Well, the purpose of the amendment was not really about Iran. It is about continuing the war in Iraq based on the lies of the Bush administration, now officially adopted by the Democrats, about Iran. After all justifications for staying the course in Iraq have proven empty, by now labeling Iran a terrorist organization (weird, huh?) the Democrats join with the Republicans to provide next justification for the continuation of the war in Iraq.
The non-Sense Amendment exposes the underlying structure of the duopoly, the two-party dictatorship, that rules the USA today.
Only Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel are outside the political pack of this duopoly mindset. It is up to the regular grass roots Democrats to face this uncomfortable and inconvenient truth.
Yes, the Kyl-Liberman Amendment was modified so the "military instruments" sections were removed from the amendment. So what? The whole amendment is false, and becomes the prelude to another amendment that does include military instruments. And yes it is a provcation against Iran but that is distraction only and not the real purpose at this time.
The real point is that is is an inflamatory escalation of the war in Iraq, not an amendment to end or even cool down the war. It is adopted to justify remaining in Iraq as long as they, both Democrats and Republicans, can sell the falsehood of "terrorist" Iran being there.
The amendment is really for domestic consumption and tells the people of the US that Iran is attacking Iraq, so we have to stay the course in Iraq to protect Iraq from Iran. This has been the Liberman mantra all along.
What about Hillary Clinton supporting it? This amendment contains exactly the same pack of lies that Clinton believed from Bush in the beginning of Iraq. Now she is "believing" them for Iran all over again. Or is she? As I see it she is a direct participant in the plan, not a dupe.
From the text of the version that seems to have been adopted:
The amendment endorses Gen Betrayus' false testimony to Congress (as bad as Powell's lies to the UN) claiming there is evidence that Iran is somehow sending weapons to Iraq. It is the USA that is sending most weapons, and Saudi Arabia that is sending weapons, Not Iran.
The amendment endorses Ambassador Crockers corkers of lies too. Plus all the other lies about so-called "evidence" of Iranian interference.
Not one argument of the 6-pages of introduction used in the bill to support the amendment is truthful or accurate. It is all opinion and supposition.
Then after six pages of lies we get to the resolution itslef on page 7. The Sense of the Senate says:
#1: That Iran poses a threat to Iraq (false) and that the US will keep a military presence in Iraq to counter Iran's influence. (That is prolonged war, not ending the war.)
#2: Says it is a critical national interest of the US to prevent Iran from turning the Shia Militias into a "Hezbollah-like force". (That is false. First, we don't have a national interset, critical or otherwise in Iraq. Second, Iran can't "turn" Iraqis into any thing. The Iraqi Shia militias think for themselves and don't all agree with each other. Third, Hezbollah is a nationalist defense force with representatives in parliament. They are not a terrorist organization like the US claims. Neither Hezbollah nor Iran has invaded and occupied anyone. The US has.)
#3 and #4 which were the worst are crossed out.
#5 says the US should designat Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp "a foreign terrorist organization". (What a joke. That has absolutely no basis in fact or evidence. That's like saying the US Marines are a terrorist organization....opps, I guess that's a bad analogy because the US Marines are a terrorist organization. It's like saying the National Guard is a terrorist organization. The REvolutionary Guards have not invaded and occupied anyone nor engaged in any terroriat activites.)
#6 Says the US treasury should implement sanctions consistent wtih these findings. (only the findings are all false.)
###
With this statement of the non-sense of the Senate, the leaders of the Senate, including Clinton and the majority of the Democrats siding with the Repubicans, are leading Congress right where they want to lead us: continued war in Iraq.
Why? Because this is right where the plutocracy wants them to lead. Sorry to have to be the one to inform you, but we live in a Fascism-lite nation that controls both parties through a two-party dictatorship run by a plutocracy that uses the two parties as a shell game to keep the voters confused.
Check out the Political Compass link (thanks to GreenSooner for posting it) to the picture of political reality. This is a great tool to see what the two-party dictatorship is all about.
