopheles, but the devil in the
details whether they get to the American people or not. According to the Riegle report,
between 1985 and 1989, the U.S. governments Centers for Disease Control sent Iraq 14
agents with biological warfare significance, including West Nile virus. Before the Gulf
War, Iraq took delivery of billions of dollars of equipment useful for making mass
destruction weapons from companies operating in more than a dozen Western Nations.
U.S. companies like Unisys, Semetex, Hewlett Packard, International Computer Systems,
E.Z. Logic Data Systems, International Imaging Systems, Finnigan-MAT, Spectra Physics,
Zeta Laboratories, Cerberus and Perkin Elmer made millions and much of what came from
America went with the blessing of the U.S. Commerce Department, which approved the sale
of more than $1.5 billion worth of dual-use goods.
More than 100,000 veterans of the first Gulf War contracted serious medical problems as a
result of chemical and biological agents released during U.S. bombing campaigns, exposure
to depleted uranium, tank-killing shells, dispersed petrochemical and airborne toxics
delivered by U.S. action. The Iraqi people and tens of thousands of children continue to
suffer and die from thirteen years of sanctions, embargoes, destruction of infrastructure,
polluted water, food shortages and collapse of medical services.
I think back to a moment in the early 1990s when a writing partner, Steve Emerson,
charged that the government was overlooking the seriousness of the first attack on the
World Trade Center and was not actively pursuing the perpetrators. We had been working
together on docudramas, film and television stories investigating Justice Department and
FBI counter-terrorist efforts, post Cold War conflicts and the working of the STASI, the East
German secret police. During the first Iraq war, Steve came across disturbing information,
militant Islamic recruiting in America and growing violent threats. The first Iraq war and
escalating turmoil in the Mideast region, in post Soviet Afghanistan and in Israel and
Palestinian territories sent waves of hate across the Balkans into Europe, across the
Caspian and southern states of the former Soviet state into Chechnya and Russia, across the
Near East into Pakistan and Malaysia, across North Africa into Sudan and Somalia
Steve believed it was only a matter of time before the anger, recriminations and hate would
reach American shores.
At the time, I was reporting on Patriot missile system issues and it would be my last work
with Steve... He wrote Jihad in America, which the Public Broadcasting System aired in
1994. Steve told me, as he worked to finish the documentary, that he would be challenging
the FBI and opening eyes across the U.S. He began his on-air report looking into the
camera. The World Trade Center loomed high above him. He began to speak about Islamic
Jihad and a holy war against America, Christians, Jews and Muslims who would not
surrender to fundamentalism. Jihad in America asked hard questions. The early 90s
investigation of the underground bombing of the Trade Center had not been followed up
on, Steve reported, and there were many reasons to follow the tracks of the perpetrators
wherever the tracks led.
It was not to be. Although Steve had written an op-ed article for the N.Y. Times in 1993 that
the bombing of the Trade Center is evidence of a more frightening development: hundreds
of radical operatives live in the U.S., making up a possible loose terrorist network that
includes highly trained Islamic mercenaries, his voice didnt instigate stepped up actions
by the NYPD and FBI. Steves warning was ominous and prescient, but didnt produce
hoped for results. After Jihad in America aired, multiple death threats changed Emersons
life and day-to-day patterns of behavior, but he continued working the beat. The attack on
the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 was a nightmare he predicted could come
true. Few listened as American policy escalated in the Mideast and Near East and produced
a calculus of escalating conflict.
Now we see results from September 11th, billions of dollars, rubles, euros and other
currencies going to military stockpiles, capabilities, projection and use. The true-costs of
war are incalculable on top of the tens, hundreds of billions, trillions as a Nobel prize
winner, Joseph Stieglitz estimates will be spent in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nuclear arsenals,
warheads and delivery systems of Pakistan and India threaten to immolate millions. In
Israel, perceiving unending threats, a nuclear force is enhanced and aimed at nations as
distant as Iran, Russia and Pakistan while a next generation anti-ballistic missile system is
deployed, nuclear tipped missiles deployed on submarines, and state-of-art intelligence
gathering systems rolled out. North Korea tests its ballistic weapons and looks for hard
cash via exports. Regional Chinese generals, who have extended autonomy to develop and
sell sophisticated weaponry, trade with Iran and Israel. As budgets and military operations
have gone up, perceived security has gone down.
Take another look at the record, a record thats rarely put before the American public.
Consider that, for the spending you see, theres what is not meant to be seen, the impact of
the dark side, the spooks at work, billion dollar budgets in military signals (sigint),
electronic (elint) and human (humint) intelligence. Billions of dollars spent to snoop,
interdict and destroy. What we do see is limited, but astounding in its depth and breadth.
Ask the question, who armed Iraq? Rhetoric aside, the U.S. and allies armed Iraq in the runup to our first- and second-wars with Iraq. The record is there to examine, from chemical
and biological weapons to Scud missiles and nuclear fuel
Former U.S. Senator Don Riegle from Michigan chaired hearings in the fall of 2001 on the
Iraq weapons program and the Gulf War Syndrome which affected tens of thousands of U.S.
troops. In 2002, Riegle attempted to go public with the Iraq arms story in an interview with
the St. Petersburg Times: What is absolutely clear is this: That if Saddam Hussein today has a
large arsenal of biological weapons, partly it was the United States that provided viruses he
needed to create those weapons At the time, as nearly as one could construct the thinking,
the United States was principally focused on Iran as the main problem in that area. And
because Iraq and Saddam Hussein were a direct rival and opponent of Iran, the thinking
appears to have been in the Reagan-Bush period that they were prepared to help Saddam
Hussein because in a sense he with us against Iran.
A vast, profitable enterprise was assisting Saddam Hussein. In a 17,000-page report Iraq
delivered to the United Nations, they document the sources of their weapons programs,
many developed when the U.S. was providing direct military assistance and promoting
delivery of weapons technology from the west. Independent investigations confirm this
trail of shipments of arms, chemical and biological weapons, weapons of mass destruction.
When the independent press queries how the United States knew Iraq had chemical and
biological agents the direct answer is we supplied them. During inspections before the
second Iraq war the sub rosa question was were these weapons destroyed? The U.S. was
on record before the invasion acknowledging that weapons inspections teams had
destroyed or accounted for the destruction of some 95% of their weapons of mass
destruction. Later, the U.S. refuted the inspection regime, as war drums were beating loud
and the Administration offered dire voices like Colin Powells, whose credibility has now
evaporated as Secretary of State.
Unbalanced and Asymmetrical
Henry Kissingers Teutonic accent introduces balance of power, a counterforce doctrine
for the ages. The only person in his American immigrant family not to lose his accent over
the last forty years, Kissingers adopted philosophy advocates military power being
wielded to advance national security interests broadly defined, proportionate and
disproportionate force as needed. If the opponents position is one of weakness, then
according to Kissinger-doctrine of balance of power, a nation can consider concessions. If
an opponents position is one of strength, Kissingers belief is to develop additional
weapons capabilities and/or use force to balance power before negotiations. Kissinger is an
ultimate war wonk a policy maven who it is said has learned little from past failures and
string of setbacks and disasters that occurred over the course of his national security
watch.
Yet, Kissingers expert judgment continues on as standard fare in primetime media, as if
his somber gravity, voice and Teutonic take on war is credible. Dr. Kissingers TV visage
sternly warns of the dangers of weakness, how the U.S., we must push forward, not
retreat, how we should not step back or make concessions. The Doctors advised
prescription runs predictable a mixture of American power, strategic and tactical
advantage, a strong dose of demands, followed by tough negotiations. Kissingers
philosophy is a foreign policy shaped in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, policies
that led to world wars and tens of millions of deaths. As a Doctor of Philosophy he studied
the masters, Metternich and Von Clausewitz. Metternich was a purveyor of power politics,
a counsel to the kings and generals attempting to stop democratic revolts. The Age of
Metternich stood against the Age of Enlightenment. Balance of Power meant preserving the
Power of the Empire. Metternich counseled his version of tough negotiating. Choices
were few when dealing with Metternich concede to our terms or we will use our national
power to crush you then we will negotiate, on our terms.
Von Clausewitz, a war gamer of continuing repute in war college classes, is another source
of Kissingers academic policy wisdom. Von Clausewitz, perhaps best remembered for his
quote that war is politics by other means, considered war a perennial tool of politics. He
codified war as a blunt and unpredictable means of achieving political goals. His warning of
unforeseen consequences in war resonates ominously today as rattled sabers include
nuclear swords. In the 21st Century we hear the lugubrious song of student Kissinger mit
Metternich mit Clausewitz.
The new Bush doctrine, intended to prevent and preempt any nation or bloc of nations
from threatening U.S. interests broadly defined adds a new chord to old waltzes of empires.
The potential targets of U.S. war planners are multiplying and a beating metronome is
speeding up. War gaming is a growth industry. No nation will be allowed to approach
balance of power with the U.S. The torch of liberty on Americas shore will no longer be
such a shining beacon, a welcoming message to the world, so much as a warning light be
wary. Military action and harsh measures must be taken to protect the homeland.
Within a matter of hours after the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden was identified by U.S.
government sources as the "prime suspect". At the same time, it was later reported, a series
of calls were made to top U.S. military and national security officials informing them that
Iraq was aligned with Osama despite decades of ongoing conflict and enmity between
secular Iraq and the religious fundamentalism of Osama and al-Qaeda. General Wesley
Clark, former NATO commander and soon-to-become presidential contender, is surprised
to receive a call shortly after the attacks on the Pentagon and Trade Center informing him
that Iraq is involved and to put the word out. He says he couldnt follow the directive as the
intelligence didnt fit the crime.
Within days, President George W. Bush pledged to "lead the world to victory" against
terrorism. The Administration confirmed its intention to embark on "a sustained military
campaign rather than a single dramatic action" directed against prime suspect bin Laden.
In addition to targeting the Taliban in Afghanistan, a number of rogue countries are soon
mentioned as possible targets including Iraq, Iran, Libya and the Sudan. Prominent neoconservatives, neo-liberals, political figures and media experts expand the threat
environment worldwide. Administration spokespersons soon speak of mushroom clouds
over America and military men explain war planning that has characterized U.S. policy for
five decades will be replaced by a multi-front war strategy that will be waged until
victory. According to the White House, Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda has operations in 50 to
60 countries and al-Qaeda is one of a network of threats. The terrorism threat is global
and war will be a fight for civilization. Global military operations immediately need to
ramp up, hundreds of billions are budgeted under emergency appropriation, domestic
spending priorities are reallocated and a war-to-last-a-lifetime and longer is soon
announced under the heading of a new world order.
It will be unfortunate if it turns out that intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq turns out to be
seriously flawed After several months of on-ground searches, evaluation of all signals, electronic,
satellite and aerial reconnaissance, communications monitoring and human intel, there are no visible
signs of weapon alleged to have been the imminent threat and legal cause for preemptive war.
According to U.S. team-leader David Kay: We have not found at this point actual weapons. An
additional $300 million is requested for the Kays team to continue their search for weapons in Iraq....
Was the Administration rationale for war a bait and switch reporters ask at a White House briefing.
Associated Press reports, October 2003
In my hometown, the St. Pete Times, whose news and reporting provides exceptional
glimpses of U.S. Special Operations Command and Afghanistan-Iraq War Central Command
headquarters in Tampa, runs a special report: In the wake of 9/11, the special operations
forces have become favorites of Rumsfeld and the White House. The 46,000 elite
commandos have been at the forefront of the war on terror and played crucial roles in the
US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the SoCom mission is shifting, with more
responsibility, more people, more weapons and a lot more money. When Secretary
Rumsfeld, months later publicly speaks of Special Ops for the first time, it is a glimpse from
ten thousand feet: The global nature of the war, the nature of the enemy and the need for
fast, efficient operations in hunting down and rooting out terrorist networks around the
world have all contributed to the need for an expanded role for the special operations
forces. This is before we hear about drones and remote control Hellfire missiles. The Times
later provides some spare details. In 2002, Special Ops units operated in more than 150
countries. Often in concert with the CIA, special operators are chasing terrorists, weapons
of mass destruction and drug runners.
Ive a fear that comes as a nightmare. Amid flash points of war, terrorism, hatred, cycles of
violence, vengeance, secrecy, operational assassination squads, zealots, terrorists,
sociopaths and psychopaths, comes a crazed James Cagney in White Heat. Its dark film noir.
His headaches drive him over the edge. His paranoia and hate escalate in a film-as-dream.
Cagneys gang of hoods rides hidden in an empty gasoline tanker toward an oil refinery.
Heavily armed, their truck arrives and things go bad. Hes betrayed and screaming at the
coppers he climbs to the top of the refinery as sharpshooting snipers try to pick him off
Im top of the world, he yells as ricocheting bullets fly, sparking gas explosions, rising like
a mushroom cloud
Back in the days, when I was a young Hollywood agent, my partner was an older, tough
Brooklyn born agent, the classic agent who talks like "dis" and when things go bad typically
says things like well, its better than a sharp stake in the eye. He had represented some of
the great writers of the biz including Dalton Trumbo. I take a letter out of the file from
Trumbo. Hes writing about his World War I film Johnny Got His Gun. He reminds that while
we look away and go on with our lives in white light and whitest of hopes that, in war
and violence, death waits He says we all are responsible, we all make choices and his
words are despairing. Why should I look, it wasnt my fault, was it? It was, of course, but
no matter. Time presses. Death waits even for us. We have a dream to pursue, the whitest
white hope of them all and we must follow and find it before the light fails. So long losers.
God bless. Take care. Well be seeing you.
Crisis of Opportunity
General Wesley Clark was called soon after 9/11, he later reveals. He was surprised when
figures in the Bush administration wanted to talk to him of Iraqs involvement. He
publicly questions the motives of the administration in tying Iraq to the World Trade
Center and Pentagon. The White House was announcing that 9/11 demanded an immediate
response from the U.S., not a prolonged debate. The crisis was an opportunity and off-theshelf neo-con policies, developed by Dick Cheney and cohorts years earlier, were ready to
deliver. Few questions were asked, even as any connection to Iraq and the attacks was
tenuous, as Clark pointed out. Hussein and al-Qaeda were at each others throats.
Yet, the feeling of wanting and needing revenge carried policy from the Oval Office and the
Cheney suite, the policy to become the Bush Doctrine preemptive, first-use of nuclear
weapons, global expansion of U.S. military force, open-ended world war without an exit
strategy, broadened government powers via a new vast Homeland Security department
and a "Patriot Act", which few in Congress read much less debated (but what a title!) before
its passage. According to the legal director of People for the American Way, Patriot Act I
(there are plans for a second and third) gives unprecedented power to Attorney General
John Ashcroft. What the Justice Department has really done, the spokesperson explains,
is to get things put into the law that have been on prosecutors wish lists for years. Theyve
used terrorism as a guise to expand law enforcement powers in areas that are totally
unrelated to terrorism.
The speed of its passage accompanied a barrage of off-the-shelf prosecutorial policies
leading to the nations commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars in new government
terrorism-related spending. Databases and super-computers will be a big business as
threats will need to be IDd, filtered and dealt with in the U.S. and globally, its a new game.
In a matter of hours, American foreign policy turns to global war. National intelligence
estimates are now, months later, being questioned, but in the heat of the moment, Bush
directives drive policy. A neo-conservative vision of a New American Century is pushed
onto the 21st Century stage. The president adopts the neo-con/Cheney/New American
Century policies and the Vice President and his, how do we say, already suspect national
security team set out to memorialize their vision.
In one of the most far reaching documents in history, the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America is memorialized in September 2002. One year after 9/11, U.S.
doctrine becomes a 360-degree world war, waged 24/7/365, no end in sight. The
September strategy document demands to be widely read, discussed and debated. It isnt.
The U.S. Congress accepts the Bush doctrine as if delivered ex cathedra. In October 2002
Congress votes to give the President additional powers to take the nation immediately to
war in Iraq.
Few will look back. The accomplishment of the previous administration to control and limit
nuclear weapon quickly grows distant. Strobe Talbott, as Deputy Secretary responsible for
Soviet, transatlantic and NATO affairs, has delivered a nuclear draw down that was historic.
Transatlantic relations during the Clinton Administration, as the Soviet state was
dismantled, were discussed and debated by Congress in great detail. The back-and-forth, at
times, resembled British Parliaments debates. This is lost as the Bush administration
argues that rush to judgment is justified, the intelligence is sound, deliberative democratic
debate is not needed, and historic worldwide anti-war demonstrations are not considered
relevant. The President later is to tell Brit Hume in an interview he doesnt read the news,
he finds there are "opinions in the news stories" and so he would rather get objective
news from his staff in his daily briefings. Like his father who was unaware of supermarket
check-out procedures, having been in such a bubble for so many years, President George W.
Bush talks of the need for new nukes and orders it done.
A new Wild West stampede is on. Proliferate. The Presidents vision and directives prevail,
committees of Congress close their doors to public debate, intelligence reports are further
restricted as a matter of course and who is to say that the hundreds of billions in new
weapons spending is a problem? Its about peace, the Vice President drawls, peace thru
war and 'strength'. No talk of costs, long-term and immediate. Defense policy turns
offensive overnight, setting aside policies of disarmament, nonproliferation, deterrence
and multilateral diplomacy. Spending on arms will be experienced firsthand for
generations. The crisis of 9/11 gives rise to a fourth world war.
The Bush Doctrine takes its place among historic presidential decisions. The policy
demands to be read and re-read as drums beat.
________________________________________________________________________
The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

