[Two responses to the second-hand George W. quote (in yesterday’s dispatch) on hearing the voice of God before whacking al Qaeda and then Saddam Hussein amused me. Matt Bivens, who does the Nation’s “Daily Outrage” weblog wrote: “If God told him to do it, wouldn’t that make the intelligence-massaging debate moot? Does anybody have better intelligence than God?” And another reader simply sent in two words: “Burning Bush!”
By the way, Reuters released the following little summary of a Financial Times piece today:
“The Pentagon has sent an outside team of policy experts to conduct an independent review of post-war operations in Iraq amid growing criticism that Washington failed to prepare for occupation, Britain’s Financial Times reported Friday.
“It said a small group had left for Baghdad Thursday at the invitation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“The newspaper said the mission came as companies looking to invest in Iraq or win reconstruction contracts were being warned of an ‘even’ chance of the country descending into open revolt.”
They may not listen to us, but when military-industrial complex corporations start worrying about “open revolt” in Iraq, that’s when you send in the third team.]
Until recently it has often been argued – and not just by neocons – that the crushing of Saddam Hussein’s regime (however partial that may turn out to be) was on the whole a positive act, freeing the Iraqi people from a fiercely brutal and repressive regime. And there can be no question that his regime, with its prisons, its tortures, its secret police, its killing fields, was beyond dismal. But, putting aside the rhetoric of our leaders, it’s important to see the invasion of Iraq in an imperial context, which is a global context. Our men in Washington are unilateralists of the deepest sort, which doesn’t at all mean that they don’t want international support or secondary allies or the troops of other countries for the occupation of Iraq. Only today, Esther Schrader in the Los Angeles Times reports — U.S. Looks at Organizing Global Peacekeeping Force – that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is considering:
“It said a small group had left for Baghdad Thursday at the invitation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“The newspaper said the mission came as companies looking to invest in Iraq or win reconstruction contracts were being warned of an ‘even’ chance of the country descending into open revolt.”
They may not listen to us, but when military-industrial complex corporations start worrying about “open revolt” in Iraq, that’s when you send in the third team.]
Until recently it has often been argued – and not just by neocons – that the crushing of Saddam Hussein’s regime (however partial that may turn out to be) was on the whole a positive act, freeing the Iraqi people from a fiercely brutal and repressive regime. And there can be no question that his regime, with its prisons, its tortures, its secret police, its killing fields, was beyond dismal. But, putting aside the rhetoric of our leaders, it’s important to see the invasion of Iraq in an imperial context, which is a global context. Our men in Washington are unilateralists of the deepest sort, which doesn’t at all mean that they don’t want international support or secondary allies or the troops of other countries for the occupation of Iraq. Only today, Esther Schrader in the Los Angeles Times reports — U.S. Looks at Organizing Global Peacekeeping Force – that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld is considering:
“organizing a standing international peacekeeping force that could be dispatched to trouble spots around the globe.,,, Senior Bush administration officials are coming to believe that the best solution is to create a standing constabulary force made up of troops from a range of countries – but led and trained by the U.S. It would be distinct from a proposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization rapid-response force and apart from the U.N., which has provided peacekeeping missions for decades.”
It would, in essence, be an armed UN with a Security Council of one or a NATO with its headquarters in the Pentagon. It would be what empires have done forever, policed the imperial domains with “native” troops. This is, of course, what’s about to be tried out on a smaller-scale in Iraq, just as the invasion of Iraq was an initial test of imperial unilateralism in action.
The point to grasp here is that our rulers want to take all global space and occupy it, from the space inside the beltway in Washington DC to the space quite literally in space. They want the heavens and the earth – including control over the oil lands of the planet, the “arc of instability” as it’s now called – nailed down and that is a strategy well worth opposing.
