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TechnoratiThe Ponzi Scheme Presidency
Bush's Legacy of Destruction
It may finally be 2009, but in some ways, given these last years, it might as well be 800 BCE.
From the ninth to the seventh centuries BCE, the palace walls of the kings who ruled the Assyrian Empire were decorated with vast stone friezes, filled with enough dead bodies to sate any video-game maker and often depicting -- in almost comic strip-style -- various bloody royal victories and conquests. At least one of them shows Assyrian soldiers lopping off the heads of defeated enemies and piling them into pyramids for an early version of what, in the VCE (Vietnam Common Era) of the 1960s, Americans came to know as the "body count."
So I learned recently by wandering through a traveling exhibit of ancient Assyrian art from the British Museum. On the audio tour accompanying the show, one expert pointed out that Assyrian scribes, part of an impressive imperial bureaucracy, carefully counted those heads and recorded the numbers for the greater glory of the king (as, in earlier centuries, Egyptian scribes had recorded counts of severed hands for victorious Pharaohs).
Hand it to art museums. Is there anything stranger than wandering through one and locking eyes with a Vermeer lady, a Van Eyck portrait, or one of Rembrandt's burghers staring out at you across the centuries? What a reminder of the common humanity we share with the distant past. In a darker sense, it's no less a reminder of our kinship across time to spot a little pyramid of heads on a frieze, imagine an Assyrian scribe making his count, and -- eerily enough -- feel at home. What a measure of just how few miles "the march of civilization" (as my parents' generation once called it) has actually covered.
Prejudiced Toward War
If you need an epitaph for the Bush administration, here's one to test out: They tried. They really tried. But they couldn't help it. They just had to count.
In a sense, George W. Bush did the Assyrians proud. With his secret prisons, his outsourced torture chambers, his officially approved kidnappings, the murders committed by his interrogators, the massacres committed by his troops and mercenaries, and the shock-and-awe slaughter he ordered from the air, it's easy enough to imagine what those Assyrian scribes would have counted, had they somehow been teleported into his world. True, his White House didn't have friezes of his victories (one problem being that there were none to glorify); all it had was Saddam Hussein's captured pistol proudly stored in a small study off the Oval Office. Almost 3,000 years later, however, Bush's "scribes," still traveling with the imperial forces, continued to count the bodies as they piled ever higher in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Pakistani borderlands, and elsewhere.
Many of those body counts were duly made public. This record of American "success" was visible to anyone who visited the Pentagon's website and viewed its upbeat news articles complete with enumerations of "Taliban fighters" or, in Iraq, "terrorists," the Air Force's news feed listing the number of bombs dropped on "anti-Afghan forces," or the U.S. Central Command's stories of killing "Taliban militants."
On the other hand, history, as we know, doesn't repeat itself and -- unlike the Assyrians -- the Bush administration would have preferred not to count, or at least not to make its body counts public. One of its small but tellingly unsuccessful struggles, a sign of the depth of its failure on its own terms, was to avoid the release of those counts.
Its aversion to the body count made some sense. After all, since the 1950s, body counting for the U.S. military has invariably signaled not impending victory, but disaster, and even defeat. In fact, one of the strangest things about the American empire has been this: Between 1945 and George W. Bush's second term, the U.S. economy, American corporations, and the dollar have held remarkable sway over much of the rest of the world. New York City has been the planet's financial capital and Washington its war capital. (Moscow, even at the height of the Cold War, always came in a provincial second.)
In the same period, the U.S. military effectively garrisoned much of the globe from the Horn of Africa to Greenland, from South Korea to Qatar, while its Navy controlled the seven seas, its Air Force dominated the global skies, its nuclear command stood ready to unleash the powers of planetary death, and its space command watched the heavens. In the wake of the Cold War, its various military commands (including Northcom, set up by the Bush administration in 2002, and Africom, set up in 2007) divided the greater part of the planet into what were essentially military satrapies. And yet, the U.S. military, post-1945, simply could not win the wars that mattered.
