The Really Real Long War

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The Really Real " Long War "

Written by Chris Floyd

 

Tuesday, 18 April 2006

 

Savvy players in the military-industrial racket know that the " War on

Terror " is just short-end money: fat and sweet, sure, but it doesn't

really have legs. " Islamofacism " is too empty a concept to sustain the

kind of decades-long looting of the public treasury that the dear old

Cold War used to provide – the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the

world just aren't interested in dressing up in Nazi drag and playing

their assigned roles in the Pentagon-Neocon-Theocon war game. I mean,

Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, you can even walk your army right into

the heartland of Islam and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent

people, and they still won't take the bait. Not a single Muslim nation

has gone jihad over Iraq; they haven't all turned into a nice, big

monolithic evil empire set on the utter destruction of America. It's

like they're all just ordinary people or something, good, bad and

indifferent, largely occupied with their own concerns – personal,

economic, social, religious, national.

 

Of course, the war has inflamed the extremist fringes, empowered

forces of intolerance and hatred to a degree they could never have

dreamed of before; yes, its given sectarian terror a major boost,

nicely priming the pump for more war profits. And boy howdy, the next

go-round, in Iran, will goose the military market to even greater

heights. So we're not saying this Terror War gambit is a bad thing,

you understand; no, it's been boffo box office all the way. But still,

since there actually is no such thing as " Islamofacism, " – as opposed

to a few virulent and violent outlaw gangs, and a number of

authoritarian regimes that have no interest whatsoever in attacking

America – you're just not going to get that Cold War mileage you need.

 

No, when it comes to terrorizing your own people into forking over

their money and the blood of their children to keep you in clover,

there's just no substitute for the real thing: Commies. Hordes of 'em.

A billion of 'em, by God! That's right, we're talking China. Now

there's a long-term proposition for you. There's the whole ball of

wax: nukes, missiles, vast standing armies, territorial tensions,

government suppression – it's vintage Kremlin, baby, circa Cuban

Missile Crisis, anytime you need it. And here's the beauty part: you

can literally make money coming and going. You can dive into the

Chinese market, get in bed with businesses backed by Commie brass,

like Neil Bush and Donald Rumsfeld have done, give 'em Google and

Microsoft and Starbucks – even the Rolling Stones, for Christ's sake –

then turn around and bag even more billions in gargantuan weapons

programs to act as " prudent hedges against the possibility that

cooperative approaches by themselves may fail to preclude future

conflict " with them sneaky yellow devils, as the Pentagon's " long-term

strategy review " put it recently.

 

Of course, that's what the " War on Terror " is all about anyway:

gaining control of the Muslim oil lands in order to throttle China and

eventually knock it on the head if it gets too uppity. If Saddam

Hussein and the Ayatollah Khamanei had simply handed over their oil

fields to the protection of American overseers, then they could have

repressed their own people till the cows come home, with the grateful

blessing of Washington. (Equatorial Guinea's rapacious dictator

Teodoro Obiang Nguema has it down pat. He's opened his vast oil

reserves to American companies; in return, he's free to torture, loot

and starve his people, and still be lauded by those champions of

democracy in the Bush White House.) The war in Iraq and the next war

in Iran have nothing to do with Islam or liberation or terrorism or

any of that katzenjammer. It wouldn't matter if they were all Southern

Baptists or acolytes of Ishtar, if they cared tenderly for their

citizens or turned them into soylent green. They've got oil, they

wouldn't play ball, so they're going down.

 

Control of these resources and strategic areas in order to box in

China (and eventually India) and prevent the rise of any potential

rival to American domination of global affairs – or rather, the

domination of global affairs by a small American elite quite willing

to see their own country sink into corruption, ruin, tyranny and fear

– is now and has been since the end of the Cold War the driving force

of the political faction led by Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Paul

Wolfowitz and others brought into power by the rigged election of

runner-up George W. Bush in 2000. It is for this and no other reason

that thousands of Americans have been killed, and tens of thousands

maimed in Iraq; it is for this that up to 300,000 innocent Iraqis have

been slaughtered; it is for this that the war plans for Iran are going

forward. The only way that the pathetic, stunted intellects of this

political faction know how to interpret reality is through the

paranoid prism of the Cold War, with its hidebound abstractions, its

cartoonish exaggerations, its perverted morality (willing to destroy a

village, a region, a nation – even the whole world – to " save " it from

the enemy) and, more than anything else, the vast power and privilege

it accorded to the national security elite.

 

And so they -- and the generations of younger disciples they have

spawned -- are trying to re-order the world, through violence, threat

and terror, to make reality fit the blinkered template in their heads.

And they will keep on trying, even if the flame of Islamic extremism

flickers out, even if the Chinese lay down their arms, even if Iran

turns its nuclear plants into Wal-Marts and Pottery Barns. There will

always be a new Big Enemy to justify their militarist obsessions.

 

Update: Not an hour after posting the final version of this piece, I

ran across Michael T. Klare's excellent TomDispatch.com article on

much the same theme: the overall strategy of " containing China. " Go

thou and read likewise.

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