by James Glaser
April 22, 2004

My dictionary explains democracy this way; "1. A form of government in which political power resides in all the people and is exercised by them directly or is given to elected representatives. 2. A state so governed. 3. The spirit or practice of political, legal, and social equality.

Think back to when we turned Afghanistan over to its people. The people in Afghanistan never had a say in what was happening to their country. The United States Government provided a huge tent and picked out the people that could come to the tent to form a government. When things were not going our way, the CIA got out the suitcase of money and started passing it around. We provided the President, Harmid Karzie, an American oil executive, whose whole extended family still lives right here in the good old USA. Washington calls that Democracy.

To this day the White House still provides and pays for, a private army to protect the President of Afghanistan from the people of Afghanistan.

Right today in Iraq we are getting ready to turn the government over to the Iraqi people. We are going to do that on June 30th and we still have no idea of who that new government is. Last year we installed our own "Governing Council;" and now this is the truth, some of the people on that council had been away from Iraq for over thirty years. Some of these people had their own Militia for protection from the Iraqi people and our government armed them and provided transportation from the United States to Iraq for the whole Militia. These private armies are made up of people that left Iraq years ago. That is the kind of government the White House tried to foist on the people of Iraq and it didn't work.

The "new" Iraqi Government is going to be picked, not voted on, but picked by the United Nations. For some reason the George Bush's White House is totally against voting.

It is pretty well known that with enough money, we will be able to corrupt whoever the UN picks. Remember the people in Iraq are mostly dirt poor and the flash of a hundred grand or the promise of help for your whole family can be very tempting.

It isn't just third world countries that we have attacked whose government we want to subvert, but look at Spain. Spain is a democracy and they just had an election. Before that election the government of Spain was "best friends" with George Bush. They backed his war in Iraq and even sent troops to help.

In the Spanish election last month, one side wanted to keep helping George Bush with his war and keep the Spanish troops in Iraq. The other side said that the war was wrong and if the people elected them, they would pull the troops out of Iraq. The Spanish people voted to pull the troops. This was no surprise because over 85% of the people were against the war in Iraq all along. The old government just didn't care what the people thought and it cost them this new election.

Now the White House and George Bush are upset that Spain is pulling its troops. They claim to believe in democracy and when the people of Spain vote to get the troops out, Washington says that is wrong. Nothing could be more right. The people voted and the new government has to pull the troops, that was the whole focus of the election.

George Bush, Washington, and our media are now in the process of subverting our own democracy right here at home. Bush and the Congress keeps telling us things are going good in Iraq and this last couple of weeks is just an anomaly.

In two weeks a hundred American troops have been killed, 600 have been wounded, and the "coalition of the willing" is falling apart. How do I know this? Not from the American media, no I had to read the foreign press.

A headline from the April 20th "Sydney Morning Herald, "Spain, Honduras to Pull Troops, and Thais Look Shaky"

From the Irish News, "Poland Planning Pull-out of Troops from Iraq"

Last weekend there was a battle in Iraq where six Marines were killed and an unreported number wounded. The next day five Soldiers were killed. If you have ever been in combat you know that these are pretty scary battles and the only reason that we had that low number of deaths is that our troops have body armor. Guys can lose all of their limbs and still live. There are many double and triple amputees recovering in American military hospitals.

Washington and the American Media don't want us to know how bad things are over there. The "ENEMY," the Iraqi people, now control several Iraqi cities. American Troops or Coalition Troops have been kicked out and Shia and Sunni militia have taken over.

You won't see it on American television, but in the battles of the last couple of weeks American troops have killed hundreds of innocent Iraqi citizens. The same citizens that George Bush claims he is bringing democracy and freedom to.

CNN NEWS anchor Daryn Kagan interviewed Ahmed Al Sheik, the Editor in Chief of the Arab News Company, Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was the only news unit in the City of Fallujah during the last two weeks. CNN wanted to know why Al Jazeera focused on civilian deaths. Kagan asked if civilian deaths were really "the story." The local hospitals report almost a thousand deaths and claim most are Women, Children, and the Elderly.

Central Command claims 95% of the deaths were military age males, but Al Jazeera was broadcasting film of all the dead women and children. Dead children lying in pools of blood.

The American Senior Military Spokesman Mark Kimmitt had a suggestion for Iraqis who saw civilian deaths on Al Jazeera, "Change the channel to a legitimate authoritative, honest news program." He must think that Arab news has some bombed out town built to look like Fallujah, where they have actors lying in fake blood, so they can film it and pass it off as the real Iraq War.

Now is that sick? Is it sick that the American Media refuses to show dead Iraqi children and their dead mothers so that Washington can say everything is all right in Iraq? Is that a subversion of our Democracy?

Is it a Democracy when the government in Washington can control the news you get, can control the reporting about the war and claim things are all hunky dory, when plane loads of dead bodies are flown back to the states and it is against the law for the media to photograph the coffins?

Hey, let's face it, we are being lied to by our democratically elected government. No, it isn't the first time, but that doesn't make it feel any better.

POST SCRIPT

It really bothers me when my Government lies to me. There are tens of thousands of combat veterans in this country that know that urban warfare causes untold horror for the civilians living there and for Washington to try and bullshit us into believing that 95% of those killed in Fallujah were military age men is nuts.

Our Media helps those that do this lying, because they refuse to show America what is really going on. If Washington can get away with lying about what is going on in Iraq, what is to stop them from lying about what is going on in this country? We know the Bush administration lied about how much the Medicare Bill would cost and the media let that slide. Who knows what else they lied about, anything that is suspect is blamed on someone else, "bad intelligence" or "everyone thought that."

I worry about where George Bush is taking us. I don't like that a lot of the world fears us and many think that the United States is a terrorist country, but I can understand why they think that. We claim we are out to help the people of Iraq and we are killing them by the thousands. I do not understand how anyone can claim we are helping the Iraqi people.

We now have over 20,000 Iraqis in detention and most of their families have no idea of where they are. The people of Iraq can not continue to live in this war zone we have created without having the whole population suffer a lot of psychological damage. The stress over there every day must be incredible. Think about raising your family in all of the death and destruction we have brought to those people. What have we become?