Because the neocons of the Bush administration brushed aside this counterintuitive fact, they believed themselves faced in 2000 with an unparalleled opportunity (whose frenetic exploitation would be triggered by the attacks of 9/11, the "Pearl Harbor" of the new century). With the highest-tech military on the planet, funded at levels no other set of nations could cumulatively match, the United States, they were convinced, was uniquely situated to give the phrase "sole superpower" historically unprecedented meaning. Even the Assyrians at their height, the Romans in their Pax Romana centuries, the British in the endless decades when the sun could never set on its empire, would prove pikers by comparison.
In this sense, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and the various neocons in the administration were fundamentalist idolaters -- and what they worshipped was the staggering power of the U.S. military. They were believers in a church whose first tenet was the efficacy of force above all else. Though few of them had the slightest military experience, they gave real meaning to the word bellicose. They were prejudiced towards war.
With awesome military power at their command, they were also convinced that they could go it alone as the dominating force on the planet. As with true believers everywhere, they had only contempt for those they couldn't convert to their worldview. That contempt made "unilateralism" their strategy of choice, and a global Pax Americana their goal (along with, of course, a Pax Republicana at home).
If All Else Fails, Count the Bodies
It was in this context that they were not about to count the enemy dead. In their wars, as these fervent, inside-the-Beltway utopians saw it, there would be no need to do so. With the "shock and awe" forces at their command, they would refocus American attention on the real metric of victory, the taking of territory and of enemy capitals. At the same time, they were preparing to disarm the only enemy that truly scared them, the American people, by making none of the mistakes of the Vietnam era, including -- as the President later admitted -- counting bodies.
Of course, both the Pax Americana and the Pax Republicana would prove will-o'-the-wisps. As it turned out, the Bush administration, blind to the actual world it faced, disastrously miscalculated the nature of American power -- especially military power -- and what it was capable of doing. And yet, had they taken a clear-eyed look at what American military power had actually achieved in action since 1945, they might have been sobered. In the major wars (and even some minor actions) the U.S. military fought in those decades, it had been massively destructive but never victorious, nor even particularly successful. In many ways, in the classic phrase of Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong, it had been a "paper tiger."
Yes, it had "won" largely meaningless victories -- in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada in 1983; against the toothless Panamanian regime of Manuel Noriega in Operation Just Cause in 1989; in Operation Desert Storm, largely an air campaign against Saddam Hussein's helpless military in 1990 (in a war that settled nothing); in NATO's Operation Deliberate Force, an air war against the essentially defenseless Serbian military in 1995 (while meeting disaster in operations in Iran in 1980 and Somalia in 1993). On the other hand, in Korea in the early 1950s and in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from the 1960s into the early 1970s, it had committed its forces all but atomically, and yet had met nothing but stalemate, disaster, and defeat against enemies who, on paper at least, should not have been able to stand up to American power.
It was in the context of defeat and then frustration in Korea that the counting of enemy bodies began. Once Chinese communist armies had entered that war in massive numbers in late 1950 and inflicted a terrible series of defeats on American forces but could not sweep them off the peninsula, that conflict settled into a "meatgrinder" of a stalemate in which the hope of taking significant territory faded; yet some measure of success was needed as public frustration mounted in the United States: thus began the infamous body count of enemy dead.
The body count reappeared quite early in the Vietnam War, again as a shorthand way of measuring success in a conflict in which the taking of territory was almost meaningless, the countryside a hostile place, the enemy hard to distinguish from the general population, and our own in-country allies weak and largely unable to strengthen themselves. Those tallies of dead bodies, announced daily by military spokesmen to increasingly dubious reporters in Saigon, were the public face of American "success" in the Vietnam era. Each body was to be further evidence of what General William Westmoreland called "the light at the end of the tunnel." When those dead bodies and any sense of success began to part ways, however, when, in the terminology of the times, a "credibility gap" opened between the metrics of victory and reality, the body count morphed into a symbol of barbarism as well as of defeat. It helped stoke an antiwar movement.
This was why, in choosing to take on Saddam Hussein's hapless military in 2003 -- the administration was looking for a "cakewalk" campaign that would "shock and awe" enemies throughout the Middle East -- they officially chose not to release any counts of enemy dead. General Tommy Franks, commander of the administration's Afghan operation in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq thereafter, put the party line succinctly, "We don't do body counts."
