Rice Arrives Just In Time To Oversee U.S. Decline

”The analysis suggests that unless something dramatic changes – such as a newfound will by Iraqis to reject the insurgency or a large escalation of U.S. troop strength – the United States won’t win the war.”

The Americans never wanted to hold elections in Iraq, but ran out of political wiggle room when Shi’ite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani last year threatened to bring a million of the faithful into the streets of Baghdad and Basra. However, as the excellent Pepe Escobar, of AsiaTimes, reported on January 27, this weekend’s “elections” are possibly the most farcical held in human history. Bush “has introduced to the world the concept of election at gunpoint”:

Elect, then eject U.S.

The Americans dare not deny the Shi’ites their victory. But, as Escobar reported in December, and has been consistently misrepresented by U.S. corporate media, the Ayatollah is no friend of the occupation:

Thus, the Americans have been painted into a corner. Bush insists that U.S. forces will remain in Iraq “as long as it takes,” but has been forced to invest every ounce of political capital on elections that, in Escobar’s words, may result in the verdict: “First we vote, then we kick you out.”

Meanwhile, the world watches as armed-to-the-teeth U.S. troops stand on street corners, handing out election literature in someone else’s country, after having flattened Fallujah, a city roughly the size of Newark, New Jersey. Imagine if machinegun-toting Germans had performed similar electoral duties in occupied France, in 1942. Would any civilized observer have considered such a process legitimate? Yet Bush bets that his atrocity will be seen as a light unto the nations – an amazing measure of the chasm that separates the Pirates from civilization.

Aijaz Ahmad, in a piece for the political journal Frontline, published by The Hindu of India, describes an American mindset that is, in a word, savage:

Yet, for all the blood shed by both Iraqis and Americans, the U.S. has suffered a huge net loss in world public opinion, and in the resources that it has sought to steal. The Americans are now more ill-positioned than two years ago, said Mr. Ahmad:

The Black Commentator said much the same thing on March 20, 2003, as Shock and Awe broke over Iraq. “War is the great and terrible engine of history,” we wrote. “Bush and his Pirates hope to employ that engine to harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy, to leapfrog over the contradictions of their parasitical existence into a new epoch of their own imagining. Instead, they have lunged into the abyss, from which no one will extricate them, for they will be hated much more than feared.

“In attempting to break humanity’s will to resist, the Bush pirates have reached too far.”

Handmaiden to evil

George Bush and his handmaiden, Condoleezza Rice, speak a strange language that is understood only by the denizens of the American bubble. It is a language of aggression, pure and simple – an American Manifest Destiny that threatens the sovereignty of every other nation on the planet, but pretends to be a liberating force. Bush also delivered an implicit threat to those Americans who resist involvement in his savage crusade: “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” said Bush in his inaugural address. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Bush men (and woman) are prepared to declare domestic opponents of his imperial policies to be threats to internal American liberties.

In her confirmation hearings, Condoleezza Rice showed herself to be as bellicose as her master. In addition to Syria and Iran, writes Patrick Sale, of the Lebanon-based Daily Star, Rice placed Muslims in general in the cross-hairs. “America and the free world,” she declared, “are once again engaged in a long-term struggle against an ideology of hatred and tyranny and terror and hopelessness. And we must confront these challenges …”

Confrontation, everywhere, including in the south of our own hemisphere. Rice made a special effort to signal aggressive U.S. intentions against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for his “close association” with Fidel Castro. Democratic Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd reminded Rice that Luiz Inacio Lula de Silva, President of the southern colossus, Brazil, is also on good terms with Castro. He might have also told her that Brazil and other Latin American nations are working furiously to sever their dependency on strangulating U.S. terms of trade, most notably by concluding massive new deals with China; that Venezuela, Brazil, Cuba and Uruguay may soon launch a cooperative news service, so that CNN and other American agencies will no longer pollute their national dialogues; that Brazil, South Africa and India are busily establishing strategic alliances designed to circumvent the North – especially the United States; that India, China and Russia are struggling to create new poles of power in the world, circles of influence in which the U.S. would be absent.

A bad poker hand

The U.S. invasion and ongoing torture of Iraq put the planet on notice that Washington is a danger to global stability. Not just progressives, but the conservative elites of Europe and Asia, were shocked and awed in ways that the insular Americans did not contemplate. The Financial Times, a spokes-publication for Britain’s elite, warns: “Central banks are shifting reserves away from the US and towards the eurozone in a move that looks set to deepen the Bush administration’s difficulties in financing its ballooning current account deficit.” These financial managers are careful to move away from the dollar incrementally, so as not to plunge the global system into panic – but the direction is inexorably away from the U.S. currency. As a nation, we are being set up for a deep fall, but the fault lies with the Bush men (and woman), who are playing a kind of poker with the rest of the planet – one in which the only cards in their hands are military.

The military fiasco in Iraq has shown that these are weak cards, yet the only response from the Bush Pirates is to threaten further aggression in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and Cuba. Ironically, the corporate class that Bush serves is the least “patriotic” of all, ready and eager to abandon the homeland to its economic fate in favor of greener pastures in Asia. Bernie Sanders, the socialist congressman from Vermont, exposed these rich traitors for what they are, in a recent issue of In These Times: