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International News Title: The Politics of Murder, and the Democrats' War Pelosi and Reid, too timid to seriously confront President Bush and call a halt to the disastrous war on Iraq by simply refusing to fund it, have orchestrated a bill that provides the president full funding to carry on with the killing for the rest of his term, while allowing those of them who have to confront anti-war voters to claim they voted against their own measure. "I will vote against this bill," says Pelosi, who personally crafted this cave-in to Bush and Cheney. The whole Democratic Party caucus in Congress has morphed horribly into John Kerry clones. They will be voting against the war funding bill that they engineered, knowing that with Republican support, the bill will pass and go to the president with no strings attached. The Iraq War is now fully a Democratic War. With regard to the general contours of United States foreign policy for the last hundred years, and especially in the six decades following World War II, the catastrophe of Iraq has always belonged to both the Republicans and the Democrats. Both parties, and all leading national politicians, subscribe to the goal of American world hegemony, and America's "right" to encircle the globe with a military empire and intervene anywhere, anytime, for any reason we contend is related to "national security," a phrase purposely defined so broadly as to encompass any imaginable set of circumstances. We should endeavor to be minimally honest, despite the fact that even an infinitesimal amount of veracity will forever destroy the continuation of our deadly political charade. The only reason -- the only reason -- the Democrats strongly criticize the Iraq chapter in our book of Empire is that it has "failed." In terms of the moral principles implicated, it had to fail, since it was and is a war and occupation of aggression, waged against a nation and a people that never constituted any serious threat. Such moral factors are, of course, entirely irrelevant to our ruling elites; in the name of realism, let us therefore set them aside. Given that we waged a war of conquest, if we had succeeded in installing a minimally functioning and compliant government on the colonial model, the Democrats would have no objection at all. Neither would the American people. We have a long history of brutality and butchery; it is not as if a significant number of Americans would suddenly have undergone what would amount to a miraculous revival (or discovery in the first instance) of moral values and conscience. With only a few exceptions, those who pursue national office are entirely devoid of morality, conscience and even a modicum of decency. The deficiency is a necessary prerequisite for those who seek advantage and influence via a government and a state swimming in blood and violence. The first Americans spoke of "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind"; today's political leaders respect no one -- not those who elect them, not themselves, and certainly not those whose slaughter they manage, fund and approve. The Democrats will not end the murder of Iraq and of Iraqis -- first, because they do not acknowledge that it is murder, since they believe other nations and peoples are ours to dispose of as we will, and second, because they do not think it is to their political advantage to do so. The Democrats engineered this latest episode in murder at one remove precisely to maintain the lie that the destruction of Iraq is solely the act of Republicans, while the Democrats themselves make certain that the destruction will continue unimpeded. In one sense, and as deeply loathsome as both parties are today, the Republicans are a very small step closer to reality: the Republicans murder and proudly take responsibility for it, while the Democrats murder and deny they are doing so. Since they both murder, the difference is meaningless in moral terms, although specialists in the extremes of pathology might find it worthy of inquiry. This is your government today, and these are the elites who rule you: with a handful of exceptions, they are murderers, one and all. Their only concern is power, and who wields it; mounds of corpses that rise to eclipse the sun mean absolutely nothing to them. Throughout this weekend, many millions of Americans will celebrate the military that executes the murders. This is the symptom of the death spasms of Empire and of the moral death that preceded it, as the evil erupts to the surface without apology: rejoicing in murder, and honoring our monstrous ability to cause destruction on a scale never before witnessed. And there may well be further and worse destruction to come. In such circumstances, anyone who remains at all decent must be a coward. If humanity manages to survive the coming decades, judgments will need to be made at some point. Those who sided with power, violence, butchery and death will be identified -- as will those who took up the defense of the innocent, and who recognized the inviolable sanctity of a single life. Our government and our ruling class have decided, and history will remember what they have done. This weekend is a very good time to consider what your choice is, and how you choose to be remembered.
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