When War is Looming, Fight the Good Fight... But Who is the Enemy? There are some principles so inscribed in the human heart, so fundamental to our existence, and so universal in their scope, that they must transcend the usual language of politics and serve as beacons to guide us through all the storms of history. These principles are enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and in our Constitution, with its Bill of Rights. But there are dark forces at work in America ?] some hidden, some visible ?] that are tearing the very foundation on which this nation was built. And though terrorism advances their insidious agenda, they are not terrorists, and though they are the beneficiaries of corporate largesse, they are not corporations, and though they break just laws, they are not felons. No. These forces striking at the heart of America come from the citadel of power in our nation's capital. How true these words of Julius Caesar, echoing through the millennia, to warn us where we are headed: "Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind. And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar." The Constitution Beware, therefore, the modern-day Herod who slays our Bill of Rights, first-born child of the Constitution, by sweeping away its Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, its Fifth Amendment entitlement to due legal process before we can be deprived of liberty, the Sixth Amendment safeguard of "a speedy and public trial by an impartial jury," and the Eighth Amendment prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment." The USA PATRIOT Act In place of this murdered infant, he has adopted a hellish brood, among them The USA PATRIOT Act of October 2001, which allows government agents to break into your home without a warrant, tap your phones, read your e-mails, and put you in jail without charges or access to a lawyer and without informing anyone of your arrest. The Homeland Security Act Joining it, along with numerous presidential "executive orders" issued without so much as a nod from Congress, the Homeland Security Act (HSA) dissolves even the few protections left by its voracious brother. Apart from creating a monolithic government department that compounds the inertia of a bloated, congested and ineffective bureaucracy, this Act "will mostly serve to spy on the American people," according to the Republican congressman Ron Paul. Moreover, this precocious progeny has already spawned its own incestuous offspring in the form of the new Information Awareness Office. Run by Admiral John Poindexter, architect of illegal arms sales to Iran in 1990, it is the totalitarian's dream come true. Meanwhile, the government's culture of secrecy, once a dismal veil over backroom deals, has become an iron curtain of Soviet proportions. Information is now a one-way street. Agents can learn all about you, your habits, preferences, desires and beliefs, but you are forbidden to know how government acts in your name or spends your taxes. The HSA even assaults medical freedoms. The government can now force you to be injected with a potentially lethal vaccine, while stripping you of the right to sue the drug company if you are harmed. If you refuse the injection, you could be quarantined with infected people, even if you are healthy. Not even the Great Plague that devastated London in 1665 engendered such nightmarish and draconian measures. As the Republican Ron Paul says, "it is hard to think of a more blatant violation of liberty than allowing government officials to force people to receive potentially dangerous vaccines." Commenting on the same provision, the non-partisan Institute for Health Freedom warns: "You cannot defend freedom by eliminating it." Let us ponder these words of Thomas Jefferson, writer of the Declaration of Independence. "Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." And true to Jefferson's observation, the relevance of the Act to our security is, in the words of Larry Klayman, Chairman of Judicial Watch and a conservative, like "shifting chairs on the deck of the Titanic." In the same manner as its USA PATRIOT bedfellow, the 500-page HSA was hammered through Congress with such speed that legislators did not even get a chance to glance at it, let alone read it, reflect on it, or debate it. Meanwhile, the truly pressing issues of Security go ignored, such as forestalling the kinds of visa violations that permitted the World-Trade-Center attack to happen. The War Footing The call to Security is also the wafer-thin reasoning behind gathering momentum for war. In defiance again of our Constitution, which stipulates the power to declare war should reside in Congress alone, our legislators conferred that sole authority on George W. Bush in October 2002, deaf to Senator Edward Kennedy's protest that the power to declare war "is the most solemn responsibility given to Congress by the Constitution. We must not delegate the responsibility to the President in advance." For the most part, Congress was "glad to escape the unpleasantness of speaking truth to power," according to Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's Magazine. So it bestowed on one man, unprecedented in the history of our nation, this prerogative of kings. Moreover, it placed that sacred trust in a man who vowed, just before leaving for a recent NATO summit, to work for "a military operation that reflects the nature of the wars we'll be fighting." A Freudian slip perhaps, but in the White House incumbent's mind, it seems it is not a question of if the U.S. will be fighting wars, but when. Thus we have regressed almost all the way back to the days of a monarchy under a king named George. As the actor, Sean Penn, warned in a recent open letter to Bush, we have adopted our own brand of fundamentalism "through loss of civil liberties