Below is "Apocalypse of Coercion," a new article by mujca.com
coordinator Kevin Barrett analyzing 9/11 as a psy-op. The article draws
on media guru Douglas Rushkoff's book Coercion: Why We Listen to What
"They" Say. Rushkoff, an NYU professor and Esalen
Institute teacher, is one of the world's most celebrated media
commentators: http://www.rushkoff.com/ Barrett sent him a copy of
"Apocalypse of Coercion" and asked if he thought of 9/11 as
the kind of coercive psy-op his book analyzed. Rushkoff responded:
"Yeah - terrific stuff. I began thinking about this sort
connection, myself, when I saw the documentary Power of Nightmares.
He's got a lot more to say about it than I do; pretty much all my
opinions on the matter are just watered down versions of his. Have you
seen it? I'm assuming you would have, given your area of interest."
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Apocalypse of Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say About 9/11
By Kevin Barrett, http://mujca.com
Summary
“Apocalypse of Coercion” uses Douglas Rushkoff’s landmark book Coercion
as a touchstone for understanding 9/11 as a psychological warfare
operation. Rushkoff’s well-researched insights into the mind-control
techniques of car salesmen, spin doctors, cult leaders, and CIA
psych-war specialists explain how 9/11 was designed as a war-triggering
“New Pearl Harbor.” These insights also explain why so many people
can continue to believe the official myth of 9/11 in the teeth of the
overwhelming evidence against it. Perhaps most importantly, Rushkoff
predicts that new communications technologies promise to put an
explosive end to the era of pervasive coercion. His prophecy of the
coming apocalyptic end of coercion explains why the coercers were
desperate enough to try to re-infantalize the public through 9/11 in
order to maintain the old coercive structures of social control. In
predicting doom for the coercers, Rushkoff provides us with a roadmap to
a post-9/11-truth world.
Apocalypse of Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say About
9/11
“That’s just like hypnotizing chickens.” --Iggy Pop, “Lust for
Life”
“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...uh...(long pause)...we
won’t get fooled again.” George W. Bush
They say suicidal Muslim fanatics did it. They say those radical Muslims
hate our freedoms. They say the country is full of sleeper agents who
could wake up and kill us at any moment, as soon as their little
red-white-and-blue “I hate the USA” wristwatch alarms go off.
They say that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it—he’s
Muslim, isn’t he? They say invading Afghanistan and Iraq was the
appropriate response; we had to do something, right? They say if
you’re not with us, you’re against us—and if you’re against us,
you’re on the side of the evildoers.
They say those cunning, devious suicide hijackers defeated America’s
defenses using flying lessons and box cutters. They say it was ordered
by a tall, dark, handsome, sinister, hooknosed kidney patient in a cave
in Afghanistan—a ringer for the evil vizier Jaffar in the Disney film Aladdin,
but with a thicker beard to signify “Islamist.” They say it was
masterminded by a real bad dude named KSM. They say they finally caught
KSM, and that the whole story, enshrined in the official 9/11
Commission Report, is based on what KSM said under
interrogation—so it’s all right from the horse’s mouth.
They say it happened because our defense and intelligence systems
didn’t see it coming, despite all those urgent warnings from dozens of
countries as well as whistleblowers from our own agencies. They say that
nobody was really to blame, so nobody had to be prosecuted or fired or
even reprimanded. They say that by promoting the very people who made
the most outrageously improbable blunders, and giving the screw-up
agencies a whole lot more money, we’ve ensured that they’ll do
better next time.
They say that anybody who questions what they say is a conspiracy
theorist.
“Who, exactly, are ‘they,’ and why do they say so much? More
amazing, why do we listen to them?”
—Douglas Rushkoff, Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say (NY:
Penguin, 1999)
Rushkoff’s Coercion is a sizzling exposé of mind control,
American style. Unlike Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent,
Rushkoff’s book provides a detailed guide to the nuts-and-bolts
techniques employed against us every day by advertisers, marketers,
public relations specialists, Hollywood filmmakers, salespeople,
pyramid-scam artists, and cult leaders —the very same techniques
applied for decades, and gradually perfected, by CIA interrogators and
psychological warfare experts. These techniques are designed to disable
rational thought and manipulate behavior at the unconscious and
emotional levels. Anyone curious about why so many otherwise rational
people have believed the official story of 9/11 for so long, in the
teeth of the overwhelming evidence against it, should start by reading Coercion.
The secret of mind-control is simple—so simple that Rushkoff can sum
it up in one sentence: “In whatever milieu coercion is practiced, the
routine follows the same basic steps: Generate disorientation, induce
regression, and then become the target’s transferred parent figure”
(64). Hard-sell car salesmen, CIA interrogators and psychwar ops, and
cult leaders have long used this technique. Under coercion, millions of
otherwise rational people can be persuaded to act against their own
interests—whether by shelling out big bucks for an overpriced lemon,
betraying a comrade and a cause, or allowing a gang of criminals to
destroy their nation’s Constitution and launch criminal wars of
aggression.
How do they do it? Let’s start by zooming in on your local automobile
dealership. The car salesman carefully leads the mark to be dissatisfied
with his current car, and by extension his current life—and as the
mark sees his current life through newly dissatisfied eyes, he begins to
experience disorientation. The salesman then takes the mark on a test
drive and, at the right moment, asks “Is this the type of vehicle you
would like to own?” Rushoff quotes a
car-salesman-turned-whistleblower:
And anyone will tell you this, the vacuum cleaner salesman, the car
salesman—the customer has a split-second of insanity. The mind goes
blank, the body paralyzes, the eyes get glassy, dilated. And you’d be
surprised how many people have an accident at just that moment! Ask any
car dealer. We always joke about it. (43)
The car salesman’s question, like the well-timed words of a good
hypnotist, triggers a sudden intensification of the customer’s
dissociated, suggestible state. Rushkoff explains: “The customer is
already in a vehicle, being asked to imagine himself owning the same
type of vehicle. It’s the same as if I asked you if this is the kind
of book you can imagine yourself reading. Your current situation is
reframed in fantasy. It creates a momentary confusion, or dissociation,
from the activity you’re involved in. That’s why so many drivers
crash” (43).
If the customer answers no, he gets the same treatment in other cars
until he answers yes. Then he is brought back to the dealership and
infantilized, as the salesman becomes his transferred parent figure:
He is told where to go, how to walk, where to sit. One training manual
instructs the salesman to give the customer coffee whether he wants it
or not: “Don’t ask him if he wants a cup of coffee—just ask him
how he takes it.” In this way, the customer is trained to obey, and
given his fear and disorientation in the sales environment, he welcomes
the commands and their implied invitation for him to regress into the
safety of childhood. (43)
Once the customer has been infantilized, he is controlled by various
tricks. One of the best-known is the “common enemy” technique. The
salesman pretends to be conspiring with the customer against the nasty
head of the dealership, or against another salesman who is greedy and
dishonest. The “common enemy” technique is also used by the
CIA—one interrogator, the “good cop,” teams up with the subject
against the other interrogator, the “bad cop.” Governments, of
course, use the same technique: The illegitimate son-of-a-Bush of
August, 2001 doubled his approval ratings by infantilizing the American
public on 9/11 and rallying them against the “common enemy” of
evildoing Muslim extremists.
