Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

Britain's Tony Blair, following the transit bombings in London, declared we must fight against extremist Muslim views, which call upon faithful Muslims to kill the infidels.  Tragically, London's Tube and buses have been attacked in a killing spree.  One young Muslim would-be bomber, whose bomb didn't go off, linked his killing urge to Iraq, explaining he wanted vengeance for the death and destruction that Britain and the U.S. had wreaked on Iraq.

Of course, any religion that is inciting violence must be dealt with in the most severe terms.  Linking religion and violence is nothing new.

While we examine Muslim killings through the centuries, we must also analyze the teaching of some faiths.  Certain devout religions believe God or Jehovah was a mass serial killer, wiping out entire civilizations through flood followed by fire at a later date.  Some religions accept these stories as fact, while others accept them as stories told through the centuries, with no scientific or historical proof of their validity.

When scientists discovered atomic energy, and after nuclear energy and beyond, it is now imperative that religions promoting killing in modern times should consider the death and destruction toll of the last century - 50 million dead in World War Two.  The flesh of human beings was burned off their bones when atomic energy was used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  While controversy continues over whether it was necessary to be the first nation in the world to use atomic energy to burn humans to death through radiation, one thing is certain - other nations now have such power.  Let us hope no madman like Hitler will be the next to use such a frighteningly potent weapon.

Considering the link between religion and war, it is imperative that we examine what the major religions are teaching.  That is why it is essential to scrutinize, to analyze every religious belief associated with killing.  Analyze how religions attempt to link some divine power to a rampaging killer God, a mass serial killer if you please.  

Some children at a very early age are indoctrinated with extreme beliefs honoring such a killer God.  A variation of this destructive message of an Almighty mass murderer disposing of the wicked is used to promote mega buck movie spectacles, television murder shows, and violent video games that indoctrinate young children in methods of murder.  Is it any wonder that the U.S. ranks number one in the number of adults prosecuted for criminal acts according to a recent United Nations study?

Night after night we witness African men, women and children dying in Niger from starvation.  The question must be asked, "Why did the Reagan Administration cut funding for any nation that gave instruction in family planning or birth control?"

In times past, the U.S. helped stem starvation in Africa, providing this vital information.  It is a well-known fact that there are actually individuals who don't want this life-saving information on family planning and birth control to be provided to Africans, as hard as this might be to believe.  To think of the U.S. being on the side of death by starvation, along with the hideous thought of any religions daring to take such a stand is, in my opinion, committing blasphemy is something horrifying that must be accounted for in the here and now.  

Let's see the well-fed faces of those who would let millions of Africans starve to death because of some irrational view, which some dare claim is connected to religion.  Would you like to label deprivation of this information Ronald Reagan's African starvation legacy?

Certainly Muslim extremists who incite killing with bombs on subways, trains or buses must be stopped.  By the same token, religionists teaching little children that Almighty God is a mass murderer, utilizing the very elements of earth to kill by flood and fire and repeatedly killing those designated as wicked, can never lead to a world of peace.

The notorious Christian Crusades linger long in the memory of Muslims.  Christian Crusaders attempted by sword to spread Christianity in the Middle East.  They surrounded Jerusalem and blew their trumpets as they believed Jericho's trumpeters had done, and they fully expected the walls of Jerusalem to come tumbling down. When this anticipated result did not occur, the Crusaders charged into Jerusalem, killing everybody there with the bodies being piled atop one another.  Religious wars have resulted in the slaughter of humans as far back as history is recorded.

Christians were slaughtering Muslims in contemporary times in Kosovo.  Under President Clinton the U.S. stepped in, stopping this hideous slaughter with powerful military might, ending this fiendish spectacle.  War criminal Slobodan Milosevic, former Serbian president, has been tried at the International Court of Justice at The Hague for war crimes against humanity.

What is happening now in Iraq is puzzling.  How can peace loving, honest human beings the world over defend the Iraq War debacle?  Remember Saddam Hussein was a C.I.A. operative assigned to assassinate the then Iraqi president.  

Failing in his assassination attempt, Saddam fled to Syria.  The C.I.A. later helped initiate a coup overthrowing the Iraqi president and installing Saddam Hussein in power.  

Ruthlessly Saddam killed off his opposition.  This was when the U.S. supplied Saddam, while he was at war with Iran and murdering much of his own Kurdish population.  The U.S. sent Saddam every conceivable weapon, including the wherewithal to make chemical weapons with which he would perpetrate genocide against Kurds and Iranians.  

When Saddam invaded Kuwait to stop that nation from stealing Iraqi oil through slant drilling, Saddam asked April Glaspie, then U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, what the U.S. would do if he invaded Kuwait to stop stealing his oil.  Saddam was told the U.S. would do nothing since this was an Arab-Arab problem.

That big lie triggered Saddam's entrance into Kuwait, where he launched the Gulf War.  Bush declared that Saddam was worse than Hitler, not bothering to mention that he had led the move to provide $3 billion in loans from the U.S. to help Saddam buy foodstuffs.  This was all meant to help Senator Bob Dole's state of Kansas.  Dole lobbied hard for the enabling legislation and proved once more that he earned the name conferred on him by his critics as "senator for sale."  

The well-laid plan did not bear ultimate success.  The former C.I.A. director and Chinese envoy Bush I, referred to as a foreign affairs expert, sat with presumed helpless rage as Saddam Hussein instead used the $3 billion to buy weapons.  When Glaspie issued her "it's not our problem" declaration the ultimate result was that the opponent the U.S. fought in Gulf War I was using weapons we earlier provided.

Now his son, George W. Bush, who launched the Iraq War on a series of lies, using forged documents to make his case to the U.S. public, is fighting a new war, a war on terrorism, as the cost of the Iraq War spirals out of control at $300 billion.  The national debt is now rapidly approaching $8 trillion, by far the largest in the planet's history, as an ever widening civil war erupts in Iraq with religion fighting religion and daily suicide bombings killing American military personnel while Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld deliver mantras about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

How can any straight thinking individual support Reagan's calamitous policy of depriving Third World nations with family planning and birth control information?  How can any thinking individual support Bush I's decision to loan $3 billion to ruthless dictator Saddam Hussein, the man he would ultimately describe as worse than Hitler?  How can any thinking individual support Bush II's decision to launch a war against Iraq based on a deceitful charge that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction?

At what point will impeachment occur?  How many Americans and Iraqis must die in this war invented by the Bush Administration?