and dangerously heightened presidential autonomy." This, in spite of the oath of every president, before taking office, to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." Now the Administration, itself in major breach of international nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons accords, is hell-bent on striking the glint in Saddam Hussein's eye, without seeing the plank in its own, and we have the nail-biting spectacle of watching Iraq tap-dance its way through U.N. inspections, as it hopes against hope to placate an American taskmaster looking for any excuse to launch an invasion ?] comical, were it not deadly. We know that there were spies among the former group of inspectors that went into Iraq after the Gulf War, giving credence to Iraq's claims now, that some members of the current inspections team are also spies and that their sole mission is to provide intelligence that can enable the U.S. to hone its inevitable attack. Such agents are also well placed to plant evidence to justify U.S. aggression, if the U.N. team does not find any by legitimate means. Nukes Saddam Hussein makes for a convenient enemy, just as he did in 1991 when, with the prior encouragement of U.S. officials, he invaded Kuwait. But did you know that the U.S. will be using nuclear weapons against Iraq as it did then? Our own version of the terrorist's "dirty bomb", a depleted-uranium shell shatters on impact into radioactive dust. That is why the Iraqi people have endured hideous birth defects ever since and why U.S. soldiers, whose commanders did not tell them what they would be breathing in as they took over enemy positions, are plagued with Gulf War Syndrome. "Radiation levels in Iraq are appallingly high," said Harold Pinter, the famed British playwright in a November 2002 speech. "Babies are born with no brain, no eyes, no genitals. Where they do have ears, mouths or rectums, all that issues from these orifices is blood." The U.S. government is now in favor of so-called "mini-nukes", designed to deliver more focused devastation to smaller areas, while Israel, with about 200 nuclear weapons, has said publicly it will consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Iraq if Saddam Hussein so much as fires a conventional weapon in its direction. What a slippery slope we are on. Having put behind us the Cold-War nightmare of intercontinental-ballistic-missile strikes, we have replaced it with an apocalyptic outcome even more dreadful: a creeping escalation of nuclear conflict that progressively poisons our bodies, our minds, our genetic makeup, food supplies, water supplies, and the air we breathe. How many of us would prefer quick incineration to such a slow, tortuous death? The civilian toll Did you also know that the U.S. deliberately targeted civilian water supplies in the Gulf War, in direct violation of the Geneva Convention, or that the subsequent sanctions have resulted, according to The World Health Organization, in the deaths of 2 million Iraqi civilians? Blocking civilian supplies, including water purification systems, sewage pipes, medicines, hospital equipment, electricity, and communications infrastructure, the sanctions are described as genocide by two former heads of the UN humanitarian program in Iraq, Dennis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, both of whom resigned in protest. Of course, Saddam Hussein is a bad man who has done bad things. It is certainly good policy to scour his arsenals with international backing and to destroy all his weapons of mass destruction. History has also proven that nothing but the most overt threat of force will exact his compliance. However, in the event of war, Saddam Hussein will be the last person to suffer. Going to ground in the deepest bunker, he will be neither apprehended nor killed until the entire country is laid to waste around him. Alternatively, he may just quietly slip away into the night like Osama bin Laden, becoming another international fugitive whose mere survival would be used to justify a permanent war footing on the world's stage. The corporate conspiracy Although any pyrrhic victory the U.S. could attain in Iraq would come at great cost to human life, it would be a boon for the U.S. oil industry, in which the Administration is so personally invested. Think of the timing of this call to arms, which began not only with the approach of key congressional elections in November 2002, but also immediately followed Iraq's announcement it intended to exploit two of the world's largest untapped oil and natural gas resources ?] West Qurnan and Majnun ?] potentially outstripping Saudi Arabia as the largest producer. Petroleum companies are already reaping the harvest of conquest in Afghanistan, which conveniently paved the way for a string of U.S. military bases along the route of a new central Asian pipeline. In the Summer of 2001, plans for such a pipeline had been the subject of secret negotiations between the U.S. Administration and the Taliban, until talks broke down. It was shortly after this, in June 2001, that the U.S. Government told India there would be an invasion of Afghanistan that October. As to how the Administration knew, just a few months before 9/11, that Afghanistan would be invaded, draw your own conclusions! Between that prophecy and its fulfillment, the Administration was resolutely deaf to the barrage of specific warnings it received from intelligence agencies, both in the U.S. and around the world, that airplanes would be hijacked and used as missiles and that lower Manhattan would be targeted, even issuing directives to its own intelligence agencies blocking inquiries into the Bin Laden family and into Saudi financing of terror networks. In July 2001, then-FBI Deputy Director, John O'Neill, resigned in protest over the obstruction of terrorist investigations. He