GRACE V LAW -- ALWAYS GRACE

by Edward Rock:
The issue involved in Graham Strachan's reproving of Bevan O'Regan (On Target 5/3/04) revolves around the theological question resolved in both the Christian faith and Social Credit. Do we live under Law or Grace? Grace being that unearned, unmerited, undeserved credit which accumulates as a gift of God through our cultural heritage, accumulating with each additional individual contribution. It's freedom. Abolish freedom and society's credit dries up; expand freedom and there is a commensurate increase in social credit
Freedom and Law become mutually incompatible when Law restricts Freedom. For Freedom, Social Credit and Law to remain compatible, the principle of power incarnate in the Holy Trinity cannot be compromised, that principle being one member of the Trinity does not become greater than another.
If that principle was observed in the function of the three tiers of government in Australia: Local, State and Federal, the Law as clearly illustrated in Graham Strachan's contribution would not have run amuck and be completely out of balance with the other two members of the trinity. If Local Government enjoyed the same measure of power as the Federal, would private property rights have been eroded as outlined by Strachan?
In my book, "Trinitarianism: The Threefold Substance of Reality", I offer a practical proposal to achieve such balanced distribution of power.
Bevan O'Regan stoutly defended the right to private property. The term 'private' plays a key role in the extension of Freedom and Social Credit; it cannot be divorced from terms such as personal responsibility, or 'personal sovereignty'. When promoted and encouraged both Freedom and Society's Credit expand.
Graham Strachan's contribution assumed that Law, not subject to checks and balances to protect personal sovereignty and private property, had already won the day, apologising to Bevan that the fait accompli was now the reality. That position however is only possible if the Creator of Freedom is dethroned. Both Social Credit and Christianity are about working in harmony with the Creator to maintain and expand Freedom in which the Law plays its correct and limited role. It then becomes part of the Law of Love, which Christ confined to a few words to define the "first and greatest commandment," in company with "the second which is like unto it." Followed by the uncompromising assertion, "On these two laws all the law and the prophets." No endless Law, pharisaic or statute, confounded its simplicity.
I believe we need more Bevan O'Regan's telling "private" property owners to never retreat from exercising their God given 'private' rights. But even more, we need more and more Christians petitioning and excoriating the Christian Church until it upholds the Law of Love above and beyond laws which are a complete denial of the Holy Trinity. In history, when the Christian Church plays its God-given role, as in Magna Carta, the presumers to illegitimate power retire in disarray.

Further reading: "Trinitarianism - The Three-Fold Substance of Reality" by Edward Rock. Available from all League Book Services.

SILESIAN- JEWISH ROOTS OF JOHN KERRY FAMILY

KERRY'S ROOTS CONFIRMED BY AUSTRALIAN JEWISH NEWS
The report of John Kerry's Jewish roots is verified in an article in the Australian Jewish News 12/3/04. It writes: "John Kerry will take on George W. Bush in November's US election for the White House, and if he is successful he will be the first US president with Jewish roots."
In a cartoon on the same page a male is stating: "John Kerry has Jewish roots and Jewish relatives." To which a female replies: "So if he becomes president he'll be living in the White and Blue House?"

SOROS BANKROLLS ANTI-BUSH CAMPAIGN

The following reports are of special interest to those who seek to identify and weigh up the influences behind the office of President of the United States of America.
"Campaign aides to George W Bush yesterday launched legal moves to halt a multi-million pound television advertising campaign, partly funded by the billionaire George Soros, which accuses the president of "eroding the American dream".
Bush officials said the advertisements, to be aired in 17 key "battleground" states, were illegal because the group behind them, The Media Fund, accepted unlimited donations from wealthy liberal activists.

Complex new rules limit individual donors to federal elections with legal caps ranging from £1,100 to £2,700. Using a legal loophole, however, the fund said it could spend unlimited contributions on anti-Bush advertisements if they did not explicitly advise viewers to vote for or against him.
The disputed advertisement starts: "President Bush. Remember the American dream? It's about hope not fear. It's about more jobs at home, not tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas." It concludes: "It's time to take our country back from corporate greed and make America work for every American." (That's a bit rich coming from George Soros!…ed)

Bush aides asked the Federal Election Committee to impose "severe sanctions" against the fund, co-founded by Jim Jordan, a former campaign chief for Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
The fund said the Bush campaign was "merely trying to scare our donors" and pointed to a conservative group, Citizens United, that has been running anti-Kerry advertisements without prompting Republican complaints.
Citizens United, founded by a former Republican congressional aide, has taken contributions to create television advertisements calling Sen. Kerry "a rich, liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he's a man of the people".

