The Walls of the Third Temple

U.S. / Israel Coalition Seeks Palestinian Annihalation

In memoriam: Dr. Edward Said (1935-2003)



Wiping Palestine from the Pentagon's New Map?

Man thinks 'cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please | And if things don't change soon, he will. | Oh, man has invented his doom, | First step was touching the moon. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there as the night grows still. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan | License to Kill

Continuing the theme of nuclear proliferation by those supposedly opposing it, we explore the Holy Land of Palestine, a corner of the world where the ancient and the modern are forced to coexist cheek by jowl. Whether it is Sharon's cheek or Arafat's jowl is of no consequence. Who is more afraid of whom, is. Events on the ground show Old Testament terror tactics being visited on some while others enjoy New World protection. In such an environment, equilibrium and harmony will remain elusive until the United States removes itself from the equation.

"...America has remained Israel's most steadfast friend and ally. In turn, Israel has become America's most steadfast friend and ally in the Middle East." U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman

As much as I appreciate the thrust of Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunimah's 10th anniversary editorial commemorating the failed Oslo peace accords, I believe he evades fundamental truths.

I cannot accept Palestinians, forced to flee their homes following Israel's 1948 UN-sanctioned independence, see a two-state settlement as more than a brief respite on the long march to a united Palestine. Daily, directly and indirectly, South Africans see the deep emotion evinced by the return of land to dispossessed persons or peoples. Indeed, land restitution forms a fundamental building block in South Africans' reconciliation to each other.

Noting that "...most Palestinians and Israelis, the Arab League, the UN and the U.S. all support a two-state solution", Abunimah foresees increasing insistence on one man-one vote in a Greater Palestine resulting from Israeli intransigence and Ariel Sharon's stated decision to murder Yasser Arafat.

It's a crock. Abunimah knows it. A legitimate demand to return, despite the compromise reached with the Oslo accords, should not see another decade of murder, deceit and the assassination of an elected leader to motivate it. Most Palestinians must feel a desire for the return reaching out to them in their dreams, affecting their thoughts, deeds and actions, generating deeper resentment for those who would see them dead.

Palestinians and Israelis will see an end to this conflict only when they share a Palestine incorporating Israel. How could it be otherwise? The South African experience tells us it cannot be. In South Africa, the apartheid state and its banned opposition, which spoke for most consigned to the Bantustans, realized that while the African National Congress's (ANC) armed struggle could do little to oust or even crack apartheid's armor, the state would have to kill most South Africans to quash the struggle for that now-outdated form of governance, democracy.

For decades, the stalemated warring parties sought ways of levering military resources to their advantage. Ultimately, several factors drove both parties to the negotiating table.

Nelson Mandela's overtures to P.W. Botha followed by his dialog with F.W. de Klerk, international sanctions targeting structural apartheid and those running it, and an increasingly volatile populace increased the possible cost of an impossible victory by one over the other to unacceptable levels.

A negotiated, equitable settlement was the only way out. So it is with Israel and Palestine.

Most Palestinians and many Israelis know this to be true. Abunimah correctly deduces that actions by Hamas and the Israeli state do much to undermine such a settlement. He must accept, however, that if the world is to maintain pressure on Sharon's government, Hamas and similar movements are necessary.

Why? The onus is on Israel, a supposed First World democracy infinitely more wealthy and better placed than its Palestinian neighbor, to take the lead in making peace.

Instead, a fear-filled Sharon and his allies are working non-stop to destroy the Palestinian people. In giving voice to his government's desire to kill Arafat, a figurehead whose authority has been stripped of him by the Israeli war machine, Sharon denies a just peace or a Palestine in which all have the vote and equal say in governance. He thinks and speaks it out of existence.

In Ariel Sharon's twisted mind you, Ali Abunimah, do not exist. If you force yourself into being, he will squash you like a bug without a second thought.

Yes, the United States has been sitting on its hands, but Abunimah levels the allegation as a sign of U.S. weakness. He is wrong. Sharon is Washington's puppet; Washington does not dance to Sharon's tune. As it seeks to dominate the Middle East, the vociferous, pro-Israeli neo-con lobby now formulating global policy in Washington needs its Israeli forward base as never before.

U.S. threats to withhold tens of billions of dollars aid to Israel amount to nothing when Washington later loosens the purse strings without fanfare. The incarceration of Palestinians, ardent nationalists not afraid to fight for their rights, is a neo-con priority as it creates firebreaks around new theaters of war in Syria, Iran and what is left of Palestine itself.

"The friendship between Israel and the United States is a great asset to our country." White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card


Click here for detailed maps of The Wall

Now, they take him and they teach him and they groom him for life | And they set him on a path where he's bound to get ill, | Then they bury him with stars, | Sell his body like they do used cars. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there facin' the hill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

A cash-strapped Israel's ability to continue building the $1.8 billion, 540-mile Separation Wall, imprisoning the Palestinian people in a fraction of the 22% of Palestinian land demarcated by the 1967 Green Line (accepted in the Oslo accords), is evidence of U.S. complicity in their repression and subjugation.

The Palestinian people are capable, according to neo-cons, of bringing Israel to its knees. Hence tacit approval for continued Israeli atrocities; the continued establishment of Israeli 'settlements'; indifference to a genocidal apartheid, the sanctioning of Yasser Arafat's assassination; silence in the face of Sharon's inevitable destruction of any peace accord; a callous disregard for the corralling of millions of Palestinians into an area less than half the size of the Occupied Territories; a willingness to pay for a wall creating dozens of Sabras and Shatilas with United States tax dollars and, if needs be, the annihilation of Palestine.

Apartheid sought to separate people through legislation. Israel, through the course followed by The Wall, seeks to eliminate a people. Most will become refugees, dispersed through the Middle East, driven into eternal exile by Washington and Tel Aviv.

The Wall is an international abomination, a dark stain on the soul of mankind, a crime against humanity and tragic evidence of global apathy in the face of incremental genocide. Likening this concrete example of social engineering at its most diabolical to the internationally recognized Berlin Wall gives the impression separation is its goal. It is not. It is a Nazi wall, a barrier of the type erected around Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen and other monuments to man's inhumanity to man.

Shortly after work on The Wall started, it formed a small semi-circle separating the north-western West Bank from much of its Green Line land and Israel. 210,000 Palestinians were imprisoned in enclaves; 67 villages fell between the Green Line and the concrete barrier separating them from their cities; 2,800 acres of land had been confiscated; 83,000 olive trees had been uprooted, and 30 water wells, producing 4 million cubic meters of water per annum had been confiscated.

A security fence seeking an end to suicide bombings would have followed the easily patrolled Green Line. The Wall does not. Following the dictates of crazed politicians and demented settlers, The Wall twists and turns through an increasingly small area of Palestine. When complete, 500,000 Palestinians will fall between it and the Green Line. They will be prisoners confined to single-access enclaves.

Palestinians will lose 55% of their remaining land (already only 22% of pre-1967 Palestine). Confiscated territory constitutes 80% of Palestine's arable land and 65% of its water resources.

That wash-and-rinse Democrats and Republicans give precedence to courting "the Jewish vote" in the run up to the 2004 U.S. elections (a sure sign racism is alive and well and living in the U.S.) over the asphyxiation of an entire nation, clearly demonstrates where Americans stand on Palestinian self-determination and democracy in the Middle East.

That Americans in general happily accept a two-state, "separate but equal", apartheid solution says it all.

"The work that AIPAC does is a vital part of our democratic process. You speak out boldly, and that's good for America, it's good for Israel and good for the cause of peace and justice in the world." U.S. President George W. Bush



Click here for interactive map of Israeli missile sites and silos

Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused, | And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill. | All he believes are his eyes | And his eyes, they just tell him lies. | But there's a woman on my block, | Sitting there in a cold chill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Why, however, would the U.S. want Sharon to wall off the Palestinian people and wall in the Israelis?

Israel is the barrel of the gun pointed at the Middle East's head. The Palestinian demand for self-rule or, dare one hope, democracy in their own country, stands to unsettle a cozy, multi-trillion dollar relationship reaching back to the establishment of the anachronistic, self-proclaimed 'Jewish' state.