As the President finally admitted in some frustration to a group of conservative columnists in October 2006, his administration had "made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team." Not intending to repeat the 1960s experience, he and his advisors had planned out an opposites war on the home front -- anything done in Vietnam would not be done this time around -- and that meant not offering official counts of the dead which might stoke an antiwar movement... until, as in Korea and Vietnam, frustration truly set in.
When the taking of Baghdad in April 2003 proved no more of a capstone on American victory than the taking of Kabul in November 2001, when everything began to go disastrously wrong and the carefully enumerated count of the American dead in Iraq rose precipitously, when "victory" (a word which the President still invoked 15 times in a single speech in November 2005) adamantly refused to make an appearance, the moment for the body count had arrived. Despite all the planning, they just couldn't stop themselves. A frustrated President expressed it this way: "We don't get to say that -- a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it."
Soon enough the Pentagon was regularly releasing such figures in reports on its operations and, in December 2006, the President, too, first slipped such a tally into a press briefing. ("Our commanders report that the enemy has also suffered. Offensive operations by Iraqi and coalition forces against terrorists and insurgents and death squad leaders have yielded positive results. In the months of October, November, and the first week of December, we have killed or captured nearly 5,900 of the enemy.")
It wasn't, of course, that no one had been counting. The President, as we know from Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, had long been keeping "'his own personal scorecard for the [global] war [on terror]' in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists -- each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down." And the military had been counting bodies as well, but as the possibility of victory disappeared into the charnel houses of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon and the president finally gave in. While this did not stoke an antiwar movement, it represented a tacit admission of policy collapse, a kind of surrender. It was as close as an administration which never owned up to error could come to admitting that two more disastrous wars had been added to a string of military failures in the truncated American Century.
That implicit admission, however, took years to arrive, and in the meantime, Iraqis and Afghans -- civilians, insurgents, terrorists, police, and military men -- were dying in prodigious numbers.
The Global War on Terror as a Ponzi Scheme
As it happened, others were also counting. Among the earliest of them, a website, Iraq Body Count, carefully toted up Iraqi civilian deaths as documented in reputable media outlets. Their estimate has, by now, almost reached 100,000 -- and, circumscribed by those words "documented" and "civilian," doesn't begin to get at the full scope of Iraqi deaths.
Various groups of scholars and pollsters also took up the task, using sophisticated sampling techniques (including door-to-door interviews under exceedingly dangerous conditions) to arrive at reasonable approximations of the Iraqi dead. They have come up with figures ranging from the hundreds of thousands to a million or more in a country with a prewar population of perhaps 26 million. United Nations representatives have similarly attempted, under difficult circumstances, to keep a count of Iraqis fleeing into exile -- exile being, after a fashion, a form of living death -- and have estimated that more than 2 million Iraqis fled their country, while another 2.7 million, having fled their homes, remained "internally displaced."
Similar attempts have been made for Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch has, for instance, done its best to tally civilian deaths from air strikes in that country (while even TomDispatch has attempted to keep a modest count of wedding parties obliterated by U.S. air attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq). But, of course, the real body count in either country will never be known.
One thing is certain, however: it is an obscenity of the present moment that Iraq, still a charnel house, still in a state of near total disrepair, still on the edge of a whole host of potential conflicts, should increasingly be portrayed here as a limited Bush administration "surge" success. Only a country -- or a punditry or a military -- incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion.
If all roads once led to Rome, all acts of the Bush administration have led to destruction, and remarkably regularly to piles of dead or tortured bodies, counted or not. In fact, it's reasonable to say that every Bush administration foreign policy dream, including its first term fantasy about a pacified "Greater Middle East" and its late second term vision of a facilitated "peace process" between the Israelis and Palestinians, has ended in piles of bodies and in failure. Consider this a count all its own.
Looked at another way, the Bush administration's Global War on Terror and its subsidiary wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have, in effect, been a giant Ponzi scheme. At a cost of nearly one trillion taxpayer dollars to date (but sure to be in the multi-trillions when all is said and done), Bush's mad "global war" simply sucked needed money out of our world at levels that made Bernie Madoff seem like a small fry.
