Great Article by Eliot Weinberger

[Guest guest]

Here is an important article by the sensitive and well-informed poet and

essayist Eliot Weinberger on the current Plastic Adminstration and their Gospel

of Fakeness (& Real Bloodlust).

Please disseminate internationally.

Lv,

J.I. Abbot

1/15/03 New York: Sixteen Months After

By Eliot Weinberger

11 January 2003

For years they'll be debating the future of the empty pit where the World Trade

Center once stood, with fantastic or hideous proposals of gardens in the sky or

indoor lakes or threatening tic-tack-toe-shaped fortresses. But at the moment,

the only thing certain is the fate of the actual towers themselves. The scrap

steel will be shipped from the Fresh Kills landfill in Staten Island to the

Grumman shipyard in Trent Lott's fiefdom of Pascagoula, Mississippi. There, it

will

be melted down and turned into the "New York," an $800 million "state of the

art" amphibious assault ship. In Bush America, every ploughshare must be beaten

into a sword.

War and war and war. 150,000 troops are massed in the surrounds of Iraq, many of

them reservists pulled from their normal lives, preparing for what the Pentagon

is already declaring the "greatest precision-bombing aerial assault in

history," to be followed by an invasion which the United Nations estimates will

cause 500,000 casualties. There are troops or "advisers" in India, Pakistan,

Uzbekistan, Kyrgzystan, Georgia, the Philippines, Colombia . . . and

speculation that Iraq is merely a stop on the road to Iran.

Military operations in Afghanistan are continuing at a cost of a billion dollars

a month— compared to the $25 million a month the U.S. is spending there on

humanitarian aid, most of it paying for the offices and maintenance of the aid

workers, or vanishing into the crevices of local corruption. Helmeted and

armored Special Forces troops still move like Robocop through the villages,

past the hundreds of thousands of displaced peasants trying to survive the

winter.

This year, the Pentagon budget will increase by $38 billion to almost $400

billion. The increase alone is practically the entire budget of the

second-biggest military spender, China. Meanwhile, millions of Americans have

lost their jobs or have had their salaries greatly reduced. There are schools

around the country that will be closing a month early this year because of

budget cuts, further evidence of the theory that Republicans never allot any

money for education in order to keep the electorate stupid so that they'll vote

for Republicans.

Everything is war and war, the talk of war, while the real, declared war—the

War on Terrorism—is a complete failure. It could not be otherwise: One

cannot, by definition, wage a military (and not metaphorical) war against

terrorism, for the terrorists themselves are not waging a war. Wars are fought

to coerce an enemy to accept one's policies or sovereignty. Even when they

involve the mass slaughter of civilians—as has been increasingly the case

since World War I—they are not terrorism. (A Palestinian suicide bombing,

however repulsive, is the act of a civilian combatant in a war of

independence.) Terrorism is committed by small, clandestine, independent

groups—the evil twins of NGO's—in the attempt to persuade like-minded

people to join their side, whether physically or intellectually. The massacre

at the World Trade Center was, in terms of the United States, a means without

an end: There were no grounds on which the U.S. could admit "defeat"; the only

possible "victory" for al-Qaeda was a sympathetic response from within the

Muslim world.

In a revenge-seeking and deliberate confusion of host and guest, the U.S.

military easily overthrew the essentially unarmed Taliban regime, leaving vast

areas of the country in the hands of warlords, and partially restoring the

freedoms (music and television, women without burqas and girls in school,

clean-shaven men) which the Afghans had enjoyed under that oppressive Soviet

occupation the U.S., through its fundamentalist surrogates, the Taliban, had

fought so long. [Freedom, however, only goes so far: A few days ago, a

political cartoonist was thrown in prison for mildly satirizing President

Karzai.] The country is in ruins, but the pipeline from Kazakhstan has now

become a reality, and its plans are drawn, the fulfillment of an old dream

among the Bush crowd. As Dick Cheney said in 1998, when he was CEO of

Halliburton: "I can't think of a time when we've had a region emerge as

suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It's almost as

if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn't see fit to put

oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the

United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things

considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business

is."

The War on Terrorism has been good for business, but hasn't done anything bad

against the terrorists. With one possible exception (an Egyptian strategic

planner), not a single important al-Qaeda member has been killed or captured.

George Bush has not mentioned the name "Osama bin Laden" in six or eight

months, and no wonder: He may think he's Wyatt Earp, but those evil-doing

Clanton Brothers aren't playing by the rules and they never showed up at the OK

Corral. So all Bush can do is just shoot at anybody who looks mean.

