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On the day that the Iraq invasion began, BC
was certain that the U.S. Pirate class led by Bush, Cheney and
Rumsfeld were on a fool’s errand, a delusional mission that
would turn the world’s people definitively against the United
States, and lead to defeat. That defeat is now accepted as a
matter of fact by a majority of Americans – although it is by
no means clear that most Americans understand the reasons they
have been beaten.
Written as the first bombs fell in Baghdad,
this article was prescient in its prediction of how the conflict
ultimately would unfold. Here it is, as composed on March 19,
2003, and published on March
20 – The Editors.
We are all assembled, the world's people, awaiting
the Pirates' lunge at history. The Bush men have made sure we
pay rapt attention to their Big Bang, their epochal Event, after
which the nature of things will have changed unalterably to
their advantage – they think. The Bush men are certain of our
collective response, convinced that once we have witnessed The
Mother of All War Shows, humanity will react according to plan,
and submit.
Bush was already savoring the New American Century
just days ago, when he summoned his underlings from Britain
and Spain to the Azores to make yet another final pronouncement.
"We concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth
for the world," Bush said.
Spoken like a King. Or The Man Who Would Be King.
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Rudyard Kipling's tale of an English colonial
soldier drunk on his imagined power over the natives is eerily
appropriate. The projected fruits of Shock and Awe – the power
to pillage the world with impunity – utterly bedazzled and blinded
the perpetrators of the staged holocaust, even before the Event
itself had unfolded. In the days between the final U.S. ultimatum
and the invasion, American political and corporate media players
were visibly shaken by the clear and unanimous world revulsion
at U.S. imperiousness.
"Are we going back to The White Man's Burden?"
Arab League UN Ambassador Yahya Mahmassani shot at CNN's startled
Wolf Blitzer. "Is this the 21st Century?"
Yes, it is, and George Bush and his armies cannot
wrench away the provenance of Time to lift again the Burden
that even Kipling knew the White Man was not fit to bear.
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No one can predict the specific ways in which
nations and movements will resist Bush's aggression against
civilization. What is certain is that the Pirates have succeeded
in arraying important sectors of every other nation on the planet
in opposition to Washington's hegemony. Bush has made the name
that is our patrimony – "America" – a curse on the
lips of much of the world.
If Shock and Awe is essentially a horrific psychological
warfare exercise – and it is – the assault on humanity's collective
sensibilities has already had disastrous, unintended effects.
Although they are incapable of realizing it, the
Bush men have revealed themselves to the world - the audience
for Shock and Awe - as grotesquely ugly, brutish, irredeemably
repugnant human beings whose touch must be avoided under all
circumstances. Every plan and project of individuals and nations
will be shaped by having witnessed a racist America raining
fire on a weaker people - and reveling in the crime.
Bush's plan for world domination was doomed before
the burning, blasting, thundering, screaming display. The Pirates
have accelerated the processes of their own ruin.
As we wrote in the March 6 issue of BC.