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"OH! WHAT A LOVELY WAR!"
AND PREPARING FOR WAR WITH CHINA?
MID-EAST REALITIES - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 8/24/2000:
The popular attention span these days seems to be minutes,
not even days. And the politicians and Generals sure know how to
manipulate this situation, the ever compliant corporate-sponsored mass
media going along of course.
It was just a few years ago now that the U.S. unleashed
missiles and bombs at both Afghanistan and Sudan. And it was just
two years ago that a Western air armada further devastated the country
of Iraq. And even today U.S. and British warplanes daily "patrol"
Iraq. Moreover crippling "sanctions" have resulted in a kind of modern-day
sanatized genocide against the people of the country once known as Babylon,
birthplace of Western Civilization. More than 1.5 million Iraqis
have already been killed as a result of the sanctions and bombings, including
over half a million children who would otherwise be alive today.
This article originally published in the British media
two years ago shortly after the bombs and cruises missiles starting falling
again needs to be read again and its lessons understood. For this
pattern of events will continue into the future unless there is a basic
reevaluation by the Americans, or more likely, until there are counterforces
able to restrain, and if necessary to punish, the Americans.
And for those who think all this warning is much ado about
nothing, consider the following. For the first time this month the
Pentagon has deployed the latest cruise missiles outside of the continental
U.S, at Guam in the south Pacific, reportedly at the insistence of the
U.S. Commander in Chief in that region, Admiral Dennis Blair. Furthermore
the U.S. Navy has just finished its Global 2000 war games. The secret
and classified scenario this year, so the leak goes in Washington, was
a possible war against a major Asian nation, codename RED. Hundreds
of senior military as well as civilian strategists were involved, including
experts at cyber warfare and nuclear escalation.
MER FLASHBACK TO TWO YEARS AGO:
"OH WHAT
A LOVELY THING IS WAR. HOW DIVERTING.
HOW UNITING.
HOW AMERICAN."
"A CONSTANT
STREAM OF 'ENEMIES' IS THE ONLY JUSTIFICATION
FOR A
HALF-CENTURY OF MILITARY PROCUREMENT."
By Gore Vidal
Sunday - The Guardian - August 23, 1998
Forty per cent of the American people in the Malls Assembled, our agora,
decided that the strikes against Islamic Satans in the Sudan and Afghanistan
were intended to divert attention from the Commander-in-Chief's problems
with Savonarola Starr. Such figures were enough to make a patriot
weep and turn yet again to Henry Adams. The
Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1920), must reading this August
on the better
beaches.
How can the one indispensable nation turn so rapidly into the one, apparently,
indisposable global empire and world policeman? What has gone
wrong? Why are they
blowing up our embassies? Who are they? Or as a lady asked
me at a political meeting in Orange County, California, during the Cold
War: "I have two questions. First, what can I do as an average American
housewife to fight Communism and, second, what is Communism?"
No president can do much of anything domestically. The economy takes
care of itself,
Nixon once observed and, besides, he added, it's pretty dull.
That leaves the President foreign affairs. Trips abroad. Pageantry.
Nixon himself had a vastation equal to that of Henry James in the Galerie
d'Apollon of the Louvre when he first marched past the gorgeous royal guard
of the king of the Belgians. Reeling at the glory of it all,
he ordered Ruritanian uniforms for the White House security men, uniforms
that to this day dress many a far flung production of The Merry Widow.
But pageantry to one side, there are the pleasures of showing that the empire is no poor helpless (brain-dead) giant. Stand tall. Light the missiles. Bang! People always rally round the President when he's telling foreigners what's what -- the Palmerston manoeuvre.
No one can count the number of covert and overt wars that the United States has fought since 1945. Governments overthrown in Guatemala and Iran. Then bloody "police action" in Korea -- no triumph, as it turned out. A dozen years of containing China by trying to destroy its millennial enemy, Indochina. The destruction, in the process, of Cambodia and Laos.
Then war on the cheap. Reagan invades the island of Grenada, forgetting
to tell its
Queen, your Queen, in the process. Reagan also dropped bombs on Gadaffi
in Libya.
Bush had his light show in the Gulf. Defied by the great Satan Noriega,
for whose capture we invaded fearsome Panama, we kidnapped Noriega, put
him on trial in a Miami court that had no jurisdiction over him, then put
him in jail for crimes that make no sense. What is this all about?
For one thing, a constant stream of "enemies" is the only justification
for a half-century of military procurement; $5.5 trillion thus far. When
Communism folded, two new wars were launched.
First, against drugs -- an unwinnable but highly enjoyable and profitable enterprise for the prosecutors, and even the victims of our paranoia.
Then there was the war against terrorism. What is a terrorist? Well, anyone who objects, say, to our support for Israel. To dramatise these enemies we put snarling faces on them. Enemy of the Month Club. Arafat for a long time.
Gadaffi, whose eyeliner still offends American manhood. Nasser, who died. Noriega, who got kidnapped. Saddam, who got away, if not with Kuwait, with his defiance. Now Osama bin Laden of Saudi in Afghanistan.
The CIA's demonising process is fascinating, swift, unvarying. Each demon admires Hitler. Keeps a copy of Mein Kampf beside his bed. Is a poofter -- red silk knickers are found in his closet. He also has mistresses and takes cocaine. In Noriega's case the captured cocaine paste turned out to be tortilla flour. Can't win them all, as they say at Langley, Virginia. The fact that there are more than a billion Muslims in the world, as opposed to a quarter of a billion Americans (by no means united in this enterprise), gives no one pause. Twin devils: drugs and Islamic terror fuelled by an insane fundamentalism -- who can forget Olivier as the Mahdi?
It was irresistible for Clinton to push the revenge button against those responsible for the embassy bombings. Unfortunately, we don't actually know who they were or, if do we know, were the missiles accurate? Sandy Berger looked definitely shifty at the National Security Council press conference. Madeleine Albright, due to some configuration of her handsome lips, seems always to be extruding snakes and toads and scorpions. It appears that a guess was made. Action was taken. Allies... Forget it, Boris! We stand alone. And we stand tall.
Also, a matter of some relevance to the recent troubles in Washington,
should something unfortunate explode on American soil, under the Constitution
the President assumes wartime powers and is beyond the reach of all law
and custom, as Lincoln discovered when he invoked the sombre constitutional
phrase "military necessity", which allowed him to cancel habeas corpus,
shut down newspapers and free the slaves. Oh, what a lovely thing is war.
More to the point, as the eloquent Spiro Agnew once said: "The United States,
for all its faults, is still the greatest nation in the country."
More to come.
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