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Think Locally, Act Globally

Here's a pretty old legacy post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 22 years ago, in 2002, on the World Wide Web.

Now that Saddam Hussein has caved in and accepted the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, the Bush administration has declared that it doesn’t give a damn and it wants Congressional carte blanche to bomb Iraq whenever it pleases [NY Times]. Although they are lobbying the UN Security Council for a resolution authorizing police action against Iraq, Bush wants Congress to authorize war whether or not the UN goes along with his transparent plan for conquest and plunder.

The toadies in the War Party of Congress — Daschle, Gephardt, Hastert, et al. — are all lining up to cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war, but there is a growing amount of grumbling amongst Congressional Democrats. With good reason — not only is Bush’s plan transparent conquest, it’s also transparent attempts at an October Surprise to derail the Democrats’ chances of holding on to the Senate and retaking the House in November by energizing a hawkish coattail once the anti-Iraq media blitz hits the airwaves. As Roderick Long has pointed out, Bush should get a t-shirt with his new slogan: Think locally, act globally.

The Bush-Rumsfeld junta claims that Iraq is a unique threat to the world:

Iraq is unique, Mr. Rumsfeld said. No other living dictator matches Saddam Hussein’s record of waging aggressive war against his neighbors, pursuing weapons of mass destruction, using them against his own people, launching missiles against his neighbors, brutalizing and torturing his own citizens, harboring terrorist networks, engaging in terrorist acts, including the attempted assassination of foreign officials, violating international commitments.

Rumsfeld is correct that the peace and welfare of a great many people in the world is in peril from a rogue state, which

  • … pursues aggressive campaigns of conquest and plunder against sovereign states
  • … has imprisoned thousands of its own civilians without basic civil rights protections
  • … does everything it can to stockpile weapons of mass destruction and has threatened to use them unprovoked [*]
  • … flouts international agreements and threatens war in violation of international law
  • … has used poison gas against its own people in acts of repression
  • … is goverened by a maniacally hawkish, unelected head of state

… and so on. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, it’s not Iraq. Anyone want to guess who it is? Anyone? Anyone?

In Other News

The Bush administration is, of course, doing everything it can to use the war issue as a media smokescreen over issues that it would prefer to go away, here’s a brief review of some U.S. news tidbits:

1 reply to Think Locally, Act Globally Use a feed to Follow replies to this article

  1. Discussed at www.radgeek.com

    Geekery Today:

    What you mean “We”?

    Here are the facts as we know them. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tony Blair, Donald Rumsfeld, and several other senior government officials in the U.S. and U.K. told us that Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq had large stockpiles of…

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Anticopyright. This was written in 2002 by Rad Geek. Feel free to reprint if you like it. This machine kills intellectual monopolists.