Campaign finance reforms at the heart of the row were backed by Democrats and opposed by Republicans.
They have proved much more restrictive for Democrats, who used to raise unlimited sums from companies, trade unions and rich liberals. Mr. Bush has been much more successful at raising money under the new laws, attracting record sums in individual, £1,000 gifts. Telegraph (UK) by David Rennie, 3/11/04.

BASIC FUND

ONE YEAR LATER: "WHAT WILL IT TAKE?"

HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY - WAR ON IRAQ

by Robert Fisk:
Independent U.K. 13th March2004.
"It was almost year ago, on March 20, when the first bombs struck 30km from Baghdad, orange glows that wallowed along the horizon. They came for Baghdad the next day, and the Cruise missiles swished over our heads to explode around the presidential palace compound, the very pile where Paul Bremer, America's supposed 'expert' on terrorism, now works, resides and hides as occupation proconsul over the Anglo-American-(and Australian …ed) Raj.
The illusions with which the Americans and British went to war are more awesome now than they were at the time.
Saddam Hussein, the man we loved when he invaded Iran and hated when he invaded Kuwait (our dictators have got to learn that only our enemies can be attacked) had already degenerated into late middle-age senility, writing epic novels in his many palaces while his crippled son Oudai drank and whored and tortured his way around Baghdad; hardly the target for the world's only superpower.

As the American 101st Infantry Division approached Baghdad, one of the last editions of the Ba'athist newspapers carried a telling photograph on its back page. A uniformed, tired, fat Hussein stood in the centre, on his left his smartly dressed son Qusai but on his right Oudai, his eyes dilated, shirt out of his trousers, a pistol butt above his belt. Who would ever fight to the death for these triple pillars of the Arab world?
Yet Hussein thought he could win, that destiny - a dangerous ally for all 'strongmen' - would somehow lay low the Americans. It was always fascinating to listen to Mohamed al-Sahaf, the information minister, predicting America's doom. It was not just Iraqi patriots who would destroy the great armies invading Iraq; the heat would burn them, the desert would consume them, the snakes and rabid dogs would eat their bodies. Not since the Caliphate had such curses been called down upon an invader. Was it not Tariq Aziz, Iraq's former deputy prime minister, who warned Washington in 1990 that 18 million Iraqis could not be defeated by a computer? And then the computer won.

United States President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, of course, had a remarkably parallel set of nightmares and dreams, encouraged all the while by the right-wing neo-conservative pro-Israeli American Vulcans. Hussein was the all-powerful, evil state terrorist whose non-existent weapons of mass destruction and equally non-existent connections to the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington must be laid low. Liberation, democracy, a New Middle East. There was no end to the ambitions of the conquerors.
I remember how anyone who attempted to debunk this dangerous nonsense would be set upon. Try to explain the crimes against humanity of September 11, 2001 and we were anti-American. Warn readers about the crazed alliance of right-wingers behind Bush, and we were anti-Semites. Report on the savagery visited upon Iraqi civilians during the Anglo-American air bombardment, and we were anti-British, pro-Hussein, sleeping with the enemy.

When Blair's first 'dossier' was published - most of it, anyway, was tired old material on Hussein's human rights abuses, not weapons of mass destruction - the beast's weapons capability was already hedged around with "mights" and "coulds" and "possiblys". When a day after Baghdad's "liberation" I wrote in The Independent that the "war of resistance" was about to begin, I could paper my bathroom wall with the letters of abuse I received.
But such venom usually accompanies broken dreams. Hussein thought he was fighting the Crusaders. Bush and Blair played equally childish games, dressing themselves up as Churchill, abusing their domestic enemies as Chamberlains and fitting Hussein into Hitler's uniform.
I remember the sense of shock when I was watching Iraq's literally fading television screen and heard the first news of an Iraqi suicide bomber attacking US troops - during the invasion. It was a young soldier, a married man, who had driven his car bomb at the Americans near Nasseriyah. Never before had an Iraqi committed suicide in battle like this - not even in the Somme-like eight-year Iran-Iraq war.
Then two women drove their car into the Americans in southern Iraq. This was astonishing. The Americans dismissed it all. They were cowardly attacks which only showed the desperation of the regime. But these three Iraqis were not working for the regime. Even the Ba'athists were forced to admit that these attacks were unique and solely instigated by the soldier and the two women.
What did this mean? Of course, we did not pause to ask.

Then we created a new myth. The Iraqi army had melted away, abandoned Baghdad, changed into jeans and t-shirts and slunk off in cowardly disgrace. Baghdad was no Stalingrad. Yet we have dangerously altered the narrative of Baghdad's last days. There was a fearful battle along Highway 1 on the western bank of the Tigris river in which Hussein's guerrillas fought off an American tank column for 36 hours, the US tanks spraying shellfire down a motorway until every vehicle - military and civilian - was a smouldering wreck. I walked the highway as the last shots were still being fired by snipers, peering into cars packed with the blackened corpses of men, women, children.
Carpets and blankets had been thrown over several piles of the dead. In the back of one car lay a young, naked woman, her perfect features blackened by fire, her husband or father still sitting at the steering wheel, his legs severed below the knees.
It was a massacre. Did we think the Iraqis would forget it?