The CIA, like the automobile industry, has long been refining coercive
techniques aimed at eliciting compliance. Whether the Company wants to
coerce an interrogation subject into spilling the beans, or a whole
nation into supporting a war, the techniques are basically the same as
those used by hard-sell car salesmen: Generate dissociation through
disorientation, induce regression, and become the target’s transferred
parent figure.
In an interrogation, the CIA begins by disorienting the subject:
As the minutes, hours, or days go by, the “sights and sounds of an
outside world fade away, [and] its significance is replaced by the
interrogation room, its two occupants, and the dynamic relationship
between them” (CIA Interrogation Manual) which is why
interrogation rooms are generally devoid of windows and free of all
references to the outside world, including time of day and day of the
week. The subject becomes completely dependent on the interrogator for
all external stimuli and, accordingly, his sense of self (35).
After the subject’s sense of self has been broken down, the CIA
interrogator chooses from a grab bag of techniques that accomplish the
same thing as the car salesman’s line “Is this the type of vehicle
you would like to own?” These techniques induce a sudden state of
radical confusion by disrupting the target’s familiar emotional
associations. The CIA manual explains: “When this aim is achieved,
resistance is seriously impaired. There is an interval—which may be
extremely brief—of suspended animation, a kind of psychological shock
or paralysis...that explodes the world that is familiar to the subject
as well as his image of himself within that world. Experienced
interrogators recognize this effect when it appears and know that at
this moment the source is far more open to suggestion” (qtd. In
Rushkoff, 36). At this moment, the interrogator encourages the subject
to regress to a childlike state of mind, and becomes the subject’s
transferred parent figure.
This is a very good description of what was done to the American people
on and after September 11th, 2001. The images of the planes crashing
into landmark buildings, and those buildings exploding into powder and
shards, created a state of extreme confusion, “a kind of psychological
shock or paralysis.” The bombs that brought down the Twin Towers and
WTC-7 literally exploded the world that was familiar to us, and our
images of ourselves in that world. We experienced a moment of
dissociation, which is why we can still recall where we were and what we
were doing when we learned of the attack. As the psychological warfare
experts who designed the operation knew very well, this left us
radically open to suggestion—to mass hypnosis. Our old world had been
annihilated, and we were ready to be hypnotized, and to have a new world
created for us. We desperately needed a parent figure to tell us how to
make sense of the madness.
The government, of course, became that transferred parent figure. The
presidency, instituted by George “father of his country” Washington,
is a paternal institution. Even an illegitimate son-of-a-Bush could
briefly become our idealized national daddy. We believed what “they”
told us about 9/11, with little or no effort to discern the actual
facts, because we had been coerced and infantilized. When Susan Sontag
spoke out against the absurd infantilization of the American people
post-9/11, she was subjected to vicious attacks by intelligence-asset
pseudo-journalists. Why? Not because what she said wasn’t true—it
obviously was. The reason Sontag had to be ripped to shreds by the CIA
rag National Review and its epigones was that she was getting too
close to understanding that 9/11 was a psychological warfare operation
by US and allied intelligence agencies, not a “terrorist attack” by
anti-American foreigners. Sontag understood that the American public had
been subjected to induced regression. By calling attention to this fact,
she was indirectly calling attention to the psy-op man behind the
curtain.
The choice of September 11th as the date of the attacks was obviously
made by a psychological warfare expert who wanted to make the American
people suffer induced regression and put childlike faith in their
government. The number 911 has overwhelming emotional associations in
the mind of every American. From early childhood, we are taught that
this is the magic number we can call in the event of an emergency. If
anything terrible or deeply threatening happens to us, all we have to do
is push those three buttons on the nearest telephone, and a benevolent
parent figure—the government—will come rushing to help us. With the
ongoing breakdown of the family and its authority, and the widespread
consciousness of abuse between family members, the number 911 represents
the government that has become our real daddy. The planners of 9/11 took
advantage of this fact, enshrining their false-flag attack with a number
that evokes our desperate, childlike need for the government to be the
daddy who comes racing to help us in an emergency. Every time we hear
“9/11” we are enveloped in subconscious emotional associations of a
benevolent, fatherly government that can be counted on to save us from
catastrophe. Unless we have learned how to defend ourselves against
coercion, it is these emotional associations, not facts, that condition
how we think.
Once our old world had been exploded, our minds regressed to a childlike
emotional level, and our faith placed in the transferred parent figure
of our government and its paternal figurehead, we were ready to be
bombarded by hypnotic words and images. The hypnotic inculcation of
thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes is a simple matter. The key is
repetition: Repetition, repetition, repetition. In the
Alice-in-Wonderland world of the so-called war on terror, “what I tell
you three times is true.” They tell us over and over that 9/11 was
like Pearl Harbor; we accept the paradigm and prepare for a righteous
world war. They tell us over and over that Bin Laden did it, and we
internalize that belief, without reference to evidence. They tell us
over and over that Bin Laden is America’s enemy, and we accept the
story, even though many of the world’s most prestigious journalistic
outlets have told us that Bin Laden spent the first two weeks of July,
2001 getting treated at the American Hospital in Dubai and meeting with
CIA Station Chief Larry Mitchell. They tell us over and over that the
guy in the grainy video confessing to 9/11 is Bin Laden, even though
there is very little resemblance between this overweight impostor and
the Osama Bin Laden of other photos and videos. They tell us over and
over about the 19 suicide hijackers, and we believe them, even when we
find out that many of these alleged hijackers are still alive, that
these individuals were/are not Muslims at all but intelligence agents,
and that the “flight schools” they trained at were actually CIA drug
import airstrips. They tell us over and over that (whore-chasing,
boozing cokehead) Mohammad Atta put a bizarre parody of an “Islamic
terrorist’s last will and testament” into a suitcase and checked
that suitcase on board his suicide flight—say what?!—and that
the suitcase was mistakenly put onboard a different flight so it could
be quickly discovered and offered as “evidence.” They tell us that
other “suicide hijackers” conveniently left a car full of evidence
at the airport. They tell us that a hijacker’s passport miraculously
floated down from the inferno in the Towers to be discovered as more
“evidence.” They tell us that the fact that the “hijackers”
spent the night of 9/10/2001 in a motel right across the street from the
gates of the National Security Agency headquarters is just a weird
coincidence. They tell us that a good Samaritan burglar happened to
“steal” the briefcase containing the “evidence” of the
“hijackers” concocting their plot in Hamburg, Germany, and felt
compelled to deliver the briefcase to the German police. (What they
don’t tell us is that the German police are rolling on the ground
laughing at the absurd pretext, and have publicly stated that the
“burglar” was an intelligence agent.) They tell us over and over
that the World Trade Center collapsed from diesel-fuel-induced fires,
despite the fact that no high rise steel frame skyscraper has ever
collapsed due to fire, including much worse ones than those on 9/11.