Any bullets fired from the loaded gun that is the current Israeli state should be defensive anti-ballistic missile missiles fired from jointly developed $2bn Israeli-American ARROW Weapon System batteries on incoming nuclear or other ballistic missiles.

Initiated in 1988, at the time of the Rumsfeld Commission, the program has moved through three phases, from experimentation, through development of the Arrow 2 anti-missile missile guided by the U.S.-developed Green Pine radar system, to the deployment of two batteries. The U.S. congress has subsequently approved funding half the cost of deploying a third.

Israel suits the Bush administration's need for a test bed meeting the demands of its increasingly expensive preemptive counterproliferation nuclear weapon strategy. Yeah, you read it right... preemptive counterproliferation. The counterproliferation concept first reared its head in a 1993 Clinton Administration document entitled Defense Counterproliferation Initiative, upgraded in 1996.

A great deal of flesh has since been added to its bones.

Having departed from Cold War nuclear policies of deterrence and Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to viewing Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) such as the 0.3 kiloton Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) bunker buster as legitimate battlefield weaponry, the Bushites have reintroduced the nuclear arms race with a bang.

Cold War MAD assured deterrence. It was the best of an extremely bad deal. Now, using "terrorism" as its rationale and public lever, the neo-cons who pulled the United States out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 2002 are developing low-yield TNWs to deter and preempt the production of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by "rogue" states.

The development and deployment of TNWs, as well as a policy of preemption, form an integral part of The National Security Strategy of the United States of America.

"Our comprehensive strategy to combat WMD includes: Proactive Counterproliferation Efforts. We must deter and defend against the threat before it is unleashed. We must ensure that key capabilities - detection, active and passive defenses, and our counterforce capabilities - are integrated into our defense transformation and our homeland security systems."

"...we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country."

Rather than being an improvement on deterrence, preemptive counterproliferation, managed by the autonomous Missile Defense Agency (MDA) (incorporating the Ballistic Missile Defense Program's proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) system and a Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system), will speed the arms race; open it to more players; increase the chance of error; blur the distinction between defensive and offensive weaponry and, by dramatically increasing the likelihood and feasibility of all-out nuclear war, create the situation it purports to abort.

Preemptive counterproliferation compounds the devastating consequences wrought by the U.S.' unilateral adoption of a policy of preemption. Ostensibly designed to limit threat, it has increased it. Counterproliferation will do the same.

The Nuclear Posture Review, which attracted strong congressional support in February 2003, details circumstances under which the U.S. may use TNWs.

In the manner of Israel's transparently opaque nuclear defense posture until the late 90s, the authors of subsequent official reports tip their caps to using conventional weapons where they will serve the same purpose but, besides indicating an enlarged nuclear arsenal, they give themselves the option to use either.

Their opacity lends them an air of idiocy, like generals choosing to invade and occupy Iraq indefinitely at enormous cost when surgical nuclear strikes are available and unilaterally assumed legal.

Had the U.S. used a single low-yield RNEP bunker buster (a refinement of the B61-11 deployed in Europe during the mid to late 90s) on Baghdad, the ground shock, heat blast and resulting gamma-radiation field would have killed up to 50,000 people within 24 hours.

The potential repercussions of offloading such a weapon over North Korea could escalate a nuclear conflict in a matter of hours. We are all aware of the possible horrors brought about by the use of 100-kiloton bombs.

Facing overwhelming nuclear firepower, named 'enemies' of the United States such as Libya, Syria, Iran and North Korea do not yet possess delivery systems enabling them to attack the U.S. mainland. Iraq never had a hope in hell of building any such thing. Besides China, analysts believe only North Korea possesses the needed warheads. Were either to attack the U.S. (an extremely long shot in China's case), they would subject themselves to instant obliteration.

Nuclear deterrence through the threat of second strikes remains the most effective counter to such single-strike nuclear attacks. Deterrence also precludes the use of WMD.

TNWs increase rather than decrease the chances of an enemy developing or using WMD. Such WMD would be used in the event of attack by low-yield TNWs. Should the threat of WMD be contrived (Iraq / Iran / Libya), states or organizations would resort to the uncontrollable weapon over which the Bush and Sharon regimes profess control, i.e. terror.

Paradoxically, through his command of nuclear power and the state of Israel, George W. Bush does control global terror. Sharon, his jackbooted, nuclear-warhead wielding capo, implements it.

Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon's New Map, would have us believe Israel is an island in an alien sea. Possessing its own nuclear triad and serving as the U.S.' testing ground for a forward-based Theater Missile Defense (TMD) system, Israel is nothing more than an over-privileged nuclear porcupine in possession of several hundred conventional and tactical nuclear warheads.

Its delivery systems and silos circling Palestine and facing all-comers, Israel possesses a land, sea and air-based triad of some 400+ nuclear warheads the U.S. would see protected at any cost; to prevent it falling into the hands of "terrorists", of course.

If the United States is embarking on a takeover of Middle Eastern oil; if reported breakdowns between the House of Saud and Washington are to be believed; if the U.S. launches an Iranian or any other offensive designed to boost the Republicans' 2004 reelection campaign; if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq escalate; if Bush is unable to garner international military and financial support for his foray into the region, and if there is any substantive backlash from a country like Syria in the face of conventional or preemptive counterproliferation attacks, the last thing the neo-conservative administration of George W. Bush needs is a restive Palestinian population.

It would rather see Palestine disappear from the map than watch the world's fourth or fifth-largest nuclear arsenal (and the U.S.-sponsored medical, scientific, communications, economic, transport, electronic and engineering technologies supporting Israel's consumer society) opened to inspection or sabotage.

In fact, it will probably preempt such a possibility. And it will ask an ever-obliging Sharon to do its dirty work for it.

I'm sure Ali Abunimah knows this.

"AIPAC has a job to do. We need you to keep up the advocacy that is keeping Israel strong - and America safe." U.S. Senator Tom Daschle

Conclusion

Until the United States distances itself economically and materially from Israel and its many lobbyists crowding the Capitol; until the U.S. leaves the people of Greater Palestine to hammer out a mutually acceptable settlement (in much the same way South Africa's Botha regime and its imagined Total Onslaught faded to obscurity in 1989), the people on both sides of The Wall will know nothing but fear, enmity and terror.

It is high time more commentators linked a hypocritical America's military interests in the region to the intractable problems facing two peoples who want nothing more than to live in peace in their own country.

"I'm an Israeli at heart." U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool | And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled. | Oh, man is opposed to fair play, | He wants it all and he wants it his way. | Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there as the night grows still. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan | License to Kill

[First posted at Open Source Politics]

Iraq: The End of War as We Know It

Welcome to the Lake of Fire

Give me back my broken night | My mirrored room, my secret life | It's lonely here, | There's no one left to torture | Give me absolute control | Over every living soul | And lie beside me, baby, | That's an order!

Leonard Cohen | The Future

Ignoring immediate and long-term U.S. foreign policy strategies and objectives, including never-ending war and a Pax Americana, this entry stems from a week-long bout of 'flu and a consideration of the deliberate two-year disinformation campaign carried out by the Bush administration. Explaining the Iraqi debacle as a calculated, interim, holding action while departments such as the Office of Force Transformation get their act together, we see through the smoke and mirrors preoccupying the global media and discern diabolical strategies designed to stamp American authority on an unsuspecting globe.

If one can glean positive signs from the United States' humiliation in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is that war, as Westerners know it, has passed its sell-by date. In a densely populated, wired world where the average Third World citizen packs enough firepower to incapacitate a high-tech platoon, we can measure military success by the extent to which guerillas are prepared to embrace the unconventional.

Embrace it they have. Americans are learning the hard way to fight a war on 23 million fronts.

There are two ways to view this lesson in visiting death on others. First, we can revel in Americans recognizing the Middle East as a second Vietnam. In responding to 9-11 as it did, the United States was always on to a hiding to nothing. Whether its military defeat takes two, five, ten or forty years, Washington's war machine will leave the Middle East and Asia with its tail between its legs, whipped like a rented mule, jeered like a broken bully.

Why? There were and are no justifiable reasons to invade and occupy Iraq and the United States military, as it is constituted, is unable to do the job.

That's the upside. There is another way of viewing it; and things do not look good. However, before we introduce the alternative view, let's explore reasons for believing that which appears apparent to those not adrift on a sea of lies, oblivious to the obvious, transfixed by a media machine feeding them a daily diet of rapid-fire deceit.

