The way U.S. president George Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA director George Tenet used David Kay’s statements, and the way the liberal-left trumpeted Kay’s testimony to buttress their case for “pushing Bush out” in November, leave no doubt about this conclusion.

There is now a stronger consensus in ruling circles for the strategy of “pre-emption.” Kay said his snoops discovered that Baghdad possessed no “weapons of mass destruction” at the start of the Anglo-American assault on Iraq. Then in the same breath he argued that Saddam Hussein’s regime was “even more dangerous than we suspected” because it had the capacity to manufacture such arms, and he backed the White House decision to invade 100 percent. Bush, Rumsfeld, and Tenet grabbed this argument and run with it. It was repeated again and again on the small screen, the airwaves, and the printed press.

Kay made some headway in silencing critics of the White House who claimed that the Bush team had conspired to falsify CIA reports to bolster its case for war. If he had had the same “intelligence” presented to him, Kay said, he would have chosen the same course “the political leaders” took. By presenting himself as outside of the current administration, Kay blew more wind in the sails of the Oval Office with his argument.

The one point around which there is widespread agreement across the bourgeois political spectrum is Kay’s claim of “faulty intelligence” leading up to the Iraq war. Liberal critics of the administration used this to go after Bush and argue their case that he is the main source of all evil in Washington and has to be dumped in November. This goes right along the lines of the main gripe that Nancy Pelosi and Thomas Daschle—the Democratic leaders in Congress—have had with Bush on “defense”: neglecting “homeland security.”

Bush and Rumsfeld licked their chops. Yes, there are faults with “our intelligence,” they said. And they’ll be taken care of by improving and strengthening the CIA and every other spy agency and network that serves the interests of the U.S. empire. In this case, as in every other, the liberal criticisms helped advance the case for imperialism and its wars. As an aside, Bush announced a hefty increase for the Homeland Security department in his new budget proposal.

The president and other top officials in his cabinet astutely pointed to the continuity of their Iraq policy with that of Bush’s predecessor, William Clinton.

As long as working people accept the framework of protecting “America,” defending “our country,” supporting “our troops,” or improving “our intelligence,” they will be inevitably drawn to support the war party. That’s what the Democratic primaries, and the campaign appearances of all the liberals contending for the nomination to compete against Bush in November, are helping to accomplish.

Revolutionists are glad to do what it takes to push Bush out in November. But not in order to push a liberal into the White House like the warmongering, “end welfare as we know it,” death-penalty advocate Clinton.

As Malcolm X put it, working people need to shed all illusions that there are fundamental differences between Democrats and Republicans. “One is the wolf, the other is a fox,” he said. No matter which one of the two is in the White House working people go to the wall. In the 1964 presidential elections, when the main candidates were Lyndon B. Johnson (the “peace” candidate) and Barry Goldwater (the “war” candidate), Malcolm X exposed the deceit of this phony distinction.

“The shrewd capitalists, the shrewd imperialists,” he said, “knew that the only way people would run towards the fox [Johnson] would be if you showed them the wolf [Goldwater]. So they created a ghastly alternative… And at the moment he [Johnson] had troops invading the Congo and South Vietnam.”

The main threat imperialism faces today is the inevitably deepening depression conditions worldwide. It’s this economic and social nightmare capitalism is leading toiling humanity toward that is generating working-class resistance and social explosions—like those in the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, and Venezuela. These grinding conditions of imperialism in its decline, along with communist leadership, are what will open the road for working people toward overthrowing the rule of finance capital and rebuilding the world on new foundations that start from the interests of the vast majority, not the profits of the few.
 
 
Related articles:
Bush on TV: ‘I am a war president’
Kay testimony aids war party in the U.S.  
 
 
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