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Issue Number 37 - April 10, 2003
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"To the extent that war is a contest of wills, psychology plays a tremendous role. Always does, always did. The problem with human psychology is it is exceedingly difficult to know what is going to elicit a certain type of behavior. You don't know how you are going to behave in a stressful situation. All the more so, you don't know how somebody operating from a different culture, a different mind-set, might react to stressful circumstances." - Lani Kass, professor, National War College
Bloody footprints to Baghdad and Basra mark the first tentative steps in the Bush men's apocalyptic adventure. They have embarked on a project to bring to heel a world that they hold in great contempt, but of which they have no understanding whatsoever. Products of a white American cultural bubble that glories in its transparency to the globe but sees only its own illusions staring back, the Pirates play at psychological warfare and succeed in psyching out only themselves.
Let us be lucid, above the din of corporate media that serve only to further embed the fantasies that have inspired the mad and hopeless American lunge at global domination. There is only one fact that has been affirmed since American tanks crossed the Kuwaiti border in late March - and it is a redundant fact, already known to the people of the world: The U.S. military is awesomely powerful. It can destroy a developing nation's military and state structures. So, then what?
In the minds and plans of the Pirates, the then follows as naturally as night follows day. Having seen the alternative in the wreckage of Saddam Hussein's army and capital, the international community will accommodate itself to American fiat. Like the Borg on the Star Trek Voyager television series, the Americans will have made their point to the rest of the planet: "Resistance is futile." Iraq quiets down for a smooth and profitable occupation, Iran and Syria become instantly supine, the European community accepts second class status in a region in which it has been the dominant trading partner, and regimes everywhere prepare to change of their own accord in any manner that the U.S. might suggest.
If the fantasy scenario does not unfold, the Bush men have no other cards to play - except to lash out again with their only real asset, the war machine. They will then face the limits of even that singular power - a high-tech, low manpower building-and-bunker-destroyer that cannot occupy anyplace unfriendly for very long.
For Bush's New American Century in-a-can to work, the world's people and nations would be required to stand still, transfixed in shock and awe of the U.S. military. That, in fact, was and remains the extent of The Plan. The incestuous corporate cabal revolving around Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle have bet everything on their own, shared fantasy. Although National War College professor Lani Kass had other people in mind at the time, she could have been speaking of the Bush men when she warned of getting caught in situations where "you don't know how somebody operating from a different culture, a different mind-set, might react to stressful circumstances."
The world is certainly distressed with the United States, and is busily conspiring against the rogue nation. As we wrote in last week's
, "In self-defense, the world will be forced to reorganize itself, to create new mechanisms of trade and security in place of the institutions that the Bush men are deliberately savaging. The Americans will be left out of these arrangements." In lashing out at international order, the U.S. has destroyed the foundations of the special status it has enjoyed since the end of World War II.
Henry C. K. Liu concludes that the U.S. has initiated its own decline. In an April 5 Asia Times commentary, "The war that may end the age of superpower", Liu wrote:
This war has succeeded in pushing Russia, France, Germany and China closer, in contrast if not in opposition to US interests worldwide, a significant development with long term implications that are difficult to assess at present. Globalization is dealt a final blow by this war. The airlines are dead and without air travel, globalization is merely a slogan. The freezing of Iraq foreign assets is destroying the image of the US as a financial safe haven. The revival of Arab nationalism will change the dynamics in Middle East politics. The myth of US power has been punctured. The geopolitical costs of this war to the US are enormous and the benefits are hard to see.
This war will end from its own inevitable evolution, even without anti-war demonstrations. It will not be a happy end. There is yet no discernible exit strategy for the US. After this war, the world will have no superpower, albeit the US will remain strong both economically and militarily.
Mr. Liu is no radical - he's chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group. Liu notes that the British military has notified Prime Minister Blair that his forces "cannot sustain a high level of combat for indefinite periods." Liu could have added that the U.S. military is not configured to an occupation of Iraq under circumstances other than absolute quiet in the region.
Yet the Bush Pirates insist that they will hold and exploit the country all by themselves, and with enough ready forces to fend off the "evil ones" in Tehran and Damascus and... well, wherever. They cannot. American military reserves have already become a de facto draft force, subject to interminable, disruptive call-ups. The real thing is only a conflict - or rough occupation - away, a politically unacceptable non-alternative.
The entanglement in Iraq with the current U.S. force structure is the end result of the Pirates' way of doing business. They are the spawn of military industry, speculative finance and the most rapacious elements of the energy sector - Enron in arms. They sold the U.S. government the kind of high-tech military that would produce the most profits, and now seek to profit further by outright international plunder. Thus, Richard Perle sits on the Defense Planning Board while telling Goldman Sachs that an American invasion can be accomplished with 40,000 men with lightning speed, opening up first the Iraqi oil fields and soon leading to the capitulation of Iran and a regime change in Saudi Arabia. Voila. But it is all based on the illusion that the world thinks as speculative finance capitalist Pirates do. Nobody believes that but the delusional white American public.
Thirty five years ago, Black people rose up as grown men and women to confront a U.S. ruling structure that had, at its center, titans of manufacturing and commerce in the world's most dynamic market. Dr. Martin Luther King's words at a Memphis church on the eve of his assassination speak to an America that has, in fundamental ways, disappeared.
[W]e are asking you tonight, to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis. Go by and tell them not to buy Sealtest milk. Tell them not to buy - what is the other bread? - Wonder Bread. And what is the other bread company, Jesse? Tell them not to buy Hart's bread. As Jesse Jackson has said, up to now, only the garbage men have been feeling pain; now we must kind of redistribute the pain. We are choosing these companies because they haven't been fair in their hiring policies; and we are choosing them because they can begin the process of saying, they are going to support the needs and the rights of these men who are on strike. And then they can move on downtown and tell Mayor Loeb to do what is right.
George Bush and his Pirates don't care if Black people or anybody else in the U.S. buys Wonder Bread, or if the general public has disposable income to buy anything at all. Big city Mayors are more than likely Black, these days, starved like the rest of urban America by the Pirates ensconced in Washington with their eyes on global plunder. The Bush men have accelerated the decline of the American economy with the same delusional disdain that they mangle the world order - and with no more concern for the consequences.
They have made enemies of everyone. That's why their defeat is certain, although, to paraphrase Dr. King, not all of us will get to the Promised Land.
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