They tell us over and over that Hani Hanjour, who could not fly a Cessna
training aircraft, somehow executed an amazing stunt maneuver in a
hijacked 757 in order to hit the empty, newly-reinforced wing of the
Pentagon and cause minimal damage—instead of just diving into the roof
and killing thousands.
Even more important than the repetition of such ludicrous propositions,
has been the bombardment of the public with words and phrases designed
to disable rational thought: terror, terrorism, the war on terror,
hate our freedoms, hate our values, patriot, patriotic, Patriot Act,
evildoers, extremists, security, anthrax, homeland, biological weapons,
Islamo-fascist, dirty bombs, weapons of mass destruction. These
emotionally-charged terms, drummed incessantly into our brains,
reinforce the unconscious emotional predispositions that govern our
thoughts. They literally force us to think certain thoughts, and render
us literally incapable of even entertaining others. Just as the car
salesman’s coercive question “How do you take your coffee”
literally forces 90% of non-coffee-drinkers to obediently accept a cup
of coffee, the psych-war experts’ attack of disorientation,
regression, and parental transference literally forces 90% of the
American public to think patently ludicrous thoughts, adopt those
thoughts as a model of reality, and cling to those self-evidently absurd
thoughts in the teeth of overwhelming factual evidence.
The question remains, who are “they” ? The answer is obvious—just
read the Project for a New American Century’s manifesto Rebuilding
America’s Defenses, published in September, 2000, which openly
calls for a “New Pearl Harbor.” The 9/11 “New Pearl Harbor” was
brought to us by the neoconservatives, who believe that all human beings
except themselves are governed by irrational emotions and incapable of
evidence-based reasoning. The neoconservatives are Zionist extremists
and cult followers of the demented philosopher-guru Leo Strauss, whose
worldview can be summed up in the adage “if you can’t beat Hitler,
join him.” They apparently believed that a massive dose of coercion,
in the form of 9/11, could motivate Americans to preserve and expand
their imperial domination of the planet in general, and their commitment
to a belligerent, expansionist Israel in particular.
Oddly enough, 9/11 was apparently designed with the help of focus
groups:
...The trick only needs to work long enough to win (or avoid) a war.
Even if “the truth” emerges sometime later, at least the primary
objective has already been achieved...when American corporate and
governmental interests adopted these techniques for use against the
American people, they needed to cloak their assault in a seemingly
benign manifestation: the focus group. About ten “average” members
of a target population are brought into a room and asked to discuss an
issue while a team of researchers, clients, and a camera record their
responses from behind a one-way mirror. A researcher stays in the room
with the subjects, asking them questions and pushing them in new
directions...
Bob Deutsch, an anthropologist [and legendary psy-op focus group guru]
who worked for the Department of Defense...led focus groups revealing
Americans’ irrational beliefs about Japan. “You want to uncover in
your audience what I call a “spasm of sentiment,” he explained.
“It’s their illogic—their emotional logic.” He told us how in
focus groups with average American citizens, he learned that most people
still associate the Japanese with Pearl Harbor: “People say, for
example, “Japan took our lives in 1941, and they took our livelihoods
in 1991.” Because Japan disrupted America’s self-mythology of being
invincible, the nation would never be forgiven in the irrational
American sentiment. (140)
The authors of 9/11 needed a horrifyingly spectacular, murderous attack
on the American “homeland”
in order to elicit this “Pearl Harbor effect.” They needed to
“disrupt America’s self-mythology of being invincible” so that
Arabs and Muslims “would never be forgiven in the irrational American
sentiment.” They were not interested in triggering just one quick war
in Afghanistan, or a second one in Iraq. They were after “the war that
will not end in our lifetimes”—an ongoing war that would remove
Americans’ Constitutional liberties, massively increase military
expenditures, and legitimize attacks against Middle Eastern nations for
decades into the future, on behalf of Israeli expansionism and the
petrodollar hegemony on which it depends.
9/11, in short, was an apocalypse of coercion. It was a psy-op on a
scale of murderousness and mendacity to make the Reichstag Fire look
like a kid playing with matches.
Play with fire, however, and you just might get burned. This
“apocalypse of coercion” could end up being an apocalypse for its
authors, and for coercion itself. The neocons have been revealed and
reviled as pathological liars, and only the flimsiest film of reticence
is preventing the major media from exposing the 9/11 psy-op and
triggering the greatest scandal in world history, and a Constitutional
crisis light-years beyond anything in the American experience. As people
awaken to 9/11 truth, they grow psychic armor that renders them
invincible to coercion in any form. Recoiling from the sheer horror of
such murderous coercion, their psychic immune system is strengthened. It
is a safe bet that no 9/11 skeptic will ever buy a lemon from a car
salesman—or even accept an unwanted cup of coffee. The 9/11
truth-awakened individual will not succumb to the blandishments of
advertisers, political pundits, cult leaders, politicians, or Fox News
commentators. He or she will smell coercion coming from a mile away, and
tell the prospective coercer into which orifice their coercion may be
inserted.
The simple truth is, coercion doesn’t work any more, and future
historians will view 9/11 as its final implosion. In the mid-1990s PR
guru Howard Rubenstein saw that the internet had made damage-control
coercion obsolete, and began advising clients that they had no choice
but to let the ugly truth hang out. Need a coverup? “The lesson is not
to do it. Sure, people will come to you and say, ‘Let’s set up a
committee and we’ll call it so-and-so, and we’ll hire someone to run
it,’ and my attitude is: What’s known is known. Simple. What is
known gets published. So it’s foolhardy to set up a fig-leaf committee
and hope nobody will look under the fig leaf and see what’s there”
(160). Unfortunately, the Bush Administration didn’t take
Rubenstein’s advice when it set up the 9/11 Commission.
The word “apocalypse” denotes the cataclysmic end of the world, but
its original Greek meaning is “unveiling.” By unveiling the truth of
9/11, and the mechanisms of coercion it employed, we can avoid the
apocalyptic future of endless war that the New Pearl Harbor was designed
to trigger. Less obviously, we can expose and discredit the mechanisms
of coercion that governments and corporations use to dehumanize us. It
is time for coercion-savvy media specialists like Rushkoff and
Rubenstein to join the 9/11 truth movement and help us figure out how to
communicate 9/11 truth, turn the 9/11 apocalypse of coercion against its
perpetrators, and ensure that in our shared human future, communications
technologies will be used to empower people, not enslave them.
Kevin Barrett
Coordinator, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com
********************************
Feb 2 2006
1) Physics Professor Steven Jones Packs Lecture Hall and Overflow
Rooms
Huge Crowd Hears of 9/11 Big Lie, WTC Controlled Demolition
Communications Professor Philip Gordon will be writing a story on the
talk for MUJCA-NET. Look for it to be up in a few days at http://mujca.com
2) Edgar J. says "Steele yourself" for a US-Israeli Attack
on Iran...
vs.
3) The US and Israel Cannot Attack Iran by Michael C. Ruppert,
and BOMBING IRAN? DON’T COUNT ON IT UNLESS THE NEOCONS EXCEED THEIR
KNOWN CAPACITY FOR STUPIDITY by Stan Goff
(subscribers-only articles reproduced for educational purposes--do
not post)
MUJCA-NET presents these opposing viewpoints on the likelihood of an
attack on Iran in order to underline just how insane the neocon
saber-rattling really is. Are they crazy enough to do it and destroy the
US empire and economy, and maybe the world? Or are they just pretending
to be crazy? See: http://mujca.com/madmantheory.htm Either way, 9/11
truth is the way back to sanity.
