When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled (in Bush v. Gore): "the individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States," it was merely confirming the fact that the policy of the U.S. government policy is not set by its citizens. Even if Bush had won the 2000 election, the true policymakers are not elected, and in many cases not even appointed by elected officials. One of the major groups setting foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, is the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Founded by William Kristol, editor of the News Corporation's Weekly Standard, PNAC has become a major influence on the military policy of the U.S. government through two of its leading members, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Defense Policy Board member Richard Perle.
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The September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center has been compared to 1941, but a more apt comparison is 1914. The loss of innocent life on a single day is comparable to Pearl Harbor, but the nature of the terrorist attack, and the waging of war against other countries with no connection to the terrorist attack, are reminiscent of the assassination of the Archduke of Austria which started the First World War. In 1914 Austrian patriots held the entire Serb nation responsible for the act of a single terrorist. As Russian patriots came to the defense of their fellow Slavs in Serbia, patriots in Germany, England, France, the Ottoman Empire, and eventually the United States joined the war.

As the USA was about to enter the First World War, Emma Goldman described patriotism in the following words: "Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. Let me illustrate. Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others."

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1. War and animal exploitation are two expressions of the same cultural orientation toward domination rather than cooperation.
2. We believe that human and non-human animals deserve the same compassion and respect. We must care about the human children who will be terrified, killed, injured, displaced, and orphaned by war.
3. Peace activists are compassionate people who might over time be convinced to extend their compassion to non-human animals.
4. Wartime constraints on civil liberties have already and will continue to jeopardize our ability to work for animals.
5. If we ever wish to gain the support of a critical mass of people, the animal liberation movement cannot afford to remain estranged from social justice movements.
6. The United States military practices vivisection on a massive scale, testing conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons on animals.
7. Military attacks on urban spaces terrify, kill, injure, displace, and bereave companion animals.
8. Military attacks on rural locations terrify, kill, and bereave farmed animals.
9. Bombs and biological weapons destroy habitats and poison the environment upon which all animals depend for sustenance.
10. Bullets, bombs, and biological weapons don't distinguish between human and non-human animals.

I can sympathize with these young men and women, I can grieve for them and their families, but I cannot, and I will not, condone any actions they take that result in the death of another human being. However, I can support them in their battle to hold on to their humanity, as they struggle to resist giving in to the dehumanizing machines of war, as they struggle to return to us physically and psychologically intact, as they struggle to come back to us as brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. I can guarantee to them that my support for their well-being will run deeper and truer than the superficial rhetoric of those who have sent them off to war.
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As the the younger Bush Administration, with the support of the U.S. Congress, moves toward escalation of the bombing of Iraq into full-scale war, it is time to review the Gulf War launched by the elder Bush. As the 1991 Gulf War was entering its second week, the Political Ecology Group issued an Action Paper analyzing the war from an environmental perspective.

While the article focused on the effects of the war on humans, news reports at the time were beginning to show also the massive loss of marine wildlife resulting from oil released into the Gulf by military action. As U.S. energy policy has not fundamentally changed for decades, much of this article reads as current news. An abridgement of the action paper is presented here not just as history, but also as a warning of the likely consequences of a new war in Iraq, under consideration by the current Bush Administration.
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The rapid U.S. military takeover of Iraq was, indeed, a Blitzkrieg ("lightning war"), to use the term coined by the Nazis. Like the U.S. military today, the Nazis used the latest in military technology to press their advantage.

As Charles Patterson points out in Eternal Treblinka, the Holocaust also required nonmilitary technology. A chapter of the book, The Industrialization of Slaughter, is subtitled The Road to Auschwitz through America. While the automobile industry is often credited with the invention of assembly-line technology, it actually began with slaughterhouses. After taking the assembly line from the slaughterhouse to the auto assembly plant, Ford went on to support fascism. The transmission of the assembly line from the slaughterhouse to the automobile industry led to Blitzkrieg and gas chambers.