September 2002
The White House
Washington
The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a
decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national
success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise
Today the United States enjoys a position of unparalleled military strength and great
economic and political influence. In keeping with our heritage and principles, we do not use
our strength to press for unilateral advantage. We seek instead to create a balance of power
Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the
Federal Government.
Today, that task has changed dramatically. Enemies in the past needed great armies and
great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can
bring great chaos
To defeat this threat we must make use of every tool in our arsenal military power, better
homeland defense, law enforcement, intelligence, and vigorous efforts to cut off terrorist
financing. The war against terrorists of global reach is a global enterprise of uncertain
duration
The greatest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and
technologyHistory will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act.
In the new world we have entered, the only path to peace and security is the path of action
The United States will stand beside any Nation determined to build a better future
In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the
conviction that all Nations have important responsibilitiesWe are also guided by the
conviction that no Nation can build a safer, better world alone.
Freedom is the non-negotiable demand of human dignity; the birthright of every person
in every civilization
[POTUS SIGNATURE]
George W. Bush
______________________________________________________________________________
I. Overview of Americas International Strategy
The United States possesses unprecedented and unequaled strength and influence in the
world We must defeat threats to our Nation, allies and friends. This is also a time of
opportunity for America
II. Champion Aspirations for Human Dignity
America must stand firmly for the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity: the rule of law;
limits on the absolute power of the state; free speech; freedom of worship; equal justice;
respect for women; religious and ethnic tolerance; and respect for private property
III. Strengthen Alliances to Defeat Global Terrorism and Work to Prevent Attacks Against Us
and Our Friends
The United States of America is fighting a war against terrorists of global reach. The enemy is
not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology We make no distinction
between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to them.
The struggle against global terrorism is different from any other war in our history. It will be
fought on many fronts against a particularly elusive enemy over an extended period of time
We will disrupt and destroy terrorist organizations by:
direct and continuous action using all the elements of National and International
power. Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and
any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of
mass destruction (WMD) or their precursors;
defending the United States, the American people, and our interests at home and
abroad by identifying and destroying the threat before it reaches our borders. While
the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the International
community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self
defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing
harm against our people and our country;
denying further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or

compelling states to accept their sovereign responsibilities.
We will also wage a war of ideas to win the battle against International terrorism
While we recognize that our best defense is a good offense, we are also strengthening
Americas homeland security to protect against and deter attack this strategy will turn
adversity into opportunity
In the war against global terrorism, we will never forget that we are ultimately fighting for
our democratic values and way of life. Freedom and fear are at war, and there will be no quick
or easy end to this conflict. In leading the campaign against terrorism, we are forging new,
productive International relationships and redefining existing ones in ways that will meet the
challenges of the twenty-first century.
IV. Work with Others to Defuse Regional Conflicts
Concerned Nations must remain actively engaged in critical regional disputes to avoid
explosive escalation and minimize human suffering. In an increasingly interconnected world,
regional crisis can strain our alliances, rekindle rivalries among the major powers, and create
horrifying affronts to human dignity
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is critical because of the toll of human suffering, because of
Americas close relationship with the state of Israel and key Arab states, and because of that
regions importance to other global priorities of the United States the United States will
continue to encourage all parties to step up to their responsibilities as we seek a just and
comprehensive settlement to the conflict.
The United States, the International donor community, and the World Bank stand ready to
work with a reformed Palestinian government If Palestinians embrace democracy and the
rule of law, confront corruption, and firmly reject terror, they can count on American support
for the creation of a Palestinian state.
Israel also has a large stake in the success of a democratic Palestine. Permanent occupation
threatens Israels identity and democracy. So the United States continues to challenge Israeli
leaders to take concrete steps to support the emergence of a viable, credible Palestinian state.
V. Prevent Our Enemies from Threatening Us, Our Allies, and Our Friends with Weapons of
Mass Destruction
The nature of the Cold War threat required the United States with our allies and friends to
emphasize deterrence of the enemys use of force, producing a grim strategy of mutual
assured destruction
Having moved from confrontation to cooperation as the hallmark of our relationship with
Russia, the dividends are evident - an end to the balance of terror that divided us; an historic
reduction in the nuclear arsenals on both sides; and cooperation in areas such as
counterterrorism and missile defense that until recently were inconceivable.
But new deadly challenges have emerged from rogue states and terrorists
We must be prepared to stop rogue states and their terrorist clients before they are able to
threaten or use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and our allies and
friends. Our response must take full advantage of strengthened alliances, the establishment of
new partnerships with former adversaries, innovation in the use of military forces, modern
technologies, including the development of an effective missile defense system, and increased
emphasis on intelligence collection and analysis.
Our comprehensive strategy to combat WMD includes:
Proactive counter proliferation efforts.
Strengthened nonproliferation efforts to prevent rogue states and terrorists from

acquiring the materials, technologies, and expertise necessary for weapons of mass
destruction.
Effective consequence management to respond to the effects of WMD use, whether by

terrorists or hostile states.
We cannot let our enemies strike first

For centuries, International law recognized that Nations need not suffer an attack before they
can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger
of attack. Legal scholars and International jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of
preemption on the existence of an imminent threat most often a visible mobilization of
armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack.
We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of todays
adversaries. Rogue states and terrorists do not seek to attack us using conventional means
The United States has long maintained the option of preemptive actions to counter a sufficient
threat to our national security. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and
the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if
uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemys attack. To forestall or prevent
such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act preemptively.
The United States will not use force in all cases to preempt emerging threats, nor should
Nations use preemption as a pretext for aggression. Yet in an age where the enemies of
civilization openly and actively seek the worlds most destructive technologies, the United
States cannot remain idle while dangers gather.
We will always proceed deliberatively, weighing the consequences of our actions. To support
preemptive options, we will:
build better, more integrated intelligence capabilities to provide timely, accurate

