Bush responds to political crisis with lies and new war threats

President George W. Bush’s speech Thursday on "the war on terror" constitutes a sobering measure of both his government's desperate political crisis and the threat that it will try to extricate itself from this crisis through escalating militarism.

The speech was a compendium of lies delivered with the aim of terrorizing the American people and rallying his extreme right-wing base. In remarks that at times bordered on lunacy, he invoked the unlikely bogeyman of an Al Qaeda terrorist network poised to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia."

Bush delivered his remarks to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the agency created by the Reagan administration in the 1980s to conduct political propaganda and subversion operations overseas previously carried out covertly by the CIA.

It was to this same audience that the US president proclaimed nearly two years ago a "forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East." Then he was predicting that the successful US imposition of "democracy" in Iraq would lead to a "global democratic revolution" that would topple regimes throughout the region.

In Thursday's address, Bush advanced the reverse of this domino theory, warning that unless the US military achieves unconditional victory, the result will be "Zarqawi and bin Laden in control of Iraq," and the spread of radical Islamist regimes internationally.

This latest assertion has no more credibility than the one advanced in 2003. It is indicative, however, of the growing desperation within US ruling circles over the debacle in Iraq and of the administration's decision to rely on fear as its main means of coercing the American people into submitting to its policies.

As if on cue Thursday, the authorities in New York City issued a terror alert for the city's subways, only hours after Bush's speech and just in time for the evening television news and scare headlines in the next day's papers. Almost as soon as the alert was announced, however, intelligence officials acknowledged that the threat was of "doubtful credibility." Friday saw Pennsylvania Station shut down because of the discovery of a "suspicious" soda bottle.

The aim of such alerts, like Bus's speech itself, is to instill fear, thereby keeping the public off balance and suppressing the growth of political opposition and social unrest.