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2004-02-28 - 4:27 p.m.

CBO Disputes Bush Promise To Cut Deficit in Half in 5 Years

Budget Analysis Challenges Administration's Forecasts

"President Bush's budget would not cut the budget deficit in half over five years, as the president has promised, and would run up $2.75 trillion in additional debt over the next decade, according to an analysis the Congressional Budget Office issued yesterday."

...

"The credibility of Bush's economic and budget forecasts has been attacked by Democratic presidential candidates and independent economists alike. Bush earlier this month backed away from the forecasts of his own Council of Economic Advisers, which had projected that the number of payroll jobs this year would be an average of 2.6 million higher than last year's -- an improbable figure, given the sluggish job market."

...

""This is devastating," said Thomas S. Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. "This confirms our worst fears about the president's budget.""

...

"Kahn said the deficit picture is actually worse than that. The CBO estimate does not take into account funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond this year because Bush included no such funding in his budget request. White House officials have conceded that they will have to seek as much as $50 billion in war funding, probably after the November election."

These quotations are from an article in the Washington Post by Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer.

It highlights the continuing credibility gap of an adminstration that is running us into bankruptcy with its huge tax cuts for the rich, and a misguided war in Iraq based on lies to the Congress and the American people, which has greatly increased the danger from terrorism. Go here to read the whole article.

2004-02-27 - 7:36 p.m.

The Misuse of American Power

"This is why I consider the forthcoming election so important, because if we endorse the Bush Doctrine, then we have to accept the consequences, i.e. hostility and resentment toward the United States throughout the world. If we reject the Bush Doctrine in November, then we can write it off as a temporary aberration."

"When you look at the history of the United States, we have had many temporary aberrations -- the internment of the Japanese Americans in the Second World War, the McCarthy era, Watergate, and so on. We went on to greater and better things. If we now reject Bush, I think we can resume our place in the world as a powerful but peace-loving nation. If we endorse him by giving him another four years, then we are losing ourselves to something that I find extremely scary."

"I think that we might end up in a permanent state of war, because the war against terror -- it doesn't need to come to an end. The Bush approach facilitates terrorism, re-energizing itself by creating more terrorists."

The above quotation is from billionaire investor, George Soros, in an interview with BuzzFlash. The whole interview can be found here.

It's a sobering look at the disastrous consequences of the Bush Administration's misguided foreign policy, and is reason enough for the absolute necessity of removing this incompetent administration from office before it is too late.

The Bush Doctrine will give us endless war, more and more terrorists to deal with, and the eventual bankruptcy and destruction of our nation as we know it.

As Rumsfeld said in his leaked memo, it's costing the terrorists millions, but us, billions. That's a one thousand to one disadvantage that will eventually bleed us dry. All our nation's wealth will be sucked down this endless rathole. We're already starting to feel it as the costs mount, the budget deficit explodes, and vital services are cut.

Be sure to register and vote in November. Our future depends on it.

2004-02-23 - 2:53 p.m.

Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World

Well known psychiatrist, author, and professor, Dr. Robert J Lifton, at 77 years old, has written a new book with the above title, which is highly critical of the current administration's reactions to 9/11. Here's a review of it at the Globe and Mail by Christopher Dreher.

Some excerpts follow:

"I'm trying to get underneath the behaviour and look at the motivations and impulses behind it," Dr. Lifton said at his home in Cambridge, Mass., a short distance from Harvard, where he is currently a visiting professor. "Both the Islamists' and our own radicalism."

...

What's really going to get Dr. Lifton booted off the Defence Department's holiday-card list is the way he scrutinizes the current administration. In essence, he puts George W. Bush and his hawkish advisers on the psychiatrist's couch, and diagnoses a unique blend of Christian and military fundamentalism that Dr. Lifton considers a threat to peace.

The administration's reaction to the terrorists' challenge is the crux of what Dr. Lifton calls "superpower syndrome," a psychological treadmill spurned on by vulnerability and perpetuated through violence that has left the United States destabilized and terrorism poorly countered. "I'm creating a structure with a medical metaphor to explain overall and consistent behaviour," he explained.