After all, al-Qaeda—once one strips away the propaganda—appears to be a

group of, at most, a few hundred educated, middle-class fanatics, who

masterminded terrorist actions, mainly in Africa, at the rate of one every

eighteen months. They also ran camps in Afghanistan for thousands of young

peasants attracted to local jihads, including 5,000 trained by Pakistani

intelligence for incursions into Kashmir and 3,000 Uzbekis attempting to

overthrow the dictatorship in Uzbekistan (which receives hundreds of millions

of dollars in U.S. military aid). It is these Afghan and foreign peasants,

Taliban foot soldiers and jihadis, that the Bush Team has labeled "al-Qaeda

terrorists" and left to rot in Guantanamo Bay (in cages, by the way, identical

to the one in which Ezra Pound was placed in Pisa in 1945). Al-Qaeda, as the

recent bombings in Kenya prove, continues as it did before. Forced out of

Afghanistan, it is merely less visible.

There is indeed a malevolent "sleeper cell" in the United States, but it is not

the one in Attorney General John Ashcroft's apocalyptic imagination. It was

formed in the 1970's, in the Ford Administration, by Donald Rumsfeld, then as

now Secretary of Defense, and his young disciple, Dick Cheney, whom Rumsfeld

got appointed as White House Chief of Staff. During the Reagan years they

attracted brilliant young ideological extremists: Paul Wolfowitz, Richard

Perle, Eliott Abrams, Zalmay Khalilzad, among them. In 1992, the last year of

the Bush Sr. administration, convinced, as everyone was, that Bush would be

reelected, and hoping for a second-term purge of the multilateralists

surrounding the President, they launched their first secret manifesto: "Defense

Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years 1994-1999," written by Wolfowitz and

Khalilzad, under the direction of then Secretary of Defense Cheney.

According to their "Guidance," with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the "first

objective" of the United States was now "to prevent the re-emergence [sic] of a

new rival":

"The U.S. must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new

order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need

not aspire to a greater role."

We must "discourage" the "advanced industrial nations" from "challenging our leadership."

"We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even

aspiring to a larger regional or global role."

"We will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing. . . those wrongs

which threaten our interests. . . Various types of U.S. interests may be

involved in such instances: access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian

Gulf oil; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles,

threats to U.S. citizens from terrorism. . ."

The report, which never mentioned any allies in these global efforts, was an

embarrassment to Bush Sr. and his consensus-building advisers, and was quickly

suppressed after it was leaked to the New York Times. Then Bush was defeated by

Clinton, and the cell went underground in the boardrooms of corporations and

right-wing foundations and think tanks.

In 1997, "appalled by the incoherent policies of the Clinton administration,"

they formed a group called the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), "to

make the case and rally support for American global leadership" and to restore

"military strength and moral clarity." Their founding statement was signed by,

among others, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Khalilzad, Lewis Libby, and Jeb Bush

(at the time the Heir Apparent), along with such imams of conservatism as

Francis Fukuyama, William Bennett, and Norman Podhoretz.

In September 2000-- when the election of Gore seemed a certainty—PNAC produced

what was to become the Hammurabic Code of the Bush Jr. Administration:

Rebuilding America's Defences: Strategies, Forces And Resources For A New

Century. The document, which is endless, speaks openly of a "Pax Americana":

expanding current U.S. military bases abroad, and building new ones in the

Middle East, Southeast Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. It is

contemptuous of the United Nations. It recommends "pre-emptive strikes" and

particularly mentions Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. It suggests that to fight

these countries we need small nuclear warheads to target "very deep,

underground bunkers." (Such weapons, called Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrators,

are now being developed.) It speaks of fighting and "decisively winning

simultaneous major theater wars." (Thus Rumsfeld's current obsession with

taking on Iraq and North Korea at the same time.) It is the origin of that

bizarre, Teutonic phrase, "homeland security." It advocates, as has now been

done, pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile and all other international

defense treaties—in the Pax Americana we won't need them. It recommends

increasing defense spending to 3.8% of the Gross Domestic Product (the amount

of the 2003 budget, almost to the penny). It talks not only of controlling

outer space with Star Wars weaponry, but also of controlling cyberspace,

fighting "enemies" (foreign or domestic?) on the Internet.