In one of my first posts to the Web, early in 2002, I responded to a Dave Winer interpretation of a Lance Knobel analysis of New York as a battlefield. I wrote:

This war has been waged for millennia and its battles have been fought ... in the hearts, minds, and countries of every person conscious of its existence. The buildings hit on 9-11 were symbols or, if you insist, targets rather than battlefields. And the attacks formed a message rather than a military onslaught designed to meet set objectives.

The message was simple. "You have lost the war. If you don't understand that by now, you're even dumber than your worst critics think. We, the barbarians, are no longer at the gates. We are inside and, once we've fucked you up good and solid, we'll be on top. Catch us if you can. Sleep tight."

The U.S.' response to being targeted was predictable, confirming the world's worst fears. Public reaction to 9-11, which led to the quagmire in which U.S. forces now find themselves, left the world wondering whether those peopling the information society suck at their brains with straws.

9-11 offered a reality check. Many writing to the Web urged introspection, demanded investigations into criminal negligence and complicity, highlighted the neo-con agenda, and identified Caspian Basin and Middle East oil as primary drives behind any retaliatory attack on defenseless Afghanistan and Iraq. Those opposing invasion and occupation echoed the Nuremberg judges, warning that such acts transgressed international law and constituted crimes against humanity.

As if Rumsfeld could have cared less. He is a self-professed visionary. The American public ignored its whistle blowers. Yet, they are not the only ones at fault.

Sadly, as most commentators now dissect the freely available minutiae of governmental treachery and duplicitous action, there are fewer observers offering cogent overviews of a rapidly deteriorating situation. More distressing, there are even fewer prepared to consider a future-event horizon extending beyond several days.

Besides breathing new life into the neo-con securocrats and their detractors, Donald Rumsfeld and the National Security Council's September 11, 2001 decision to go to war with Iraq as it invaded Afghanistan offered ample evidence plans for the invasion had been brewing for years.

In the aftermath of the 'Pearl Harbor' called for by the PNAC policy document Rebuilding America's Defenses, readying an unwieldy war machine for Iraq's invasion gave the Bush regime time to build a specious case for occupation and nay sayers opportunity to decry it.

The Bush cabal embarked on a flagrant, transparent campaign of emotional manipulation, intellectual terror and, where necessary, physical coercion. Such allegations are not flippant. Aspiring Democratic nominee and presidential hopeful General Wesley Clark has said of George W. Bush's fraudulent campaign coercing officials to tie Iraq to al-Qa'ida:

"Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.'"

I would pay attention to Clark, a man I do not hold in high regard. He is a military misanthrope with a brain washed of a past by a thirty-year military career. More, he might or might not have supported the illegal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. However, putting his lack of morality aside he has, unlike George W. Bush, no reason to lie on network TV.

George W. Bush has several reasons. He is keeping some to himself.

During the murderous onslaught unleashed on a helpless Afghan people, the disinformation campaign targeting Iraq relied on outright lies by Bush and those serving in his cabinet; a flagrant disregard of international law; cover-ups by the agencies responsible for ensuring the safety of Americans; massive bribes and handouts to the super rich and countries willing to aid or abet the crime; the suspension or curtailment of U.S. and non-U.S. citizens' civil liberties, and media complicity.

In most Third World countries, George W. Bush and his securocrats' flagrant abuse of office and the crimes they committed through deception and fraud would, by now, have seen them languishing in prison.

The American people, carpet-bombed to silliness by a campaign of contradictory statements, sat before their TV screens like idiots and soaked it up. Their brains sucked dry, they filled their crania with the lies of their leaders.

While Iraqis on the receiving end of the U.S. military's armamentarium respond with anger and deadly guerilla warfare, we who now see George W. Bush massaging the lies of his vice-president on international TV merely laugh. How the mighty have fallen. What a pathetic sight.

We would do well to review such deceptive sentiments. We would do equally well to forget the mainstream media. News of the developing war in the Middle East does not feature on network news shows. There is another way of viewing this charade. But it will keep for now.



Things are going to slide, slide in all directions | Won't be nothing | Nothing you can measure anymore | The blizzard, the blizzard of the world | Has crossed the threshold | And it has overturned | The order of the soul

In line with the warmongering crazies' ideas becoming state policy, George W. Bush sold Americans The War on Terror (TWOT), the 'export of security', and never-ending, preemptive conflict.

Now that TWOT's first invoices are starting to trickle in, those who lent George W. Bush their tacit or active support in the run up to the invasion and partial occupation [1] of Iraq cannot bleat. It was a budget-destroying package deal offering pyrotechnics and mass slaughter and they bought into it.

Many on the left saw through the shroud of duplicity and warned of its dangers. Armchair neo-cons remained willfully blind to that which stared them in their blood-crazed faces. Incapable of seeing their own humanity, a promise of revenge and the blood-drenched deaths of thousands of wild-eyed "camel jockeys" spurred their support of a morally bankrupt campaign of inestimable cost doomed to end in failure.

Once George W. Bush crossed from Kuwait into Iraq with his conventional army, he stepped into the shoes of his nemesis, Saddam Hussein. Hussein, who had crossed the same line twelve years before, paid for what he did. For George W. Bush and the American people, the crushed and mangled bodies mixed with the choking white dust of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center remain a small down payment on a future few can begin to imagine.

As the dripping blood of U.S. soldiers becomes a steady stream of body bags and as the occupation meets stiffening resolve from a rag-tag army of volunteers swiftly being honed to professionalism by experience, direct pan-Arabic and indirect global support, the past and future should become discernible to those who promoted this horror with such unseeing zeal.

But still it seems to elude them. They should distil this morass to clarity without further delay because there is no going back.

TWOT is a decades-long self-enrichment program floated on the blood of millions and powered by a paper-thin veneer of hype mixed with liberal doses of spin. Let's look at basic facts. There were no wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Osama Bin Laden possessed no army or air force. Saddam Hussein commanded no air force and kept no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Hans Blix, Scott Ritter and a cast of millions said as much. They believe Hussein, in 1991, destroyed all weapons of a type the United States produces in vast quantities. The DoD's weapons team found two mobile laboratories without the laboratories. Such mobile laboratories are now produced in the United States.

Bin Laden and Hussein fled their offices, leaving the American invaders to inflict brutal, savage and criminal acts of terror on the Afghan and Iraqi people.

Besides killing, maiming or wounding tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, the United States' torture of detainees is unconscionable, illegal and morally repugnant. More than 10,000 Iraqis and untold numbers of Afghans have been arbitrarily imprisoned on suspicion of being "terrorists".

Torture is common in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay. Where U.S.-applied torture is inadequate, suspects are packaged and delivered to countries such as Egypt, Morocco and Algeria for interrogation. Confessions are then extracted for collation back in the United States.

As Brigadier-General Janis Karpinski puts it: "It's not that they don't have rights... They have fewer rights than enemy prisoners of war."

Americans accept this obscenity. In doing nothing to publicize or counter it, the mainstream media, often targeted by those they support in Iraq and Afghanistan, condones it.



When they said "Repent Repent" | I wonder what they meant | When they said "Repent Repent" | I wonder what they meant | When they said "Repent Repent" | I wonder what they meant

Given the present ghastly state of affairs, why should we view the invasion of Iraq as the end of war? To start with, the nature of war has changed. The ratio of military to civilian wartime casualties is the inverse of fifty years ago. During WWII, eight soldiers lost their lives for every civilian killed. Today, eight civilians die for every soldier lost in battle.

Remembering the 23,000,000 fronts faced by U.S. troops in the Iraqi theater of operations, war, as we know it, is coming to an end.

In 2001, I watched a battle group leaving Norfolk, Virginia for Afghanistan. As a response to 9-11, it struck me as a decidedly twentieth-century response to a twenty-first century problem.

In a ludicrous display of brute force lacking any capacity to address the problems it faced, the ships were sailing to join two battle groups already in position, an air force second to none, and tens of thousands of military personnel tasked with finding and destroying Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban, and al-Qa'ida.

It was a conventional response to an unconventional threat. Why? Call them dumb, but American war planners are not stupid. The future in mind, there was a need to test theories put forward by analysts who foresee the use of such battle groups as sea-based arsenals.

