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Assessing Iraq's situation is none of our business. Choosing to continue the occupation of Iraq is not our rightful decision. Invading Iraq and slaughtering one hundred thousand innocent people, in the initial bombing alone--and then torturing people and killing more--is a major war crime of Hitlerian proportions. What right do we have to continue that crime and to profit from it, by writing our puppet government's giveaway of their oil fields to Exxon-Mobile & Co? By "we," of course, I mean the Bush Junta. We, the American people, have nothing to say about it.
Where is the rule of law here at home?
This has been my question all along--from before the invasion, when 56% of the American people opposed this war (Feb. '03). What right does George Bush have to do any of this? Congress CANNOT just give away its power to declare war. The Iraq War Resolution itself was UNCONSTITUTIONAL. There was no vote in Congress to declare war on Iraq. Thus we are NOT at war--and everything that has happened since has been egregiously ILLEGAL. The Bush Junta has as much right to BE in Iraq, and to be making decisions about Iraq, as Hitler did in France.
I'm with you, ProSense. We need to return to FIRST PRINCIPLES: The Constitution. The Geneva Conventions. The rule of law.
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This horrendous mess has a history that goes way back to the "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution in 1964, by which LBJ dramatically escalated the war on Vietnam. LBJ lied to Congress that the North Vietnamese had fired on US ships. The CIA had been in the country since 1954--when Eisenhower prevented UN-sponsored elections that Ho Chi Minh would have won--and had created a highly corrupt artificial entity called "South Vietnam." The US crept into Vietnam---an act that JFK was in the process of trying to undo, when he was assassinated--on the false premise of "defending" an ally that we had created. This fragment of legitimacy gave the War Profiteers a pinhold through which to eventually push hundreds of thousands of US troops and vast military expenditures. They MANUFACTURED an incident out of whole cloth--a provocation by the "North Vietnamese," the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident, in a country that did not belong to us, and where we should not have been--and sold that to Congress as justification for retaliating. Thence to major warfare and the slaughter of upwards of two million people!
Congress never declared war on Vietnam either. Because a declaration of war requires A TRUE ACT OF WAR against the US or its REAL allies. Otherwise there is no justification for it. "North Vietnam" did not attack us. Nor was it engaged in hostilities with any true ally of ours. Vietnam was in the midst of a civil war instigated by the CIA! And Vietnam furthermore posed no danger to us whatsoever. In fact, Ho Chi Minh offered to be our only ally in the communist world. And Vietnam was a country that had been fighting off invaders (mostly the Chinese) for 5,000 years. They are ferociously committed to their independence. And Ho Chi Minh cited this in his letters to our government--he quoted the Declaration of Independence and Thomas Jefferson!
But the War Profiteers wanted war. If any of this had become known to the American people--say, in debates in Congress on a declaration of war against Vietnam--war would be difficult to manufacture. So, while LBJ was selling himself to the American people as the "peace candidate" in the 1964 election, the sneaky "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution was shoved through Congress, with only 2 dissenting votes.
The Iraq War Resolution had 125 dissenting votes in the Anthrax Congress--God bless those dissenting and courageous patriots! But it was very similar to the "Gulf of Tonkin" resolution in that, 1) it was based on baldfaced lies; and 2) was NOT accompanied by a declaration of war, and, instead, unconstitutionally gave that decision away to the Executive.
We need to go back to FIRST PRINCIPLES starting then: in 1964. And we need to never, never let this happen again. Now we have the Bush Junta attacking Somalia and threatening to attack Iran, with no authorization whatsoever. This has gone way out of control. We need to restore Constitutional government. Jefferson, Madison & Co. designed the Constitution to PREVENT this very thing--war at the option of the executive. We have allowed the erosion of that "balance of power" protection--and we need to reverse course, and stop that erosion, before we find ourselves in WW III, led by a lunatic and his greedy cabal.
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