And cluster bombs are our creation. And I recall with a kind of raw amazement how, as American gunfire was swishing across the Tigris, I somehow reached the emergency room of Baghdad's biggest hospital and had to slosh through lakes of blood amid beds of screaming men, one of whom was on fire, another shrieking for his mother. Upstairs was a middle-aged man on a blood-soaked hospital trolley with a head wound that was almost indescribable. From his right eye socket hung a handkerchief that was streaming blood onto the floor.

Destroying not just the structure but the identity - who paid them?
or days we had seen the news tapes of Basra and Nasseriyah after 'liberation'. We had seen the looting and pillage there, benignly watched over by the British and Americans. We knew what would happen when the fighting stopped in Baghdad. And sure enough, a medieval army of looters followed the Americans into the city, burning offices, banks, archives, museums, Koranic libraries, destroying not just the structure of government but the identity of Iraq.
The looters were disorganised but thorough, venal but poor. The arsonists came in buses with obvious pre-arranged targets and did not touch the contents of that which they destroyed. They were paid. By whom? If by Hussein, then why - once the Americans were in Baghdad - did they not just pocket the money and go home? If they were paid post-burning, who paid them?
Of course, we found the mass graves, the hecatombs of Hussein's years of internal viciousness - for many of which he was backed by the West - and we photographed the tens of thousands of corpses, most of whom he buried in the desert sand after we failed to support the Kurdish and Shia uprisings.

Our 'liberation', as the grieving relatives never stopped telling us, had come a little late. About 20 years late, to be precise. Into this chaos and lawlessness, we arrived. Dissension was not to be tolerated among the victors. When I pointed out that "the 'liberators' were a new and alien and all-powerful occupying force with neither culture nor language nor race nor religion to unite them with Iraq", I was denounced by one of the BBC's commentators.

'Big business' and mercenaries
See how the people love us, we cried - which is much the same as Hussein used to say when he took his fawning acolytes on visits to the people of Baghdad. There would be elections, constitutions, governing councils, money - There was no end to the promises we made to this tribal society called Iraq.
Then in came the big American contractors and the conglomerates and the thousands of mercenaries, British, American, South African, Chilean - many of the latter were soldiers under General Augusto Pinochet - Nepalese and Filipino.
And when the inevitable war against the occupiers began, we - the occupying powers and, alas, most of the journalists - invented a new narrative to escape punishment for our invasion. Our enemies were Hussein's "diehards", Ba'athist "remnants", regime "dead-enders". Then we killed Oudai and Qusai and pulled Hussein from his hole in the ground and the resistance grew more fierce.
So our enemies were now both 'remnants' and 'foreign fighters' - that is, al-Qaeda - since ordinary Iraqis could not be in the resistance. We had to believe this. For had Iraqis - religious or otherwise - joined the guerrillas, how we could explain that they didn't love their 'liberators'?

At first, we were encouraged to explain that the insurgents came only from a few Sunni cities, "previously loyal to Hussein".
Then the resistance was supposedly confined to Iraq's "Sunni triangle". But as the attacks leached north and south to Nasseriyah, Kerbala, Mosul and Kirkuk, the triangle turned into an octagon. Again, we were told about "foreign fighters", failing to grasp the fact that 120,000 of the foreign fighters in Iraq were wearing American uniforms.

Still there was no end to the mendacity of our 'success'. True, schools were rebuilt - and, shame upon the Iraqis involved, often looted a second time - and hospitals restored and students returned to college. But oil output figures were massaged and exaggerated and attacks on the Americans falsified.

At first, the occupying power reported only guerrilla attacks in which soldiers were killed or wounded. Then, when no one could hide the 60 or so assaults every night, the troops themselves were ordered not to make formal reports on bombings or attacks that caused no casualties. But by the war's first anniversary, every foreigner was a target.

The suicide bomber came into his own
The Turkish embassy, the Jordanian embassy, the United Nations, police stations across the land - 600 of our new Iraqi policemen slaughtered in less than four months - and then the great shrines of Najaf and Kerbala.
The Americans and British warned of the dangers of civil war - so did the journalists, of course - although no Iraqi had ever been heard to utter any demand for conflict with their fellow citizens. Who actually wanted this "civil war"? Why would the Sunnis - a minority in the country - allow 'al-Qaeda' to bring this about when they could not defeat the occupying power without at least passive Shia support?