1)
http://www.gnn.tv/B12675 (great pictures!)
http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/163875/3/
Questions remain from 9/11 report, professor says
ANNA CHANG-YEN - Daily Herald
A BYU physics professor speaking on Wednesday night implied a government
cover-up of what really happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and cast doubt on
the blame placed on Osama bin Laden.
Professor Steven E. Jones suggested before the attacks the Bush
administration was seeking a way to increase military spending and
invade Iraq. The ensuing attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan have created
most of Muslims' disdain for America, he said.
He spoke at Utah Valley State College to a packed lecture room, and by
video to adjacent overflow rooms, sponsored by the Center for the Study
of Ethics.
Center director David Keller said, "The collapse of the World Trade
Center buildings illustrates a strange convergence of physics,
engineering, ethics and politics."
(More at: http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/163875/3/)
2)
The Crack of Doom
by Edgar J. Steele
February 1, 2006
My name is Edgar J. Steele. This is a Nickel Rant.
Last night, President Bush delivered the State of the Union
Address, a speech
that had to be written for him by our masters (though, in all fairness,
Bush did
pretty much keep his crayons within the lines).
Incredibly enough, Bush claimed that "we are winning"
in Iraq.
Even though it has become plain that America never will escape
from Iraq with
her dignity, Bush ruled out a withdrawal by saying, "If we were to
leave these
vicious attackers alone, they would not leave us alone. They would
simply move
the battlefield to our own shores." Via all those Iraqi and
Palestinian
aircraft carriers, no doubt. Words. Just words. Spoken
only as a man who ran
from war when it was his turn could speak them.
As expected, Bush repeatedly set up the coming invasion of Iran.
"And we do not
forget...Syria, Burma, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Iran because the
demands of
justice, and the peace of this world, require their freedom as
well."
Bush did settle the question as to who gets to start the
festivities in Iran
when he claimed that "Iran...sponsors terrorists in the Palestinian
territories
and in Lebanon, and that must come to an end. The Iranian government is
defying
the world with its nuclear ambitions, and the nations of the world must
not
permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons." Did you
just hear him
invite Israel to bomb the hell out of Iran? I did. Guess who
gets to go in
afterward and do the dirty work? Right. Your kids and mine.
Have you picked
out your son's burial plot yet?
At least Bush honestly drew the battle line when he said,
"And one of the main
sources of reaction and opposition is radical Islam." I've
said it before and
I'll say it again: This is not a war on "terrorism," it
is a war on Islam,
blood enemy of Israel and its bullyboy, the United States of America.
Bush's true allegiance became clear when, later in the speech, he
demanded that
"the leaders of (Palestine's ruling party) Hamas must recognize
Israel, disarm,
reject terrorism and work for lasting peace." Remember that
Palestinian
children are the ones lobbing rocks at the Israeli tanks rolling through
their
neighborhoods and who are getting shot in the head by Israeli snipers as
punishment for their meager efforts to protect their sisters and
brothers.
Remember that it was Rachel Corrie, peace activist, who was run down and
brutally murdered by an Israeli tank on Palestinian soil where she stood
up for
the right of Palestinians simply to exist.
Once a year, at about this time, the President delivers the State
of the Union
address. Tomorrow is Groundhog Day. Many people have gotten
these two events
mixed up in their minds, which is understandable. As someone over
at Air
America Radio once pointed out: "It is an ironic juxtaposition of
events: one
involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little
intelligence for prognostication while the other involves a
groundhog."
Twins separated at birth?
Coincidence?
You be the judge.
(For the whole article, see http://www.ConspiracyPenPal.com)
3)
The US and Israel Cannot Attack Iran
by
Michael C. Ruppert
© Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be
posted on any Internet web site without express written permission.
Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted
for non-profit purposes only.
January 27, 2006 0800 PST (FTW): The reason why so many Americans
on the left and right, whether supporters or opponents of Neocon tyranny
in Washington, are “sold” on the idea that American or Israeli air
strikes against Iran will take place this March (or soon thereafter) is
simple. It is more frightening for them to ponder the prospect of an
impotent America standing exposed and vulnerable in a world that largely
– and for good reason – hates it. Global economic meltdown, chaos
and nuclear war are more scary than the evil that Americans have
incrementally compromised themselves into endorsing. The uncertainty of
a world no longer tethered to a US center – even one that many
verbally oppose – represents an intolerable leap into the unknown.
That leap, however, is a fait accompli.
The US bluffs onward with its saber-rattling rhetoric but the whole
planet is calling that bluff. Foreign investment in Iran is increasing,
not decreasing. The planet is throwing money into Iran.
Every day I receive three or four stories from diverse sources –
marginal internet researchers and <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>mainstream media<?/color> outlets – stating
why an attack on Iran is, a good idea, or likely, or inevitable. In
these two companion pieces, FTW’s Military Affairs Editor, Stan
Goff (retired US Army Special Forces and former West Point instructor)
and I delineate the reasons why such an attack will not (and probably
cannot) happen. That is, of course, with one remotely necessary caveat:
that stupidity beyond belief has overtaken the US and Israel. I would
rephrase that to also include suicidal tendencies beyond belief. Stan
and I both know something about these kinds of operations. I’ve been
studying them for 30 years and Stan has been living them for that long.
Any military attack on Iran of any kind will mean the end
of the world as we know it. The same thing is true of a US-sponsored
assassination attempt on Hugo Chavez or any other “regime change” or
intervention anywhere. All such developments would be universally
perceived as US-sanctioned in any case. There is much less reason to
fear the US than there was three or four years ago. Near-toothless
tigers with bad gums and fetid gingivitis breath do not inspire fear and
awe. They invite attack. A pressure-cooker of pent-up global rage
against the US awaits only a pinprick to make it blow.
As I said in lectures throughout 2005 and in my new DVD , the world has
drawn a line in the sand around Iran. China, Asia, Europe and even
Britain cannot (and will not) do without Iranian oil and gas. In 2004,
China alone signed $200 billion in long-term oil and gas deals with
Iran. Europe and the rest of Asia are in similar investment
positions.cannot do without Iranian energy. especially since four
months ago the UK became a net energy importer as its North Sea
production continued to plummet with a decline rate approaching 10% per
year.
Britain has already ruled out against Iran and it will likely
oppose US moves even for sanctions (a necessary precursor) in the UN
Security Council.
The world has not forgotten the lies used by the US to justify its
invasion of Iraq, nor has it somehow missed the fact that we are getting
our Imperial ass kicked there. The world has not missed today’s
headlines that the US Army is stretched to the . “The Army?” you
say. “But these are going to be air strikes!”
Stan Goff has spelled it out eloquently in his article: any
US or Israeli attack on Iran will give the Iraqi insurgency a combined
dose of steroids and meth crystals that will spell utter defeat for the
US in Iraq and end the ultra-fragile SCIRI (pro-Iranian Shia)-centered
coalition that is now on life support.
