I am indeed honored to have received the 2018 Sam Adams Award, and as with so many things, timing is everything.  The Rob Reiner movie Shock and Awe was released in the US last summer, a very watchable drama documenting US government fabulations on the road to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003.  Constructed by government political appointees and politicians, foisted on the American people, heavy lifting courtesy of the New York Times and the Washington Post, and the television "news", rendered most of the country either willfully or blissfully ignorant.

Of course, too many of our countrymen and women, and large parts of Iraq were simply rendered, fat and black oil burning, sizzling, stinking, dying, melting into the dust and fusing with sand.

Surely our government would not lie to, deceive, steal from and destroy us, in the name of some hidden agenda of ideology, oil, or for the sake of investment opportunities and a political dependency on an old men's entangling alliance.  What kind of government would that be?

That some news agencies (Knight-Ridder) and some people got it right is good to know, and good to remember.  

The ceremony last Saturday night in DC was inspiring, and I shared my thoughts on the future of truthtelling.  Like most libertarians, I'm pessimistic in the short term, optimistic in the long term.  Like any good anarchist, I am wholly comfortable identifying the state as the primary enemy of peace and prosperity.  The American bureaucratic state, enamored of war and enmeshed in corporate strangleholds, empowered by debt, emboldened by bluster, is a dangerous enemy, not just to the world but to average Americans.

We need to stop subsidizing it.  But before that happens, with or without our direct action, we really should get to know it better and understand how it operates.

At a fundamental level, it is about people.  There is a specific group of people who engineered the Iraq war, both in 1991 and in 2003, and all the years in between. This team also engineered the destruction of Libya, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, and in their view, hopefully Iran.  Certainly it's not just the Middle East, many of the same people were part and parcel of the US societal and political wetwork in capitals throughout South and Central America, throughout Africa, in Southeast Asia and more recently Eastern Europe.  Regime change is their chosen field, albeit they learn little from the past and are remarkably unaware of their limitations.

We call them neoconservatives, but beyond that our focus should be on a set of specific individuals.  You know their names, like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bolton, Feith, Wolfowitz, Abrams, Perle, the lower tier of up-and-comers like the guys I worked with and around, like the Wurmsers, Bill Luti, even former youngsters like Trigilio.   I wrote about this crowd in 2003 and 2004, and they never went away.  The fifteen plus years, after a very successful propaganda campaign here at home, have been filled with neoconservative successes.  Wes Clark's explanation of the list of countries we were to destroy is a lot shorter than it once was, thanks to two two-term presidents and the sustained efforts of neoconservative propagandists, the military industrial complex along with the Israeli lobby that have all oriented their business plans and political sponsorships around federal war spending.   The American people may be curious about what the late 20th and early 21st century has wrought for the land of the free.  With Republicrats and Demopublicans all advocating the policies of their sponsors, getting honest answers isn't easy, and those often lead to more frustration for American taxpayers and patriots.

Iran still stands, but a grand military chessboard has been set up around that nation and her likely protectors.  A unique vision for a greater Israel advocated by fewer than ten thousand people in the world is driving every step of US global policy.