Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → threat to world peace → propping up tyrants

, Viagra spokesman Bob Dole attacked presidential candidate Howard Dean for his opposition to the Bush administration policy toward Iraq:

“I thank God F.D.R. was my commander in chief in WWⅡ. Had it been Howard Dean we would have not participated. This would have saved lives and none of us would have been wounded. Just one little problem: we would have lost our liberty and freedom.”

Ah well, standard partisan political posturing and all. But it reminded me about an op-ed I’d written for my college newspaper during the run-up to Operation Desert Storm. The reason why I was reminded is this excerpt:

…[W]hile Congress worked to pass sanctions against Iraq, the Bush Administration opposed sanctions and tried to cozy up to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein…

To reassure Saddam Hussein that he had the Bush Administration’s support, despite Congressional misgivings, Bush sent influential Republican Senators Arlen Specter and Robert Dole to deliver a conciliatory message to the Iraqi leader in the Iraqi city of Mosul…

If the world had stood up to Hitler soon enough, there might not have been a World War Ⅱ. Similarly, it was Bush’s refusal to accept the ounce of prevention that the Congressional sanctions packages might have been that led this country into the Gulf War.

Well, would you just look at Salon today! Full of news:

Any doubts that may have lingered about Alberto R. [“obsolete & quaint”] Gonzales’ chances of being confirmed as president Bush’s next Attorney General pick were put to rest , when Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told the New York Times Democrats will not oppose the move.

Read about those Pentagon estimates that suggest the war in Iraq is costing $4 billion a month? Well, add another 50 percent to arrive at the real pricetag. That, according to UPI, which reports the permanent war in Iraq is costing the U.S. just under $6 billion every month, or $200 million each day.

Did the first Bush administration cynically choose to ignore Saddam’s use of chemical weapons in , just as the Reagan administration did in ? And has the current Bush administration brushed this history of complicity with real WMD under the rug, while using nonexistent WMD as a reason for war?

More of what U.S. taxpayers are buying (from the World Policy Institute):

In , more than half of the top 25 recipients of U.S. arms transfers in the developing world (13 of 25) were defined as undemocratic by the U.S. State Department’s Human Rights Report: in the sense that “citizens do not have the right to change their own government.” These 13 nations received over $2.7 billion in U.S. arms transfers in , with the top recipients including Saudi Arabia ($1.1 billion), Egypt ($1.0 billion), Kuwait ($153 million), the United Arab Emirates ($110 million) and Uzbekistan ($33 million).

When countries designated by the State Department’s Human Rights Report to have poor human rights records or serious patterns of abuse are factored in, 20 of the top 25 U.S. arms clients in the developing world in  — a full 80% — were either undemocratic regimes or governments with records of major human rights abuses.

More of what taxpayers are paying for:

Parade Magazine recently ranked the 20 worst dictators now in power. Many are familiar: Fidel Castro, Muammar Gadhafy, Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe and others. They are all guilty of human-rights violations, and some have committed genocide. But there’s another trait common to all 20 leaders: Every single one has received foreign aid from Western countries.…

Parade ranked Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir the world’s worst dictator. And OECD countries have given his regime more than $6 billion in non-military aid. The United States has accounted for more than $1 billion of that aid.…

In total, the United States has contributed more than $7 billion in aid to these dictators. In North Korea, Belarus, Ethiopia, Swaziland, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, the United States has contributed more than 20 percent of the total aid these countries have received from OECD countries.