Those fueling the “attack Iran” hype argue that “precision” air
strikes would likely not involve US ground troops. They forget
that as the US has become bogged in the Iraqi quagmire next door, it has
made extensive (if tenuous) bargains with Shia militias and the
pro-Iranian SCIRI regime that would undoubtedly drop all support for a
US-led peace in Iraq in the event of such an attack. As Goff so aptly
points out, an attack on Iran, even by Israel alone, would lead directly
to a US defeat in Iraq. This would come at a time when US forces are
stretched to thebreaking point.
Iran has made it bundantly clear that the whole world will suffer oil
shortages in the event of a US or Israeli attack. All Iran has to do is
to reduce exports and the rest of the world’s powers will turn on the
US in a minute. The recent lessons of and demonstrate what
sudden (and mild by comparison) energy shortages can do in a world where
demand has likely already exceeded supply.
Iran is also in a position to close the Straits of Hormuz through which
about half of the world’s oil passes. It is known (or reported) to
have <?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>Excocet, Silkworm and
even the deadly Russian Sunburn<?/color> missiles that would make
the job easy.
Oil is not the only weapon Iran can use to rally the whole world
(including Europe) against the US. Iran’s is a thriving economy,
swollen with petrodollars. That money is being used to purchase
European/Japanese/Korean-made autos, consumer goods, and high-cost
technology. Iran is filled with technicians, managers and investments
from all of the above countries. It was Russia that sold Iran the
technology for much of its nuclear research including the Bushehr
nuclear reactor. Russia has also sold Iran surface to air missile
systems. China has sold Iran all kinds of military hardware.
The Iranian military is orders of magnitude stronger and better equipped
to retaliate throughout the region than was Iraq’s. With that in mind,
I strongly recommend Goff’s brilliant <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>Full Spectrum Disorder<?/color> to get a
glimpse as to how thoroughly Iraqi insurgents have beaten the US
military outside the box. The only people who don’t seem to know this
are American taxpayers.
Economic sanctions against Iran are even more toothless. Should the US
try to weaken Iran through economic sanctions it would immediately
threaten the economies of China, Europe, India and East Asia. That is,
if the US could get the sanctions through the UN in the first place. If
Iran has no money to spend then all those investments and technicians
and factory reps have to go home.
On an almost daily basis, stories are hitting the mainstream that Iran
is or isn’t moving all of its foreign assets to Asia and out of
British and European banks. The mixed messages alone are enough to roil
the markets and that’s exactly the object lesson Iran wants to drive
home.
SANCTIONS AND THE UN
Don’t hold your breath, Condi. They aren’t going to happen. Any
sanctions that might come out as a result of US pressure won’t even
make Iran blink. The best the US can hope for is maybe travel
restrictions on Iranian leaders (yawn). And if that’s all the US gets
after taking the matter to the UN, the US will appear even weaker.
The permanent members of the UN Security Council include Britain,
France, China and Russia. All have one-vote, unilateral veto power.
Other current Security Council members include Japan, who will certainly
oppose anything that might slow down Iran’s purchases of their
products. These nations can read the writing on the wall. The US
consumption binge is ending on a note of severe indigestion and
flatulence. The US economy is crumbling and the signs are clear that
<?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>Joe America<?/color> is
waking up to the fact that he’s already in <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>way over his head<?/color>.
IT’S THE BOURSE, OF COURSE
The key to understanding why Iran is under such pressure from the
Empire is simple: The oil bourse scheduled to open in Iran this March
will trade in Euros instead of dollars. The entire world (including
Japan, China, Russia, India, Latin America and Europe) is eager for this
bourse to open. For it is there that they will free themselves from the
indirect taxation that has been imposed upon them by the US dollar since
the Bretton Woods agreement was ratified after World War II.
True, dollar hegemony began when the dollar was decoupled from gold
during the Great Depression. It gained strength when, during the Second
World War, the US supplied and fed a beleaguered world, accepting
payment in gold. Oil, gold and the dollar are in heavy, heavy play right
now. It is impossible for all three to rise in value at the same time.
On that front it’s two-to-one against the dollar.*
This threat to dollar hegemony was a major reason for the removal of
Saddam Hussein. He started trading Iraqi oil for Euros in 1999. Though
he wasn’t taken seriously at first, by 2000 he was attracting enough
international business to scare the bejesus out of Imperial Washington.
Iran is at least twice the economic threat to the dollar that Iraq was.
The only problem is that the Empire has suffered a case of premature
ejaculation. It spent all of its resources in Iraq: economic,
political, moral, and military. “They’re gone and there ain’t no
more.” Like the men on the bridge at Eindhoven which proved too far
for Sir Bernard Law Montgomery in 1944’s Operation Market Garden, Iran
can now stand, looking across the bridge which it controls and give the
US the raspberry. Like the rest of the world, Iran understands that the
US cannot cross that bridge without risking losing the war. Any
futile attempt by the US and Israel to attack Iran would be the single
largest “nuclear moment” since August 9, 1945, surpassing the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962.
The world understands this calculus and is betting – whether they
admit it or not – on Iran. The one ace up the Empire’s sleeve,
PROMIS software and other advanced hacking programs, could be used to
sabotage the bourse’s operations. But then that would be like the US
leaving a calling card saying “We did it.” The world knows what the
US is capable of in terms of “data mining.” About a sixth of my book
<?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>Crossing the
Rubicon<?/color> was devoted to that technology and its deep
connection to the Empire.
As for Israel, an air attack on Iran would almost certainly result in an
uncontrollable chain reaction throughout the Muslim world. Beyond all
reason the state of Israel would be suddenly surrounded on all sides
with never-before-seen levels of animosity. I cannot fail to note the
resemblance to events narrated in the Book of Revelation. There can be
no doubt about what the Fundamentalist Christian PACs want. Since
Israel, not Iran, is the only nuclear power in the region it kind of
makes one wonder.
Either way, the spring and summer of 2006 are going to be a turning
point in human history that no one will forget. Those who hope the US
will attack Iran may be supporting not a turning point in history but
rather history’s end.
* Much of the above analysis comes from the best economic teaching paper
I have read in ten years. It is a must-read called “The Proposed
Iranian Oil Bourse”by Krassimir Petrov, Ph.D. Commissioned by
investment banker Douglas Bowey (whom I have met), it was first
published (as far as I can tell) in a long, seven page version on
January 16th at . Le Metropole Cafe is a subscriber-only site
that features commentary by some of the best economic minds on the
planet. Shorter versions of the article are proliferating over some of
my favorite internet sites as free reprints under US Copyright laws. I
strongly recommend subscribing at Le Metropole to get the long version.
If not, all you have to do is Google the title and you’ll see how far
and wide this great work has spread.
BOMBING IRAN?
DON’T COUNT ON IT
UNLESS THE NEOCONS EXCEED THEIR KNOWN CAPACITY FOR STUPIDITY
by
Stan Goff
© Copyright 2006, From The Wilderness Publications,
www.fromthewilderness.com. All Rights Reserved. This story may NOT be
posted on any Internet web site without express written permission.
