Clash of Civilizations"Cindy Sheehan's a clown. There is no anti-war movement."Robert Wrubel |
2005: A Lamentable YearStanding on the bridge wing of the Portuguese Meko 200 class frigate, the
NRP Álvares Cabral, I noted an all-weather chart listing the
NATO ships taking part in joint exercises off the South African coast. The media had reported that led by the flagship, the Ticonderoga-class missile cruiser
U.S.S. Normandy, two frigates from South Africa, one each from Portugal, the Netherlands, and Canada, a corvette from Denmark, and a German fleet replenishment vessel would participate.
The chart aboard the
Alvares Cabral listed two additional ships, the supply vessel
U.S.S. Big Horn and the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer
U.S.S. Bainbridge, which displaces as much tonnage as the
Normandy.
So why weren't these U.S. ships, which would would make something of a mockery of the
NATO nature of the flotilla, in port? Were they skulking over the horizon, lying low? My guess is somewhat more prosaic. The supply vessel was probably trundling north and the
U.S.S. Bainbridge, which would replace the
Normandy as flagship and head for the Mediterranean, was most likely doing duty in the Gulf. The
Normandy, ostensibly heading for the Med, would probably replace her, joining a battle group off Iran.
If we're not told these things, we can only guess at them.
Who woulda guessed the
whole fleet would be
'sunk' by a single sub? It at least gave
Defence Minister Terror Lekota chance to indulge in doublespeak directly contradicting his speech of last week.
"With sustained interoperatability with foreign forces such as Nato we are well positioned to respond to any unforeseen circumstances that may confront either ourselves or other regions," he told the
Cape Times.
Lekota was quite clear that a working relationship with Nato was desired, reported the Cape-based paper. "They have a partner of reliable capability because we are forging working relations here," he said.
So much for
"At the interstate defence and security committee meeting held in Dar es Salaam, the SADC defence and security ministers took the position and recommended that sister countries of the region should not agree to host Africom — in particular, to host [US] armed forces," he said.
BuaNews | Africa opposed to US command base
Grand Theft PentagonThe NATO force was predominantly American. I'm not surprised. As the only alternative to dispatching its fleets across the Pacific, sending them line astern through
Suez is probably not conducive to the secrecy so beloved of an increasingly totalitarian regime. Cape Town forms an essential, albeit low-key base for the U.S. fleet.
A source I consider impeccable spends much of his time down at the
Royal Cape Yacht Club, in a harbour made inaccessible to South Africans by U.S. pressure. Is it for our protection?
"Not at all," says my source. "Their supply ships are passing through all the time. And they don't do manifests."
He's miffed off because the U.S. is now allegedly asking that the yacht club be moved.
The cops x-raying people visiting the war party on the Waterfront were more forthright. "These
vokken* Americans make me
vokken sick. They're
vokken paranoid. We have to shut the
vokken harbour for them every time they
vokken come in. And that they do all the
vokken time."
*
Vokken is a South African word used by those trying to overcome a stutter.Local marines and navy divers spent five days guarding the flotilla.
I spoke to several sailors over the weekend. While the Americans and Canadians were allowed to go shark diving in False Bay, they weren't allowed to wander up Table Mountain. Too dangerous for the modern warfighter it seems. Even so, one PO boasted of being accosted at an ATM and having to do a duck on the double.
I wish the U.S. would do a duck. Its presence bodes ill, smacking of an empire on the march.
Wishful thinking will achieve nothing. Presently, there is no force on Earth capable of slowing, let alone stopping, the
Pentagon's juggernaut. China, Russia, the EU, the Middle East, Asia, and South America are powerless to prevent what might be the United States's last great leap of faith.
Game PlanAs the United States used, indeed needed, the Soviet Union and China to project its power, so emerging economic superpowers
China and
India will need the United States for some time to come. Unlike the former Soviet bloc and enjoying far greater rapport with its Putin-led Russian neighbour, China's economically forceful and resource-hungry foreign policy, will likely remain outwardly isolationist. Sino-Russo relations are good, contradicting those of the Sino-Soviet era when cross border skirmishes were so common they were seldom considered worthy of mention.
A country that has oppressed its own while keeping its hands off all but its
closest and smallest of neighbours, Beijing seems to realise that self-containment precludes over-extension and collapse. More, while it gives not a fig for others, a relatively stable world outside its borders means a greater likelihood of calm within.