 

The U.S., in short, is "the essential defender of today's global security

order." Allies are unnecessary; world opinion is irrelevant; potential

competitors must be crushed early. And, in the eeriest moment in the report, it

imagines "some catastrophic event," a "new Pearl Harbor," that will be the

catalyst for the U.S. to decisively launch its new Pax. (Small wonder that, on

September 12, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld insisted we immediately invade Iraq and,

shortly after, Condoleezza Rice convened senior members of the National

Security Council to ask them to "think about ‘How do you capitalize on these

opportunities?'" )

The Sleeper Cell has awoken. After successfully engineering a judicial coup

d'etat to install their genial figurehead as President, they now control the

U.S. government. Led by Cheney and Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz is Deputy Defense

Secretary, Khalilzad is Ambassador to Afghanistan, Libby is Cheney's chief of

staff, Abrams (after having been disgraced in the Iran-contra scandal, and

after years campaigning for a law to require the posting of the Ten

Commandments in every government building) is now chief White House adviser on

the Middle East. A half-dozen others from PNAC hold important posts in the

Defense and State departments. Their goal has been cheerfully described by

Condoleezza Rice (who believes that Bush is "someone of tremendous intellect"):

"American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the

United States on the national interest. There is nothing wrong with doing

something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order

effect." Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, is more honest:

"This is total war... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we

embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but

just wage a total war, our children will sing great songs about us years from

now."

In ways that Ronald Reagan would envy, the Sleeper Cell is masterful at

manipulating the new forms of mass media, particularly the hyperbolic

television news and radio talk shows. It officially began the rhetorical

invasion of Iraq precisely on September 1 (in the words of Andrew Card, White

House chief of staff, "You don't launch a new product in August") and was

relentless in creating frightening stories until the November elections.

Endless reports of atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein (some of them, of

course, true) were combined with assertions that, as Rumsfeld put it, there is

"bulletproof evidence" linking Saddam and al-Qaeda (none of which has ever been

produced), which in turn were combined with frequent warnings from Ashcroft and

the FBI and the CIA of new "spectacular attacks" from al-Qaeda "that meet

several criteria: high symbolic value, mass casualties, severe damage to the

American economy and maximum psychological trauma."

It is dizzying trying to keep up with the news, to remember what happened the

day before—which is precisely their intention—but let two examples suffice:

In December, a few days after Iraq turned over a 12,000-page list of their

weapons to the U.N.—an act first demanded by the White House, and then

ridiculed when Iraq complied—the media were suddenly flooded with a story

that Iraq had given al-Qaeda the nerve gas VX, an odorless, colorless oil that

causes death in minutes. This story, needless to say, fit all the criteria for

sensational news: Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, gruesome death, and terrorist

threat. A few days later, those omnipresent and anonymous "senior officials"

were telling CNN that there was "absolutely no intelligence" on this matter,

"zero confirmation of evidence." Obviously the story had originally come from

the government, and it followed the classic pattern of what was, during the

Vietnam War, called "disinformation": leak false information, wait until it has

its effect, and then deny it, knowing that assertions remain in the collective

memory longer than their negations.

Far more serious is the current frenzy over the possibility that Iraq will

somehow release smallpox, either among American troops in the projected war, or

in the U.S. itself through its imagined terrorist surrogates. This has led to

the mass-production of smallpox vaccines—to the delight of the drug company

executives in the Bush inner circle—ambitious plans to vaccinate the entire

country and the predictable "lifeboat" debates on television of who should be

vaccinated first.

The smallpox panic largely comes from the assertions of Judith Miller, a New

York Times reporter, that unnamed "intelligence sources" are "investigating"

whether a scientist named Nelja Maltseva from the Russian Institute of Viral

Preparations visited Baghdad in 1990 and sold Iraq a vial of a smallpox strain

that caused an epidemic in Kazakhstan in 1972.

Dr. Maltseva died two years ago. Both her daughter and a laboratory assistant

claim that she only visited Iraq once, in 1971, as part of a global smallpox

eradication effort, and that her last trip abroad was to Finland in 1982.

Furthermore, the Russians have always claimed that the Kazakhstan epidemic

never happened, but was merely Cold War propaganda.

Edward Said attacked Miller years ago for her "thesis about the militant,

hateful quality of the Arab world." Among her many books, she is the co-author

of Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf with Laurie Mylroie, who is the

author of Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, which expounds the

theory that Saddam personally orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center

bombing—a theory that only Richard Perle seems to believe ("splendid and

convincing"). Like almost everyone on the White House Team, Miller is

associated with two right-wing think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute

for Public Policy Research (the latest issue of its magazine features Oriana

Fallaci on the "moral superiority of Western culture") and the Middle East

Forum, which has been posting the names of university professors critical of

Bush on its website. The Forum is run by Daniel Pipes, who is famous for his

comment about the "massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange

foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene".

