Submitted as a letter to the Editor, The Tico Times, San Jose, Costa Rica

March 26, 2003

Dale Johnson, troporg@racsa.co.cr 506-269-7856

Santa Bárbara de Heredia, Costa Rica

Rationales for the current attack against Iraq are inverted nonsense. The terms of the discourse are delimited by the powerful and disseminated worldwide by their might and media. There is little rationality in this discourse, only half-truths, distortions and lies. It is not the regime of Saddam Hussein that threatens the peace and stability of the world. This threat, now a bloody reality, is the imperial ambition of the United States. It is not Iraq that possesses a great arsenal of weapons of mass destruction and the willingness and ability to utilize these weapons. The weaponry being unilaterally unleashed against Iraq is far superior to chemical and biological agents in the application of terror and mass destruction.

The regime of Saddam Hussein is portrayed as a Rogue State. That is a fair term. Iraq is an oppressive dictatorship, but hardly a threat to neighboring countries and certainly not to the United States. What the United States wants specifically is the oil that Iraq sits on and more generally to subordinate all nations that resist being incorporated into the Bush Family and Associates Inc. dream of the New World Order.

In the American construction of a New World Order, the United States is fast becoming a Super Rogue State. The Super Rogue declares its right to use unilateral preemptive military means against whatever nation or political group deemed to present a challenge to imperial design. It uses economic and military aid to construct and fortify Client Rogues that pursue policies of official terrorism. The Super Rogue uses terrorist means to wage a War on Terrorism. The root causes of the terrorism of the desperate are totally ignored. Terrorists are to be exterminated, initiating an escalating chain of violence. The Super Rogue does not work diplomatically to forge alliances with friendly nations. It expects European allies to be, like Great Britain, vassals in the imperial system. It bribes and coerces lesser states to follow its dictates. The Super Rogue works to dominate international institutions and when it does not get its way, seeks to undermine or to make these institutions irrelevant to its actions. The Super Rogue violates international law, established treaties, and human rights at will and with impunity and celebrates these violations as bringing freedom and democracy.

The construction of the Super Rogue State is a political project of extremist mummies like Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfield, made possible by the events of September 11, 2001. The world’s leading terrorist today is not Osama Bin Laden, his name is George W. Bush. The Burning Bush needs his violent homologues, his mirror images, Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

The foremost terrorist organization is not El Qaeda, nor even its covert rival in Dirty Tricks, the CIA, it is the Pentagon.

The wars, terror, and inhumanity of the Super Rogue can and must be constrained and eventually dismantled. This can be accomplished by world wide activism of states that aspire, under pressure from their citizens, to become something other than vassals and by people demanding peace, justice, and equality.

In this struggle, the role played by citizens of the United States is particularly crucial. The many thousands of intellectuals and artists that proclaim "Not in My Name" needs to multiply many fold, pledging to resist in every possible way and to condemn in every forum, the policies of the United States government whose unilateralism, disrespect for the international norms of civilized society, and arrogant exercise of military power bring disgrace and shame to the people of the United Sates and violence and terror to the peoples of the world. The party of opposition, the Democrats, is to be condemned for cowardice and complicity in the Bush Administration’s policies of war. Many American citizens have uncritically succumbed to a perverse patriotism and acquiesced to insanity, sending their sons and daughters off to kill and be killed in service to the Rogue State. This victimization and dehumanization of large segments of the citizenry is conditioned by the overwhelmingly pervasive war propaganda machine of the big business media and of a government that represents the interests of the large corporations, especially the oil giants. Those Americans less victimized need to not just lament but counter with loud reaffirmations of the truly American ideals of peace, justice, and democracy that have been so perversely subverted by our rulers.