With both the U.S. and China facing the consequences of
peak oil,
global warming, increasingly vicious
resource wars and
overpopulation, the latter is better placed to cope with change than the former. Nobody really gives a damn about climate change — a melting polar cap offers opportunity to drill for fossil fuels. For now, easy access to vast but finite oil reserves in a swiftly re-arming Russia, a blood-soaked Middle East and, until recently, a forgotten Africa give China an edge not enjoyed by the EU or North America.
Keeping the U.S. economy on its toes by threatening to
dump and sink the dollar amounts to short-term market manipulation of a type not dissimilar to Washington's regular recall of Chinese goods and its attendant media hype. The only difference is that, while the U.S. can only hope to keep the Yuan in check,
China can sink the dollar whenever it wants to.
Lacking any real threats to ongoing economic growth, Beijing would rather not upset the apple cart. Mammon, the god of the world's leading religion (according to
Ambrose Bierce) and the source of our love of "stuff", dictates Beijing will need to ship substandard goods westward a while longer before it takes its place as the
world's leading self-sustaining economy.
It will therefore go as softly as we on the U.S.
Besides, given the
sub-prime lending and hedge-fund debacle, the ramifications of which have
yet to make themselves felt, the United States is quite capable of scuttling its own economy. To keep going, it needs all the help it can get.
The Great War for CivilisationConcomitantly, any threat to China's future sovereignty or national integrity by an increasingly overpopulated south-east Asia is being taken care of by an overstretched American military hell bent on pursuing '
creative chaos' and a global '
arc of instability'. For now, financing the U.S. budget deficit remains in China's and Russia's increasingly fat-walleted interests.
A dissolute Rome remained propped up for at least a century after it collapsed. The U.S. use of proxy European armies, mercenaries recruited from Blackwater, Mexico, South Africa, an increasingly large pool of poor people, and warlords a la Rashid Dostum will maintain a pretence of security for quite some time. Security, through the barrel of a gun, is all the U.S. has going for it and until a short while ago, not even that seemed to be going all that well.
Needing a couple of hundred billion to bail out those affected by the
sub-prime lending market crash, the State department immediately dumped at least
$70 billion worth of weapons on the
Middle East, the most sizeable chunk going to its
onetime forward base of choice, Israel — now
gearing up for war with
Lebanon,
Syria, and
Iran.
Built on a meaningless currency increasingly reliant on linkage to others' oil, the victory culture has for the past few decades seen commonly accepted measures of its currency's worth transferred to its seemingly ceaseless production of
weapons of mass destruction.
Hedging its bets, Washington found itself on to a
multi-trillion dollar profit train. Should the price of oil rocket or should, God forbid, another war break out, wealthy Americans stand to make huge profits.
So, is it all doom and gloom for the
think-tank crowd? I think not. It's certainly not if you view torture, detention without trial, airbrushing and forgetting, mass surveillance, secrecy, the suspension of habeas corpus, the curtailment of civil liberties, record defense budgets, and increased taxes as the greatest cost of war in the 21st Century.
Only the
little people take offence at such things.
With American oligarchs now straddling a global economy sustained by increasingly small middle classes desperate to escape those who do their work, the great unwashed,
Dick Cheney has reason to smile. The U.S. epitomises the worst of Yeltsin's and the best of Stalin's Russia.
Deer Hunting with JesusI'd say the Bush administration has done pretty well. Aided by its business partners, the Democrats, the G.O.P. has vested unfettered dictatorial powers in an executive president on steroids. Taking around 10,000 casualties, the U.S. military has obliterated Afghanistan and Iraq, creating enemies and markets it will fight and others will profit from for decades to come.
Think about it. 10,000 dead, including those sacrificed on the altar of Ground Zero. Hell, not too long ago, the Brits would lose that number in an afternoon and still call it a good day. On the other side, more than a million innocent people have been blown apart, many more have been maimed or suffered grievous wounds, and more than four million Iraqi and Afghan refugees now flood Damascus, Amman, and to a lesser degree, every other city in the Middle East — Tel Aviv excepted, of course.
The U.S., it has been noted, can
accept such losses with equanimity.
More important, and like it or not, the U.S. military is firmly ensconced in at least four immense, permanent bases sprawled along the oil lines crossing Mesopotamia. With the help of NATO, the armed wing of the EU, it has beefed up its presence in every country surrounding Iran, starved out North Korea, and now looks set to oust Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf.
And, by taking Africa, it will take tomorrow from under China's nose. We're powerless to stop it.
