Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country that determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of Patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
- Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall, at the Nuremberg trials
The Bush administration's rap on John Kerry is that he is inconsistent. The president's virtue, on the other hand, is supposedly his consistency. But to stick to the same rhetoric when the facts have changed, to insist on what is palpably false, to render black as white and to say it all with a childlike faith in civics class bromides is not commendable consistency. It is instead the mark of a narrow mind overwhelmed by large events.
Iraq is completely falling apart. The occupation of Iraq now lacks any shred of credibility it ever had, with increasing violence and assassinations in the run up to the fraudulent June 30 "transfer of sovereignty.". ... The idea that George W. Bush can give a series of speeches and put this turkey back in flight only reveals the vast distance between his administration and the reality of the world we live in at this point. News flash to Dubyah, Rove and their mind control apparatus spinning out of control: two and two does not equal three, or five. Imperial occupation is not "sovereignty," "liberation, "freedom" or "democracy." You can't fool all the People all the time, and your act is wearing very thin.
The neo-cons are the heirs of rollback. They ditched the strategy (containment) against a nuclear-armed superpower to launch a pre-emptive war against a toothless Iraq, which has been contained and deterred—and disarmed—since the Gulf War. They identified the wrong enemy (a state), attacked it for the wrong reasons (WMD), and in a way that strengthened our real enemy, the transnational terrorists of September 11. America has made mistakes in foreign policy, but nothing compares to this. In the larger context of the Cold War, Vietnam made a kind of sense. In the context of the struggle against Islamist terrorism, Iraq is an act of self-sabotage. Of the neo-cons and their neo-con war Auden might have written: 'Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face.'