information on threats, wherever they may emerge;
coordinate closely with allies to form a common assessment of the most dangerous
threats; and
continue to transform our military forces to ensure our ability to conduct rapid and
precise operations to achieve decisive results.
The purpose of our actions will always be to eliminate a specific threat to the United States or
our allies or our friends. The reasons for our actions will be clear, the force measured, and the
cause just
VII. Expand the Circle of Development by Opening Societies and Building the Infrastructure of
Democracy
A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than
$2 a day, is neither just nor stable. Including all of the worlds poor in an expanding circle of
development and opportunity is a moral imperative and one of the top priorities of U.S.
International policy
VIII. Develop Agenda for Cooperative Action with the Other Main Centers of Global Power
America will implement its strategies by organizing coalitions as broad as practicable of

states able and willing to promote a balance of power that favors freedom. Effective coalition
leadership requires clear priorities, an appreciation of others interests, and consistent
consultations among partners with a spirit of humility.
There is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in the world
without the stained cooperation of its allies and friends in Canada and Europe. Europe is also
the seat of two of the strongest and most able International institutions in the world: the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which has, since its inception, been the fulcrum of
transatlantic and inter-European security, and the European Union (EU), our partner in
opening world trade.
The attacks of September 11 were also an attack on NATO, as NATO itself recognized when it
invoked its Article V self-defense clause for the first time. NATOs core mission collective
defense of the transatlantic alliance of democracies remains, but NATO must develop new
structures and capabilities to carry out that mission under new circumstances. NATO must
build a capability to field, at short notice, highly mobile, specially trained forces to respond to
a threat against any member of the alliance
We welcome our European allies efforts to forge a greater foreign policy and defense identity
with the EU, and commit ourselves to close consultations to ensure that these developments
work with NATO
With Russia, we are already building a new strategic relationship The Moscow Treaty on
Strategic Reductions is emblematic of this new realityAt the same time, we are realistic
about the differences that still divide us from Russia and about the time and effort it will take
to build an enduring strategic partnership Russias uneven commitment to the basic values
of free-market democracy and dubious record in combating the proliferation of weapons of
mass destruction remain matters of great concern
The United States has undertaken a transformation in its bilateral relationship with India
Differences remain, including over the development of Indias nuclear and missile programs
The United States relationship with China is an important part of our strategy to promote a
stable, peaceful, and prosperous Asia-Pacific region
We welcome the emergence of a strong, peaceful, and prosperous China
Yet, a quarter century after beginning the process of shedding the worst features of the
Communist legacy, Chinas leaders have not yet made the next series of fundamental choices
about the character of their state. In pursuing advanced military capabilities that can
threaten its neighbors in the Asia-Pacific region, China is following an outdated path that, in
the end, will hamper its own pursuit of national greatness
IX. Transform Americas National Security Institutions to Meet the Challenges and
Opportunities of the Twenty-First Century
The major institutions of American national security were designed in a different era to meet
different requirements. All of them must be transformed.
It is time to reaffirm the essential role of American military strength. We must build and
maintain our defenses beyond challenge.
Our militarys highest priority is to defend the United States. To do this effectively, our military
must:
assure our allies and friends;
dissuade future military competition;
deter threats against U.S. interests, allies, and friends; and
decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence fails
The presence of American forces overseas is one of the most profound symbols of the U.S.
commitments to allies and friendsTo contend with uncertainty and to meet the many
security challenges we face, the United States will require bases and stations within and
beyond Western Europe and Northeast Asia, as well as temporary access arrangements for
the long-distance deployment of U.S. forcesdeveloping assets such as advanced remote
sensing, long-range precision strike capabilities, and transformed maneuver and
expeditionary forces. This broad portfolio of military capabilities must also include the ability
to defend the homeland, conduct information operations, ensure U.S. access to distant
theaters, and protect critical U.S. infrastructure and assets in outer space.
Innovation within the armed forces will rest on experimentation with new approaches to
warfare, strengthening joint operations, exploiting U.S. intelligence advantages, and taking
full advantage of science and technology
We must transform our intelligence capabilities and build new ones Intelligence must be
appropriately integrated with our defense and law enforcement systems and coordinated
with our allies and friends
Initiatives in this area will include:
strengthening the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence to lead the

development and actions of the Nations foreign intelligence capabilities;
establishing a new framework for intelligence warning that provides seamless and
integrated warning across the spectrum of threats facing the Nation and our allies;
continuing to develop new methods of collecting information to sustain our

intelligence advantage;
investing in future capabilities while working to protect them through a more vigorous
effort to prevent the compromise of intelligence capabilities; and
collecting intelligence against the terrorist danger across the government with allsource analysis
Just as our diplomatic institutions must adapt so that we can reach out to others, we also need
a different and more comprehensive approach to public information efforts that can help
people around the world learn about and understand America. The war on terrorism is not a
clash of civilizations. It does, however, reveal the clash inside a civilization, a battle for the
future of the Muslim world. This is a struggle of ideas and this is an area where America must
excel.
We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security
commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations,
inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not
extend to Americans and which we do not accept...
In exercising our leadership, we will respect the values, judgment, and interests of our friends
and partners. Still, we will be prepared to act apart when our interests and unique
responsibilities require
Ultimately, the foundation of American strength is at home. It is in the skills or our people, the
dynamism of our economy, and the resilience of our institutions. A diverse, modern society has
inherent, ambitious, entrepreneurial energy. Our strength comes from what we do with that
energy. That is where our national security begins.
Chapter Seven High Security

________________________________________________________________________________
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft
from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not
spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of
its children.
President Dwight Eisenhower
~
Its about fear. Michael Moore got it when he wrote the script for his Academy Award
winning film - Bowling from Columbine. From the time the Pilgrims came onshore to today,
and no doubt into the distant future, the history of America is a history of guns and their
extension violence and war. Were a country at war, perpetually at war. No nation
competes with Americas ability to wage war. Our military is second to none, our war
making capabilities can rain fearsome death to anyone on earth. U.S. satellites circle the
globe 24/7 providing 360 readiness and capabilities to coordinate targeted strikes.
Weapons of mass destruction? The U.S. arsenal has the state-of-the-art, from gas to bio,
nukes to chems, theyre all bunkered, stored or deployed ready for first use and re-use.
Watching TV this week with all these Generals who are consultants for CNN and Fox and NBC, its the
most amazing thing to have the Army telling us what the truth is. This is absolutely insane.
Michael Moore, Acceptance Speech, Academy Awards, March 2003
President Bush pushes tax cuts, arguing this is the best way out of economic recession,
special unpaid for war appropriations, and demands another round of historic military
spending increases. A new and expanded security state is being created to 'watch over'
Americans. History-making budget deficits are back and the national debt spirals upward,
while analysts like Paul Krugman question the motives behind policies with a "hidden
agenda". The Bush years drive the longest continuous job decline since 1944-46 and war is
waged without deep debate by either major political party on the cost to the economy and
impact on American lives. The decision by a man who calls himself "the decider" will have
long lasting impact.
The famous line written on the wall of the war room of the Clinton campaign in 1992 was
Its the economy, stupid. The American economy is producing rich and poor in record
numbers. The U.S. now can point at statistics that ensure an us and them picture of haves
and have nots. The middle class, a middle class rise in living standards, and expectations
of better times ahead for Americas next generation is giving way to another reality. Some
statistics from business sources:
The wealth of the top one percent exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95
percent
Over a recent two year period, the Forbes 400 richest Americans saw their wealth
grow by an average of $940 million each while over the recent twelve year period
the net worth of the bottom 40 percent declined by 80 percent
The Federal Reserve reports that family wealth was substantially below 1989
levels for all income groups under age 55
From 1983-1997 only the top five percent of households saw an increase in their
net worth while wealth declined for everyone else
As of 1997, the median household financial wealth (marketable assets less home
equity) was $11,700, $1300 lower than in 1989
Anticipated Social Security payments are now the largest single asset for a
majority of Americans
On an inflation adjusted basis, the median hourly wage in 1998 was seven percent
lower than in 1973 when Nixon was in the White House
Eighty six percent of stock market gains between the 1989 and 1997 run up flowed
to the top 10 percent of households and 42 percent went to the most well-to-do one
percent
The pay gap between top executives and production workers grew from 42:1
in1980 to 419:1 in 1998 (excluding the value of stock options)
Executive pay at the nations 365 largest corporations rose an average 481 percent
from 1990 to 1998. Business Week reports that in 1998 the average large company
chief executive was paid $10.6 million, a 36% jump over 1997
Impacts on lives include:
Household working hours reached 3149 in 1998, roughly 60 hours a week for the
typical family, moving Americans into first place worldwide. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics the typical American now works 350 hours a year more
than a typical European
The work week has expanded by 184 hours since 1970, an additional 4 weeks on
the job for the same or less pay
Parents now spend 40 percent less time with their children than they did thirty
years ago
More than 65 million anti-depressant prescriptions were written in 1998
Wait, there's more:
The national poverty rate remains above that of the 1970s

One in every four preschoolers in the U.S. now lives in poverty
In 1998 the U.S. General Accounting Office reported that $112 billion was needed to
repair dilapidated public schools
In 1973 the U.S. imprisoned 350,000 people nationwide. By 1998 the prison
population was 1.8 million, roughly 674 people in prison per 100,000. Europe-wide
the imprisonment rate is 60-100 per 100,000. My home state of Florida spends
more on corrections than on colleges. California has had an eight fold increase in its
prison population over the past two decades.
And, since we're close to Disneyworld here in my state of Florida
In 1998 Disney CEO Michael Eisner received a pay package totaling $575.6 million,
25,070 times the average Disney workers pay
And, for perspective, "It's a Small World"
Three billion people live on less than $2 a day

1.3 billion people get by on less than $1 a day
Every jet fighter sold by the U.S. or other developed country costs the schooling of 3
million school children
In 1997 the U.S. exported $8.3 billion in arms to non-democratic countries
Experts report that $8 trillion is socked away in tax havens
80 percent of the worlds people live in developing countries
95 percent of the next generations children will be born there
General Eisenhower, a Republican from 'middle America', the state of Kansas, had it right
when he talked about guns and warships and rockets and a theft from those who are
hungry and cold and not clothed. We are taking away from our future when we do not
consider the costs overall of a world in arms. The President of the U.S. had been through
World War II as Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and he witnessed the results
and the Nuremburg Trials. He has credibility that few of those who push for more war,
more spending on war, have or will ever have.
What do we have to fear? The phrase Homeland Defense is self explanatory, as held under
International law and precedent. Article 51 of the U.N. Charter speaks to the right to selfdefense.
The Bush Doctrine in effect sets aside adherence to International law and the U.N. Charter
where there are only two circumstances in which use of force is permissible self-defense
against an actual or imminent armed attack or when the Security Council has directed or
authorized use of force to maintain or restore international peace and security. Neither of
these circumstances existed before the second Iraq war. Absent one of them, U.S. use of
force against Iraq could be seen as unlawful, or as precedent for other nations to broaden
their definition of what is defensive.
Many in the legal and international community now question the precedent that has been
set by first use, preemptive U.S. military action in Iraq. The decision by the U.S. to go to
war, preemptive war, will have far-reaching consequences.
We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that
they lost the war, but that they started it. And we must not allow ourselves to be drawn into a trial of the
causes of the war, for our position is that no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war.
It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.
- U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson
Nuremberg Trials, Reported August 12, 1945, Department of State Bulletin
A First Use Policy

