Recently, my favorite Bush basher from the Right, Paul Craig Roberts, went over the top. Note, I did not say, "went too far". On its face, what this former Reagan Treasury official has to say is accurate and truthful. In a critique of the Bush White House entitled "Watching the Constitution Fade Away" dated May 1st, Roberts proclaims, among other zingers: "Unless Bush is impeached and turned over to the war crimes court in the Hague, Americans will never reclaim their liberties from an executive branch that has established itself as the sole judge of the limits of its powers."

With that premise, assuming it is true, Americans will never "reclaim their liberties". There is as much chance of  G.W. Bush being impeached by the U.S. Congress and surrendered to the Hague for war crimes as I have of winning the Nobel prize for molecular physics. The bipartisan Washington establishment will not indict one of its own, an individual who is carrying out a war policy which both political parties have effectively authorized. Bush and Cheney know that. To repeat myself, the Democrats voted for Wolfowitz's War, and by implication, for everything which went with it--lies, torture, war crimes, etcetera, including the upcoming unprovoked assault upon Iran.

Nitpicking Bush and Cheney in the execution of this overall policy--the so-called "war on terror"--is part of the game, accepted by both factions of the Washington establishment, because that game is self-serving for those in power (both political parties) and to those seeking power. Capitol Hill is in no position to impeach Bush. Everybody, Republicans and Democrats alike, might be exposed.

Is this wholesale deception and hypocrisy new in American history? If one were to take the dishonest nitpicking of the Democrats seriously and also consider the honest criticism of Bush II by concerned citizens like Paul Roberts, one might conclude that the malfeasance of the Bush/Cheney White House in foreign affairs is unique and unprecedented.  But it isn't. To the contrary, it is a well established, well documented American tradition. What's more, it is part of a coherent pattern. To address the most outstanding examples, does any serious student of American history think that America was not lied and railroaded into World War I and World War II?

FDR makes G.W. Bush look like a duffer in the lying department. The story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is no secret to those willing to take the time to check it out. FDR lied in public about keeping America out of the war in Europe because that is what the American people wanted to hear and that is what FDR needed to say in order to get re-elected. In private, FDR was frantically plotting to come to the aid of his pal "Uncle Joe" in the Kremlin, using Stalin's own agents within the U.S. Government to get the job done. In addition to rescuing Stalin, FDR wanted to make good on his secret assurances in 1939 to the deluded politicians in Whitehall and to those in Paris that Washington would join them when a war broke out with Germany over the phony issue of Danzig and the "territorial integrity" of Poland. 

To achieve these two objectives via the "back door to war", FDR went on the warpath against Japan, and maneuvered Tokyo into attacking the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The truth about Pearl Harbor did not surface until years after the end of the war in 1945. Rear Admiral Robert Theobald's book The Final Secret of Pearl Harbor did not appear until 1954. Congressman Hamilton Fish's definitive, comprehensive indictment of Roosevelt--Tragic Deception, FDR & America's Involvement in World War II--did not get published until 1984, when Fish was 94! Both books are unknown and forgotten. There was no outrage, retrospectively, against Roosevelt and his handlers.

As for Woodrow Wilson and World War I, the pattern was similar. Wilson said one thing for public consumption; in private he did just the opposite, which subterfuge landed Uncle Sam in World War I, thereby saving England and France from capitulation to Germany. How did it transpire? Last month, April, an essay appeared on the internet at something called Information Clearing House by one Albert Doyle, a retired New York attorney. Entitled "The Passionate Attachment", the essay was a short, blistering history lesson about Zionism in relationship to U.S. Middle East policy. Doyle starts off:

Zionism is essentially Jewish nationalism rooted in 19th century racist, colonialist thinking gilded over with a “religious” patina. The earliest Zionists saw security for persecuted Jews in a “return” to Palestine and those early leaders were clear if circumspect to the point of deceit about having to displace the Arab inhabitants of Palestine to secure their goals.  Zionism became serious about a century ago as east European Jews emerged from their village religious culture, although many early Zionist leaders were not religious Jews. The early Zionist movement was vigorously opposed by more assimilated western European Jews as well as most Jewish religious leaders; it gained support, although still a minority, on the break up of the Ottoman Empire and really got off the ground with the World War I British Balfour Declaration which promised Zionists a homeland in Palestine in exchange for certain services to the British. [My emphasis.] Palestinian Arabs, Muslim and Christian, were at the time the large majority in Palestine and the famous declaration contained the cynical and impossible condition (now forgotten) that the Jewish homeland was not to be at the expense of the majority Arab population of Palestine. In fact, the Zionist state which came into being was precisely at the cost of that majority of Palestinian Arabs. Today we are expected to forget this but not surprisingly the victims have had trouble with the idea and still do.

What Woodrow Wilson was doing in private inside the White House, prior to America's entry into the Great War, relates to what the Zionists were doing in secret on behalf of the British War Cabinet. Attorney Doyle brings up the issue of "certain services to the British", then drops it like a hot potato, with no explanation. The leaders of Zionism in Europe offered to bring America into the war in exchange for the British giving Palestine to the Zionists at the successful conclusion of the war. Prime Minister Lloyd George and Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour agreed. What did they have to lose? It was either that, or negotiate a status quo ante peace with Germany, which settlement would have been an acknowledgment that England had lost the war. No British imperialist wanted to swallow that.

The word was sent posthaste from London to Washington and New York. An impressive triumvirate of Zionist agents on the scene--Bernard Baruch, Justice Louis Brandeis, and Samuel Untermyer--went to work on the visionary, messianic Wilson. They were his friends, his advisors, and his campaign contributors. Their joint efforts tipped the scales. The rest is history. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 followed as a receipt from the British to the Zionists for the bargain. Next came the Paris "Peace Conference" of 1919, dividing the Continent and truncating Germany. Then, the ever-scheming Winston Churchill arrived in Palestine as Colonial Secretary in 1920, to hand over Palestine and the Palestinians to a British High Commissioner, the English Zionist, Mr. Herbert Samuel. All thanks to an unbalanced U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, launching America into a war under false pretenses, "to make the world safe for democracy". Sound familiar?

What is the relationship to the current debacle in the Middle East, spearheaded by the current American President? It is all part of the same pattern, going back to 1916. Foreign correspondent Eric Margolis watched the "60 Minutes" interview with former CIA chief Tyler Drumheller a few Sundays ago. "Surely, this is the smoking gun" I thought to myself "on the subject of Bush's boldfaced deceptions about WMD." It may have been, but nothing happened Monday morning. As Margolis reports in his Writer's Notebook of April 24th:

One of the things that continues to amaze and dismay me is the failure so far of many Americans to realize they were lied to and deceived into an unjust war by White House propaganda. Or that a cabal of neoconservatives engineered a war to serve another nation. Where is the outrage? Why are more Americans not demanding Congress charge administration officials with malfeasance, lying to Congress, and creating an illegal war? Anyone who watched this weekend’s program, `60 Minutes,’ saw the former CIA chief in Europe affirm that the White House was warned that the story about Iraq’s purchase of uranium from Niger, which Bush used to justify invading Iraq, was faked. Why, one wonders, is there not a storm of public outrage? Too many Americans remain in denial that they launched an illegal, unwarranted war for the basest of reasons.

Get the picture? It has all been done before, on a larger scale. It is high time we realize that an American President can get away with anything in the realm of foreign affairs and "illegal" wars. There is an abundance of precedent for it and there is no outrage because of it. The case against the Imperial Presidency has been lost, or conceded without a fight. The U.S. Constitution is a fiction. The White House, in the hands of either political party, can and will act with impunity. That is the record, and the record is as clear as gin.