Contact admin@copvcia.com. May be circulated, distributed or transmitted
for non-profit purposes only.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
-Edward Abbey
January 27, 2006 0800 PST (FTW): Sometimes it is a good mental
exercise to put oneself in the place of his or her opponent. Imagine an
antagonistic scenario from the standpoint of the other side to determine
“most likely courses of action.”
It’s a simple exercise on a military battlefield – linear and
clear-cut, a simple race to calculate the destruction of an opponent.
It is an infinitely more problematic exercise once new layers of
complexity are added.
The Haitians have a proverb that goes, “A stupid person is a real
thing.”
I say all this as a preface because I am about to outline all the
reasons I don’t believe the United States or its proxy Israel will
bomb Iran in March – a speculation that’s growing legs in the
media, especially the internet, right now.
Plenty of us wrote volumes explaining why the Iraq invasion was and is a
disaster – not for the world, but for the carnival barkers of the Bush
administration. We practically wrote imperial advice columns.
The administration did it anyway and hasn’t proven capable of getting
back on the right foot since. (Except politically, in
“<?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>winning<?/color>”
the 2004 election of course, but they were ably assisted in that venture
by the asinine Democratic Leadership Council.) Don’t get me wrong.
The Bush administration failing is probably a good thing in the larger
scheme of things, just as was the defeat of the Wehrmacht in Russia, and
the annihilation of Custer’s genocidal 7th Cavalry in Montana.
The problem, as always, is that when the high muckety-mucks make these
bad decisions, it’s the lowly grunts that bleed for them.
So everything I write here about why (from the point of view of the Bush
administration itself) the US and/or Israel attacking Iran would, as a
dumb-ass decision, rank with winter ground attacks against Russia and
taking that shortcut through the Little Bighorn — doesn’t mean they
won’t do it anyway.
With that as a huge caveat, let me explain why neither the Bush
administration nor the Israelis will attack Iran in March or any other
time this year… unless that Haitian proverb goes into effect.
In case it’s gone unnoticed, the ancien political Praetorians
assembled at the Bush White House recently to conduct an intervention.
Imperialeminence gris Zbigniew Brzezinski has been lobbing salvos
of op-ed columns at the stupidity of the decision to invade Iraq.
Earlier this month, a Blue-Ribbon panel of Wilsonian Machiavellis met
with Bush to “offer advice on the war.” Numbered among these
sages were Madeleine Albright, William Perry, William Cohen, James
Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger, Colin Powell, and – ominously – Robert
McNamara, the Rumsfeldian metrician of the Vietnam quagmire. This,
just as Paul Bremer, who made his bones at the knee of the genocidal and
charming Henry Kissinger, declares that as the colonial viceroy of Iraq,
he was… “a scapegoat.” Coincidence? I think not.
Poor, poor Paul.
On the 11th of January, Brzezinski opined that “Victory or defeat [in
Iraq] is, in fact, a false strategic choice.”
In using this formulation, the president would have the American
people believe that their only options are either “hang in and win”
or “quit and lose.” But the real, practical choice is this:
“persist but not win” or “desist but not lose.”
Victory, as defined by the administration and its supporters -- i.e., a
stable and secular democracy in a unified Iraqi state, with the
insurgency crushed by the American military assisted by a disciplined,
U.S.-trained Iraqi national army -- is unlikely. The U.S. force required
to achieve it would have to be significantly larger than the present
one, and the Iraqi support for a U.S.-led counterinsurgency would have
to be more motivated. The current U.S. forces (soon to be reduced) are
not large enough to crush the anti-American insurgency or stop the
sectarian Sunni-Shiite strife.
Both problems continue to percolate under an inconclusive but
increasingly hated foreign occupation.
Moreover, neither the Shiites nor the Kurds are likely to subordinate
their specific interests to a unified Iraq with a genuine, single
national army. As the haggling over the new government has already
shown, the two dominant forces in Iraq -- the religious Shiite alliance
and the separatist Kurds -- share a common interest in preventing a
restoration of Sunni domination, with each determined to retain a
separate military capacity for asserting its own specific interests,
largely at the cost of the Sunnis. A truly national army in that context
is a delusion. Continuing doggedly to seek "a victory" in that
fashion dooms America to rising costs in blood and money, not to mention
the intensifying Muslim hostility and massive erosion of America's
international legitimacy, credibility and moral reputation.
Aside from the Orwellian intro about persisting and desisting –
really a suggested rhetorical approach for the administration to bug the
fuck out of Iraq, and the sooner the better – the rest of this
analysis could have been written by yours truly and a host of other
irascibles anytime over the past three years. We may not assign
the same plus and minus signs to categories and outcomes, but the fact
that we are in accord on these (highly reduced and simplified) basics
should be telling us something.
The question is, what?
I propose that it means the empire is in very deep shit.
I’m not, however, going to propose that Wilsonian “realists” like
Brzezinski, Powell, and Albright have any better solution than the
booger-picking loons in office right now. I think the criticisms
of the former of the actions of the latter have the strong, sour scent
of panic. These same luminaries paved a direct path to where we
are now, and gave us all the old wait-and-see three years ago when Karl
Rove’s wet-brained Pinocchio stepped up to this crap table.
Brzezinski can’t say it, so I will.
Behind the whole “stable, secular democracy” smokescreen (which he
borrows from the administration) lie the true and original goals of this
adventure: to build permanent US military installations in Iraq and take
the political pressure off Saudi Arabia; to maintain those installations
as “lily pads” from which to launch future military operations
throughout Hydrocarbon Asia; to have this military control over the
region as a lever to use against various current and future competitors,
including Western Europe, Japan, and China… especially China; to
compensate for the increasing weakness of the United States as a center
of productive capital by militarily securing the global dominance of the
US as the center of finance capital; to create a demonstration effect
with a decisive and destructive “shock and awe” military assault on
Iraq as propaganda-of-the-deed for would-be malcontents.
The fact that none of this has turned out as planned, which I will
discuss further along, does not mean that there was ever much choice, at
least from the standpoint of the US dominant class… which includes not
only Bush but all those nervous Wilsonians who appeared for the
intervention.
When the Soviet Union broke up and the Warsaw Pact stood down, an entire
globally deployed imperial military apparatus became a doctrinal orphan.
The very enemy which was the raison d’etre of the Pentagon, its
organization, its composition, its disposition, its “air-land war”
doctrine… became an anachronism in less than a year between 1989 and
1990.
The question of how to re-dispose this unwieldy and wildly expensive
killing machine was never going to be resolved in a vacuum. The
historical tendencies that would contextualize that decision were
already in motion, and even with a very high level of complexity, there
were trend lines within those tendencies that were already part of the
dominant preoccupations within US ruling circles.
They may rule over the people in the bog, but they are still in
the same goddamned bog.
The problem was complicated by the vulgar political realities of
American society, where an entire worldview had been carefully
propagated in conjunction with the Cold War, and upon that worldview
rested the very legitimacy of successive governments.
Enemies, of course, are essential to maintain the hegemony of our
national rulers, and suddenly we were left floundering without one.