One widely circulated legal report addressed the U.S. first use, preemptive policy with the
following jurist language: "There is no basis in International law for dramatically
expanding the concept of self-defense, as advocated in the Bush Administrations
September, 2002 "National Security Strategy" to authorize "preemptive" preventive
strikes against states based on potential threats arising from possession or development of
chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and links to terrorism. Such an expansion would
destabilize the present system of U.N. Charter restraints on the use of force.
There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Saddam] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we
dont want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
Condoleezza Rice, The Selling of the Iraq War The First Casualty, New Republic, June 30, 2003
On the home front, in 1997 Greg Mello from the Los Alamos Study Group reported in
Citizens Watch that weapon scientists in New Mexico had finished work on a new nuke. His
research showed that the B61-11, a modified B61-7, added a new mini nuke capability to
the U.S. arsenal. The B61-7s conversion kit creates a low-yield, tactical, bunker-busting
weapon and the earth-penetrating capability is intended for use against deeply buried
targets such as command and control bunkers. Greg tells me the weapons development is
in direct contravention of stated U.S. policies and the Department of Energys own
Stockpile Stewardship and Management plan.
The failure to reach and destroy underground bunkers, German-built in Baghdad, during
the first Iraq war gave Pentagon hawks the sway necessary to push through secret
development of useable tactical nuclear weapons delivered via cruise missile or F-16. In
2002 President Bush adopted a new Nuclear Posture supporting first use of nuclear
weapons. A box of Pandoras, as former New Mexico Governor Bruce King referred to big
problems, was let loose. It was a matter of record: the U.S. is ready, willing and able to use
nuclear weapons preemptively as 'deterrence'.
The ripple effect of this decision on other peoples and nations, national security concerns,
military policy, nuclear weapons and development has yet to be calculated. The driving
concern seems to be a global war on terrorism has demonstrated a need for new nuclear
weapons, ergo we must develop the weapons for use as needed. Forward positioned,
tactical nuclear weapons are now an option wielded solely by the American Commanderin-Chief. To date, hes rejected the first use of nuclear weapons. Perhaps he fears almost
certain global backlash if he pulls the trigger. Perhaps the necessary occasion hasnt
presented itself. Whatever the Presidents thought process, the decision is the Presidents
alone. Resolved, the U.S. Congress has given the President open-ended authority, sole
authority to fire a nuclear shot in a global war.
The Presidents got his wingmen flying alongside him. Congressman Steven Buyer of
Indiana loudly calls for the use of this tactical, upgraded weapon as part of asymmetrical
warfare. Thomas Woodrow, an associate of Paul Wolfowitz and veteran of the Defense
Intelligence Agency, writes for the Washington Times: At a bare minimum, tactical nuclear
weapons should be used against the bin Laden camps in the desert of Afghanistan. To do
less would be rightly seen by the poisoned minds that orchestrated these attacks as
cowardice on the part of the United States and the current administration. Buyer and
Woodrows bomb of choice? The new B-61. The B-61 packs big bang for the buck. The kit
conversion is cost effective. Left unsaid by the Congressman and others advocating firstuse of tactical weapons built to reach and destroy underground (or hardened, under
mountain or other strategic facilities) is the use of nuclear weapons would have far ranging
and unforeseen consequences. The threat of use, in itself, ushers in a new nuclear era of
small, deliverable mini nukes, a new generation of useable, low-yield nuclear weapons,
strategies and tactics.
In February 2002, Congressman Ed Markey of Massachusetts, a leading nonproliferation
advocate, and a broad cross-section of the U.S. Congress wrote the President and said dont
do it: We write to express our deep concern about reports that your Administration is
considering the development of a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons and the
resumption of underground nuclear testing.
Accelerating preparations for underground nuclear testing undermines a moratorium that
has been upheld for nearly ten years by both Republican and Democratic Administrations. The
development of a new generation of low-yield nuclear weapons would require the termination
of an existing legislative prohibition on such activity, sending a resoundingly negative signal
to allies and potential adversaries alike that the U.S. is abandoning International effort to
stem the proliferation of nuclear weapons
Adopting an aggressive nuclear posture by resuming testing and new weapons development is
a step backwards into the hostile policies of the Cold War era, and a virtual invitation to other
Nations to opt out of the International nuclear proliferation regime.
In March 2002, USA Today reported the Bush Administration's need for younger nuclear
weapons designers and engineers. A spokesperson is quoted saying another generation of
scientists needs to be trained to replace an aging cadre of Cold Warriors who are
heading toward retirement and taking the USAs nuclear weapons knowledge with them.
Nobody wants to work here, said Tom Thomson, a senior weapons designer at Livermore
National Lab. One of the few remaining members of a nuclear priesthood who continue in
service at Livermore and Los Alamos labs, Thomson was very concerned. Theres no sense
of mission. The USA Today frontlines-of-the-war dispatch concludes: Only by challenging

scientists to design and build new nuclear weapons will the labs regain their intellectual
edge. A new seminary will be built, new priests trained and old nuclear weapons
designers retired. The 2004 Bush budget allocates over $2 billion additional dollars for a
Modern Pit Facility, with several billion more projected in following years.
So whats a pit facility? Plutonium pits are triggers for nuclear weapons. The round pits are
about the size of a softball. The proposed Modern Pit Facility, according to the few National
Nuclear Security Administration documents released, would be capable of producing pits at
Cold War rates. Each pit will be certified and certification comes with sticker shock. The
first new certified pit was produced at Los Alamos Lab in 2002 and cost $350 million
dollars; another $1.5 billion is budgeted for triggers from Los Alamos. In the heart of Texas,
there are a reported 12,000 or so pits at the Pantex nuclear facility in Amarillo and another
five thousand or so held in strategic reserve. These triggers are for potential future use.
The Bush Administrations new nuclear doctrine, rejecting non-proliferation and firing up
nuclear weapons production to combat rogue states, is rarely discussed. Its a national
security issue. Broken treaties and a new arms race, proliferation and useable nukes are
explained away like a country song, Thats Just the Way Its Gonna Be. It cant be talked
about much. Seventeen thousand triggers arent enough. New triggers are on the way, new
useable nukes are in the pipeline, not to worry, trust us were told, its for national
security.
The road of broken and abandoned treaties reads like a trail of tears, a memorial to
dislocation and a brutal mandate. In the shadow of the claw, comes the arrows of a new
nuclear world, controlled digitally from afar, directed via satellite network, covering every
meter of the earth. The Presidents new doctrine is about useable nukes, an extended,
space-based nuclear umbrella-in-the-making
I consider the death of Dr. Edward Teller in September, 2003, an obituary reporting he died
near the Hoover Institute where he served a Senior Fellow. I recall how he convinced
President Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and later Ronald Reagan to build the bomb,
then a super hydrogen bomb, then a Star Wars system to defend against the bomb and, in
effect, a command and control system from space to guide nuclear bombs against omniterrestrial targets. I realize Bushs small nukes and first-use strategy is in play with the
2002 merger of U.S. Space Command and Strategic Nuclear Command. A network of GPS
guidance systems will soon deliver digitally-directed nuclear war capability to the U.S.
President and war planners. I think about Teller and how many people, on the eve of their
retirement or when faced with death, change their minds about what theyve done with
their lives, the decisions theyve made. If they could do it over again, they say, if they had
another chance, theyd do things differently but the advice they give others after their
deeds are done, with an eye toward history and mortality, rings hollow do it different
than I did it and Teller says now he would not have advised dropping the Los Alamos-built
nuclear bomb on Japan, if he had to do it over. But his personal decisions were what they
were and his actions are what they are. The National labs scientists married war planners
in union with a presidential first-use decision. Before his death, reconsidering his decision
perhaps publicly for the first time, Teller spoke of the possibilities of demonstrating the
power of the first nuclear bomb by exploding it miles over Tokyo harbor, forcing surrender
by Japan with a minimum of casualties. I think we shared the opportunity and the duty,
which we did not pursue, to find a possibility to demonstrate the bomb, he said at a 50th
anniversary forum of the bombing. Now, in retrospect, I have a regret. His regret was too
late.
At the Pantex nuclear site, rows of pits look like a scene out of the movie, Alien. Images
made public show high security rooms with dangling pods, rows upon rows of shining
nuclear triggers, seeds of war machines, thousands of them. Like in Alien, a secret war
machine is guiding from behind the scenes, hidden triggers of the U.S. nuclear weapon
arsenal ready when needed. Yes, Pantex triggers could be pulled off the shelf, but new Los
Alamos triggers are better. Hundreds of millions of additional, new dollars are
clandestinely at work, nearly a billion more than the last Clinton budget for the National
Security Administration that administers the nuclear weapons business in the Department
of Energy.
The Pentagons Nuclear Weapons Council has put advanced nuclear weapons on its front
burner and Congress acts to set aside a 10-year research ban on useable nuclear weapons
the next generation of useable, low-yield nukes is unleashed as part of a "fourth world war"
we read about... Congress gives the president and his men a green light and the charge is on
and accelerating. the billions are adding up. Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New
Mexico adds an extra quarter billion to the presidents 2004 budget request and few eyes
blink. Americas new nuclear arms race picks up velocity and critical mass.
I call Greg Mello, the longtime Los Alamos study director and ask about the latest. The
public interest group has been doing much of the available oversight work tracking the
mission of the Lab, particularly war-related design and development of nuclear weapons.
Greg tells me what he knows about requirements for low-yield weapons, including neutron,
enhanced-radiation weapons and agent defeat tactical weapons, all in-the-works. The
development path taken by the lab is both a matter of public record, demanded by
disclosure laws, and in-secret, black budget development. The tip of the public disclosure
raises numerous flags as to the intent and timetable for these next generation nukes. The
Governor of New Mexico, former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson responsible for the
national labs during the second Clinton administration and occasional emissary to North
Korea, is to meet again with North Korean representatives, as the Bush Administration
raises a nuclear saber.
In April 2003, the administration announces a new Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
designed to destroy underground bunkers on the same day it meets with North Korean
representatives in China to discuss Koreas underground, nuclear weapons development.
The Bush administration makes it clear to assembled diplomats that the new generation
weapon would penetrate hardened rock, the kind encountered in mountainous North
Korea -- and Iran. North Korea and Iran announce they are going ahead with their nuclear
programs. Iran restates its program is not a weapons program. China continues its strategic
programs, taking notice of first-use threats, tactical nukes development and its strategic
need for oil/gas under contract from Iran. Tensions increase and President Jimmy Carter, a
former nuclear engineer, and many others speak of increased likelihood of war.
Back on 'the ranch', the U.S. nuclear arsenal has a glitch, its modified bunker-buster, the
B61-11, developed after the Iraq war, according to Fred Celec, deputy assistant to the
Secretary of Defense, is only designed to penetrate soil. It will not survive rock. Celec and
U.S. officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration explain that the
Administration needs another new weapon designed for different, deeper uses and is
moving forward quickly with its design testing and manufacture. Los Alamos National Lab
in New Mexico and Livermore National Lab in California will be designing and engineering
the weapon. The Presidents decision as Commander-in-Chief, opens a new vector of
nuclear weapons a forward projection of force with a robust capabilities policy
including first use of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons as deterrent. Nukes
designed to be tactical again. In real-world terms, its a closer-to-use nuclear world redefined and -drawn by the U.S.
In a 2002 briefing re: the Administrations new nuclear posture, J.D. Crouch, assistant
Secretary of Defense releases the new, updated nuclear policy, with a Powerpoint slide
presentation. His introduction begin with blunt talk of operational deployment:
In a capabilities-based approach, we had to determine a way to size the nuclear component of
the force. We did that by essentially adopting a completely new approach to this problem.
What we posited is that there are sort of immediate and potential contingencies that we will
have to deal with. In fact, theres a broad range of contingencies. Immediate things in that
category may be rogue states that we would have to deal with. We will maintain an
operationally deployed force for immediate and unexpected contingencies.
Keywords to take away here are operationally deployed, a nuclear component with a
size to meet a broad range of contingencies. The cards a President arranged in a back
room of war planners are now shown face up. Rogue states beware. The U.S. will now
have operational plans for using nuclear weapons. The impact? Deployment of a forward
projected, nuclear arsenal with bunker busting (and, soon, mountain-tunnel busting),
precision-guided and targeted, tactical, useable nukes alongside a first-use policy with a
President who has twice pulled the trigger and gone to war. and a defense doctrine that
overtly states an intent to use nukes offensively, preemptively, at the sole discretion of the
Commander-in-Chief.
By mid 2003, the nuclear players significantly rearrange their strategies and tactics
North Korea, after claiming the Bush administration unilaterally stepped away from
the Clinton Administrations commitment of no nuclear first-use, announces it is
abandoning the shutdown of civilian nuclear energy production that could be used
to process weapons-grade nuclear materials. It restarts its nuclear plants and
announces an intention to defend itself with all means necessary, including nuclear
weapons.
A crisis ensues, a crisis continues.
China speeds up its nuclear weapons development program and is unsuccessful in