The invasion of yet another Third World country by the world's only super power offered a suitable test bed.

Shipping and troop movements had little to do with the outcome of Afghanistan's invasion. The state security apparatus's ability to work with proxy armies forming the Northern Alliance was also put to the test. The result was a match made in Nirvana. Experimentation delivered promising results. If anything, a tough campaign in Iraq will make the future easier for a Bush regime elected to a second term.

In many ways, Iraq is a win-win situation for militarists on both sides.

That those defending Iraq from invasion and occupation will triumph on the ground is not in doubt. American soldiers go to Iraq to kill Iraqis so that Iraqis will not kill them. The jihadee kills invading Americans selflessly, with a knowledge of his or her eternal reward. Under such rules of engagement, only the jihadee, with an apparently better grasp of principles supposedly shared by the world's other great religions, can win.

Cheney and his gang would be hard pressed to care less. They are oilmen, not soldiers. They will tend to the barrels and allow the body bags on both sides to take care of themselves. In war, winning is relative. The Bush administration does not mind sacrificing others' lives on the altar of a future only they foresee. Anyway, that future stands to displace even the jihadee from his position as the H-Bomb of the dispossessed.

There is another positive reason to view this neo-con campaign as the end of conventional war.

During the apartheid era, most South Africans took succor from the knowledge that a minority could not oppress a majority forever. History told us war destroys governments. Governments are ephemeral. Peoples and cultures are not. By attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, faced with no opposition and hiding behind a facade or righteousness, George W. Bush committed all Americans to a war against the people of those countries.

Bar their obliteration, there is no way to defeat them. Genocide, done by halves, sees peoples rebounding with increased resilience.

George W. Bush's oil wars always were going to be a bloody mess. For non-militarists, it is a lose-lose equation. Even in the absence of organized urban warfare, popular resistance was always going to exact a terrible toll. Already, as the war gets under way, it is evident the United States cannot subdue a burgeoning conflict and win the day; whatever your definition of win.

The so-called war declared over by the American president before it started in May, he and his lapdogs employed linguistic lunacy for short-term gain. Tripping over their unbraided tongues, they betrayed a global trust and consigned the United States to pariah status.

Word on the global street has been unkind, to say the least. "Fuck 'em," is a sentiment frequently expressed when raising the U.S. in conversation. "They'll be thrashed. Serves 'em right. They had it coming to them."

They had it coming to them. I've heard that one before.

I doubt such sentiments raise eyebrows among those making up the Bush cabal. They have bigger fish to fry.

A third factor rendering conventional war obsolete is conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom in the corridors of political power suggests a U.S. withdrawal would signify a whipping. Better to stay and wait out the coming storm at the cost of tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of American jobs, tens of thousands of Iraqi lives and a sizeable cut to Bechtel, Halliburton and other friends.

Better to restore law, order and good governance in a country rendered ungovernable by trigger-happy kids, yahoos in uniform, rampant crime, a swelling resistance army and an illegitimate regime unacceptable to right-thinking Iraqis.

Better to watch the cradle of civilization, where 1,000 civilians are being killed each week, slide into self-sustaining anarchy, civil war, poverty, illness, and depravity than appear unable to control the uncontrollable.

Better to forget that, for Americans, the war was lost before the first boot heel left its imprint on Iraqi soil.

Better for whom?

"God is fighting them with your hands," Saddam Hussein told Iraqis last week.

The Bush regime does not need God. It has more powerful options.

As with a people, you cannot kill an idea. This cuts both ways; for neo-cons and resistance fighters. Nor can you hunt down and eliminate terror where there is only enmity and hatred. Terror is transitory. It cannot survive where killing and carnage are the norm; it moves on.

Where rape was used as a tactic in Sierra Leone and civilians were forced to cut out and eat the hearts of their relatives in the DRC, terror held no sway. In such situations, all that remains is murder and death.



Things are going to slide ... | There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code | Your private life will suddenly explode | There'll be phantoms | There'll be fires on the road | and the white man dancing

Neo-cons like to think "out of the box".

This is where the downside to the end of war kicks in. The future lies in our hands. Today, we see a campaign of murder for experimentation and profit taking place in Iraq. It is an extremely costly business. If Americans are aware of anything, it is cost.

Conventional approaches to warfare are not cost-effective.

What are the alternatives? In the absence of substantial armies being fielded by Third World countries facing conventional threats to their people, land and resources, we cannot assume Western securocrats charged with stealing the future will pack their bags and go away.

Win or lose, war is a lucrative business, a valuable commodity sucked up by a voracious, seemingly insatiable market.

Like any product subject to market forces, war is subject to the concept of continuous improvement. It's a case of "Out with the old, in with the new."

As the military industrial complex melds further with Western business and energy interests, we will see the rise of the new neo-con. We will see Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Richard Armitage, Robert Kagan and their venal ilk resurrected as Schwarzenegger clones on steroids.

They will do battle with the same interests that scuppered the World Trade Organization (WTO) talks ten days ago at Cancun, Mexico. The interests of the super rich and the super poor, vested in their post-democratic leaders, are inexorably moving towards a showdown.

If we view as dummy runs all conflicts the United States has initiated since Vietnam, what does a future war between rich and poor hold? What shape will resource wars of the future take? Why, if we look at the current Iraqi debacle, is the U.S. government apparently immune to criticism leveled at it? What do the French, Germans and British know that we do not?

Six years ago, a Quadrennial Defense Review Board found the U.S. military, in its post-Cold War form, inadequately equipped and trained to fight two wars simultaneously. If their finding was ever in doubt, one has only to turn on the television or glance at the headlines on Google's news site.

Most would agree the Bush administration would have preferred to have Syria and Iran locked down, North Korea muzzled, and West African oil reserves stitched before the onset of the 2004 election season. However, assured of its return to the Oval Office, or comfortable with the notion of a fresh Democrat or Republican administration furthering the national agenda, it appears unconcerned.

Like Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration has time on its side. Ongoing war is not in doubt. The product is. From a neo-con point of view, more cost-effective methods of coercion and resource control are imperative.

Building on the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and exploiting the Bush Doctrine of Preemption, the Pentagon is planning to reinforce the U.S. nuclear arsenal with a new generation of low-yield Tactical Nuclear Weapons (TNW) delivered through an upgraded Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Program.

The NPR envisaged possible preemptive nuclear strikes against several countries:

In setting requirements for nuclear strike capabilities, distinctions can be made among the contingencies for which the United States must be prepared. Contingencies can be categorized as immediate, potential or unexpected. ... Immediate contingencies involve well-recognized current dangers� Current examples of immediate contingencies include an Iraqi attack on Israel or its neighbors, a North Korean attack on South Korea, or a military confrontation over the status of Taiwan. ... North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Libya are among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies. All have longstanding hostility toward the United States and its security partners; North Korea and Iraq in particular have been chronic military concerns. All sponsor or harbor terrorists, and all have active WMD and missile programs.

In May this year, approving the requested sums, the Senate Armed Services Committee completed its markup of the National Defense Authorization Bill for the fiscal year 2004.

And, in keeping with Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's seemingly senseless demands that the U.S. fighting forces stay lean and mean, the new neo-cons seek to preclude quagmires such as Iraq. Should the going get rough in the Middle East, they can easily subjugate their favored army of ragheads.

Until they do, the neo-cons will use Iraq to convince Americans the Bush regime or its successor knows what it is doing. John and Jane Doe will come to realize that war is inevitable, that it is costly and, if they are to sustain their unquenchable appetite for consumer goods produced in the sweatshop that is the Third World, sacrifices will have to be made.

Far better to sacrifice a few million Iraqis than the benefits accruing to those living in the misinformation economy.

The American public will come to demand quick, clean surgical strikes and, by God, that is what it will get. Had Baghdad been subject to an initial strike by TNWs, U.S. forces would have moved swiftly to secure the Kirkuk oilfields, suppressed resistance before it started, and moved on to Syria.

Baghdad might have been a sheet of glass but, hey, who cares? Looters trashed a good portion of human history in any event. Who's complaining?

The threat of similar devastating preemptive action would have seen North Korea toeing Washington's line and Saudi Arabia would not now be issuing press releases reflecting a desire to acquire a nuclear arsenal.