The War on Drugs was a bland substitute through the 90’s. Hell,
we like drugs. That foolishness was combined with the imperatives
of consumer demand production to juice up accumulation through both
Clinton terms – so we were encouraged to go on a spending bacchanalia
and told more than once that we were at the end of history, that we had
arrived at some consumer nirvana atop a jillion miles of fiber optic
cable that now lies as unused as the Gold Coast Railroad.
The problem with telling everyone that they’re at the end of history
is that it is a lie with a very short half-life. American politics
runs in two-to four-year cycles, within which there is a kind of
partisan mud-wrestling where there are very few rules. Except to keep
the focus off the system itself.
Both parties are constantly offering up the intellectual equivalent of
cotton candy for the masses while they compete to see who can shovel the
most money into the pockets of their most loyal capitals. The
other thing they both do, of course, at the national level, is try to
preserve American dominance in the world.
There is no argument about this goal, only about the best method to
achieve it.
The problem with an abrupt shift like the end of the Cold War and the
resulting disruption of those old categories is that it exposes the
American ruling class to a crisis of legitimacy.
That is where we are now – the ruling class and its dominant faction
is trying to build a new worldview to fill the void, in many respect at
odds with the old one, when the old one hasn’t faded yet from memory.
Combine this with the fact that all the old partisan points of reference
have been jumbled apart by this post-Cold War disruption, and we have
the weird spectacles we are treated to now – like two Yalie frat
brothers running against one another for the presidency, both agreeing
with each other on the most important question in the public mind, the
war in Iraq, one running as a “war hero” and losing to a more
compelling (if utterly ridiculous) image of his fellow multi-millionaire
opponent as a Wild West cowboy… an image of a myth.
The reactive mendacity of both parties over the last three years is
waking a lot of people up. That is a big political problem… for
the bigwigs.
I could say, “Meanwhile, out in the real world,” but I won’t.
I said earlier, or at least the Haitian proverb said, “A stupid person
is a real thing.” That would mean a lot of stupid people are a
lot of real things… or a really big real thing.
So I will say instead that, “Meanwhile… the empire is losing its
moorings.”
I’ll begin with Iran. I promised a hypothesis. It is that
neither the US nor Israel will attack it.
WHY NO ATTACK ON IRAN
THE US MILITARY WILL BE DEFEATED IN IRAQ
I’ll begin with the increasingly nightmarish military and political
fiasco in Iraq.
The legitimation of a SCIRI*-dominated government by an election the US
had forced upon them by Grand Ayatollah Sayyid, Ali Husaini Sistani, has
effectively created a UN recognized pro-Iranian government in Iraq.
There are multiform armed conflicts. The US military occupation
force is, with punctuated operational exceptions, effectively confined
to its bases. This occupation force exists in an ocean of
murderous hostility. Some polls show 87% of the population now
wants the US out, and that factors in the 20% of the population that is
Kurdish and wants the Americans to remain as a guarantee against war
with Turkey.
Oil production, projected before the invasion by the PNAC alumni to jump
to 4 million barrels per day, was 2.3 mb/d before the 2003 invasion has
not been able to top 2 mb/d since.
Military morale is rock bottom. Six figure reenlistment bonuses
are on offer to special operations types to stop them joining
Rumsfeld’s shadow contract army of mercenaries. Academic types call
these companies PMCs for Private Military Contractors.
Regional Arab and Muslim hostility to the US is at an all time high,
creating profound dangers for the US-supported governments of Jordan,
Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt.
The myth of American military invincibility has been incinerated by a
lightly armed, urban resistance (so much for the “demonstration
effect”).
Oil was central to this whole debacle, though not in the way people
thought. There was never a need to steal it. It’s actually
cheaper to buy it. Military operations are outrageously expensive,
and a recent calculation that takes in the hidden and long term costs of
war shows that the Iraq war will likely cost the US $2.65 trillion.
The primary consequence of any attack on Iran will be the decisive
military defeat of the United States in Iraq.
An attack on Iran right now would result in an almost instantaneous
and generalized southern Shia insurgency directed against the US
occupation. That insurgency would, within weeks, bring about
tactical alliances between Shia militias in south and central Iraq and
Sunni nationalists and Islamists in the north. The occupation
would become literally unsupportable.
ISRAEL
The Sunday Telegraph (UK) has published a story showing how
Israeli jets cannot effectively reach Iran for a preemptive strike
against nuclear power facilities (Iran has NO nuclear weapons capability
and is years away from it.). The story notes that Israelis can
reach their hypothetical targets, however, from Iraqi Kurdistan, where
the US oversees airfields for its own increasingly common air strikes
against urban targets all over Iraq.
Much is being made of the fact that both Bush and Blair have said that
military action against Iran “has not been ruled out.” But
they never rule that out. As an indicator of intent, this
statement has all the food value ofNutraSweet. We take
little comfort, however, from the rhetorical escalations against Iran in
which the obedience-trained press, as usual, is echoing serial
distortions about “Iran’s nuclear program,” even as laptop
bombardier William Kristol goes off his Paxil long enough to
visualize attacking Iran in his boring-ass Weekly Standard.
Iran’s nuclear program is a nuclear power program. I am
on record as one who believes that producing electricity with fission is
unspeakably stupid. But the point is that Iran is not
producing nuclear weapons. Period! Categorically! Not!
There are already three real nuclear militaries in the region. One
of them – Israel – is openly hostile to Iran. Call me simple,
but isn’t the best guarantee against nuclear proliferation in the
region dismantling Israel’sexisting nuclear arsenal?
Bush and Blair are pretending to try to force the UN into taking action
against Iran. Yet the biggest violator in the world of UN
resolutions – Israel – is armed to the teeth, illegally occupying
another nation, and has a consistent history of violent provocation.
It would be imprudent to ignore the possibility of an attack on Iran,
when only three years ago we were hearing Condoleezza Rice warning us
that we didn’t want to find out “the smoking gun is a mushroom
cloud,” as part of the fabricated hysteria to promote an invasion.
Saddam… Saddam… Saddam… 9-11… 9-11… 9-11… mushroom
clouds… mushroom clouds… mushroom clouds.
I don’t even doubt that there are members of this administration who
might argue for striking Iran. A stupid person is a real thing.
END OF EMPIRE – Fast Crash or Slow Burn
But the reason for the recent “interventions” by the Old Guard
are clear. They are concerned that George W. Bush’s
administration might not note the signposts along this road that say, End
of Empire.
We are not an empire that exists through force of arms, except in very
limited spatio-temporal ways. That is why I say that this is not now nor
has it ever been a Bush war. Democrats, who would have likely
created their own pretext to try the same thing, albeit in more
“multilateral” fashion, were as obliged by the imperatives of
American power as any Republican to conduct a redisposition of American
military forces out of their Cold War posture and into roughly the same
arrangement being attempted now by Bush’s band of narcissists.
The difference between the administration and these cynical Wilsonians
is that the latter recognize a disaster when they see it. They are
simply in the best position to name what they see now – within
acceptable limits, of course – without any damage to their own
political careers and legacies.
George W. Bush did not invent the international system this
administration has deployed its military to protect. George W.
