The Official Website of DC Tedrow - State Violence and BACALA's Prestigious Speakers

Fire your boss.

Main Menu

State Violence and BACALA's Prestigious Speakers

Written by DC Tedrow

Thursday, 06 December 2007

The following letter/commentary might appear in the January 2008 issue of We the People. John Kelley told me to go ahead and throw it online, so here it is.

State Violence and BACALA's Prestigious Speakers; or, Some Thoughts on our Moral and Political Culture

In the November 2007 issue of We The People, John Kelley presents a revealing discussion of Bay Area Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse (BACALA) and the less-than-secret pro-corporate agenda of tort reform advocates. (See "Who's Abusing Who, Karl Rove and BACALA".) Another interesting point can be made concerning BACALA's series of speakers.

BACALA has featured an impressive array of guest speakers over the past few years: Karl Rove (Nov. 28, 2007), Ann Coulter (Sep. 6, 2006), Karen Hughes (Aug. 11, 2005), and Oliver North (Aug. 26, 2004). By any sane standard, BACALA has established itself as a community leader when it comes to promoting international terrorists, propagandists, and apologists for state violence. This is an easy point to miss when history is suppressed or ignored.

To recap: In March 2003, ignoring the largest protests in human history, the Bush administration launched an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, a virtually undefended nation that did not pose any credible threat to the United States. As a result of a dozen years of crippling, UN-backed, U.S.-enforced economic sanctions, in fact, Iraq did not pose a credible threat to any country, including its neighbors Kuwait and Iran, nations it had invaded previously.

Moreover, the invasion was carried out even though 1) it was in violation of international law; 2) it was widely predicted by analysts across the political spectrum that invading Iraq would only increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks on the United States; 3) the Bush administration knew Iraq did not have WMD or any WMD program; 4) Iraq did not have any connection whatsoever to the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and 5) Saddam Hussein had offered to leave the country before the invasion.

The history of the sanctions exposes the entire rationale for the invasion, in fact. In 1991, George H.W. Bush encouraged Iraqi dissidents to rise up and overthrow Hussein. When they attempted to do so, they found no support from the United States and were slaughtered by Hussein. The 1991-2003 sanctions were imposed by the United States with the express purpose of keeping Saddam Hussein in power following the first Gulf War. Keeping Hussein in power sewed disunity among Arab countries, provided a market for arms suppliers, and provided a rationale for a continued U.S. military presence in the region. Meanwhile, half a million Iraqi children died as a result of bans on certain food items and much needed medical supplies – a price the United States felt was worth it, according to Madeline Albright.

In other words, if the U.S. was so concerned with removing Hussein, all it had to do was lift the sanctions and let the Iraqi people take control of their country. Unfortunately, this plan had the downside of leaving the fate of Iraq and its oil in the hands of the Iraqi people, so it was scrapped. As a rule, democracy is anathema to the people most committed to spreading it.

There are many more reasons why the invasion of Iraq was illegal and unethical, but these are the basic problems with the popular mythology. Much of it was laid bare before the invasion – for instance, everyone paying attention knew that neither the CIA nor any other nation’s intelligence agency seriously believed Iraq had WMD.

Much more of the mythology was exposed afterward – for instance, when President Bush, in an August 2006 press conference, made the curious claim that, "nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. ... Nobody has ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq." Or when Colin Powell’s chief of staff, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, admitted that Powell had lied to the UN, describing Powell’s February 2003 speech as, "a hoax on the American people, the international community, and the United Nations Security Council." Steve Allinson and a dozen other UN weapons inspectors also knew Powell's speech was ludicrous: "Various people would laugh at various times [during Powell's speech] because the information he was presenting was just, you know, didn't mean anything -- had no meaning," said Allinson in October 2003.

And so it goes, lies and mythology, terror and coercion, ad nauseum. The basic point is simple, though: All this information is publicly available, in countless books and news articles. And all of the aforementioned speakers—Rove, Hughes, Coulter, and North—as mouthpieces, propagandists, and strategists, have played their part in the Bush administration's illegal, predatory war, with awful effects for the American and Iraqi peoples. The next time BACALA invites a guest speaker, it would be instructive for concerned citizens—or at least the folks who aren't subservient to psychopathic monsters—to review this record.