You'll see a woman | Hanging upside down | Her features covered by her fallen gown | And all the lousy little poets | Coming round | Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson | And the white man dancin'

The downside to the end of conventional war is the dawn of an age of Pocket Apocalypse. It will target over-population and disease; it will be an age of nuclear warfare conducted preemptively on Third World countries much like Iraq. A logical extension of Project for the New American Century (PNAC) thinking, fast becoming official policy and practice, such warfare is closer than most would choose to think.

Resistance is futile in the face of Americans' recognition of 'other people' being the enemy. Any number of Third World fighters armed with RPGs and Kalashnikovs is incapable of facing down a TNW fired from earth orbit. Used preemptively against peoples deemed enemies by politicians unaccountable to their electorate, no media will cover these 'wars'.

Before long, such events will become nine-day wonders commanding as little attention and attracting as little opprobrium as the blatant lies of the most powerful man on earth. Nothing dulls the conscience like repetition, and immediately realizable rewards (cheap gas) show that most attach a small price to their morality.

Today, with the future obscured by a curtain of obfuscation, many find the need to accentuate the positive. Such people tend to denigrate those who speculate on the agendas of the securocrats. For them, war, as Westerners know it, has passed its sell-by date in a positive, liberal sense. How sadly, hopelessly deluded such people are.

As the neo-cons march to global supremacy using means at their immediate disposal, those peopling the information society will probably continue sucking at their brains with straws, floating a sea of lies, oblivious to the obvious, transfixed by a media machine feeding them a daily diet of rapid-fire deceit.

Back in September 2001, the hijackers of four commercial airliners might have believed they were delivering a message to the Bush administration. They were fools. Bush and Bin Laden, embracing the unconventional much like resistance fighters on the streets and overpasses of Baghdad, were delivering a message to the American people.

Afghanistan and Iraq form the foreword and introduction preceding the first chapter in A Dummy's Guide to the Pocket Apocalypse, essential reading between the lines for those entering an age of preemptive nuclear warfare.

Whether or not fear-filled Americans care to tear themselves from their TV sets to decipher the message left them two years ago is entirely up to them. It does not matter to their leaders. They are in control.

Give me back the Berlin wall | Give me Stalin and St Paul | Give me Christ | Or give me Hiroshima | Destroy another fetus now | We don't like children anyhow | I've seen the future, baby: | It is murder

Leonard Cohen | The Future

[1] The United States does not occupy Iraq. Some 150,000 troops and a handpicked clique of collaborators are trying to occupy a country already occupied by 23,000,000 people. Some occupation. Then again, who really wants Iraq, the Bush administration and Condi Rice's "...central front in the war against terrorism"?

[First posted at Open Source Politics]

A State of Terror Too

George W. Bush's State of Dreaming

For the innermost decision | That we cannot but obey | For what's left of our religion | I lift my voice and pray: | May the lights in The Land of Plenty | Shine on the truth some day.

Leonard Cohen | Land of Plenty

...the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor.

Rebuilding America's Defenses | Project for a New American Century

South Africans, schooled in the politics of state-sponsored terror, the "divide and rule" stratagem, and fortified by healthy doses of pragmatism and skeptism, remained unmoved by sentiment surrounding 9-11 commemorations this past Thursday. The Bush regime's despicable program of acquiring oil and other resources by invasion and occupation has ensured the evaporation of goodwill towards the United States and the growth of a rampant and vituperative anti-Americanism.

Thursday's ceremonies, replete with the nauseating schlock that shrouded the air like dust from the fallen towers throughout the year following their collapse, carried with it the requisite contrived hype designed to move a veritable library of recently-published books, documentaries and films. Among the latter, we find the dubious DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, designed to fit President George W. Bush's campaign for re-election in 2004.

Many people, however, opted for contemplation this year. Such quiet reflection evinces a dawning realization of the exploitation of the event, the shameless promotion of a global reign of terror and an ad hoc hegemony by a cynical state apparatus. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's statement did little to undermine this view: "Let this day always be a reminder ... why we must fight and win this global war on terror."

The U.S.A.'s grip on that elusive commodity, corporeal security, is absolute. It has never been in doubt. With the largest defense budget the world has known, the ability to blow the globe apart many times over, and a globally pervasive surveillance and policing capacity, the United States cannot be defeated militarily or by random acts of terror.

Yet, since September 11, 2001, the Bush regime has unstintingly, fallaciously, and for its own selfish ends, linked its future to national security concerns.

9-11 was a tragic, spectacular event, an attack on American life and property by, in the main, Saudi nationals. There is, however, no evidence to suggest a sustained terror campaign being waged against the American people or their government. Much as a single advertisement promoting a product in a magazine is a costly and wasteful exercise, a single attack on American soil would constitute a campaign destined to collapse at the outset. Two years ago, the only things to collapse were the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

Nor was the country's grip on material security loosened by 9-11. Any stated weakness is mythic, in keeping with the scripted charade we are watching play itself out wherever Bechtel, Halliburton, multinational oil companies and vested-interest groups and think tanks have an interest.

In terms of lives lost, it can be argued that 9-11 was not the most devastating terror attack carried out on American soil. The April 19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, killed 168 people. 2,800 people died in New York, Washington D.C. and in a Pennsylvanian field on September 11, 2001. Man for man, the nineteen hijackers aboard the four airliners each accounted for 147 lives, falling far short of the indivdual tally of the American from Oklahoma City, still the most lethal terrorist the United States has ever known.

We who live elsewhere know this. But body bags and statistics mean as little to us as they do to our political leaders. The symbolism of the event counted for more than the lives extinguished. It is that symbolism that is being abused. Just as we do not trust statistics, we know that the Bush regime's ability to "fool all the people all the time" is overrated. There are as yet no real and imminent external threats to U.S. hegemony. Where the United States' leaders would have us see "terrorists", we see only the administration of George W. Bush.

Bearing in mind Shakespeare's observation "Security gives way to conspiracy" (Julius Caesar), attention needs to be paid to demands for full, open investigations into 9-11, anthrax, the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the duplicity of America's military-industrial leaders. The maxim, "The enemy is never without, always within", holds good. There is an author behind every scripted tragedy. More, to sustain a myth, one needs a director. It is he and all those supporting him who must be shown to be making executive decisions that kill Americans and tens of thousands of non-U.S. citizens.

America's actions following 9-11 have elevated to center stage something far greater than material security. Security, in name, has given way to conspiracy in shameless practice. Since his injection into the White House by the United States Supreme Court, George W. Bush has built his presidency on conspiracy in the name of national security. Until he is shown up for the fraud he is, he and his cohorts will continue to exert inordinate influence on U.S. foreign policy for decades to come, whether in or out of office (with or without the help of 'revolving door' friends such as the Carlyle Group and Halliburton).

If the congressional report into the 9-11 massacre denies its readers access to information spelling out a U.S.-Saudi plot devised and implemented by the National Security Council, it delivers enough to hang minor players, the U.S. security apparatus. Given detailed briefings by 11 countries and having tracked many of the operatives as they went about their training over two years in the United States on visas issued in Saudi Arabia, the FBI had all the information needed to stop the operation, first proposed in 1996.

The DoD had more than adequate opportunity to scotch its execution from the same Andrews AFB where, to now, as many as 1,325 wounded U.S. troops en route to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington or the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda have been stretchered from C-17 transports. (A further 4,500 have been shipped back from Iraq suffering mental and physical ill health.)

Even with excisions, it should be apparent to all but the willfully blind that George W. Bush and his cohorts had all the intelligence they needed to appreciate just how their allowing of such an attack (the destruction of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon) could profit them and, by extension, the United States in the long term.

U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney sums up the administration's approach to adversity: "...the Good Lord didn't see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would normally not choose to go. But, we go where the business is."

For financial gain (which equates to power), the American security edifice (subject to extraordinary bureaucratic frustration in the months preceding the hit), was ordered to stand down for a day and 2,800 people were sacrificed at the slippery altar of untold millions of barrels of oil by avaricious, unscrupulous representatives of a military industrial complex gone mad.