The general hysteria about smallpox, in other words, and the very real

possibility of mass vaccinations with its statistically inevitable

corresponding deaths, is entirely the result of unsubstantiated rumors

published by someone with a clear agenda.

Meanwhile, over at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has created 2POG, the $7 billion

Proactive Pre-emptive Operations Group, whose "super-intelligence support

activity" will combine "CIA and military covert action, information warfare,

and deception." Along with the usual boys'-magazine fantasies of high-tech

espionage (including something about "tagging" the clothes of terrorists with

DNA samples that can be perceived by laser beams from satellites) the

"proactive" component consists of "duping al-Qaeda into undertaking operations

it is not prepared for and thereby exposing its personnel." That is,

encouraging terrorist acts that will provoke an American response. If this

seems unimaginable, or paranoid, it is worth remembering Operation Northwoods,

which the Pentagon proposed to Kennedy a few months before he was assassinated.

The idea then was a project of bombings, hijackings and plane crashes that would

kill American citizens and lead to popular sentiment for an invasion of Cuba.

(Kennedy—even James Bond-addicted Kennedy—rejected that one.)

Around another bend of the Pentagon, the Defense Research Projects Agency has

created the Information Awareness Office, whose mission is "Total Information

Awareness" (TIA). The Office is run by former Admiral John Poindexter, who in

1990 was convicted of five felony counts for lying to Congress about the

Iran-contra affair. TIA, according to Poindexter, will

create "ultra-large-scale, semantically rich, easily implementable database

technologies" that will allow the Pentagon to access "world-wide, distributed,

legacy databases as if they were one centralized database." Which means: every

possible computerized record in the U.S., on which an individual's name

appears, will be copied and collated by the Pentagon: credit card purchases,

library books, police records, automatic toll collectors on bridges, university

course enlistments, membership lists, and on and on—as well as all e-mails and

logs of Internet surfing. They have received $200 million for a pilot program.

Over the door of Poindexter's office is the motto "Scientia Est Potentia,"

Knowledge Is Power. (George Bush presumably being the exception that proves the

rule.)

The Sleeper Cell has awoken, and there is nothing to stop them. The Democratic

Party, afraid of being branded "unpatriotic" by the Republicans, has gone into

hibernation. The tattered remains of the Left is—as the Left always is—more

preoccupied with fighting among themselves. With a few individual exceptions,

there is almost no opposition in the major media. (Powerful anti-Bush articles

by, among others, Gore Vidal, Harold Pinter, and John Berger, are published in

England, but not here.) The only forum for criticism is the Internet, which,

though still uncontrolled, remains the one point in the PNAC program that has

yet to be (openly) addressed by the Bush Team. As we enter Bush II Anno III,

anger has turned into a kind of sullen resignation.

Perhaps the problem is that there are no words to describe this Administration.

All the pejoratives, however accurate, that might be applied-- "warmongers" and

"imperialists,corrupt" and "bloodthirsty,fanatical" and "criminal"—have

been drained of their meaning by decades of propaganda. They are as banal as

the rhetoric of the think tanks. Small wonder that American writers have

generally been either silent or bathetic ("9/11 reminded me of the day my

father died") on all that has happened in the last two years. We no longer have

the words to even think about what is happening, about violence that is not

"just like a movie," about people like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Perle and

Wolfowitz and Rice and Ashcroft and Bush, who are not Pol Pot or Stalin or

Hitler, who are lesser forms of evil, but evil nonetheless. To begin to talk

about them is to relive the old nightmare of the scream with no sound.

-------------------------------

The "New York. . . After" articles are written for publications abroad. In

English, they circulate via e-mail and may be reproduced freely

These articles will be published for the first time in the U.S. as a

book,_9/12_, available in March from the Prickly Paradigm Press, distributed by

the University of Chicago Press. Pre-orders from Chicago at this link, or from

Amazon at this link.

Series Page

Last changed: January 18, 2003

[Guest guest]

Dear Jesse

I've found these posts interesting . One comment on Bush's chart is that he has

the three kama Lords ( 3,7 and 11 ) all in the Lagna . There might be some

unbalance there .

~

Nicholas

Dear All,Here is an important article by the sensitive and well-informed poet

and essayist Eliot Weinberger on the current Plastic Adminstration and their

Gospel of Fakeness (& Real Bloodlust).Please disseminate internationally.

;)Lv,J.I. Abbot