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Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

IMPERIAL MOURNING

May 30, 2005 by cmackie

“Preventive Warriors,” a documentary about the National Security
Strategy of the United States
issued by the White House in September of
2002, is the perfect antidote to Dear Leader’s Memorial Day ravings (a pious official proclamation for “a day of prayer for
permanent peace”
and an imperial radio address to the nation that the U.S.
will continue to “wage the war on terror and spread freedom across
the world”
).


Watch “Preventive Warriors”
online
. This 2004 documentary, featured today on “Democracy Now!,”
presents expert commentary by Chalmers Johnson, Noam Chomsky, Rahul Mahajan, Phyllis
Bennis, Mark Lance, Maria Ryan, Michael Klare, Tariq Ali and others on the neocon doctrine of
preventive war and the current U.S. regime’s ambition to dominate the world, militarily,
economically and culturally.


The doctrine is rational “within a lunatic framework,” Chomsky points
out, which is “not so unusual.” What is unusual, says Chalmers, is the in-your-face aspect of the
strategy for “military dominance” originally laid out by Paul Wolfowitz in 1992. Chalmers also
says he does not believe neocons are conservatives at all, new or old, but rather “serious radicals
committed to the militarization of the country.”


Or as Klare notes, there is a “crusading spirit” reflected in all the documents, an implicit belief
in American exceptionalism because “we’re chosen,” and it is “this mode of thinking [that] is
deeply embedded in the Bush administration.” All of these document, Klare asserts, “are driven by
arrogance.”

Dear Leader, above, placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National
Cemetery for all Americans to see. But his mismanagement of the war in Iraq — including poorly
armored Humvees, insufficient troop levels and no “peace” planning — means the deaths of more
soldiers whose coffins his regime allows no Americans to see as they are being brought home for
burial.

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Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
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