After today’s rumors that Qatar may ask the Bush administration to withdraw its troops and turn the archipelago of U.S. built bases over to the United Nations, Donald Rumsfeld once again convened a news conference and announced that the troop ships floating off the Turkish coast and the military personnel filling the small emirate of Qatar from border to border are all being ordered to reassemble on the eastern edge of Long Island, New York, for what he termed the “giant leap to glory.” In the meantime, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer announced that “embedding ceremonies” previously to be held in Kuwait for up to 500 journalists slated to join forward units of the U.S. military were being rescheduled for Riverhead, Long Island, early in the week of March 17. “In Long Island,” he said at the press briefing, “cement is in any case easier to come by.” Both Rumsfeld and Fleischer denied that these “local redeployments” would in any way affect the war effort.
Okay, okay, so it’s all my fantasy. But developments in what passes for the world these days have hardly been less strange. Here, for instance, is the statement the Pentagon was forced to rush out yesterday — how’s this for desperation — after Donald (“the dapper don”) Rumsfeld’s gaffes re: Tony Blair and the British role in the war:
“NEWS RELEASE from the United States Department of Defense
No. 108-03
(703)697-5131(media)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 11, 2003
(703)428-0711(public/industry)STATEMENT FROM SECRETARY RUMSFELD
“I have no doubt of the full support of the United Kingdom for
the international community’s efforts to disarm Iraq. In my
press briefing today, I was simply pointing out that obtaining a
second United Nations Security Council Resolution is important
to the United Kingdom and that we are working to achieve it.“In the event that a decision to use force is made, we have
every reason to believe there will be a significant military
contribution from the United Kingdom.”[Web version: p>”>www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2003/b03112003_bt108-03.html]”
No. 108-03
(703)697-5131(media)
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 11, 2003
(703)428-0711(public/industry)
STATEMENT FROM SECRETARY RUMSFELD
“I have no doubt of the full support of the United Kingdom for
the international community’s efforts to disarm Iraq. In my
press briefing today, I was simply pointing out that obtaining a
second United Nations Security Council Resolution is important
to the United Kingdom and that we are working to achieve it.
“In the event that a decision to use force is made, we have
every reason to believe there will be a significant military
contribution from the United Kingdom.”
[Web version: www.defenselink.mil/news/Mar2003/b03112003_bt108-03.html]”
And then — a subject I’ve been attending to — it seems resignations are beginning to break out all over. In Australia, a senior intelligence analyst Andrew Wilkie stunned the government by resigning and, in part, blaming Colin Powell’s UN claim of Saddam/Al Qaeda links for the act. “Wilkie describes his resignation as the ”biggest decision I think I’ve ever made in my life’ but felt compelled to act by what he thought is the prospect of a high risk of a humanitarian crisis from any U.S.-led attack on Iraq. ”I don’t believe I could stand by any longer and take no action as this coalition marches to war. I think the interests of the thousands of people, perhaps tens or even more, tens of thousands of people or even more who could be injured, displaced or killed in a war, I think their interests is more important.'” (and for the Australian government’s instant vilification program against Wilkie, see the Sydney Morning Herald).
Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, heroic leaker of the Vietnam era, has just called on leakers everywhere to rise up and leak a storm. “Don’t wait until the bombs start falling,” Ellsberg said at a Tuesday press conference in Washington. “If you know the public is being lied to and you have documents to prove it, go to Congress and go to the press.”
As I considered the foot-in-mouth nature of the Bush administration’s unilateralism today, I thought of that famed mantra posted in the Clinton campaign “war room” back in — well, what was that distant year, anyway? — “It’s the economy, stupid.” This administration insists over and over again (with a bow to German “intransigence”), “It’s the war against Saddam, dumkopf.” Or against weapons of mass destruction, or for the liberation of the Iraqis. (Never, of course, for anyone’s economic benefit, never in any relation to the oil lifeline that flows like blood through the international economic system — see Robert Jensen’s brief piece off the ZNET website below.) And the war our strategists imagine is indeed an ambitious one; ambitious enough that, as Mike Klare suggests in a piece at the Alternet website, we should be thinking not simply about a war in Iraq but about those meant to follow; or as Maureen Dowd suggested today in a laugh-through-your-tears incandescent column in the New York Times that Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et. al. simply want to take Iraq alone. (“The more America goes it alone, the more “robust,” as the Pentagon likes to say, the win will be.”)
All striking pieces, all on the mark. But I keep thinking about that Clinton mantra. I do my best not to speculate about the distant future much. It’s so perilous. We’re almost always wrong. Still, what a moment, economically. The Dow sinks, oil prices rise, stocks of oil shrink, unemployment rises, the estimated price of an Iraqi invasion and occupation soars — and all before anything actually happens. I suspect — logical as the urge to grab the world’s lifeline may look on paper (and most of the members of this administration spent years and years in a wilderness of paper, writing proposals for conquering the world, hair-raising examples of which are newly revealed every week) — this administration’s pre-occupation with the occupation of Iraq (and the Middle East) is going to prove devastating indeed to their own fortunes. If you think Bush the Father’s poll figures dropped fast back in the ancient post-Gulf War I days, just wait to see what this war, even in success, is likely to do to oil prices. Smart Americans will start trading in their SUVs for Schwinn’s in the next week. After all, it’s the economy, stupid. Tom
I Vant to Be Alone
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
March 12, 2003It will go down as a great mystery of history how Mr. Popularity at Yale metamorphosed into President Persona Non Grata of the world.
The genial cheerleader and stickball commissioner with the gregarious parents, the frat president who had little nicknames and jokes for everyone, fell in with a rough crowd.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get more Strangelovian, it does. The Bush bullies, having driven off all the other kids in the international schoolyard, are now resorting to imaginary friends.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars here yesterday and reassured the group that America would have “a formidable coalition” to attack Iraq.
Petróleo, petróleo, petróleo
By Robert Jensen
ZNET
March 4, 2003Bush administration officials’ mantra these days is that a war on Iraq will have nothing to do with oil. Secretary of DefenseDonald Rumsfeld has said such a suggestion is “nonsense.”
“It has nothing to do with oil,” Rumsfeld said. “Literally nothing to do with it.”
The problem is — literally — that no one in the world believes that.
It’s not that people around the world don’t acknowledge weapons of mass destruction, terrorism and the human-rights abuses in Iraq as problems. It’s just that people also realize that war is not the solution for those problems, and if not for oil the United States would not be pressing for war.
How much the world understands this was made clear at last month’s World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The legendary Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano offered three reasons the United States wants to attack Iraq: “Petróleo, petróleo, petróleo.”
Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of “Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Ideas from the Margins to the Mainstream.”
To read more Jensen click here
The Wars After Iraq
By Michael T. Klare,
Alternet
March 12, 2003The U.S. military buildup, now nearing completion in the Persian Gulf area, looks a lot like the buildup that preceded the Gulf War. Indeed, many of the same air, ground, and sea units that participated in Operation Desert Storm are once again deployed in the region or on their way there. But there will be one vast difference between the two wars. American troops were quickly withdrawn at the end of the 1991 war; this time, they will stay right where they are — possibly for a very long time.
The reason for this difference lies in the contrasting aims of the first President Bush and the second. In 1991, Bush the elder sought to expel Iraqi forces in Kuwait and eliminate the threat to Saudi Arabia. Once that goal was accomplished, American troops were free to return home — which they did with remarkable dispatch.
Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author of Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict