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]
