skip to main |
skip to sidebar
4 November 2006.
Yesterday, the Asian Times took the unusual step for this journal of publishing a leader (editorial) entitled Iraq: Bush has a plan, and it's working, the object of which seems to be to counter that self-serving commonplace of mass media spin (not merely in the US, but here in Europe as well), which maintains that the motives of US foreign policy are basically benevolent, but that implementation, as in all human endeavours, can sometimes leave something to be desired - the «bumbling benevolent giant» view of US foreign policy. To the editors of the A-Times, the wellsprings of US policy in Iraq have little to do with the pure water of democracy, but with another and more viscous liquid :A strategy of fomenting chaos makes perfect sense in a twisted sort of way: a stable, autonomous Iraq means oil will be pumped, bringing down international crude prices, and that's the last thing the Bush administration's backers want. Who are the administration's backers, and who has a hotline to the presidency, via Vice President Dick Cheney? Big Oil.
«Consider», the paper asks its readers, «these well-known facts»:
- Cheney was formerly chief executive officer of oil-services company Halliburton, which, incidentally, was found by a 2003 Pentagon audit to have overcharged the US government by US$61 million for delivering gasoline to Iraq.
- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sat on Chevron's board of directors from 1991 to 2001, and Chevron named an oil tanker after her.
- James A Baker III, secretary of state for Bush's father and now "fixer" for the Bush family, has been appointed co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, charged with advising Bush Jr on future Iraq policy. His law firm, Baker Botts, was ranked by Who's Who Legal last year as "Global Oil and Gas Law Firm of the Year". His clients include the royal family of Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries kingpin Saudi Arabia.
- Bush himself was a Texas oilman, though not a very successful one. Ever heard of Bush's company, Arbusto? Probably not. Arbusto was going busto before it eventually ended up in the hands of Harken Energy in 1986. Harken gave Bush a seat on the board, some stock options and a $120,000 consulting contract. The energy industry pumped $2.8 million into Bush's 2000 campaign.
As the A-Times points out, these facts are «well-known», and should come as a surprise to no one whose knowledge of US politics is not limited to Fox News or newspaper headlines. But aside from the obvious economic benefits to the «decider» and his courtiers of US policy in Iraq, which has been less than «benevolent» to those Iraqis who made up the over half a million «excess deaths» which more than three years of warfare have brought to their country, there are other considerations, both foreign and domestic, which, in my judgement, certainly played vital roles in the decision to pursue an illegal and unnecessary war. Below, my response to the leader, in a letter to the A-Times (which, nota bene, has a new address for such correspondence - writeto@atimes.com) - which I took the liberty of copying to StumbleUpon :
To the editor :
Whether or not the present plan, which the A-Times leader describes in some detail, is Plan A or Plan B, the fact of the matter is that those who determine US policy profit from it immensely, not only economically, as there pointed out, but also politically, as the war - and in particular the «failure» in the war - «justifies» ever more extensive limitations on the liberties of not only foreigners (who as «enemy combatants» have «no rights which the white man was bound to respect»), but also to citizens of the United States itself. The right of habeas corpus is no longer a given, and the vast domestic prison industry - a «growth industry» whose staying power makes IT development look like a bubble and which incarcerates nearly one per cent of the US population - is shadowed by a secret chain of foreign detention centres, in which, presumably (we are not allowed to know), private enterprise plays, as it does at home, an ever more important role. Admittedly, the Bush regime has not succeeded in bring democracy to Iraq, but it must be recognised that has done a brilliant job of exporting it from the United States. All this, not to mention the benefit to the Imperial power (a k a the «Unitary Executive») of a classic divide et impera strategy which, in dividing not Gallia but Mesopotamia in partes tres, removes a hinder to the rule of the chosen regional satrap, Israel, and makes possible a move against the one remaining obstacle to total dominance, Iran....
28 October 2006.
Under the title Cheney endorses simulated drowning, Mark Tran, business editor at Guardian Unlimited and formerly a correspondent for the Guardian newspaper in New York and Washington, has published an article in yesterday's issue* highlighting a radio interview with Richard Bruce Cheney in the Vice-President's office in the White House on the occasion of «Radio Day» (24 October) in which the following interchange occurred :
Q [from interviewer Scott Hennen, WDAY] Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
THE VICE PRESIDENT [i e, Mr Cheney's present alias]: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.
