Rummy's march of folly.

Lately Rummy has been busy writing Op-Eds justifying his warmongering by equating the "war on terror" with the Cold War. Since he hasn't had much luck defeating the terrorists on the battlefield, he's decided to take his agit-prop to the opinion pages. This Sunday, he contended that victory over the Soviet Union was achieved in part through the creation of the "Many new institutions and programs of the Truman years," meaning the National Security state. What he doesn't mention, of course, is that the military industrial complex --- which Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against --- was the natural outgrowth of these new institutions and programs that made a new perpetual war on something --- anything --- inevitable after the Cold War. Filling this vacuum of peace is the real purpose of our new declared-undeclared war.

After the fall of an atrophied and bankrupt Soviet Union, Rummy and his buddy Dick-shot Cheney and their benefactors in the defense industry, desperately needed to come up with a new boggy man to justify their continued bloated defense budgets ad infinitum. The threatening specter of a "peace dividend" was anathema for the neocons and their new American century. Just as their predecessors after WWII had to sell the threat of an ill-defined "Communist menace," the Rummy/Cheney cabal now has to push the equally dubious "long war" against the global "struggle against violent extremists." This constant fear mongering is imperative in order to keep the vast majority if tax-payer money flowing into the coffers of Halliburton and away from health care, education and other social programs designed to mitigate the ravages of unrestrained capitalism.

This dovetails nicely with corporate America's master plan to grow and maintain an impoverished and ill-educated underclass that will provide a steady stream of pliable employees going into low wage jobs, trained just enough to run a register at Wal-Mart. As an added benefit, this also ensures an endless supply of disadvantaged youths willing to play Russian roulette on the battlefield in the hopes of eventually getting a better education from the GI bill, which they've been priced out of being able to afford on their own. The new military/corporate paradigm, which requires putting the "infant" back in the "infantry," is designed solely for those not able to buy their way out of it, like Dick Cheney and all the neocons were able to during the Vietnam war.

It is now essential that all Americans, who actually do believe in peace and freedom, stand up and let their voices by heard. As Rummy writes, "Many critical battles in the war on terror will be fought in the news rooms and editorial board rooms," and he's right. So it is up to all of us to make sure, through our letters to the editor and our blogging, that we speak truth to power. People of good conscience must put an end to this march of folly, this immoral perversion of our long cherished values of democracy and fair play before it’s too late. The great nation we grew up in is in imminent danger of disappearing off the face of the earth unless we do something to stop it from happening.