INTRODUCTION TO THE 2005 EDITION

The four most beautiful words in the English language are “I told you so.” For several years I have been writing and saying in books, pamphlets, and even, occasionally, inside the electronic zoo currently inhabited by a single rabid Fox that there was no proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction nor was he the slightest threat to the United States or even to “our” oil fields which are, by divine right, American property despite the deity’s characteristic misjudgment in placing them on land that belongs to Moslems who are fellow children of the Good Book just like us Christians and Jews located all over the lot. Why the deity misplaced those specific oil and natural gas fields probably has more to do with a busy workload than any desire to make mischief for the residents of the U.S., the nation that produced Henry Ford. Plainly, the deity had far too much work keeping the poor Florida lady linked to her lifeline as well as the smitten pope in Heaven’s anteroom, not to mention all those hurtling souls like reverse comets from the Middle East. I suspect a weary, fed up deity might, in a moment of weakness, just conjure up another tsunami or two to get rid of us once and for all.

Meanwhile, I have been reading a confirmation of what I have been denounced for saying since 9/11: “Spy Agencies Called ‘Dead Wrong’ in Prewar Analyses on Iraq.” This story in the Los Angeles Times is billed as “Text of Letter to President Bush.” The letter is from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States regarding weapons of mass destruction. These “disinterested” experts conclude that the “intelligence community was dead wrong in almost all of its prewar judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” So far so good. So true. Now, alas, watch the buck not so subtly pass: “What the intelligence professionals told you about Saddam Hussein’s program was what they believed. They were wrong.” Thus, the Commission shifts responsibility to the professional intelligence gatherers while carefully protecting the president and vice president who were gung ho for an invasion of Iraq before 9/11. After 9/11, all intelligence was carefully bent to show what horrible dangers we faced from the monolithic Taliban and their associates Al-Qaida, joint-master of every sort of nuclear and biological weapon ready, in a mere forty-five minutes, to destroy us because we are good and they are evil according to the best information of the oil and gas junta that governs us. Certainly if they were not eager to remove us from the planet before we wrecked Afghanistan and Iraq, two countries that had done us no harm, they are probably now more than ever ready to bring on their suicide planes in order to level our alabaster cities.

I am sometimes asked how I was so certain that Saddam and company lacked the horrendous weapons our rulers insisted they had. Am I some sort of secret agent? No. But I do live in Europe part of the year where every reader of the serious press knows exactly how our governing junta is constantly cooking up “evidence” through our various intelligence agencies in order to excite the media to terrify us into wars of preemptive aggression against nations with enormous oil reserves, nations plainly guided by Satan who is being transformed by our dizzy media into a Moslem or, at the very least, prophet.

In the year since the first publication of Imperial America, my warnings about how the electronic voting machines could be so easily rigged during the ’04 election certainly came true in Ohio as Representative John Conyers demonstrates in “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio: Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff, January 5, 2005,” soon to be, I assume, invisibly published as are those documents that are critical of the way that corporate America arranges elections for us while their media covers up those crimes, great and small, that are committed in the process. Although many Ohioans were aware that games were being played by those supervising the election of November ’04, none of those accountable, like their secretary of state, has thus far answered the questions put to them by Congressman Conyers. Also, the companies that make the electronic machines from Diebold to Triad are owned by die-hard Republicans who insist that because of “trade secrets” only their employees can examine the machines. Thus, our elections our privatized.

Although poll taking is something of a craze in this least democratic period of our history, nothing much seems to penetrate the polled. Although they are standing firmly against the presidential efforts to replace Social Security (in no more imminent danger of collapse than Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction pre-invasion) with an “investment bonanza” for Wall Street, there seems to be no very active political inquiry against what is intended to be the greatest gold rush since the Klondike. So much that once provoked national outrage seems nowadays to fade away like a TV commercial. One thinks of the horrors of the prison system that the military has been running from Cuba to Iraq and who knows where else? Those in charge, starting with the president, secretary of defense, and so on down the line of command, are automatically exempted from all accountability. A few enlisted men and women have been charged and it is reasonable to assume that the killings and torture will continue as usual, if not on an even larger scale. Certainly, we shall not be informed. But to the extent that the odd brave journalist-publisher who goes public with information about our military prisons, a bizarre reflection of what goes on at home, will be drowned out by three-minute TV rebuttals and denials in the mainstream print media.

Question: is it that we really don’t know these things? Or that we know or suspect quite a bit but are fearful of seeming to be out of step with a vast propaganda machine? Or, finally, has some traditional American spirit—ever skeptical of authority—been switched off for lack of fuel?

This is all deeply puzzling, profoundly un-American. Sooner or later in our history, injustices, if permitted to go on too long, have suffered from a sort of spontaneous combustion as in 1860 when the institution of slavery became so incandescent that civil war broke out. There are similar omens and portents today that we are approaching a great crisis in our affairs when a hugely wealthy minority has set itself in opposition to a more marginalized, even disenfranchised, majority that already shows signs of awakening to the danger to us all. When it does, no corporate conglomerate will be strong enough to protect the tyrants.

—Gore Vidal

Los Angeles

April 2005