Later that day, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, scribbling furiously in his notebook, made a point of including Saddam Hussein's name among those destined to find themselves on the receiving end of long-planned terror offensives. George W. Bush, a glove-puppet operative, then tucked his treason into his Bible and implemented the Project for a New American Century's (PNAC) Plan A.

This blueprint for global domination first saw the light of day as Rebuilding America's Defenses (download) and had been bubbling on a backburner since 2000, waiting to be lent luster by the imperious National Security Strategy of 2002.



Now, there's a woman on my block, | She just sit there facin' the hill. | She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan | License to Kill

While Bush Inc. does not have the wherewithal to impose outdated notions of empire on the world, it does have the will and the deterrent power of its formidable arsenal to destabilize key states and regions.

Presently, as European countries scrabble for oil in the Libyan desert, the Bush Gang fights Russia for supremacy in the Caspian Basin and more established Middle Eastern oil markets. Traditional business partners Saudi Arabia are playing both off against each other. They need to. Backed by a myopic electorate, Bush is plunging Iraq into a designed chaos and permanent occupation, setting it up as a future oil supplier and springboard for a Saudi takeover.

Increasing tension between the two former allies in terror has been exacerbated by the Saudis exploiting Bush's increasingly desperate, poorly crafted attempts to quash evidence of U.S. complicity in 9-11 and its leading role in the acts of mass terror following it, i.e. the illegal invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Having seen the Taliban pay for their refusal to accept U.S. conditions for piping oil from former CIS states and the Caspian Basin to the Indian Ocean (an attack sketched by the Clinton administration, fleshed out by Bush's team and placed on his desk four days before the Twin Tower attack), the Saudis need all the leverage they can lay their hands on.

With a potential U.S. occupation force already in place in their country and 130,000 troops across their northern border, the desert-kingdom co-conspirators behind 9-11 need the attentions of the U.S. and its president's father, George H. Bush (Saudi and South Korean bagman for the Carlyle Group), like they need a hole in the head. The Russians offer them an air of respectability George Bush Sr. does not possess.

The groundwork for PNAC Plan B, a fallback, was already well under way on September 11, 2001. United Sates oil companies cling to the West African coast like maggots to a cadaver, the vanguard of earth movers gouging the earth for gold, diamonds, uranium, timber and coltan. Pillaging African oil from Equatorial Guinea, the Niger Delta (where they are well-placed to head off the southern surge of Islam), Gabon and Angola (where 90 percent of the country's oil is pumped from the secessionist Cabinda enclave), U.S. interests effectively divide a world charted by the Pentagon's New Map.

The United States all but has West Africa in its pocket. Should the Middle East fall to the U.S. military, Bush's successors will hold East Africa and European interests in North Africa in a vise. The notable exclusion of South Africa from the Oil Belt (or The Gap, as the war-makers choose to call it) makes it increasingly likely it will see a return to its colonial roots as a victualling station for armies on the move northwards and to the Chain of Steel strung across the East.

The dollar, controlling global oil, will hold sway over the Euro and the Yen.

Millions are in little doubt that George W. Bush was aware of the attacks planned for 9-11. Nine months after his injection into the White House through the manipulation of the democratic process, the presidency of George Bush Senior's son was moribund. Osama bin Laden, the scion of a family extremely close to the Bushes, allegedly gave George's career as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces a shot in the arm.

A desperate Taliban, urged by circumstance and the US security services, were offered a Saudi hit squad of convenience and the opportunity to make a statement. Earlier in the year, U.S. government representatives had threatened, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." Facing occupation, they opted for the pre-emptive strike.

Whether or not bin Laden was working for Western, Saudi or Taliban interests, remains to be seen. While hundreds have been incarcerated at Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay, bin Laden and Mullah Omar (identified as the masterminds behind the attack in less time than it took George W. Bush to respond to news of it) have deliberately not been brought to book with the lightning speed that characterized the identification and arrest of minor players remaining alive after September 11, 2001.

Today, looking remarkably relaxed and towards the future, bin Laden and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, stroll among the flower bedecked mountains of Northern Pakistan, issuing hollow threats. In New York, Baghdad, Kabul and hundreds of cities and towns around the world, grieving families mourn their dead.

If, over two years, anything has been demonstrated beyond doubt, it is the selective ability of the U.S. security apparatus to apprehend those they purport to seek. In this instance, those arrested were the minions, the 9-11 fall guys. All had been under intense surveillance for years. None were arrested before completing their mission. Members of the British SAS at Tora Bora, having trapped Osama bin Laden, experienced first-hand the obfuscatory meddling of politicians who allowed bin Laden and Mullah Omar to slip to sanctuary in much the same way Saddam Hussein has done.



Goodness hides behind its gates | But even the president of the United States | Sometimes must have | To stand naked.

Bob Dylan | It's Alright Ma

Despite overwhelming evidence of a negligence transcending the criminal, the Bush regime's hold on the reins of global power has never been tighter.

Indulging a childlike petulance, U.S. citizens remain under a spell cast by a corrupt and belligerent leadership while they came to terms with the graphic symbolism inherent in an unknown force pulling down of the pillars of the temple. In a tragic, ironic twist, and much like the white supporters of the apartheid state (see A State of Terror), Americans seem incapable of accepting their leaders' complicity in terror. Much like those who bolstered the apartheid regime, American citizens have more to fear from their leadership cabal, an elite that benefits from perpetuating their fear of inadequate security, than anyone or anything else.

The threat this elite poses to American security is as real as the fear it has sown among the American people.

9-11 has been unashamedly abused to further the arguments, agendas and portfolios of all who attach to it any meaning beyond that evident in the tragedy itself. In keeping with PNAC policy dictats, draconian 'pre-emptive' security legislation designed to prevent the possibility of such attacks recurring, allow far more devastating, unprovoked attacks on states or persons deemed enemies by American politicians interpreting intelligence as they wish.

Is it any wonder the world chooses to despise the United States rather than empathize with it?

Such legislation, contradicting the spirit of the Constitution of the United States, directly affects American citizens and all those living outside the country's borders. The outsourcing of torture, detention without trial, invasive surveillance by electronic, digital and other means, an increase in 'visible policing', never-ending war, the dissemination of misinformation through a pliant media, and the perpetuation of a mythic threat show Americans to be perhaps more insecure today than at any time in their country's history.

That Americans fail to see through the so-called War on Terrorism continues to amaze South Africans. We watch agog as Bush's opportunistic inhumanity, driven by his Global Transaction Strategy, deprives people around the world of their human rights in the name of, you guessed it, security. Tin pot dictators, smaller in stature than the U.S. president only by virtue of his obscene war-making budget, are stepping up campaigns of terror against their own people. Hundreds of thousands are dying as a direct result of the Bush Doctrine.

Through pre-emptive war, a blatant disregard of international peace and law-enforcement agencies, the suspension of fundamental human rights, the trashing of democratic values and processes, conspiracy and disinformation, security legislation and a manufactured state of domestic terror, criminal negligence and perhaps treason, the United States government has turned a spectacular, extraordinary tragedy into an iconic fallibility of convenience it continues to use to its financial, strategic and treacherous advantage.

We will take the actions necessary to ensure that our efforts to meet our global security commitments and protect Americans are not impaired by the potential for investigations, inquiry, or prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC), whose jurisdiction does not extend to Americans and which we do not accept.

National Security Council | The National Security Strategy of the United States of America

[First posted at Open Source Politics]

A State of Terror

P.W. Botha's Dream State

This is the story of a government voted to power by a minority; entrenches itself through nepotism, corruption and electoral fraud; enjoys hegemonic power; consistently ignores United Nations resolutions; legislates the suppression of civil liberties and freedoms; promotes itself as a bastion of Christian ideals; bases its policies on security from imagined threats; invades, occupies or destabilizes sovereign states; seeks profit from warfare; deploys nuclear weapons; funds and gives direction and material aid to proxy armies; engages overtly and covertly in murder, repression, and torture; runs an active chemical and biological weapons program; exploits occasional domestic terror incidents to launch attacks on opponents; sponsors massacres; uses detention without trial; manipulates the media to its ends; consistently lies to its electorate; quashes dissent and denigrates those who oppose it as "unpatriotic"; enriches itself through free-market socialism; relies on its security establishment to determine policy; creates a rubber-stamp judiciary, and reduces its citizens to pliant, subservient instruments of its will.