The picture of nearly all the candidates in the upper right quadrant is exactly what I mean when I say we have a two-party dictatorship that allows for a small range of argument between the two wings of the "business as usual party" about where to stand in their quadrant.
Only Kucinich and Gravel stand outside this duopoly-certified pack of candidates in another quadrant of political reality. Kucinich's not-for-profit Health Care plan compared to Clinton's for-profit mandatory Health Insurance plan, is the perfect example of the difference in political outlook of the two quadrants of political perspective. And we see how the candidacies of Kucinich and Gravel are treated by the powers-that-be behind and supporting the pack.
I believe Kucinich and Gravel stand with the majority of the people, but that that majority is so dispirited and alienated that they won't look up from being entangled in the weeds of confusion caused by the fake opposition between the two parties.
This Political Compass grid also shows that the elections in Iran are about equal to the elections in the USA as far as giving the voters a real choice between candidates. In Iran the ruling council vetts and chooses the candidates, and in the USA the ruling elite do the same.
The two-party sham works for both parties. The Republican Party does not live up to the Republican PR about small government, no foreign regime change or entanglements, free trade, etc, any more than the Democrats live up to their PR. The Republicans don't deliver on anti-abortion any better than the Democrats deliver on anti-war. But the two parties use their PR organs to divide up the voters, and then the leadership of the two parties vote to keep the plutocrats in power. The two wings only differ on the minor tactics of how to accomplish their common strategy of keeping the rich in control.
For example, the question "should we drill in ANWAR or not?" is jsut a "minor tactic" -- a bump in the road -- to the people who own America. The Republicans say "sure we should drill and get profit everywhere we can." The Democrats say "if you drill in certain places then the people will grumble and maybe become too socialist and nationalize the oil industry, so you have to give them some environmental protections to keep them pacified." That becomes the big shell game that keeps the voters occupied and too confused to see who is making the real decisions and collecting the profits.
For another example, the Democratic Leadership always has been in favor of the War in Iraq and still is, but because the grass roots are not, the Leadership had to shift its PR statements to oppose the war. But the Democratic leadership doesn't really want to end the war and the Kyl-Liberman Amendment is an example of that truth. The Democrats want to "win" the war in Iraq as much as Bush does, so they argue over strategy, such as the bogus Biden-Brownback-Boxer amendment, rather than just shuting down the government until the troops are withdrawn. The Democrats plan is to win the election in 2008 so they can be the party that won the war, not the party that ended the war.
The truth, that is, the Big Con, that this amendment exposes yet once again, is that the majority of Democrats in the Senate are Republican-lite. Like Bill Clinton said, "I hope you're all aware we're all Eisenhower Republicans."
Now this amendment on Iran becomes the vehicle that Democrats can distract the voters from the Democratic refusal to stop the Iraq war. Now the Democrats can say "we approve of the war on Iran even though we were lied to by Bush on Iraq." Of course they are supporting this amendment by the same lies now about Iran, but that doesn't matter in the long run. Why. Because the voters live in the United States of Amnesia well known to the likes of Goering, Hitler, Schwartzenegger, and Bush where USA Fascism-lite is as simple as the alphabet:
A. "Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger."
- Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, From his cell at Nuremberg Trials 1946
- from Nuremberg Diary by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947)
B. "The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogan. As soon as you sacrifice this slogan and try to be many-sided, the effect will piddle away, for the crowd can neither digest nor retain the material offered. In this way the result is weakened and in the end entirely cancelled out."~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, chapter six.
C. “People need somebody to watch over them. . . . Ninety-five percent of the people in the world need to be told what to do and how to behave.”
– Arnold Schwarzenegger from a 1990 profile in U.S. News and World Report
D. "See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
~ George W Bush, 5/24/05
The majority of Democrats, the ones voting for the amendment, are playing from this same play book. They know exactly what they are doing to continue the war in Iraq, which is the real purpose of the Kyl-Liberman amendment.
[This blog was cross posted at Daily Kos]
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