A declaration of war against the world
A 28-page answer to the question 'why do they hate us'

Late last week, copies began oozing out of Washington of a remarkable document the Bush Administration plans to submit shortly to Congress. The document, entitled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," is an overview of policies, most of them apparent or previously announced, that the White House sees as relevant to the nation's security. It should be required reading for any person who still believes the United States represents an unambiguous force for good in world affairs.

Bush's "strategy" is nothing less than a declaration of war against the world. For those of us who want to believe that our government reflects the ideals of our country and the good-heartedness of the American people, it is truly a repellant masterpiece. And while some aspects of the Bush strategy have been strains in American foreign policy for decades, give Bush points for honesty: as never before, he lays it all out, in one place, in 28 pages of arrogance that answer better than Osama himself ever could the question of Why They Hate Us. [read more]

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Fighting Street to Street

To understand why an invasion of Iraq may not be the cakewalk that the White House expects, pay $20 (round trip) and board an Iraqi Airways flight that soars from Baghdad straight through the American-enforced "no-flight zone" to Basra on the southern tip of Iraq. [read more]

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Is Bush's War Illegal?

Then what happened after failing to get any formal authorization from the Security Council, the U.S. Ambassador Negroponte-- who has the blood of about 35, 000 people in Nicaragua on his hands when he was U.S. Ambassador down in Honduras-- sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the U.N. Charter to justify the war against Afghanistan. And basically saying that we reserve the right to use force in self-defense against any state we say is somehow involved in the events of September 11. Well, the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed me on that and asked what is the precedent for this? I said that the precedent again goes back to the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 when the lawyers for the Nazi defendants argued that we, the Nazi government had a right to go to war in self-defense as we saw it, and no one could tell us any differently. Of course that preposterous argument was rejected by Nuremberg. It is very distressing to see some of the highest level of officials of our country making legal arguments that were rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal. [read more]

thanks to American Samizdat

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Ours Not To Reason Why
By Michael Kinsley

The official U.S. government message on how citizens should decide about going to war is, "Don't worry your pretty little heads about it." Last week the White House issued a sort of Official Souvenir Guide to the Bush administration's national security policy, and it is full of rhetoric about democracy. Yet that policy itself, including at least one likely war, has been imposed on the country entirely without benefit of democracy. George W.'s war on Iraq will be the reductio ad absurdum of America's long, slow abandonment of any pretense that the people have any say in the question of whether their government will send some of them far away to kill and die. [read more]

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Is 'Groupthink' Driving us to War?

Drawing on studies of group decision-making, Janis argued that the pressures of like-minded people deciding as a group lead to a deterioration of mental reasoning, reality testing, and moral judgment. In short, groupthink leads to a breakdown of critical thinking.

In his 1972 book Janis also examined the flawed decision making that went into the Korean War, Pearl Harbor, and Vietnam and presented in contrast the decision making process that occurred during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the post-World War II Marshall Plan.

So far the Bush administration's foreign policy team has manifested all the symptoms of groupthink that Janis identified: [read more]

thanks to bertramonline