Madoff, by his own accounting, squandered perhaps $50 billion of other people's money. The Bush administration took a trillion dollars of ours and handed it out to its crony corporate buddies and to the Pentagon as down payments on disaster -- and that's without even figuring into the mix the staggering sums still needed to care for American soldiers maimed, impaired, or nearly destroyed by Bush's wars.
With Bush's "commander-in-chief" presidency only days from its end, the price tag on his "war" continues to soar as dollars grow scarce, new investors refuse to pay in, and the scheme crumbles. Unfortunately, the American people, typical suckers in such a con game, will be left with a mile-high stack of IOU's. In any Ponzi scheme comparison with Madoff, however, one difference (other than size) stands out. Sooner or later, Madoff, like Charles Ponzi himself, will end up behind bars, while George, Dick, & Co. will be writing their memoirs and living off the fat of the land.
Eight years of bodies, dead, broken, mutilated, abused; eight years of ruined lives down countless drains; eight years of massive destruction to places from Baghdad to New Orleans where nothing of significance was ever rebuilt: all this was brought to us by a President, now leaving office without apology, who said the following in his first inaugural address: "I will live and lead by these principles: to advance my convictions with civility... to call for responsibility and try to live it as well."
He lived, however, by quite a different code. Destruction without responsibility, that's Bush's legacy, but who's counting now that the destruction mounts and the bodies begin to pile up here in the "homeland," in our own body count nation? The laid off, the pension-less, the homeless, the suicides -- imagine what that trillion dollars might have meant to them.
It's clear enough in these last days of the Bush administration that its model was Iraq, dismantled and devastated. The world, had he succeeded, might have become George W. Bush's Iraq.
Yes, he came up short, but, given the global economic situation, how much short we don't yet know. Perhaps, in the future, historians will call him a Caesar -- of destruction.
Veni, vidi, vastavi... [I came, I saw, I devastated...]
45 Comments so far
Show AllThe national debt is an instrument for the elites to strengthen their control over the people. Without the interest expense, the people could keep more of their production surplus for reinvestment in their independent small enterprises, independent and small being the most efficient, productive enterprise type. The result is more free time to study, learn, enjoy and attend to civic responsibilities. The national debt is accumulated in service to the various elite rackets, i.e. the war/fossil/chaos enterprises and the implosive speculative bonanzas across the commodity and finance markets. The elites' rackets are highly net destructive in many senses and made possible only by the resilience of the people. The rackets effectively shift wealth from the people to elites, i.e. from the majority who respect law/order to the minority who defy law/order (mercenary enterprises such as Blackwater appear to support law/order when in reality they erode law/order and support lawlessness, helping to further promote the elite rackets). The debt does not shift wealth to the elites but amplifies the damage of the wealth shift against the people. The national debt is like monetary inflation, making everything more expensive for the people, not so much for the elite. As long as the people submit to the rackets, they will continue to work longer hours for less in return. There is an illusion of progress in the choices and varieties of material products. But that amount of progress is peanuts compared to the society's potential to achieve the same level of prosperity (for the people, not the elites) with one quarter of the effort/expense. However, this would require continued reliance on fossil fuel which is not sustainable. So both the fossil fuels and the elite rackets should be cut out, the current prosperity cut in half and the work week cut in half, for the society to realize its true potential.
Danick -
I like your imagery about "a kind of karmic justice", but my take on the grandiose, ironic sweep of millenial-long events has a different focus.
Isn't it bizarre that in the year 1492, the Spanish Inquisition began (eventually ousting the Muslim Moors and Jews from the Iberian penninsula in the name of Christianity) while Columbus simultaneously set forth to sail the ocean blue?
Isn't it doubly bizarre that European colonialization of the western hemisphere's New World, and then manifest destiny on the North American continent, swept inexorably from east to the west - westward still, more than a century later, into Hawaii and the Phillippines, appearing to crest with abortive forays onto the Asian land mass in Korea and Vietnam only in the wake of two horrendous World Wars?
But now, with Little George's catastrophic 21st Century crusade to retake and occupy Mesopotamia (by way of Afghanistan) with the highest of hi tech arms, western European culture has at last finally gone full circle..... from the west unto the east, any day now, any day now.... as that old song goes.