Tom Barnett knows it. Author of numerous papers touting "the export of security", his last great blast justifiably proclaimed
The Americans Have Landed. Unlike most global citizens, Barnett has his feet firmly planted in reality's killing fields. He suffers few illusions. A
promoter of network-centric warfare, he knows just how insidious and all-embracing the warfare of empire should be.
The U.S. has
seven hundred military bases scattered across the globe, but Barnett knows these to be cumbersome, albeit necessary evils. Total war engages every level of society and, abetted by the great coalition of the unknowing, every level has been occupied. Our distributed network, including Cape Town's harbour, has been well and truly hacked.
It's a case of "All your base are belong to us."
The Pentagon's New MapIs this sort of thing planned? Hell yes. People far more intelligent, dispassionate, and indifferent to others than you or I have their minds focused firmly on the medium term. Acknowledging the need for smoke-and-mirror party tricks, e.g. the dumping of minions like Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Powell, Rove et al before indictment, the occasional injection of another puppet into the White House and the incessant bombardment of brain-numbing lies, these people, as my friend Barnett would put it, have the future
pretty well mapped out.
Much as we'd like to think otherwise, they are not dumb. In fact, the far right will go to any length to keep the best and brightest locked into wealth and privilege as it packs the stupid and the disadvantaged off to war.
Iran could be a mess, but in taking the Cape, the Bush Gang have prepared for every eventuality. Israel's value as a forward base and the guardian of Suez is
on the wane and could, conceivably, be dropped come the bombing of Iran. Should the Iranians be capable of blocking the Straits of Hormuz or better still, Suez, Israel will serve merely as a distraction, occupying the energies of countries adjacent to it.
It's not inconceivable that
Hezbollah and Hamas could win the battle if not the war.
So what? We are no longer, as
Tom Engelhardt's essay seems to posit, fighting a Twentieth-century war. In 2000, the
Project for a New American Century foresaw the need for a "
Pearl Harbor incident". They delivered. Such people are likely to go all the way and we might, sooner rather than later, see the Middle East turned to glass.
A simple error in Ron Suskind's 2002 article, Without a Doubt, erroneously juxtaposed "faith" and "reality" as opposing principles of the Bush regime. Bush used the terms "gut" and "instinct" and Suskind incorrectly tied these words to Karl Rove's assault on the Christian right. "Gut" and "instinct" relate to "intuit" rather than "faith" and the Bush Gang are, if anything, intuitive politicians. They define the end and, thereafter, justify the means. In short, they shape the intelligence to fit the policy.
The Great UnravellingI suspect the Bush Gang, not being desirous of ends akin to Saddam's, would like to leave Iran to the
incoming Clinton administration. But the
Long War is not without risk and people are generally predictable. With the five-year period of grieving over for whatever was lost on September 11, 2001, more and more people are willing to give those tapes another look.
Taking
Occam's Razor to what is immediately evident, they will one day be prepared to admit that which is so blindingly obvious; that they were conned into condoning a global bloodbath by what will one day be remembered as the greatest crime of the Twenty-first Century.
Only then, and only if their realisation forms a tipping point triggering a cascade, will the worm begin to turn.
Until then, Bush and his ilk will continue to ride roughshod over all of us.
Have the think-tankers planned for such an "awakening"? I think they have. I, unfortunately, have not and can therefore only speculate that another such event will be used to put 911 back in the shade. Are America's leaders up to it?
Definitely. As Karl Rove — I'm convinced it was Rove, pointed out to Suskind:
"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."Ron Suskind |
Without a DoubtHe's right. You do know that, don't you?
Expect a "
dirty bomb" of one type or another to go off near you soon.
Note: I do tend to lose the point, don't I? I was noting misgivings I had about Tom Engelhardt's article,
Empire of Stupidity. I suppose any misgivings I might have do not amount to disagreements. However, Tom's mention of "defeat", "bungled", "fiasco", a "back-turning process", and general introspection did jar.
Some of the greatest minds in skulduggery have spent decades spinning the warp and weft of history. When the time came for them to become bit players playing second fiddle to the likes of Russia, China, and India, they decided to go for broke (and then some).
I cannot see the U.S. leaving the Middle East as soon as 2010 or 2012. I do not see Americans embracing defeat for many, many years. The dead zone, one might argue, is forever. Iraq, as I have argued, is and was not a defeat. It was a conquest, an obliteration, the beginning of a process, and a foretaste of things to come through the Twenty-first Century.
How the greater process plays itself out, is anybody's guess.