died in the World Trade Center attack. Immediately after 9/11, suspected terrorists in Bin Laden's family were allowed to flee the U.S. Evidence of such links has fomented the groundswell of demands for an independent investigation into 9/11. But the Administration's eventual, grudging response was to appoint as its chair a man widely regarded as a war criminal with far more blood on his hands than Osama bin Laden. Henry Kissinger is among other things a fugitive from justice in Paris. There, police handed him a warrant in 2001 regarding the disappearance of French citizens during Pinochet's Kissinger-sponsored dictatorship in Chile. Rather than face the music, Kissinger fled. For fools rush in But motives aside, think of the underlying logic behind such a war. To save our society from terrorists, we will go into their lands and make the peoples cower before our invincible military might. We will round up their suspects and associates. We will roll into their towns with tanks, keep the populace under constant surveillance, and kill the chief protagonists of terror. We will seal off their roads and cut off their water supplies. We will temporarily suppress their activities, that is until they return with even more resolve to carry out their suicide missions. Sound familiar? It is exactly what Israel does in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with such devastating consequences, both to itself and to the Palestinians. It is a futile and self-destructive equation. As Shakespeare puts it, "There is no sure foundation set on blood,/ No certain life achieved by others' death." Terrorism is like a hydra. Cut off one head and two grow in its place. Yet we are doing on a global scale what Israel is attempting and failing to do in its own little theatre of war, except that the stakes are now proportionately higher. This is not a moral judgment, it's a practical one. It just plain doesn't work! Counting the cost And what are some of the consequences at home? In the name of war against that shadowy, amorphous and ever-enduring figure of the cave-dwelling international terrorist, our freedoms are destroyed, our natural wildernesses are stripped and raped to produce oil, our pristine rivers are filthied, our skies are starved of oxygen, our nation's finances are squandered, and our future is mortgaged. Our official military policy now is to let no other country rival our military might, a doctrine for which we the American people pay dearly with a larger weapons expenditure than the 15 next-largest nations combined. Meanwhile, our education system is slowly starved of the funds it needs to ensure an enlightened generation steers our country into the future. Make no mistake. After the reckless expenditures and tax cuts of this Administration, rooted in the kind of fuzzy accounting that toppled a series of once-mighty corporate giants, we are headed for national bankruptcy. And the day will surely come, when we will be the ones going cap-in-hand to the IMF and World Bank for bailout loans. Conclusions The Founding Fathers etched into our constitutional makeup what should have been an enduring safeguard against the abuse of power. Theirs was a courageous act of defiance in the face of Tyranny, and we are called upon to exercise like courage in our time. This is true Patriotism, to uphold our core beliefs, rather than to acquiesce in their demise. We are now ruled by an Administration that has poisoned the genetic code of our Constitution. More than the mere loss of civil rights, our foundational principles are imperiled. "When the government fears the people," said Jefferson, "there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny." The gospel that purportedly guides our leadership, warns of "false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravening wolves. You shall know them by their fruits…a bad tree cannot bring forth good fruit." Invasion of our Constitution is the fruit of this Administration, revealing its true nature. Hanging alongside it, is invasion of Iraq. How long can our cabal of God-professing officials continue to ignore the Lord's pronouncement, that it is the meek who shall inherit the earth? We are now called upon to endorse a foreign policy that exacts support from other nations to fight America's wars, while the U.S. thwarts every positive effort at international cooperation, whether it be saving the world's climate or bringing prosecutions of war criminals. But let them holler their war chants from the White House loudly enough, and perhaps the American people will forget their grievances. And if there should be another major terrorist attack on U.S. soil, the people might be persuaded to return the current Administration to office in 2004 or even to tear up the provision that no president serve more than two four-year terms. So what convenient atrocity could occur as elections approach, to wring from us our compliance? The Terrorism Risk Insurance Act is now in place, providing for public funds to reimburse insurers in the event of a terrorist event, so Corporate America can rest assured that taxpayers will foot the bill when the time comes. If the maxim be true that passivity is interpreted as consent, we cannot afford to be silent now. We are again at that time in the Course of human events when it becomes necessary to dissolve the political bands that have connected us. The Declaration of Independence reminds us that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government." In the name of Liberty, our very status as Americans depends on doing so. November 2002 The poems on this website are protected by U.S. copyright law and registered with the U.S. Library of Congress. Please direct any requests for publication, in whatever form or medium, to the author, Ian Reed, at tango_poet@hotmail.com (212) 841-0341.