The dark shadow of Fascism is moving swiftly over South Africa. The advent of the Government of Dr. Malan and his Nationalist Party, well-known for its servile adulations of Hitler and allegiance to fascist principles, has stripped off the mantle of democracy ... All the pious proclamations of Christian trusteeship and white man's civilisation can no longer hide the dangers that are inherent in a country where race and colour rule as the instrument of State policy. ... unless the United Nations take effective action, South Africa will be plunged into the most frightful race conflicts.

South African Communist Party (1948)

In 1948, D. F. Malan's Herenigde Nasionale Party (Reunited National Party), the party that was to entrench apartheid and shape South Africa's future for 45 years, was elected to power by a minority of eligible voters. Attracting 42 percent of the vote on a ticket vilifying the governing United Party as being too liberal and incapable of dealing with the so-called swart gevaar (black threat), it won 79 seats. Although the ousted governing party drew 52 percent of the vote, it took only 71 seats.

Embarking on a legislative rampage to entrench a system that had been in place for decades, the Nationalists sought to dispossess black South Africans absolutely. The 1952 Suppression of Communism Act declared communism illegal and allowed the state to ban individuals, usually for 5 years. Banning took the form of house arrest.

The 1954 Resettlement of Natives Act legalized forced removals and fostered the creation of bantustans, impoverished tribal reserves in which famine and disease prevailed. Created as "independent states" by the 1953 Bantu Authorities Act, bantustans served as official "homelands" for millions of South Africans (labeled "superfluous Bantu") not needed for labor in South Africa's towns and cities. Tying repression to security legislation, the 1956 Native Administration Act allowed the state to banish black South Africans to remote rural areas indefinitely.

In 1968, former president of the African National Congress (ANC), the late Oliver Tambo, wrote:

"During the last two decades human values in our country sank to primitive levels as elementary human rights were trampled underfoot on a scale unparalleled in recent history. This occurred in open and direct defiance of the United Nations and the entire international community. It is as well to remember that the men in power in South Africa today wholeheartedly supported Nazism and have never repented of it."

Not allowed to move from city to city by the Native Laws Amendment Act or leave South Africa by the Departure from the Republic Regulation Act and a raft of legislation entrenching National Party power, most South Africans became prisoners in their own country.

The 1955 Bantu Education Act denied most South African children access to a meaningful education. Over five years, ANC-led protests against Bantu education culminated in the 1960 Sharpeville Massacre and a 10,000 strong march in Cape Town. Sixty-nine people died at Sharpeville and two in Cape Town.

With the arrest of some 20,000 people, the non-racial Liberal Party decided peaceful protest to be meaningless. In 1961, the ANC formed Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK), charged with controlled violence focusing on sabotage under the leadership of Nelson Mandela. The award of the Nobel Peace Prize to former ANC president Albert Luthuli in December 1961 preceded MK's first guerilla actions by days.

As the National Party crushed dissent by South Africans of all races, it sought to dominate a civil society and economy dominated by white, English-speaking South Africans. Embarking on vigorous affirmative action and a socialist program of economic reform, Afrikaners replaced English-speaking whites at every level of South African society.

Espousing free-market principles and Calvinist Christian motives backed by the Dutch Reformed Church, the establishment of parastatals controlling transport, telecommunications, electricity, fuel, armaments and the production of iron and steel saw the rapid rise of white Afrikaners to positions of disproportionate power. The civil service, overhauled, became an instrument of the National Party, directly affecting the lives of all South Africans.

Most notably, the National Party took control of the state security apparatus and immediately shaped it to meet its desired ends.

There was far more at stake than the security of South Africa's peoples, a notion inextricably linked to their separation from each other. The apartheid state, guided by ideologues such as D. F. Malan, J. G. Strydom, H. F. Verwoerd, B. J. Vorster and P. W. Botha, saw enormous potential for generating and accumulating wealth throughout southern Africa.

Using its occupation of Namibia, in contravention of United Nations resolutions, as a buffer state and a springboard into Africa, the National Party sought to further its regional ambitions by military force. Under the guise of a Christian government fighting a "total onslaught" mounted by the Soviet Union and led by ANC "terrorists", the state dragged South Africa and tens of thousands of white conscripts into wars of conquest or destabilization with its neighbors.

Masters of the "divide and rule" strategy, the Nationalists set South Africa's loose on Namibia, Angola, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and the former Zaire (now the DRC). They easily coerced African leaders, including Malawi's Hastings Kamuzu Banda, into collaboration, escalating regional tension.

Demonizing communism and the "terrorist" threat that had supposedly ousted Ian Smith's white-minority government in Zimbabwe, the South African state drew moral and logistical support from Western powers including the United States and Britain. It became a formidable regional power, a leading exporter of arms to proxy armies in Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, and it developed and produced tactical nuclear weapons.

With black dissent subject to increasingly harsh security legislation, including amendments to the Internal Security Act, the Public Safety Act, the Immorality Act, and the Criminal Law Amendment Act, white South Africans began to feel increasingly secure under National Party rule. It was a false sense of security.

It is easy to explain the ease with which whites were so easily co-opted to the Nationalist cause. White and black South Africans had little experience of each other. The Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, the Group Areas Act, the Customs and Excise Act, and the Official Secrets Act (among many others legislated during the 1950s) ensured the separation of peoples, with whites having the run of the country.

Censorship denied South Africans access to information that was common knowledge elsewhere. News of the 1976 CIA-backed invasion of Angola, the Cassinga Massacre in which South African Defence Force (SADF) troops slaughtered up to 800 people, and the SADF's later thrashing at Cuito Canivale were withheld from the public in the interest of national security. With undue enthusiasm, the state censored or banned books (including Anna Sewell's children's classic Black Beauty), films, and magazines freely available across the country's borders.

Television or, as Posts and Telegraphs Minister Albert Hertzog called it, "the devil in the black box", was not introduced to South Africa until 1976. South African Broadcasting Corporation Chairman (SABC), Piet Meyer, a member of the Afrikaner Broederbond, immediately put it to work for the state.

"We must harness all our communication media in a positive way in order to gather up Afrikaner national political energy in the struggle for survival in the future ... our members must play a leading role," he told fellow Broeders in 1977. SABC director-general Douglas Fuchs concurred. "We are involved in the politics of survival. The SABC cannot stand aside."

Questioning unswerving adherence to National Party policy, a journalist received the following explanation from SABC senior political commentator Alexander Steward, "By asking that, it shows you do not understand the ways of propaganda. With propaganda you never let up."

Writing in 1996, ANC stalwart Govan Mbeki noted:

"The state security system identified the cause of the country's woes as an onslaught by the communists from the north. The red peril that was to overtake the country became the focus of TV propaganda on a nightly basis. The white population was brainwashed into accepting that the government's security apparatus was the only hope of salvation from evil communists."

The state's deluded ideal, always shrouded in allusions to security from "terrorism", was a South Africa without black people. By the early 1970s, it seemed such a state was possible. It seemed South Africa would one day be completely free of the "evils of communism", the "terrorist threat" and, of course, black South Africans.

In 1976, white repression turned to bite the hand from which it drew its lifeblood. The Soweto riots, during which up to 800 people (mainly school children) were gunned down across the country, triggered the downfall of white domination and repression.

However, with legislation to back them, the explosion of black anger within South Africa's borders convinced a vast security network and most white South Africans that they needed tougher measures to counter a fast-increasing "terrorist" threat to their security.

Dozens of black civic organizations joined the ANC, the PAC and other liberation movements on the state's list of banned organizations. Deaths in detention, routine torture, and the disappearance of those opposed to the state became commonplace.

If the 1976 protests highlighted anything, they showed how brittle white South Africans felt their security to be. A flood of qualified white people left South Africa in the largest 'brain drain' the country had seen since Verwoerd led the country out of the Commonwealth in 1960. Over the following two decades, whites would flee South Africa with each wave of violent protest. To some, democracy's arrival was merely a matter of time, and they did not want to be around to meet it.

Whites opposing apartheid had few options open to them. Unable to identify with the humiliation and suffering meted out to their black compatriots, many elected to 'change the system from within' by joining white opposition parties. Effectively, all they could do was warn fellow detractors of the need to prepare for and participate in an inevitable showdown with the state.