While I was writing this report, my phone rang and a voice asked me if I would meet a man downstairs, a middle-aged Iraqi and a teacher at Cardiff College who had recently returned to Iraq, only to realise the state of fear and pain in which his country now existed. His mother, he said, had just raised 1 million Iraqi dinars to pay a ransom for a local woman whose daughter and daughter-in-law were kidnapped by armed men in Baghdad in January. The two girls had just called from Yemen where they had been sold into slavery. Another neighbour had just received back her 17-year-old son after paying $5,000 (about R32,500) to gunmen in the Karada area of Baghdad. Two days ago - it is Friday as I am writing this - kidnappers grabbed another child, this time in Mansour, and are now demanding $200,000 for his life.
A close relative - and remember this is just one man's experience out of a current population of 26 million Iraqis - had also just survived a bloody attack on his car outside Kerbala. Driving south after winning a contract to run a garage in the city, he and his 11 companions in their vehicle were last week overtaken by men firing machine pistols at the car. One man died - he had 30 bullets in his body - and the relative, swamped in his friends' blood, was the only man not wounded.

Unsurprisingly, the occupation authorities decline to keep statistics on the number of Iraqis who have died since the 'liberation' - or during the invasion, for that matter - and prefer to talk about the 'handover of sovereignty' from one American-appointed group of Iraqis to another, and to the constitution that is only temporary and may well fall apart before real elections are held - if they are held - next year.
If we could have foreseen all this - if we could have been patient and waited for the UN arms inspectors to finish their job rather than go to war and plead for patience later, when our own inspectors couldn't find those weapons - would we have gone so blithely to war a year ago?
For that war has not ended. There has been no "end of major combat operations", just an invasion and an occupation that merged seamlessly into a long and ferocious war for liberation from the 'liberators'.

Just as the British invaded Iraq in 1917, proclaiming their determination to bring Iraqis liberation from their tyrants - General Maude used those very words - so we have repeated this grim narrative today.
The British who died in the subsequent Iraqi war of resistance lie now in the North Gate Cemetery on the edge of Baghdad, an enduring if largely neglected symbol of the folly of occupation." -- Foreign Service, © 2004 The Independent. UK.

BUSH'S WAR IS A FINANCIAL DISASTER

by Eric Margolis:
The Toronto Star Canada, Sunday 14 March 2004
"…The famous words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus after the bloody battle of Heraclea in 280 BC are as appropriate for America's conquest of Iraq: "One more such victory and we are ruined."

The March, 2003 invasion of Iraq pitted the world's greatest military power against the largely inoperative army of a small, dilapidated nation of only 17 million (deducting rebellious Kurds), crushed by 12 years of sanctions and bombing.
Thanks to total air superiority, invading U.S. forces achieved a brilliant feat of logistics, racing from Kuwait to Northern Iraq in under three weeks. The 15% of Iraq's army that stood and fought was pulverized by massive, co-ordinated U.S. air strikes and artillery barrages. Urban resistance failed to materialise.
The rout of Iraq's forces recalled another colonial war, the Dervish Campaign of 1898. Gen. Kitchener led the imperial British Army far up the Nile into Sudan where it met and massacred a primitive Islamic host at Omdurman. Britain's quick-fire guns and artillery mowed down Dervish cavalry and sword-waving "fuzzy-wuzzies" as murderously as U.S. precision munitions vapourized Iraqi units.
U.S. air and ground forces in Iraq displayed superb technical, electronic, logistic and combat prowess confirming they are two full military generations ahead of nearly all other nations. But as the great modern military thinker, Maj-Gen J.F.C. Fuller, observed 40 years ago, the proper objective of war is not military victory but a politically advantageous peace.

While the U.S. won an inevitable military victory against a nearly helpless Iraq, political victory so far remains elusive…
Neo-con promises of 'liberation' of Iraq, of joyous, flower-tossing crowds and of rapid 'democratisation' have turned to dust. Iraq remains a dangerous, volatile mess seething with violence and implacable Shia political demands. Twenty resistance groups now battle U.S. and allied occupation troops. Militant Islamic jihadis are heading for Iraq to fight 'Great Satan' America. Yet Bush still claims invading Iraq made America safer.
However, because of Iraq, much of the world now regards America itself as a menacing, unstable threat. President Bush has stuck his head into a hornet's nest. The U.S. will bleed men, money and reputation for a long time before it figures out how to get out of the first colonial misadventure of the 21st century." © : t r u t h o u t 2004.

BOOKS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMON LAW

"Magna Carta" - Its continuing importance in our lives today. Price$ 8.00 posted

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"The Westminster Tradition and Australia" - The parliamentary democratic system inherited from Britain by Leslie R. Marchant. Price S20.00 posted

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