�Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have.� --President George Bush, Jan. 10, 2007

So our great leader assures us all will be well in Iraq once we no longer restrict our troops, increase their number and allow them to kill more people. And raise greater threats to Iran and Syria, thereby pleasing evangelical Zionism and bringing the Middle East closer to total chaos.

The dithering incompetence of our mass murderer in chief, as he faced his deserved shame and political failure, is in flagrant contrast to the behavior of Saddam Hussein, confronting his legal assassins. Hussein was portrayed as a fiendish monster, even if it took profound lies and incredible distortions that treated the American public as a population of morons.

�I call on you not to hate because it does not leave a space for a person to be fair and it makes you blind and closes all doors of thinking and keeps one away from balanced thought I also call on you not to hate the peoples of the other countries that attacked us and to differentiate between the decision-makers and peoples.� --President Saddam Hussein, Dec. 27, 2006

The dignity with which Saddam Hussein faced his lynching was hardly in keeping with the image of him previously projected by Western mind managers. His last moments may have been deemed out of character by his enemies, but it was their abysmal lack of character which created the whole sordid affair.

The pornography of his execution was accompanied by claims of justice having been done, along with some of the most tasteless political cartoons since the Mohammed caricatures. That last indulgence of alleged Western freedom helped bring about the Tehran conference on the Holocaust, which clearly revealed the hypocrisy of the West's claim to free speech, both in its treatment of criticism of the Holocaust story as heresy punishable by imprisonment, and its blatantly biased coverage of the conference itself, which paralleled its slanted reporting of Hussein's show trial.

Saddam's much heralded brutality was really small time by comparison to the mass slaughters of Bush and Blair. These butchers wade ankle deep in Iraqi blood, all the while proclaiming their humanitarian search for justice and end to terror. They achieve a perverse level of coordination in raping language and poisoning logic, while they murder people and destroy nations.

How does the West look when it massacres in the name of humanitarianism, and attacks freedom to speak, think or even, in the case of Palestinians, vote? Societies practicing Western values are revealed as dishonest at their very core, and when real democracy raises its head it is immediately decapitated. It is called fundamentalist or terrorist by an oppressive force which makes fundamentalism or terrorism inevitable.

On those occasions when the voice of the people has actually been heard, the West has worked to smother it now, and strangle it later. The example of Hamas in Palestine is most glaring, but throughout the Arab world where it, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah increasingly represent the common people against their tyrants, the empire depicts them as antidemocratic forces. This, as it murders with impunity, arms local despots who keep their people in physical and mental bondage, and sucks the earth dry of the poisoning petroleum that propels its crippled civilization towards ecological doom.

The same is attempted, though with far less success, in Latin America, where predominantly Christian communities react to centuries of domination by minority rulers and elect governments of their own. These are immediately dubbed extremist, communist and any other negative label empire can find to denigrate an emerging counter force. But the people vote to survive by using the material abundance of their societies to better their own lives, rather than watch foreigners and homegrown elites gorge themselves while majorities live in poverty.

How can they call their systems democratic, when they haven't learned the simplest and most important rule of American democracy? Which is: Fundraising! The recent canonization of a new House speaker mentioned almost as an afterthought that she had served her party as its financial king, long before she was made its congressional queen.

Democratic power is rising at a time of the most serious threats to the planet's future. It is given great lip service in our own founding myth, but is violently suppressed when it attempts to counter those threats. They are posed by an economic regime which practices without regard for humanity's future, but only concentrates on creation of profit in the present. When market capitalism denies global warming or climate change and is joined in unholy alliance with doctrines of racial and religious supremacy, the world faces a terror emanating from its internal substance and not any imaginary external force.

The distortions that motivate consumption at the near speed of sound and spending at the near speed of light could bring an ominous darkness to the planet. Menaces to our environment are often blamed on individuals who pursue greedy policies, but they are the only policies that can be pursued in a system that does not recognize the possibility of long-range detriment to all of humanity, but only operates on the short range creation of wealth for some of humanity.

The crisis of our time may not be any clearer than in the brief quotes of two leaders, both in our minds and in their words. One was demonized as evil, by the West, while the other represents real evil, to the rest. When the assassinated villain speaks with a more humane sense of reality than the leader of the world's most powerful nation, we should all think twice about what we are told about anybody, and what we believe about anything.

Copyright � 2007 Frank Scott. All rights reserved.

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