Let me then take you in three quick leaps (via articles below) from Washington to space and back again. The latest piece by the New York Times‘ Paul Krugman, a one-man op-ed page commando these days, is superb on the way the men (and they are, with the odd exception, men) of this administration are trying to turn Washington into a one-party town and our country into a one-party state (a la the old Mexican model, as Krugman points out). It’s a frightening development. Domestically, they want to fill all space attached to power after emptying it of all potential opponents. Internationally, as their National Security Strategy made so clear a year ago, they intend to do the same, broaching no other power or regional grouping of powers that might challenge the United States militarily for the foreseeable future. (Whether this is possible is quite another matter.)
But perhaps more importantly – since this gets almost no attention here – they want to take space (other than Antarctica the last demilitarized spot on earth, so to speak), nuclearize it, fill it with exotic weaponry, some of which is already well beyond the planning stages, and deny it to any other power. This, of course, involves tearing up yet more international treaties. In a striking piece, Neil MacKay of the Glasgow Sunday Herald lays out some of these plans as they were revealed recently in a distinctly macho U.S. Space Command document.
And all those dreams are tied up in the most dangerous ways in the minds of these men with the most all-destroying of weapons, nuclear ones. Americans think they are afraid because terrorists who loathe our country, might get their hands on such weaponry – which is indeed possible sooner or later – but the deeper fear has to be of our own nuclear dreams which are fuelling other dreams of nuclear proliferation as Drake Bennett suggests in a long review of Bush administration “counterproliferation” policies in the American Prospect magazine. Only yesterday Condi Rice suggested again that the United States, already committed to what Jonathan Schell has called “proliferation wars,” would take on the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs alone if we had to.
Our imperial leaders, more fundamentalist on being the singular power of the globe than on any other issue, are taking us all down a hyperpower highway that leads only to rubble. Tom
Toward One-Party Rule
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
June 27, 2003In principle, Mexico’s 1917 Constitution established a democratic political system. In practice, until very recently Mexico was a one-party state. While the ruling party employed intimidation and electoral fraud when necessary, mainly it kept control through patronage, cronyism and corruption. All powerful interest groups, including the media, were effectively part of the party’s political machine.
Such systems aren’t unknown here – think of Richard J. Daley’s Chicago. But can it happen to the United States as a whole? A forthcoming article in The Washington Monthly shows that the foundations for one-party rule are being laid right now.
To read more Krugman click here
Revealed: US plan to ‘own’ space
As part of a plan to ensure its total military supremacy, the US is preparing to complete the domination of space — by any means necessary.
By Neil Mackay
The Glasgow Sunday Herald
June 22, 2003It sounds like the stuff of the darkest sci-fi fantasies, but it’s not. The Air Force Space Command Strategic Master Plan is a clear statement of the US’s intention to dominate the world by turning space into the crucial battlefield of the 21st century.
The document details how the US Air Force Space Command is developing exotic new weapons, nuclear warheads and spacecraft to allow the US to hit any target on earth within seconds. It also unashamedly states that the US will not allow any other power to get a foothold in space.
The rush to militarise space will also see domestic laws and foreign agreements torn up. As the document warns: ‘To fully develop and exploit [space] … some US policies and international treaties may need to be reviewed and modified’.
To read more MacKay click here
Critical Mess
How the neocons are promoting nuclear proliferation
By Drake Bennett
American Prospect Magazine
July 1, 2003Back in January, Brazil’s newly appointed minister of science and technology, Roberto Amaral, suggested in a radio interview that his country had nuclear ambitions. “Brazil is a country at peace, that has always preserved peace and is a defender of peace, but we need to be prepared, including technologically,” he said.
“We can’t renounce any form of scientific knowledge, whether the genome, DNA or nuclear fission.” It was hardly a Kim Jong-Il-caliber nuclear tantrum, but it did cause a stir. The comments were roundly condemned and a flurry of clarifications followed.
But Amaral’s boss, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, had made similar noises. In a campaign speech last year to retired military officers, Lula criticized the fact that the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) allowed nuclear powers to keep their weapons but denied them to everyone else.