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128 Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire August 15, 2003 The United States has deteriorated tremendously under the current administration . We are a polity isolated from the rest of the world and now an object of international hatred. Chalmers Johnson foresees four sorrows to be visited on this United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the United States will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. The first sorrow is a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be. There will be a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. The second sorrow is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the Presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal executive branch of government into a military junta. The third sorrow is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power and the military legions. The fourth sorrow is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health and safety of its citizens. There is a warped religiosity in all of these actions by the Bush government . He seems to have equated himself with Jesus in his repeated comments that those who are not with us are against us, which is a duplication of Matthew, Chapter 12, verse 30. “He that is not with me is against me.” Or, as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz quotes Bush saying, “God told me to strike at al-Qaeda and I struck them, and He instructed me to strike Saddam, which I did . . . .” So much for imitation Bible Speak. Allegedly there were some 148 of our troops killed in Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in 1990-1991. 696,778 service people served in these operations and now an astounding 168,001 veterans have been classified as “disabled.” The casualty rate for the first Gulf war is a staggering 29.3% of the total number of troops. Thanks 129 to Chalmers Johnson for this data and we look forward to his new book on the Sorrows of Empire. How do we turn these sorrows into joy? It is time to send our troops home from Iraq, our Palestine, our occupied country, and to put the temporary administration of Iraq into the hand of the United Nations with a view to granting sovereignty to the Iraqi people. The families of our troops are in favor of this. Let’s support those families as we demand the immediate return of our troops. As we look to the relationship of our President to the troops and to the people of Iraq, we must say, “He lied . . . they died.” ...

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