convincing North Korea to accede to U.S. demands. The U.S. refuses to negotiate with
North Korea, then succeeds in convincing China to broker a multilateral meeting.
The meeting breaks down after one day, as U.S. negotiators refer to North Korea as
an evil regime.
India and Pakistan confront rising border tensions in their nuclear stand-off.
Regional conflict continues in the Mideast and Near East. Conflict in Afghanistan and
Iraq continues. An escalating threat environment rolls from southern Russia across
the oil rich Caspian area into Iran, the Balkans and Turkey. Nuclear powers in the
region, Russia, Iran, Israel standoff and tensions rise. Israel leaks word of three
nuclear-weapon equipped submarines it has deployed.
Iran speeds up its nuclear development program in the wake of the second Iraq war
and war of words with the U.S.
Set in motion, shock waves of American power ripple in myriad, unpredictable ways as
first-use, preemptive nuclear strategy moves nations to new nuclear defense planning and
development. Nuclear proliferation is taking on a new life. New billions are appropriated
and spent. Non-proliferation treaties are threatened as a new, harsh nuclear reality sets in.
Will China now move more aggressively and, eventually, threaten first-use, preemptive
strikes and useable nuclear capabilities? Has Irans clandestine nuclear activity, with
Russian assistance, shifted gears in light of U.S. threats? Is the U.S. administrations
pressure on Russia producing fewer nukes and less risk, or are the previous agreements
negotiated by the Clinton Administration dead in the water? Will the Russians accept U.S.
nuclear weapons deployed in the Near East and Mideast and a next generation of designs
and tactical weapons, or will they too begin ramping up their own low-yield, precisiontargeted-from-space nuclear weapons designs, production and delivery systems?
These are the questions of the hour and they cannot be easily dismissed. The imminent
threat, the clear and present danger of Iraq nuclear weapons and weapons of mass
destruction was the argument made to the American people Americans were told that
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and they intended to use them. Again and again, the
Bush administration spoke of Iraqs nuclear weapons. The President warned of potential
Iraqi nuclear attacks against the U.S. in his 2003 State of the Nation speech. Administration
claims drove public support for war in Iraq. Americans continue to believe there was an
Iraq nuclear threat even after the weapons, facilities and programs couldnt be located? The
administration claims are being proven false -- after the President launched another war
against Iraq. Trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives lost and two, three wars
later, we have to ask what have we learned?
The question sticks with me as I try to sleep, the fear that under the cloak of imminent
threat, the Administration misled the U.S. into war on Iraq, even as Bush directives set in
motion a new nuclear arms race. It wasnt Iraq with nuclear weapons and an express intent
to use them unilaterally, its the U.S., it's us. We are now developing, in a wartime climate,
new useable nukes. The legacy of Bush will be nukes ad infinitum and, so far, the American
people remain unaware of the escalating nuclear arms race the U.S. has set in motion. The
diversion of conventional conflict in a multi-front war masks the harsher reality of a neonuclear hegemony.
Less than a generation ago, the U.S. war department was called the War Department. Now
the war department is called the Defense Department and nuclear warheads are called
Peacemakers
When I wake up, I read Charles Krauthammer approving the Presidents decision to declare
war on Iraq as an act of singular presidential leadership and political courage.
Krauthammer writes harshly about Sen. Edward Kennedy who, months after the wars
commencement, in September 2003, gives a widely reported speech calling the Presidents
case for war a blatant lie There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas,
announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and
was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud. Krauthammer has a
meltdown. To accuse Bush of perpetrating a fraud to go to war for political advantage,
he writes, is not just disgraceful. It so flies in the face of the facts that it can only be said to
be unhinged from reality. Kennedys rant reflects the Democrats blinding Bush-hatred, and
marks its passage from partisanship to pathology.
I wonder about pathology as Krauthammer uses the term and I wonder about
Krauthammer and a pathology assigning nuclear warheads names like Peacemaker. I
wonder about a sane, rational definition of a Weapon of Mass Destruction? Is Napalm a
WMD? Are Daiseymakers, the given name for mass ordnance that pulverizes everything
and anybody with its arc of destruction, a WMD or just "ordnance"? Are anti-personnel
weapons, thousands of dispersed bomblets that litter the ground, armed and primed, a
WMD? Are nuclear- and chemical-residues of war, depleted uranium shells WMDs? Was
Agent Orange a WMD? What really is a Weapon of Mass Destruction? The press reports
40,000 pounds of napalm being dropped by U.S. Navy aircraft at the beginning of the first
Iraq war in support of a Marine howitzer front-line deployment. Is this the use of a WMD?
The International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva responds that Napalm and fuel-air
bombs are not illegal because the U.S. is not a signatory to the 1980s weapon convention
which prohibits and restricts these weapons. By not signing on to international treaties, the
U.S. may not be prohibited under International Humanitarian Law and related
International laws from using defined and prohibited weapons of mass destruction. By
not signing a broad range of international agreements, the U.S. has seemingly inoculated
itself from being brought before international courts.
Kissimmee, I always pronounce the citys name wrongly. Its Ki-s-me, not Kissa-me. Its
located in Osceola county Florida and adjacent to Celebration, advertised as a perfect little
town in which to live. Kissimmee and Celebration and the local outskirts of Orlando and
Disneyworld are Americana picture-perfect settings, ideal places to raise a family.
Celebration, built by Disneys Development Company, is a planned community where most
every single design element and ordinance is intended to nurture a quiet n happy life. It is
described in brochures and advertisements as the quintessential American town.
Located not far from Kissimmee, Celebration and Disneyworld, is Lockheed Martin, the
worlds largest weapons contractor. Lockheed Martin promotes itself in its online
brochures, as having a vision to be the best the most respected global leader in every
market and community we serve, through the pride, commitment and power of
enterprising people. With missiles, air-to-ground and strike weapons with names like
AGM-142, AUP, BLU-109, HAVE LITE, JASSM, LOCAAS, PYTHON 4 (and 5 and 6 on the way)
and WCMD, Lockheed Martin has come a long way from its self proclaimed humble
beginnings in 1956 as a missile factory located in a former cow pasture and orange grove. It
draws it workforce now from the Kissimmee, Celebration, the Osceola area and, on the
surface, all seems good as industry growth is up.
The U.S. administrator for post-war Iraq, General Garner lived here before his relocation to
Baghdad. For sales information on the product line of Lockheed Martin, visit the website,
theyre evidently proud of what they do. The company claims ethics is the essence of
their business... Business without ethics is not the kind of business we want to be in.
Business with ethics improves, strengthens, and clarifies all that we do. Ethics gives all our
efforts a solid foundation and makes working at and with Lockheed Martin a pleasure.
Lockheed Martin cites its Ethical Principles Honesty, Integrity, Responsibility, Trust,
Respect and Citizenship[well] obey all the laws of any country in which we do business,
respect environmental concerns, and give back to the communities by improving and
enriching community life.
A thought here are the products of Lockheed Martin improving and enriching community
life? The colorful brochures present the upgraded MIM-104, PAC-3 and GEM+ Patriot
missile systems being produced jointly by Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. Raytheons
annual billion-dollar-plus revenue from the Patriot program keeps paychecks in pockets as
does Lockheed Martins multi-barrel, faster-than-a-speeding-bullet, kinetic Patriot
upgrade package. The problem with the Patriot, from a marketing point of view, is usage,
not enough of them are being fired off. Raytheons Tomahawk system of missiles is much
more profitable, due to much more usage. Replenishing inventory is a key to profit. The
depletion of inventory during the second Iraq produces profit proportionately greater
than stand-at-ready defense systems.
One of the latest upgrades in the weapons arsenal are "kits" to turn "dumb" free-release
bombs into "smart, precision" bombs, precision guided by GPS/Global Position Satellite.
To get a feel of this ordnance, lets consider the reported impacts of one guided bomb as it
is dropped a small 2000 pound Mark-84 JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munition). The
software program directing the bomb to target is called Bug Splat. Following the JDAM as
it hits the ground, its fuse ignites a priming charge which detonates 945 pounds of Tritonal,
a silvery solid mixture of aluminum and TNT. The chemical reaction produces an expanding
nucleus of gas the swells the bombs casing to double its size before the steel splits into a
shower of white-hot fragments traveling 6000 feet per second and producing a shock wave
of several thousand pounds per square inch. The fireball is 8500 degrees Fahrenheit and
the explosion carves a 20 feet crater and hurls around 10,000 pounds of rock at supersonic
speed. Some of the bomb metal fragments travel out three quarters of a mile, pieces of the
bomb producing death and destruction within a radius of a mile and a half. This is a small
bomb dropped by nearly every aircraft that flew in the Iraq campaign. JDAMS can level a
city block (as they did in Baghdad). It leaves a pile of rubble in a crater.
The reality of this resonates. I recall asking the engineer from Raytheon about the use of
these weapons and rationality of destruction. I look back at his answer. We go to war,
he tells me, and we field test, we bring the test results back to the designers and
engineers upgrades are proposed to the Pentagon and Congress funds the upgrades we
learn as we go and we get better at war the more we go to war. I realize hes right. The U.S.
has been conducting multiple field tests, to put it in engineering terms, and has had many
opportunities to upgrade the arsenal over the past half century. The weapon designer
agrees and points to the Patriot system as an example of the benefits of going to war.
The Patriots failure rate against Scud missiles aimed at Israel during the first Iraq war led
to an upgrade package of guidance enhancements and midcourse correction systems. He
wouldnt talk details, but the marketing teams at Raytheon and Lockheed later announce
their new and better product to the world field-tested and improved missile defense
systems.
We do what were trained to do. Were trained to kill. Were the best in the world.
Anonymous, Private First Class, quoted on the road to Baghdad, March 2003
Collateral damage is an innocuous sounding term that is anything but innocuous.