In a polarized society, their effect was minimal. White liberals, trapped in the cocoon of privilege, argued for moderation, opposed sanctions, entertained ideas of a 'qualified franchise', and elected parliamentarians lending credibility to National Party rule. They did not take kindly to talk of "black majority rule".

Within their ranks, however, were people such as Helen Suzman, Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine. In 1986, Van Zyl Slabbert, the charismatic leader of the Progressive Federal Party, resigned as Leader of the Opposition. Boraine followed him. He explains their rationale:

"We had no real plans for an alternative course of action, simply an awareness that genuine negotiation politics could not emerge from a Parliament dominated by whites, and we wanted to make that point as starkly as we could. Our first objective, therefore, was to make contact with the extra-parliamentary movement. We were encouraged by the warmth with which we were accepted."

By 1980, shadowy state security agencies had fleshed out P. W. Botha's "total strategy", designed to quash the "total onslaught". As B. J. Vorster's former Minister of Defence (sic), Botha saw immense value in military personnel guiding policy formulation and brought them into the State Security Council (SSC). Through agencies such as the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB) and Joint Management Committees (JMC), the military had eyes and ears everywhere.

Even so, South Africans' resistance to increasingly vicious state repression grew stronger. The resourcefulness of the two opposing extremes and an increasing number of body bags shipped back from Namibia, Angola and elsewhere forced white South Africans to slowly realize the illusory nature of security.

No incident highlighted its ephemeral qualities better than the 1982 arrest in the United States of Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, the officer commanding South Africa's naval headquarters at Simonstown.

Gerhardt, who mingled freely with SSC securocrats, had been a Soviet spy for 23 years, delivering state secrets to Moscow and compromising South Africa, Israel, Britain and the United States. The naval officer's arrest revealed the supportive environment in which the apartheid state operated, its most ardent supporters being Washington D.C., London, and Tel Aviv. Learning of the depth of Gerhardt's knowledge, a Mossad officer remarked, "We have been stripped naked."

If Gerhardt's duplicity constituted treason, the duplicity of those propping up Pretoria's inhumane system of government comprised an infinitely greater evil.

By showing the security of the apartheid state to be nothing more than an illusion and the sanctimonious piety of London and Washington to be little more than political expedience, Gerhardt's activities rammed home how a willingness to entrust one's security to the hands of a brutal and manipulative government is fundamentally flawed. In politics, trust wields no influence and offers no security.

Gerhardt, through the devastation wrought by his quiet thwarting of Pretoria's ambitions, showed black South Africans that direct confrontation with the military might of the apartheid regime might not be necessary. Their buying power, labor, expertise, skills, and knowledge could be a force far more powerful than any military machine.

Under the aegis of the United Democratic Front (UDF), then serving as the 'internal wing of the ANC', resistance to apartheid intensified during the early 80s, resulting in a sustained campaign to render the country ungovernable. Aided by sanctions, anti-apartheid activists in South Africa's black townships used consumer and rent boycotts, labor strikes, school stayaways and similar actions to incapacitate any sense of 'business as usual'.

Just as the National Party had set about securing the country for itself, Afrikaners and other white people in the 1950s, black South Africans organized through the 70s and early 80s. In much the same way it would later use institutional organs of civil society such as universities and think-tanks to thrash out policy in the run up to South Africa's 1994 election, the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) used civic and church organizations, protestors and workers' collectives, people in positions of power or influence, and street committees in every township to press home their demand for political recognition.

By the mid-1980s, with P. W. Botha at the helm, South Africa had fallen into a state of low-level civil war. While South Africans took to the streets to do battle with the SADF and police, Pretoria-funded and advised rebel armies RENAMO and UNITA (fed arms by parastatal Armscor) neutralized the "threat" posed by "terror-supporting" neighbors Mozambique and Angola. Both countries became bloodbaths.

The South African government, not content with murdering its people, devised increasingly bizarre methods of doing so. Detainees, held indefinitely and without charge, where thrown out of windows and airplanes, electrocuted or beaten to death, poisoned, starved, bombed (by car, letter or, in one case, explosives planted inside the headphones of a tape recorder) or suffocated.

South Africans quickly learned to greet state-appointed judicial commissions of enquiry into deaths in detention, state collusion in massacres, or other excesses with derision and scorn. A rubber-stamp judiciary, created in the image of its masters, lent legitimacy to such actions only to those who sought it in blatant cover-ups.

In 1985, the country teetering on the brink of collapse following fuel shortages and a refusal by U.S.-based banks to roll over the country's foreign debt, P. W. Botha declared a State of Emergency. Arrests, detentions, torture and disappearances intensified. So too did visible confrontation. The right-of-center South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) reported an average of 44 people killed each month in political violence. By the mid-80s, the figure reached 86.

(Estimates of the monthly death toll following the unbanning of the ANC and other liberation movements and their leaders in February 1990 topped 250. The struggle for a legitimate share of power in South Africa gave new shape to political violence, fostered by decades of state brutality.)

In 1987, former Progressive Federal Party chairman Alex Boraine led a large contingent of white South Africans from diverse backgrounds to a meeting with members of the ANC leadership in Dakar, Senegal. The symbolism of their meeting was not lost on Botha. Those returning from Dakar were subject to charges of being "unpatriotic" at best, traitors at worst. Accused of lending the ANC credibility, Boraine's response was that he had arranged the meeting only because the 75-year old liberation movement possessed credibility.

Botha declared a second, indefinite State of Emergency in 1986, but the will to tear down the walls of a system that had imprisoned all South Africans for so long was unstoppable.

In 1989, a group of conservative National Party politicians, realizing just how tenuous their hold on power had become, forced P. W. Botha into sudden retirement following a mild stroke. F. W. de Klerk, a hard-line conservative, filled his shoes and, in one of his first addresses to the South African people, announced the unbanning of South Africa's liberation movements, the South African Communist Party, dozens of other organizations, countless leaders and, after 27 years in jail, Nelson Mandela.

A year later, De Klerk announced the repeal of all apartheid legislation.

De Klerk was a survivor, an astute politician, and a pragmatist. Like all politicians, his tolerance of altruism was low. Negotiating the National Party's way out of power was the only realistic alternative to its immediate destruction.

Schooled and highly skilled in National Party politics, he had been present as his predecessors, B. J. Vorster and P. W. Botha destroyed any systemic opposition to their rule from white South Africans. Come election time, it was customary for a white opposition party to predict making inroads into National Party support. By transferring the focus of the National Party election campaign onto an organization or party to the left of the claimant, both Vorster and Botha pulled the teeth of their detractors.

During the 1970s, Vorster sank the United Party opposition by focusing on the few liberals comprising the Progressive Party. During the 1987 white elections, at the height of the State of Emergency, Botha all but wiped out the centrist-right Democratic Party by focusing his party's election campaign on dissident Afrikaner independents led by Wynand Malan, swart gevaar and the dangers of the "terrorists" making up the banned and all but invisible ANC.

In doing so, he rallied English and Afrikaans-speaking whites to his cause. Conservative Afrikaners hived off from the National Party and joined the extreme right, people on whom Botha could always count if the going got rough.

F. W. de Klerk was no different. During the four-year period leading to a transfer of power to a democratically elected Government of National Unity (GNU), the National Party government intensified its covert campaign to destabilize the ANC. The ANC's readiness to reinstate Operation Vulindlela (Vula) neutralized the state's Operations Springbok and Thunderstorm. For four years, the future of all South Africans rested on a knife's edge. Few white people cared enough to realize it.

Forty-five years after D. F. Malan took power with a minority vote, F. W. de Klerk's National Party, the party of "Grand Apartheid", finally spoke for most white voters. Its supporters, clinging to it as though to a sinking liferaft, realized it was no longer the power it once purported to be, offering security, Christian values and protection from imagined "terrorists" crossing South Africa's borders.

The party that had used terror to its advantage for so long had become the end of the line for the fear filled and terminally insecure. Its great lie of securing the future for all South Africans had been exposed.

I suppose that human beings looking at it would say that arms are the most dangerous things that a dictator, a tyrant needs to fear. But in fact, no - it is when people decide they want to be free. Once they have made up their minds to that, there is nothing that will stop them.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

[First posted at Open Source Politics]