What Do Bush Republicans Really Want?

Thom Hartman at Common Dreams gives us deja vu all over again. The same crew that brought you the "evil empire" bullshit while the Soviet Union was in full meltdown is the crew that is currently pushing the "long war" on terror. Hartman defines the players and their goals all the way back in 1972 when Richard Nixon began to engage the Soviet Union and detente became a geopolitical goal of the United States.

Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? And how could billions of dollars taken as taxes from average working people be transferred to the companies that Rumsfeld and Cheney - and their cronies - would soon work for and/or run?

Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear.

Knowing the players, figuring out their real motivation isn't so hard.

We've seen this movie before. The last time, it cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars, vastly enriched the cronies of these men, and ultimately helped bring Ronald Reagan to power. This time they've added on top of their crony enrichment program the burden of over 2200 dead American servicemen and women, tens of thousands wounded, as many as a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, and a level of worldwide instability not seen since the run-up to World War Two.

Crony enrichment. Isn't that what the Bush Administration is all about? Think about it. Everything the Bush led Republican Party does is designed to ease the burden of being rich and remove any stigma of accountability from those who run things either in politics or in business.

The "long war" on terror is just the newest tool of the same old anti-American conspirators.

Big hat tip to One Pissed Off Veteran.