Mr Tran's article makes clear that US military personnel responsible for «fairly robust» interrogations which included water-boarding have, at least on occasion, been severely punished by courts martial since 1901. But in accordance with the well-known general progress of moral thought since that remote time, Mr Cheney does not seem to see any contradiction between his view of a «dunk in water» as a «no-brainer» and his claim that «[w]e don't torture». My own take on the matter can be found in the response I posted to StumbleUpon, infra :
If there is a «no-brainer» in this story (aside from the results of an anatomical/physiological work-up on Mr Cheney himself), it is that he and his minions have consistently advocated the use of torture (not, of course, by the «other side»). If we didn't know from previous experience - which of course we did - the exchange reported here (the version released by the White House can be found here) would more than suffice to demonstrate the sort of «democracy» Mr Cheney has always had in mind for the inhabitants of Iraq. He has, despite the high cost of approximately 700 000 lives (more than 95 % of them Iraqi) hitherto snuffed out before their time, been willing to export this precious commodity from the United States to Iraq, without any compensation at all (all talk of profits made in the process by Halliburton and other such entities is surely a canard, and like claims of strategic control of Southwest Asian oil and gas resources, completely irrelevant to the US/UK «intervention» in the former (in more sense than one) country). Isn't altruism grand ?...
*I note in an article by Dan Eggen in today's Washington Post, that, as usual when it is felt that Mr Cheney has gone too far, the damage-control specialists, aka «spin doctors», have been called in. Now the «dunk in water» is said not to refer to waterboarding, but rather some unspecified (unspecifiable ?) interrogation method, that could, no doubt, be described as «fairly robust». A very useful manoeuvre, which addresses two audiences at the same time : on the one hand, those who do not wish to believe that the man occupying the office of vice-president of the United States is signalling that the use of torture in interrogations is desirable, not to say mandatory and who can claim, to paraphrase J Alfred Prufrock's elegant ladies, that this «is not what [he] meant at all», and, on the other, his core constituency, which, like Mr Cheney himself, possesses no qualms whatever concerning so minor a matter as torture (of others), and who will ignore all the qualifications and go on believing - correctly - that Mr Cheney was advocating the use of torture in interrogations. Nice work if you can get it !...
19 October 2006.
- Beware empires in decline, Professor Michael T Klare warns us, in a thought-provoking article published in today's Asia Times. Using the example of the egregious - and egregiously stupid - reaction of Britain and France to Egypt's decision to nationalise the Suez Canal (which he contrasts to US president Jimmy Carter's decision in 1977 to negotiate a turn over of the Panama Canal - it doesn't require much imagination to realise what Bush/Cheney would have done in this situation), Professor Klare points out the hubris which almost inevitably (with Mr Carter as an honourable exception, at least on this occasion) afflicts the decision makers of an empire on the decline :
The decline of an empire can be a hard and painful thing for the affected imperial elites. Those who are used to commanding subservience and respect from their subjects and from lesser powers are often ill-prepared to deal with their indifference and contempt. Even harder is overcoming the long-inbred assumption that one's vassals are inferior - mentally, morally and otherwise.
The first malady makes the declining elites extraordinarily sensitive to perceived slights or insults from their former subjects; the second often leads elites to overestimate their own capabilities and to underestimate those of their former subjects - an often fatal error. The two misjudgments often combine to produce an extreme readiness to strike back when a perceived insult coincides with a (possibly deceptive) military superiority.
King George and his courtiers, enamoured as they are of «faith-based» reality, are not slow to perceive slights and to react to them with military action, even if or perhaps more correctly (that pesky cognitive dissonance again !), especially if they result from their own provocations (the present situation on the Korean peninsula being an excellent case in point). And, as I maintain in my posting to StumbleUpon, infra, there are other factors in addition to perceived lèse-majesté that act to impel the King George and his court in the direction of military adventure against Iran - and just possibly North Korea - in the coming two weeks. I wonder what Euripedes would have made of this drama ?...
*Ever the gentleman, Professor Klare politely refrains from pointing out another obvious factor which would tend to lead the present US administration - like its imperial predecessors but even more so - toward such desperate acts of insanity as nuclear attacks on Iran and/or North Korea : the desire to use a new and better war to force US voters to rally round the flag, thus making the manipulations that are scheduled for the upcoming Congressional elections less immediately obvious. But his main point is well taken :
So I believe that the common wisdom in Washington regarding military action against Iran is wrong. Just because American forces are bogged down in Iraq, and Rice appears to enjoy a bit more authority these days, does not mean that "realism" will prevail at the White House. I suspect that the response of declining British and French imperial elites when faced with provocative acts by a former subject power in 1956 is a far more accurate gauge of what to expect from the Bush administration today.
The impulse to strike back must be formidable. Soon, I fear, it will prove irresistible.
We are cursed with living in interesting times....
*Note that this article was first published six days ago in Foreign Policy in Focus....