Collateral damage in war is not a term that gives due thought to the death, sanctioned
killing and destruction delivered to collaterals. The death of civilians, profound
devastation and destruction, is not collateral. Susan Sontag has written about war, having
lived amid wars brutality. She talks of the incredible noise of war and what children feel.
Its a thousand times more than what you see or hear on television. War is more horrible
than pictures can convey. United we stand, she says, is a sinister phrase. She talks of
her patriotism and of the need for empathy, starting with understanding where other
people are coming from. She repeats an ethical life is about empathy. She shakes her
head: To stop a war you need a two-party system, which we dont have. Shes outgunned
by the militarys public relations departments, aiming to target the publics mind and
deliver news, not about collateral damage, or the extent of bombing, or the price of war.
The Pentagon has learned to take its message to the public with professional, polished
spin the right words for the moment. The Iraq war becomes Operation Iraqi Freedom
with the broadcast Networks coverage featuring animated graphics, computer generated
images, headline scrolls and brief reports from reporters using satellite video phones. The
Pentagon reports from state-of-the-art studios. The military in the form of ex-military
officers is enlisted by news organizations to provide on-camera, 'play-by-play' color
commentary.
Words become tools of persuasion. We hear that "the regime in Iraq is responsible for the
war and for putting its population in harms way. The brutalities of war as they fall upon
civilians or non-combatants become explanations They were in the wrong place at the
wrong time. They shouldnt have been there. When George W. Bush concludes each of his
speeches on foreign policy, he asks God to bless America. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a
close friend of the president who says he talks to him daily, is another who reports George
Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time. The president knows
hes making history changing decisions. Evans adds that Bush copes with the anxiety as
he always has. He prays and exercises, Evan says. His friend has a placid acceptance of
challenges that come with his Christian faith, we're told.
Billions of people around the globe feel and hear reverberations when George W. Bush calls
for blessings from an Old Testament-New Testament God. When the President threatens,
he says, folks should listen, hes not "fooling". When 160 nations around the world oppose
the United States going to war before the Iraq War commences in 2003, the Presidents
press spokesperson explains that 30 nations (most at the margins of the conflict) are part
of a coalition of the willing. He does not speak of the 160 nations in opposition, who are
not willing and would seem to be a coalition of the unwilling. Unaligned and
unsupportive, to the President they are simply not relevant to his decision. The decision to
go to war is the Presidents alone and, as the U.S. President makes repeatedly clear to
nations of the world: Youre either with us or against us.
Chapter Eight Dreams of Peace

________________________________________________________________________________
Sow an action, reap a habit, Sow a habit, reap a character
Sow a character, reap a destiny
Karma
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap
New Testament
Have you considered what you sow?
Koran
Every blade of grass has its Angel that bends over it and whispers Grow, Grow
Talmud
~
ifty years before the birth of Jesus, the philosopher Cicero warned of a gathering
storm. The statesman spoke of rule by the sword and wrote of consequences the
Roman Empire would eventually face he wrote in Latin, but heres a translation of
one his musings: As you have sown, so shall you reap. A more modern translation might
be: What goes around, comes around. War promises peace and delivers war. Men at war
are not at peace. War is unpredictable. Peace enforced by threat and force of war has a
short shelf life on historys stage. Yet war seems noble, meaningful, necessary and peace
unreasonable, foolish, a sign of weakness. Why is this so? Chris Hedges new book takes a
shot at the answer. Hedges describes himself as a war addict, traveling from war zone to
war zone to get off on the high, the adrenalin, the feeling of living life on the edge. War is a
Force That Gives Us Meaning reminds us that war has great attraction, tracing to time
immemorial. It has captured individuals, tribes, villages, city states, nations, empires in its
grasp. Literature, music, love and loss, warriors and Hollywood, young immortal
volunteers, religious fanatics, zealots, dreamers of riches and ordinary people are living
testament to the power war carries.
The enduring attraction of war is this, even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we
long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.
- Chris Hedges, 2002
War is one force, but not the only force. Hedges, a Pulitzer-winning writer, is not a pacifist,
but in his book he attempts an introspective look at why we are drawn to war, not love or
other ways of resolving conflict. In fact, he writes that historians have calculated that in the
whole of human history, twenty nine years might be considered to have been the extent of
global peace. Hedges speaks of war with honesty of a correspondent whos witnessed war
in El Salvador, the Mideast and the Balkans. His experience is not a pretty picture, but he
sees the attraction. He talks of a god-like exhilaration of destroying that veterans of war
later have reflected is nothing gallant or heroic, nothing redeeming. He writes of
unquestioning patriotism, an absolute patriotism demanded by the state. Hedges addresses
an axis of evil bitter living conditions, revenge and rage that turns men and women into
criminals indifferent to suffering and death. He writes of the power and price of war on the
psyche and the profound difficulties anyone encounters when they oppose war. Hedges
book is a rare look at the attraction of war opposed to the promise of peace.
I ask myself, after reading his personal journey to heaven and hell and back, what is it that I
can do, as I watch the America I know launch itself into the new century with old, old ideas.
In my life I know, when confronted, Im not one to personally back down. My values are to
protect what I believe, but then I realize isnt it the same, to some degree, with all of us,
even my antagonists, great and small. When I speak of empathy, what am I speaking of if
not my attempt to understand how the other person, my antagonist, my enemy feels, are
they protecting themselves, their values and what of our values?
Hedges speaks of love as an antidote, I cannot go this far toward an enemy, and then I recall
the Christian belief, words in the New Testament, to love ones enemy as one loves oneself.
I think of myself as Christian, so whats missing? I know the injunctions against violence
and war are replete in most every religion and spiritual movement, so how do we justify
our own violence, our own wars, for the nation war is my war. None of us are islands apart,
yes?
A Moral Force
If a snapshot could be taken this instant of all the academics and policy makers, defense
corporations and officers, war colleges and war planners at work, the picture would
compose a living 3-dimensional view of a world at war, with each other, with ourselves,
with our environment. The sheer amount of energy going on around the clock and around
the globe devoted to war is, without question, the great human endeavor of our time and
our nature. The questions and issues of war, the manufacturing of war and the marching
orders, war-curriculums and war-missions draw down billions of U.S. dollars daily. We
draw upon the lives of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, following military and
political orders, pay our taxes that support the war budgets, wave the flag and feel the
patriotism. Make no mistake war, not peace, provides the guiding, sustaining force to
current U.S. strategic, military and foreign policy.
But what of the other forces beyond war?
Are there viable alternatives to war? Alternatives thats are livable and realistic or are we
all resigned to the momentum and physics of war strikes and counterstrikes insurgency
and counterinsurgency forward projection of force and blowback, eye-for-an-eye and
tooth-for-a-tooth injunctions, bullies at school and heroes and villains, domestic bliss or
dashed hopes and dreams when your loved one damages you to the point you cannot
hardly move without pain.
War is the big picture, but each of us, alone and person to person, will face a daily struggle
to find the alternatives to little wars that assault each of us, I realize this includes me, even
as we attempt to step up and make a difference, somehow, in the big picture, speaking up,
being brave and strong in the face of fear and violence.
An alternative to perpetual war, a paradigm shift I read about, is even being offered within
the militarys ranks alternatives to war are being proposed and widely debated in these
somewhat arcane journals read by a few. These military-political solutions have a name
Operations other than war and emphasize human contacts, civilian affairs and peace
operations. Perhaps this is the direction we need to fund in the mix of statecraft and
military tactics. The strategy, a peacekeeping tradition, does have possibilities and an
extended history, but the slate of peaceful solutions is discounted as war-fighting and wartechnology drives profits and politics. So, what is it, within peaceful resolution that can
offer win-win, and a profitable future, perhaps even a place in heaven whatever religion
we profess and follow
What is to be done with the sociopaths, you say. Got a point, I say. But there has never been
a nation of sociopaths or a nation of James Cagneys on top of the oil storage tank in White
Heat. Lets start by agreeing that we cant brand all the people in any community as our
enemy and deserving of war. Lets go, politically speaking here, after the bad guys, like in
Shane.
I download a report by Michael Bhatia entitled The Peace Allergy and discover that
operations other than war/OOTW as peacekeeping missions are a military tradition and
have a long history. Bhatia looks at current U.S. policy first, characterized in The New World
Strategy, which claims that peace operations erode the armys capacity and its sense of
mission. Bhatia (I wonder what his background is) quotes an Army Strategic Studies
Institute report that the post-Vietnam era should have led to a fundamental
reassessment of American military strategy but didnt, instead producing a two major
war strategy, where two full-on wars could be fought at the same time. I remember
Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense, in one of his televised news conferences, with
war in Iraq underway and problems with North Korea heating up, promising with
assurance that the U.S. was fully capable' of waging war on North Korea at the same time
we waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq! Three major wars can be waged, maybe more
simultaneously, the Secretary of Defense is on record. [update: In 2008 Michael Bhatia dies
in Iraq and is posthumously awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for the Defense of
Freedom]
Bhatia talks of the current debate within the ranks senior leadership at the military and
political level has denigrated OOTW and is highly allergic to peace operations although
there are some middle-level officers who see the leadership attitude as short sighted.
He talks of the reasons for an allergy to peace operations career disincentives to waging
peace and he points to decades of U.S. armed conflicts overseas un-accompanied by
planning and post-conflict preparations for restoration of civil life.
Operations other than war are missing in the U.S. military and, it would seem as I write
here in St. Pete Beach, Florida, and hear the occasional Air Force jets overhead on their way
to command central at MacDill, that the military is a good place to start practicing OOTW to
achieve the nations security objectives without resorting to perpetual war.
Bhatia adds to my dreamlike state. All the Army needs is a OOTW doctrine (perhaps as an
"addendum" to the Bush national security doctrine.) The Army is a doctrine-driven
organization and will act to implement a doctrine and standard training program for
OOTW and peace operations if, heres the big if, there is an OOTW doctrine. He talks of
the pressing need to reawaken peacekeeping and fund training. The National Guard is what
little the military has in the way of trained personnel capable of building bridges, not
destroying them, he says. He writes of a few remaining vestiges of peacekeeping missions
in the military, and berates a backward looking contingent on an ideologically driven
mission to close the Peacekeeping Institute the sole Defense Department institution
dealing with peace operations on a daily basis. In response to plans to close the Institute,
Col. George Oliver, who would be the final Institute director, told the Associated Press in
March 2002: My concern is what message does this send to the world? Its going to say
that the U.S. military doesnt really care about peacekeeping.
So there it is, we look out at the near- and mid-term future and see a powerful force for
war confronting a moral force for peace. Each of us have our own struggles to resolve as we
navigate between our hopes and dreams, our anger and kindness, our opportunities to
become active and our checking out when it feels no matter what we do, it wont make a
difference. Within the U.S. military there are faint reverberations that draw upon a
tradition of peacekeeping, a counterforce to a powerful, ongoing, multi-billion dollar
momentum for war-making.
I pull the screenplay for Patton off my shelf and reread John Milius lines celebrating war,
after his screenplay for Apocalypse Now, how Patton so loved the feeling of being in war
and I re-read Hedges, dog-eared pages, he was probably in a hotel room in New York when
he wrote them, how war gives us meaning and energy and I realize, again, how near
impossible alternative to war are, how dangerous the road to peace is I drift away and
flash back to films Ive seen, another peek inside the theater of the American mind as I try
to understand where were going, war and peace, a mortal ending for each of us or, as the
end of timers predict, an apocalyptic ending for all of us.
Then I go sideways thinking of a war between angels and demons and flash to the violence
of Scarface, over-the-top, stylish and vicious. Tony Montana, Id like you meet my little
friend, Al Pacinos character surrounded in his Miami mansion and shooting it out before
hes bullet riddled. Remember Montanas semi famous movie line before hes taken with a
blast: In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then you get the money, you get the
power. You get powerful, lose yourself and perish in excess.
And Tony Montana is a gangster hero that captures violent dreams. The thing with violence
is that it pervasive. In the U.S. we have the highest percentage of our population behind
bars than any modern industrialized nation. Amnesty International reports that our prison
population has tripled in the last decade and a half, sentences are harsher than any
industrialized nation. Brutal policies dominate and the prison system is fast becoming a
for-profit privatized industrial system run by some of the same companies, like
Wackenhut, who supply privatized services, like Halliburton and Blackwater, to the
military. Attorney General Ashcroft calls for longer sentences, expanded surveillance and
police powers, data bases searches, intrusive violations of civil rights and, to justify this
systematic expansion Ashcroft cites the war and a general threat to security. Were
moving in the wrong direction here. I think of the famous line from All the Presidents Men
again follow the money. Billions upon billions upon billions spent toward systematic
violence a pittance toward peace.
The money trail tells a tale. Is there a hope to convert wartime industries to peacetime use?
Whats do the dollars say? Are there dollars in peace, more than in war? If Lockheed
Martins or Raytheons Patriot system were to go away, what of Patriots spending, the
jobs? What would those families in Celebration, Kissimmee or those in Boston at Raytheon
do? What of the families, jobs, of all the war related industries spread across every state,
which they are as a favorite tactic for ensuring political support for war n defense
spending. What of the armies of lobbyists who argue, and pay richly, for perpetual wartime
politics, perpetual campaigning, perpetual threats and a perpetual war footing? Wheres
are the replacement dollars for war spending, how does one find a productive, even
lucrative, counter strategy to perpetual war?
Take a moment to listen to a few lonely voices whove pushed for peace against the odds.
Colman McCarthy stands out. The peaceable society wont be brought about in our
lifetime, he writes. So what? Dont worry about being successful, worry about being
faithful. Its true that a small daily act of peacemaking often doesnt seem like much. While
few of us are called on to do great things, all of us can do small things in a great way. The
Center for Teaching Peace provides a beacon of light or perhaps its better to say many
small but powerful beacons of light when small daily acts join together.
For many years, McCarthy wrote a column for the Washington Post, but he was let go
because the column, the Post reported, wasnt making enough money. The market has
spoken, said Robert Kaiser, the managing editor. It couldve also been reported that in the
period immediately before 9/11 McCarthy did an analysis of 430 opinion pieces in the Post,
noting that 420 were written by right-wingers or centrists and ten were written by
columnists considered left.
McCarthy also took a look at network television in the period around the war in Iraq: Here
are a few of the retired soldiers appearing on network television, offering analysis and
commentary on the combat in Iraq: Lt. Gen. Bernard Trainor, Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, Lt.
Gen Gregory Newbold, Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, Gen. Barry McCaffery, Maj. Gen. Paul
Vallely, Lt. Gen. Don Edwards, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerny, Col. Tony Koren, Lt. Col. Rick
Francona, Maj. Jack Stradley and Capt. Chris Lohman he offered that the news divisions of
NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN and their affiliates were choosing to carve out the dominate time
slots and on-air blocks for military commentary. The point of view was pro-war and the
special effect maps, graphics, pointers, military supplied air footage and select on-theground clips accented the message of the on-screen experts. McCarthy comments on a
credibility gap and need for analysis/reporting by independent and impartial journalists
and a range of experts commentary. Instead, we see a parade ground for military men
most all well-groomed white males saluting the ethic that war is rational, that war is the
way to win the peace. An illusion of absolute consensus prevails. Or as Tim Russert of NBC
announced as the war commenced, The country is galvanized around the President.
Why not consider air time for dissenting voices to say what millions of citizens around the
world are saying, that this U.S. invasion is illegal, unjust and unnecessary? Maybe, its clear
to many, Hussein isnt connected to the World Trade Center, maybe his forces in Iraq have
been disarmed in the manner the allied inspection teams have been reporting for years in
their thorough searches. Maybe Hussein can be removed, there are ways to do this, without
launching an invasion and announcing a global war. And why are the leaders from Veterans
for Peace or Veterans Against the War in Iraq not brought in to offer their analysis and
views that what Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Powell-Wolfowitz and the neo-con strategists
are launching will have costs far beyond a quick strike at Baghdad, removal of Husseins
regime and overthrow of the Afghan Taliban. The men and women who will be doing the
fighting, who did the fighting, deserve a seat at the table in the newsrooms of the major
media, yes? Other points of view, like McCarthys have a place, yes? Whats also is getting to
me is the big broadcast and cable networks are not talking conflict of interest and full
disclosure about their 'expert' guests and commentators, viewers are not told that this exgeneral or that ex-colonel is on the payroll of this or that military contractor. Isnt fulldisclosure, or potential bias, worth a passing reference?
McCarthys thirty-year career in journalism with the Post isnt to be lightly dismissed, even
as hes dismissed from the Post. He doesnt go without some last words:
George W. Bush lectured the world that youre either with us or against us. Americas
networks got the message: Theyre with. They could have said that theyre neither with nor
against, because no side has all the truth or lies and no side all the good or evil. But a
declaration like that would have required boldness and independence
McCarthy has two books. I check them out online for reviews and find long excerpts from
Solutions to Violence and Strength Through Peace. As a former policy maker on a state board
of education, I focus in on McCarthys assessment that there are around "50 million"
students in the U.S. and nearly all of those are going to graduate absolutely unaware of the
philosophy of Gandhi, King, Dorothy Day, Howard Zinn, or AJ Muste. He has spoken to
hundreds of college audiences, given thousands of talks. He tells a story about how he holds
up a $100 bill and says Ill give this to anybody in the audience who can identify these next
six people who was Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant, and Paul Revere? All hands go up on
all three. Then I ask who was Jeanette Rankin (from Montana, shes the first woman
member of Congress, and voted against WW I saying you can no more win a war than win
an earthquake), Dorothy Day (co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ginetta
Sagan (founder of Amnesty USA) The last three are women peacemakers. The first three
are male peacebreakers. The kids know the militarists. They dont know the peacemakers.
He hasnt lost the $100 yet.
McCarthy: We are graduating students as peace illiterates who have only heard the side of
violence. If we dont teach our children peace, somebody else will teach them violence.
How is peace taught? How are policies of peace developed? What would be a rational
national security and foreign policy, a redefinition that would bring an independent,
reasoned approach to war and peace? Im not a pacifist. I see myself as a tough nut to
crack. I know a good defense can take a team to the Super Bowl. My home team, the Tampa
Bay Bucs, proved that in 2003. I know about strong defenses. Then I realize Im thinking in
sport metaphors and feel good Im a red blooded American who's trying to win -- but in a
different way.
The philosophy of nonviolent force needs to encompass diplomacy, mediation, conflict

