Following is an excerpt of an article by Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration, Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review:
US casualties (dead and wounded) have reached over 27,000 in a war that was supposed to be a “cakewalk”, over in a few weeks. The media have done a good job for the government of keeping the blood and gore out of the living room. Except for close friends or relatives of one of the 27,000, Americans have not been impacted by the war.
They are even less aware of the consequences for Iraqis. Every day 100 or more Iraqi civilians are killed and 100 or more are maimed and injured. [On “exceptional” days] Iraqi casualties totaled 535, 152 killed and 383 wounded. How did the “war on terror” become a war on the Iraqi people?
We have heard every answer: intelligence mistakes, incompetence, and evil machination. Whichever answer we take, the killing and destruction continue.Why? Four-star general Wesley Clark, former supreme commander of NATO, said that shortly after 9/11 he was shown a Pentagon “memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
It has also recently come to light that the US government has imposed an oil deal on the puppet Iraqi government that turns Iraqi oil over to US and British firms for exploitation. The profits of the military-industrial complex are soaring, and higher military budgets are being appropriated. The value of Cheney’s Haliburton stock options has not merely doubled or tripled but multiplied by a factor of 32.
Far from making Americans safe by attacking a country that posed no threat to the US, Bush-Cheney have alarmed the Russians and the Chinese. Russian President Vladimir Putin and General Yury Baluyevsky, Chief of the Russian General Staff, have both warned that the Bush regime’s military aggression and drive for hegemony are setting off another arms race.
China has announced a 17.8 percent increase in its military budget for 2007.
Americans still regard themselves as the salt of the earth. But the rest of the world no longer sees Americans that way. When citizens of other countries turn their eyes toward America, they see evil.
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