Dr. Lifton has serious credentials to back up his observations. He has spent his entire career examining humanity's darkest corners, using his psychological training to analyze past catastrophes and genocidal acts. His work differs from other psycho-historical studies by focusing on groups instead of individuals and also by extensive interviewing of the people involved.

...

"[This administration] is special in its radical approach to the world," he said, "a dimension that is exaggerated and very extreme."

To be clinical, Dr. Lifton traces superpower syndrome to America's abrupt and public injury on Sept. 11, 2001, a devastating attack on the sense of power and potency that is essential to its conception of itself. During the following months, the administration formed reactionary, poorly designed responses that would paradoxically make the world more unsafe and the danger of terrorism even greater.

For example, he said, instead of planning a unified battle against a world problem, the Bush government ignored the concerns of other countries and the United Nations and squandered the goodwill that the United States had acquired after the attacks, polarizing the issue with its unyielding sense of mission.

"There had to be some response, but a restrained and international response," said Dr. Lifton, who supported the Afghanistan war but opposed the administration's attack on Iraq. "Instead, the administration immediately polarized the work with our own apocalyptic orientation. They created an 'Us versus Them' dynamic, instead of identifying 9/11 as terrorism by a small group of determined zealots."

And by defining their campaign as a "War on Terrorism," the administration added it to a list of past "wars" (on poverty or drugs) that were categorically unable to be won.

The attack was also a catalyst that gave the administration the courage -- what it might consider a mandate -- to attempt to reshape the Middle East to its own political and economic ideals, the most obvious example being the invasion of Iraq. This cosmic sense of entitlement, according to Dr. Lifton, could hem the United States into an endless cycle of military intervention and violence.

Worst of all, considering that the core of the United States's power lies with its nuclear arsenal (about 10,000 warheads), the struggle has made terrorist groups and weaker countries even more determined to arm themselves in kind.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush is one of the only nuclear-age presidents who has not instinctively recoiled from the prospect of using these weapons. He and his advisers have pushed for scientists to develop lower-yield nuclear weapons that could be used in modern conflicts. With both sides committed to violence in order to purify the world, Dr. Lifton said, the responses are likely to become more and more destructive as time goes on.

Yet Superpower is not just a dour diagnosis: In the final chapter, "Stepping out of the Syndrome," Dr. Lifton asserts: "We can do better. America is capable of wiser, more measured approaches, more humane applications of our considerable power and influence in the world." He hopes that his diagnosis might make people more aware of the problem, and he also hopes it would be a foundation upon which other foreign policy or political writers can base their observations.

"Right after 9/11, it was hard to get across the message of American extremism," he said. "This year, the message is much more listened to."

Go here to read this entire thoughtful review.

Then go here to listen to a very thoughtful interview with the author and psychiatry professor, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. This 20 minute interview is most enlightening.

And on the second half of this broadcast is a very insightful interview with an Iraqi feminist woman on the grave situation of women in Iraq today, well worth listening to.

And here's another very interesting interview with Dr. Lifton, in talk radio format, on OnPoint Radio, hosted by Tom Ashbrook, where they discuss his book, and the apocalyptic crusade he sees us on in response to 9/11. Also very much worth listening to.

And in addition, here's an article in The Nation, by Dr. Lifton himself, which is adapted from his book.

It's quite a long article, but very much worth reading. A few selected excerpts follow:

The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal. In particular, we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing warmaking and military power. Both sides are energized by versions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose.

...

Indeed, at the core of superpower syndrome lies a powerful fear of vulnerability. A superpower's victimization brings on both a sense of humiliation and an angry determination to restore, or even extend, the boundaries of a superpower-dominated world. Integral to superpower syndrome are its menacing nuclear stockpiles and their world-destroying capacity.

...