resolution and overcome the causes of violence. McCarthy talks about how were all
armed with ideas, ideas bring action, actions bring consequences, hopeful or unintended
as Ive learned. Teaching ideas of peace should start early, he says. Who could disagree and
I recall the conflict resolution programs we initiated in New Mexicos schools. I was
thinking more about keeping kids from beating each other up at that point, than peace
studies, but keeping kids from beating each other up begins by giving them tools to resolve
their conflicts. Peace studies, I realize, begin this way.
McCarthy is asked in one interview about the message his book sends: Whats your
response to people who feel that those who are not in support of military action are antiAmerican and pro-terrorist? He rejoins: Id suggest they read Tolstoys essay on
Patriotism or Peace in which he denounces patriotism as nationalistic self-absorption and
egotism. After Tolstoy, some Martin Luther King, who said A nation that continues year
after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs for social uplift is
approaching spiritual death. And then read the former Marine Commandant General David
Shoup: America has become a militaristic establishment, fueled by a gigantic defense
industry, and millions of proud, patriotic and frequently bellicose and militaristic citizens.
Militarism in America is in full bloom and promises a future of vigorous self-pollination.
Then some Barbara Ward: There is an old Roman proverb that says, If you would wish for
peace then prepare for war. Rubbish. If you would wish for peace, offer alternatives to
war
As the worlds largest maker and seller of weapons, what alternatives do we bring to war,
what of learning to make the peace with alternatives to war? What of the 40 or so current
conflicts in the world and the tens of thousands of war related deaths each month? What of
the 38,000 children who die each day in the Third World from diseases preventable by
immunizations that cost around $10 a child? What of legal and political solutions to conflict
instead of military solutions and force of arms? What of a moral force? Ive learned that war
promises peace, but delivers doesnt deliver. Im re-learning a lesson, that education holds
the key to peace.
Please forgive us for being the most violent government on earth,
- Martin Luther King, the Riverside Church, 1967
Do you know freedom exists in a school book?
- Jim Morrison, An American Prayer
A Physics of Peace
I was in the cusp between being a boy and a young man when nuclear weapons accelerated
my curve of awareness. As a sophomore high school debater, I was hustling up source
materials for an upcoming match with Jesuit kids from Loyola High on the topic of nuclear
proliferation.
Bombabilia" we called it back then. The Cuban Crisis and imminent risk of a nuclear
Armageddon had passed without a big bang, but all the kids at our school were still
regularly climbing under desks when siren warnings went off. I figured the Russians would
wipe out Hollywood and all of us in L.A. (thinking we had to be as big a priority target as
Washington D.C.!), so I bicycled to see our local politician, George Brown Jr., to ask him
what could be done, that I didnt want my family to get melted in a sudden flash.
I didnt know anything about George or Congress and when I asked the person who
answered the phone at his office beforehand about his address and suite number, I
pronounced it suit. I was a kid growing up in East Los Angeles and had little contact with
the outside world and I wasnt too familiar with suites. After we met and hit it off, we began
a friendship that would last some thirty years. As a teen, I worked on Browns campaigns
passing out literature and he began to share ideas with me, ideas that rocked my view of
everything. He would go on to a three decade career in Congress and committee leadership
in the arena of big science, including oversight of the nations nuclear labs. We stayed in
touch over the years and he was an invaluable source and inspiration, even when I went on
to investigative work of the labs and his committees.
George E. Brown Jr. was a physicist and engineer, and a very unusual politician. When I first
met him I wasnt sure what physicists did, but he did tell me that was opposed to nuclear
proliferation and would help me and guide me to the information I needed. In my series of
high school debates over the course of a year, I argued the issue of Nth countries
obtaining nuclear weapons and delivery systems, projecting the dangers and dealing with
the politics and ancient rivalries of countries on the brink of obtaining nuclear weapons,
concentrating on countries that had histories of war. I asked Brown about Chile and
Argentina, suggesting that their border disputes went back a century and had never been
resolved. He gently told me I had to look at a bigger picture and introduced me to terms like
geo-politics and strategic alliances.
He spoke about wars that spread and escalated because of entangling alliances and the
physics of war that once the genie was out of bottle, atomic weapons were not going to
easily be pushed back in that theres a momentum, a Newtonian law of actions and
reactions. I vowed to study physics and chemistry and advanced mathematics and did.
Later, we spoke about the Soviet Union and its border wars with China, and the spread of
tactical and strategic weapons. He gave me bundles of materials to study. I later learned
that the Congressman was a veteran of World War II and member of the American Legion
and a religious objector to war who chose to volunteer, requested active duty and served
with distinction as an Infantry officer.
In 1969, when I was coordinating the Vietnam Moratorium Committees anti-war effort in
California, we met during Georges campaign for U.S. Senate and he spoke of the U.S. role in
the world. I want to quote some of what he told me from notes and written words he gave
me in reminiscence and respect for a man who turned my life away from East L.A. and
toward the big picture far beyond what I had experienced. I became a different spirit,
young but no longer nave, because of the pictures he painted of a world that was new to
me. I hope that, over the years, I had some positive impact on his work in Congress.
I believe he positioned himself in Congress, in science, technology and astronautics, hoping