Bush did not create the emerging conflict with China that now has Iran
in sharp focus. George W. Bush did not create Peak Oil as an
inevitability within the material substrates of late imperialism.
He is simply the latest and perhaps most buffoonish in a string of heads
of state who have been scrambling to save not just capitalism – it’s
more complicated than that – but American dominance within the world
capitalist system, ever since the last half of the US disaster in
Vietnam.
George W. Bush couldn’t find his ass with a hand-held radar. He,
and no less all the imperial wizards around Brzezinski, are being
carried along by tendencies they must both fight to preserve, but which
hold within them the seeds of their very undoing.
To explain why, I have to refer back to the Edward Abbey quote at the
beginning of this commentary.
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
It is also the imperative within capitalism, and like cancer, it is
metastatic. When growth exceeds its national, regional, and
material limits, it has to reach beyond itself into those places, both
physical and cultural, that have so far escaped commodification, to
engage in what Luxemburg called “primitive accumulation”; that is,
theft, fraud, dispossession, and looting.
Sometimes, these activities are very contingent and opportunistic, e.g.,
the land grab taking place right now in the wake of Hurricane Katrina
(dispossession). Other times, these methods are highly organized,
and there is a name for that also: war.
Many grasp the essence of <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>Peak Oil<?/color> which is not a claim that oil
will “run out,” but that it will inevitably reach a point of no
return in extraction. Oil is an irreplaceable material substrate
of society as it is presently organized.
Oil is necessary for continued accumulation (growth). American
capital cannot afford oil. If they paid its real value, there
would be a deep accumulation crisis. They shift the costs onto the
public in the form of taxpayer-financed infrastructure provision for the
private sector and military spending, then write it off as a War on
Terror.
No, children, <?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>there is no
substitute for oil<?/color>… and there never will be.
The pain of accumulation crises from the US war against Vietnam has been
shifted ever more heavily onto peoples and nations far, far outside the
view of the American suburbs. The decline of world oil production
will not affect all equally. The US state will deepen its
exploitation and even destruction of the world’s most vulnerable
actors for as long as possible to fend off a political crisis at home.
The problem is that <?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>exterminist
imperialism<?/color> is so far advanced already that one can do
some fairly simple and accurate calculations now about increasing
Chinese (and now more and more Indian) oil demand and import-dependency,
and see that the confrontation between the US and China over this
strategic commodity is already in motion, though the conflict is not yet
open and direct.
China’s breakneck plunge into industrialization combined with its
past-peak domestic oil pools (China became a net importer in 1993)
created a demand for oil imports that in 2004 pushed China past Japan
for gross petroleum imports – second only to the United States.
ATTACKING IRAN IS ATTACKING CHINA – UN VETOES
China now imports 13% of its oil from Iran. China hasn’t a
single motive for antagonizing Iran. China’s seat on the UN
Security Council, and Russia’s too for that matter (Russia has strong
trade relations with Iran, sharing nuclear technology), are a virtual
assurance that US posturing about UN sanctions is pure diplomatic
psychobabble.
The Unites States will not get the UN Security Council to censure Iran.
It is in this international context that we can appreciate how
significant the consequences are likely to be of a US-sanctioned Israeli
attack against Iran. Any attack by Israel on Iran will be
perceived (probably rightly) as having been sanctioned by the United
States. Such sanction would be undeniable should Israeli planes fly
through US-controlled airspace. Those consequences are precisely why
Russia and China, as UNSC members, can rest assured that their veto
power will have the force of a final say. Bill Kristol will just
have to go home and suck his thumb.
UNINTENTIONALLY UNITING THE MIDDLE EAST
A secondary consequence, not as certain but certainly possible, would be
the sympathetic detonation of popular anti-government rebellions in
places like Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. The very
perception of a joint US-Israeli strike against a Muslim nation would
advance Muslim unity across all of Southwest Asia more quickly than
twenty Arab League conferences.
From the region, we now have to return to an international context, and
here is where the cancer-cell <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>ideology of “growth”<?/color> is significant
again.
While touted as the application of the principles of “free
enterprise” around the world, growth is actually the still-evolving
attempt of global capital to outrun its own crises. For the
moment, it involves the draining of value from developed countries via
dollar hegemony (what Gowan called the <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>Dollar-Wall Street Regime<?/color>, and the
draining of value from peripheral nations through debt leverage
(International Monetary Fund loan-sharking) combined with
<?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>dollar
hegemony<?/color>.
The security of US power in peripheral nations, for instance throughout
most of Latin America, is based most directly on the higher profits that
can be extracted from them. These higher rates of profit are
available precisely because of underdeveloped, non-capitalist sectors of
the reproductive economy; that is, the extremely low cost of living in
places where there is no well-developed social infrastructure. One
very reliable measure of that underdevelopment is <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>per capita energy consumption<?/color>. It
is to these areas that crisis-wracked capitalists (i.e., movements of
capital) flee, accelerated in this flight by competitive pressure with
one another, as they have done during the deindustrialization of many US
urban cores – sending commodity assembly platforms abroad. These
peripheral nations are also available for plain plunder in many cases.
The people in these countries, however, grow increasingly resistant as
their resources are plundered and their labor exploited. Moreover,
the incessant tendency of capitalism to <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>commodify<?/color> every cranny of social life
transforms non-capitalist (primitive accumulation) sectors into
capitalist sectors, and the inhering problems with falling profit rates
recur, and over-accumulation becomes a crisis, forcing capital to flee
once again. Patrick Bond has an excellent tutorial on
<?color><?param 0000,0000,EEEC>overaccumulation<?/color>,
sometimes called overproduction.
Given that dollar hegemony, which is the basis of US financial
domination of the world system, is also utterly reliant on the US’s
status as the premier world military power, and the corresponding fact
that inhering social and material limits to growth will inevitably be
encountered, a military crisis will quickly be translated into a more
general political, then economic crisis.
The contemporary Leftward <?color><?param
0000,0000,EEEC>continental drift<?/color> of Latin America has
been empowered by the quagmire in Iraq and by the reverse demonstration
effect, that is, the failure of the US in Iraq to support its own
mystique as invincible. Interestingly enough, the leadership being
provided to Latin Americans who are rapidly mobilizing in popular
movement toward anti-neoliberalism (read: independence) is from
Venezuela, an oil-producing nation that is building a relationship with
China, and underwriting the near-term plans of two nations, Brazil and
Argentina, to pay down the interest on their external debt and free
themselves from the IMF.
This is an indicator, I think, of the deeper significance of the
grinding military failure in Iraq – which is the most precarious
moment the American empire has seen since the US war against Vietnam.
The very fabric of the empire could unravel, and this is why the
Wilsonian section of the ruling class’ political factions is closing
in on George W. Bush.
There is probably no action, short of a nuclear attack, that the United
States could approve or conduct that would worsen that crisis more
decisively than an attack on Iran.
So there is my argument for why Iran can rest easy for now. But…
A stupid person is a real thing.
* Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shia political
party emerging as one of the dominant players in Iraq.
Kevin Barrett
Coordinator, MUJCA-NET: http://mujca.com
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