Thus,
the Bush men are doomed to failure, because no nation can subdue
a world of resistance. No weapons are that smart, and modern
economies – including America’s – are the opposites of fortifications.
The Pirates have given humanity no option but to plot to thwart
the United States, by hook, crook, deceit, feint, charm, false
supplication, flattery, secret agreements, monetary collusion,
or the poor man’s ghastly war of terror.
The
U.S. is indeed the strongest nation in the world, the only one
powerful enough to unite the planet – against itself.
The
meaning of failure
Pay
little attention to the polyglot soldiers hired to augment and
“internationalize” the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The non-Americans
(referred to as “foreigners” by the American foreigners) can
have no effect but to destabilize and scandalize their own governments.
The
Pirate’s mission in Iraq is doomed on its own terms.
The objective of their crusade is to impose corporate terms
of relationships throughout the world – their version of globalization
– enforced by the U.S. military and any sepoys they can
gather. Bush’s people constantly remind us that Iraq is to be
a “model” for the New American Century (“This is the future
for the world …”) The “freedom” they crave for Iraqis requires
American corporate domination of the economic and political
life of the country. As scholar Tariq Ali points out in the
August 27 issue of Counterpunch:
"For the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through
the privatisation of Iraq's oil, to achieve the liberalisation
of the Iraqi economy and to get the big US corporations in there.
They are not too concerned as to how the country will be run,
as long as that sort of economic structure is maintained."
The
generals are not and have never been in charge, here – this
is thoroughly a businessman’s jihad.
The
ugly and shameless rush to divvy up Iraq’s economy and infrastructure
even before the invasion had begun shocks the sensibilities
of normal humans, but is really just corporate behavior writ
large and on display for a global audience. If one sees only
pigs squealing at the trough, one misses the central point,
which is to transform a nation, region and planet into one big
trough for the benefit of pigs.
The
purpose of the U.S. occupation is to achieve “transformation”
– the key word in every Pirate script. Iraq must be made safe
for a U.S. corporate makeover, a shining “example” to the rest
of the region of what Dallas-type development can do. Yet that
goal is far beyond the horizon, since the U.S. military cannot
protect itself at present troop levels, and has no reserves
to call upon. U.S. commanders need hundreds of thousands more
troops simply to defend themselves and oil pumps and pipelines
at the current level of Iraqi resistance. Too late, the
corporate media now begin an urgent discussion of the need to
“transform” the U.S. military into a force fit for occupation
– raising the specter of a draft. “Transformation” appears to
be working in reverse.
To
meet the “boots on the ground” crisis while avoiding a draft,
Rumsfeld offers the all-purpose corporate solution: privatization.
His Pentagon numbers crunchers claim to have identified 300,000
uniformed jobs that can be performed by civilians – a huge number
that includes many tens of thousands of overseas (read, Iraq)
assignments. The problem is, nobody wants to go to Iraq.
According
to a July 31 Newhouse
News Service report, “U.S.
troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor
living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by
the Army for logistics support failed to show up.” Insurance
rates for civilians booked to Iraq have skyrocketed 300 to 400
percent – a price that Halliburton and other contractors are
more than willing to pass on to U.S. taxpayers – but it still
becomes "harder and harder to get (civilian contractors)
to go in harm's way," said Gen. Charles S. Mahan, the Army's
logistics chief. "We thought we could depend on industry
to perform these kinds of functions."
Businessmen’s
wars have special constraints, as the Newhouse report revealed:
If
military contractors cannot induce their own employees to service
the needs of the U.S. Army, how can it be expected that non-military
businesses will assign personnel to the Iraqi corporate transformation?
The
Pirates dreamed of a corporate version of the Oklahoma land
rush descending on Baghdad and Basra. The traffic is all headed
in the other direction, especially in the wake of the United
Nations bombing. The Pirate’s fantasy of Dallas and Houston
on the Euphrates is finished, over, done. George Bush’s childish
dare, “Bring ‘em on,” scares the wrong people.
Lost
cause
Meanwhile,
the Pirates have not penetrated one inch into Iraqi civil society.
U.S. recruitment of Saddam’s former secret police (see Washington
Post, August 24) is proof that occupation authorities feel
surrounded and helpless against the popular forces that have
been set in motion in Iraq, and will soon abandon a policy of
co-optation in favor of assassination and fomenting civil war.
The final nail will be driven into the coffin of the corporate
“transformation” of Iraq, and events will unfold along the more
familiar paths of national resistance to occupation.
The
global audience understands that kind of story. Humanity is
also getting an unsolicited, close-up look at how American society
is mobilized for war. The Cowboy is a racist who tears
down Islamic flags in full view of thousands, reflecting
the values of his society. Americans are demonstrating to the
world that they are most readily mobilized by hate (fear comes
second) and, therefore, are magnets of hatred, whose expulsion
is rapidly becoming the common mission of overwhelming numbers
of Iraqis.
Aggression
does, indeed, have transformative effects.
"This
is the future for the world we're in at the moment,” said Rumsfeld
special assistant Lawrence Di Rita, surveying American prospects
in Iraq, last month. “We'll get better as we do it more often."
The US will keep invading other nations until it achieves
imperial perfection.
Is
anyone on the planet holding out hope that the Bush men are
capable of civilized behavior? Even the slowest learners must
recoil at Di Rita’s earnestly stated goal: to get better at
war by constant practice. What arguments can the “friends” of
America advance among their own people who, thanks to globalization,
heard Rumsfeld’s aide nonchalantly condemn the Earth to endless
agonies? 