We know from history that collective humiliation can be a goad to various kinds of aggressive behavior--as has been true of bin Laden and Al Qaeda. It was also true of the Nazis. Nazi doctors told me of indelible scenes, which they either witnessed as young children or were told about by their fathers, of German soldiers returning home defeated after World War I. These beaten men, many of them wounded, engendered feelings of pathos, loss and embarrassment, all amid national misery and threatened revolution. Such scenes, associated with strong feelings of humiliation, were seized upon by the Nazis to the point where one could say that Hitler rose to power on the promise of avenging them.

...

Infinite War
War itself is an absolute, its violence unpredictable and always containing apocalyptic possibilities. In this case, by militarizing the problem of terrorism, our leaders have dangerously obfuscated its political, social and historical dimensions. Terrorism has instead been raised to the absolute level of war itself. And although American leaders speak of this as being a "different kind of war," there is a drumbeat of ordinary war rhetoric and a clarion call to total victory and to the crushing defeat of our terrorist enemies.

When President Bush declared that "this conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others [but] will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing," he was misleading both in suggesting a clear beginning in Al Qaeda's acts and a decisive end in the "battle" against terrorism. In that same speech, given at a memorial service just three days after 9/11 at the National Cathedral in Washington, he also asserted, "Our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, not a man given to irony, commented that "the president was casting his mission and that of the country in the grand vision of God's master plan."

...

The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous, without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will be rid of evil. Bush keeps what Woodward calls "his own personal scorecard for the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The scorecard is always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office.

...

That kind of apocalyptic impulse in warmaking has hardly proved conducive to a shared international approach. Indeed, in its essence, it precludes genuine sharing. While Bush has frequently said that he prefers to have allies in taking on terrorism and terrorist states worldwide, he has also made it clear that he does not want other countries to have any policy-making power on this issue. In one revealing statement, he declared: "At some point, we may be the only ones left. That's OK with me. We are America." In such declarations, he has all but claimed that Americans are the globe's anointed ones and that the sacred mission of purifying the earth is ours alone.

...

Despite the constant invocation by the Bush Administration of the theme of "security," the war on terrorism has created the very opposite--a sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger "war."

What results is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our excessive response to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists and more terrorist attacks, which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending "Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing--of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear. The American military apocalyptic can then be said to partner and act in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic.

We can do better. America is capable of wiser, more measured approaches, more humane applications of our considerable power and influence in the world. These may not be as far away as they now seem, and can be brought closer by bringing our imaginations to bear on them. Change must be political, of course, but certain psychological contours seem necessary to it.

As a start, we do not have to partition the world into two contending apocalyptic forces. We are capable instead of reclaiming our moral compass, of finding further balance in our national behavior. So intensely have we embraced superpower syndrome that emerging from it is not an easy task. Yet in doing so we would relieve ourselves of a burden of our own creation--the burden of insistent illusion. For there is no greater weight than that which one takes on when pursuing total power.

We need to take a new and different lesson from Lord Acton's nineteenth-century assertion: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Acton was not quite right. The corruption begins not with the acquisition of power but with the quest for and claim to absolute power. Ever susceptible to the seductive promise that twenty-first-century technology can achieve world control, the superpower (or would-be superpower) can best resist that temptation by recognizing the corruption that follows upon its illusion.

To renounce the claim to total power would bring relief not only to everyone else but, soon enough, to the leaders and followers of the superpower itself. For to live out superpower syndrome is to place oneself on a treadmill that eventually has to break down.

In its efforts to rule the world and to determine history, the superpower is, in fact, working against itself, subjecting itself to constant failure. It becomes a Sisyphus with bombs, able to set off explosions but unable to cope with its own burden, unable to roll its heavy stone to the top of the hill in Hades. Perhaps the crucial step in ridding ourselves of the syndrome is recognizing that history cannot be controlled, fluidly or otherwise.

Stepping off the superpower treadmill would also enable us to cease being a nation ruled by fear. Renouncing omnipotence would make our leaders themselves less fearful of weakness, and diminish their inclination to instill fear in their people as a means of enlisting them for illusory military efforts at world hegemony. Without the need for invulnerability, everyone would have much less to be afraid of.

And you can go here for several more reviews of this important book.

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