to do what he could to shift the nation away from the use of force and toward the use of
high tech to provide peaceful solutions.
Looking forward, his vision remains as challenging to me today as when handed to me in
1969:
We find ourselves a troubled Nation. The elections of the last year revealed the depths of
discontent. The final choices presented in November made few happy, and the leader finally
chosen has the mandate, not of Heaven, but of only a precarious, earthly plurality, far from a
majority of voters or the people
It is quite obvious that in the forefront of the causes of our discontent is the war [in Vietnam].
It makes very few people happy. Even those who see it as a holy crusade against the forces of
evil bitterly resent our failure to unleash maximum force in support of it. Those who see the
war in a different light, as a mistaken and immoral action, are equally resentful. And the large
majority, who normally accept with little question any military involvement, are restless and
unhappy that our great effort is so difficult to rationalize and so indefinite in its outcome
The basic situation represented by Vietnam is nothing less than how well we see the reality of
those forces moving humanity today and how these forces can be influenced. If this Nation
persists in seeing reality as the inevitability of conflict between good and evil than we
have solved no problems. If we see ourselves as the powerful and paternalistic policeman of
the world, obligated by our strength and the justice of our cause, to intervene on the side of
righteousness in every conflict, then we have solved no problems. We have merely postponed
for a day the results of our folly.
To solve the problems represented by our involvement in Vietnam requires that we adopt, and
as quickly as possible, a different world view The power we have is real. It can be used
meaningfully for our benefit and the worlds, if used without illusions. If we can come to see
ourselves in a different light on the worlds stage, then the changes of policy required will not
appear too difficult to achieve...
While we talk in the language of our revolutionary forefathers about individual freedom, our
Nation today has become a vast corporate state ruled by varied bureaucracies, of which the
most powerful are the least susceptible to or concerned about individual freedom
Today, most nations of the third world are losing ground, relatively speaking, to the rich
industrial nations in the drive for economic well-being. Foreign economic assistance to them
is increasingly being offset by demands for payment of interest and principal on former loans.
The rich nations manipulate the prices for third world products Instead of the old-style
political Imperialism of the 19th Century, the United States and most rich Western countries
today practices a more sophisticated form of economic imperialism. Its goal is to maintain
the largest possible area into which the products and the capital of the United States can flow
freely and safely. This is apparently the real meaning of freedom which we have armed
ourselves to the teeth to protect around the world.
Imperialism, whether old-style colonialism or new-style economic domination, represents

denial of a peoples most fundamental aspirations. The United States should not persist in
deluding itself into thinking that it is expanding freedom around the world Unfortunately,
this is the direction of our present policies.
The greatest good that the United States can do for itself in todays world is to speed the day
when hunger, poverty, and ignorance no longer afflict three quarters of mankind.
Today, most developed nations pay for a precarious security an amount which runs between 5
and 10% of their GNP. Instead of security, this payment for military purposes is one of the best
guarantees of world insecurity.
Properly administered, 1 to 2% of the GNP of the rich nations used for programs necessary to
control population, hunger and ignorance would provide the only real security for the human
race. The problem is compounded because of our insistence that the ultimate arbiter of all
causes must be national force...
I feel little optimism that the United States will anytime soon undertake the changes that
George Brown put in front of me over 30 years ago. Today, our course is set on objectives
George would be fighting against if he were alive, as would many other friends in politics
who have passed away. Paul Wellstone would be out in front. Al Lowenstein would be
hustling to put together a coalition unlike any ever envisioned by George Bush. We act even
as we know that it takes no great wisdom to foresee this nation will, as every other nation
in history, play out its course even as its people, and people world over, watch to see our
next act, waiting in the wings.
Epilogue / Ripple Effects

________________________________________________________________________________
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion
but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.
Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.
Samuel Huntington, Clash of Civilizations
et us, as we go, ask historys judgment of our generation, Americas legacy? The 20th
Century counts nearly eighty million war dead. The century recedes, our fathers and
mothers die with their memories, surviving soldiers and warriors go to rest, folded
flags on their chest. The United States prevailed in war, but is not at peace. We are the lone
Superpower, the most powerful nation in history as a result of war. Yet, perhaps
surprisingly, a new rival superpower is developing in every corner of the world, a moral
power, a global voice against war.
Even as a next-generation of nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missile systems are
announced as anti-terrorist weapons, and surveillance with super computers vacuums,
sorts and analyzes our personal data like a visage of Orwells brain, and overhead satellite
monitoring and intelligence capabilities identify people by the way they walk, and life
logs on all of us are gathered as bits on silicone in databases humming along in secure
rooms waiting to be beckoned and your lifes data scrolled across a higher ups screen for
disposition a next-generation of young voices are making waves throughout the world.
The Bush doctrines New American Century will find its place in the world, but it will not
address the real world in its immense range of life, diversity, wonder, the young energy
striving to be free. Inevitably, hopefully, the American way will reflect new voices in a
tempest tossed world, voices yearning to breathe free. The torch is raised, but the seas
beyond are in twilight.
I think back to an early morning flash at a test site called Trinity. It was early morning or
late afternoon, the New Mexico desert in the mid-1940s. My father flew his B-17 over the
site with his crew to take a look. He told me he remembered it as strangely beautiful:
The crater was turquoise, a bluish-green shimmering diamond. I think now of nukes of
war like diamonds on beckoning fingers of a skeletal hand.
I look back at fifty years, five decades of generational reality. My fathers generation passes
on and my generation is about to bequeath a next generation an arsenal of weapons and
generational wars. Todays children face a shimmering future. Is this the legacy of war the
legacy we are bound to leave? Or can dream of a transition, with policies that can make a
difference, with pivots toward peace, freedoms from want and war, a world where days
dawn clear of storm clouds on the horizon.
I think of words passed down from a small circle of friends around Bobby Kennedy, writing
to address the darkness of apartheid in South Africa, taking pen to paper they wrote of
times that try mens souls.
Words from the speech are now inscribed on Kennedys tomb. The cruelty of the world,
Kennedy said, would never be changed by those who cling to a present that is dying the
way to the future is to picture a world that is yet to be born and ask why not?
Each of us can work to change a small portion of events and in the total
of those acts will be written the history of this generation
Each of our stories, our lives well lived, will send forth ripples and our ripples will become
waves. The wonders of life are in our actions lifes diversity, carrying on, rich and full.
Ours is to persevere, ours is to protect our values, community, environment and our future.
We have inherited a revolution-in-progress, an American experiment. Within each of us are
currents that are deep, forces that are strong in their own right. As the century turns, it is
time to renew the better side of our nation.
Our nations iconic symbol of Liberty stands against a twilight sky. The best of our
American revolution calls to us to keep the torch, a declaration of rights, aloft.
Resources/Online
______________________________________________________________________
Updated:
Strategic Demands
(Website as of Sept 2014 http://strategicdemands.com/)
____________
Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a New World
http://www.scribd.com/doc/124039415/Strategic-Demands-of-the-21st-Century-A-NewVision-for-a-New-World
Surviving Victory Conference, Washington DC, 2006

http://www.scribd.com/doc/124041559/Surviving-Victory-conference-Washington-DC2006
Surviving Victory: A New Definition of National Security
Analysis: Mideast woes alarm U.S. experts UPI / September 22, 2006; based upon the
Green Institute Policy Paper: Strategic Demands of the 21st Century: A New Vision for a
New World by Roger Morris & Steven Schmidt / June 2005
The moment requires bold innovative approaches to our interests and responsibilities on
a drastically changed, swiftly changing planet. What we see as essential to a wide-ranging
democratic discussion and debate is a new strategic discourse, addressing causes as well as
effects. We must look ahead, envision and plan without illusion or compromising influence,
recognize new realities, tell unpopular truths, put the national interest ahead of office,
educate and act
Worldwide Web/New Connections

____________
@Green Horizon
(updated)
eOS: Part One
http://www.green-horizon.org/eos/
eOS: Part Two
http://www.green-horizon.org/eos-part-two/
eOS: Part Three
Sept 2014
____________
US Green Party
US Green Party Gets Serious, 2000
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/00/06/29/TALKING_POLITICS.html
Federal Election Commission recognizes Green Party as major national
party/committee
November 2001
http://www.gp.org/press/pr_11_08_01.html
____________
Founding National Platform / US Green Party

http://www.gp.org/platform2000.shtml
The goal of our founding platform was to have a Green Party policy foundation on which
Green candidates could run serious, credible, platform-based campaigns, that is, to succeed
in the goal of effective political campaigning taking the Green Party positions in the platform
and turning them into reality.
- Steven Schmidt
Green Party Key Values
http://www.gp.org/tenkey.php
The Founding US Green Party Platform and First Presidential Campaign
http://www.greeninstitute.net/node/73
http://www.scribd.com/doc/125125448/History-US-Green-Party-Founding-PlatformFirst-Presidential-Campaign-GHI-GreenPartiesConf-2004-Published2006
International Green Parties

http://www.scribd.com/doc/220932843/Green-Parties-Global-List
____________
Global Views of Earth, courtesy of the International Space Station #ISS

www.earthpov.com
www.planetcitizen.org
@Green Policy Online

GreenPolicy360
GreenLinks
Open Data/Networking-Linking
o
Digital Bill of Rights
Internet Bill of Rights / Internet Rights and Principles Coalition
Online Magna Carta

American Twilight: A Memoir of Another War

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American Twilight

A Memoir of Another War

American Twilight - A Memoir of Another War

Chapter One On the Edge of a New Frontier

Paradise Now: The Living Theatre in Amerika DVD trailer

Chapter Two Orders from Above

In the name of national security, more Congressional committees become increasingly

Today we watch a president unaccountably confident in his command of foreign affairs,

United Church of Christ

Despite dissent from major denominations, Bush's political connections to Christian

Chapter Three - Free Speech & the Fourth Estate

View from the Lab

Digital War Is the Name of the Game

New Mexico, a hub of ex-Manhattan Project physicists/engineers and younger long-haired

Conference participant/contributors included Roger, Winslow Wheeler, Charles Pena, Susan

Chapter Four Personal Politics

or so years of conservative leanings, SC became a center for California college students

resonated among younger voters, independents, workers and environmentalists,

a vision of how political election/lobbying/finance reform would pave the way to

What used to be called liberal is now called radical;

Chapter Five Seismic Shift

Institute; The Hannover PrinciplesDesign for Sustainability by William McDonough; Paul

Drums of War and Voices of Dissent

Never before has there been an international, global third party.

We support the formation of international alliances and nongovernmental organizations to

Chapter Six Perpetual War

ax Cleland was in his wheelchair. He was a graduate of Stetson University,

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

denying further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by convincing or

Proactive counter proliferation efforts.

Strengthened nonproliferation efforts to prevent rogue states and terrorists from

Effective consequence management to respond to the effects of WMD use, whether by

We cannot let our enemies strike first

build better, more integrated intelligence capabilities to provide timely, accurate

America will implement its strategies by organizing coalitions as broad as practicable of

assure our allies and friends;

dissuade future military competition;

deter threats against U.S. interests, allies, and friends; and

decisively defeat any adversary if deterrence fails

strengthening the authority of the Director of Central Intelligence to lead the

continuing to develop new methods of collecting information to sustain our

Chapter Seven High Security

Impacts on lives include:

Wait, there's more:

The national poverty rate remains above that of the 1970s

And, since we're close to Disneyworld here in my state of Florida

And, for perspective, "It's a Small World"

Three billion people live on less than $2 a day

A First Use Policy

of mission. The USA Today frontlines-of-the-war dispatch concludes: Only by challenging

A crisis ensues, a crisis continues.

China speeds up its nuclear weapons development program and is unsuccessful in

Collateral damage is an innocuous sounding term that is anything but innocuous.

Chapter Eight Dreams of Peace

The philosophy of nonviolent force needs to encompass diplomacy, mediation, conflict

I believe he positioned himself in Congress, in science, technology and astronautics, hoping

Imperialism, whether old-style colonialism or new-style economic domination, represents

Epilogue / Ripple Effects

Surviving Victory Conference, Washington DC, 2006

Worldwide Web/New Connections

Founding National Platform / US Green Party

International Green Parties

Global Views of Earth, courtesy of the International Space Station #ISS

@Green Policy Online

Digital Bill of Rights

Internet Bill of Rights / Internet Rights and Principles Coalition

Online Magna Carta