Bill from Saginaw
karlof1 -
I always enjoy your comments, but the one above about the Constitution and the president's oath of office making him or her the nation's "'chief Magistrate' or top law officer in the land" is most perplexing.
All of president's powers (and the text of the oath of office) are enumerated in Article II of the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there any reference to the president being a magistrate, or a chief magistrate, that I can find. A magistrate is a type of judge or judicial officer. Judges and/or magistrates are not a part of the executive branch of the federal government at all. Their powers come from the Constitution's Article III, rather than Article II.
Your same post then refers to some circumstance in which the AG (Attorney General) would offer advice, but the decision would not be "his call... it would be Obama's."
It is unclear, but I suspect that what you are referring to is a decision to prosecute outgoing members of the Bush/Cheney administration for war crimes, torture, or other criminal wrongdoing. If this is the context, I disagree with you.
The new Attorney General Eric Holder is the person with the final say about whether to take evidence to a federal grand jury and criminally prosecute Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or any of the others after they have left office. That is the essence of prosecutorial discretion. It would be wholly improper for the president to tell the AG to go indict his or her partisan critics, or tell the AG to dismiss criminal charges brought against anybody.
The sole input the president has in the ordinary operation of the federal criminal justice system is to issue pardons or commute sentences of people who have been convicted of a crime and already sentenced (like Bush recently commuted Scooter Libby's conviction in the Valerie Plame obstruction of justice case). The decision to bring federal criminal charges is not Obama's call at all. It soon will be solely Eric Holder's call.
Bill from Saginaw
What's this use of the PAST TENSE, Tom? Wishful thinking? Too much holiday champagne?
You write as though this is over now, what with the election and all.
Have you forgotten how this killing plan and machine was being put together in the background during the Clinton Administration?
Then, the Bush Administration actions all occured with virtually no political opposition. The "new bosses", the Democrats, did not have the temerity, while it was happening, to call "foul" about any of the numerous visible crimes, the shredding of the Constitution, nor did they question the lies and no-bid contract that made these killing fields possible.
Nor did they listen to their own constituency about the war and healthcare, or even lift a finger to support democracy and the vote by investigating several clearly stolen elections.
You think it is OVER? You think it CAN be over without ever examining, analysing, nor denouncing and punishing those who made all this policy, thievery and destruction happen?
Besides the physical and fiscal damage, Bush-CheneyCo created legal and legislative chaos that would in normal circumstances be difficult to unravel. With the latest part of the Ponzi scheme -- the "Bailout" -- they have left the new Administration with little wiggle room to act in any sphere but the direst economic ones -- even if they knew what to do.
Sooo...now what? The Accomplices are now nominally in power. Do they run the defense industries? Or Big Media? You can't turn a moving battleship around on a dime, even when you want to -- and certainly not if you haven't even planned a course change.
This nightmare isn't over. The destruction of democracy and the economy is only beginning to be seen and felt here. Only a concerted effort of the people in spite of and in rebuke of the soon-to-be Democratic "led" two-party corporate agenda of enabling and appeasement can end it.
I bought a t-shirt in NYC recently: it showed a picture of 4 Native Americans holding rifles. Above, it read “Homeland Security”, below, “Fighting terrorism since 1492”. I'm wearing that on columbus day! Hope it's bright and shiny!
Do you ever think about the meaning of the millenia-long sweep of human history? Tom Engelhardt's article omits one essential fact: Assyria was (what is now) Iraq, i.e. the Iraqis are the direct descendents of those Assyrians who first invented shock-and-awe. Is there a kind of karmic justice in Assyria finally getting a taste of its own invention? I detest the notion that my country has become the agent of making it come full circle, but I can't see this as a coincidence.
Violence begets violence. War traumatizes people. Traumatized people cease to think rationally and (are easily manipulated to) go on to traumatize other people. The wave of violence spreads around the world. Courageous leaders, visionaries, and healers have tried over the years, with some success, to reduce and release the trauma. For the past several thousand years we've lived a precarious balance between the forces that spread violence and trauma and the forces that transcend them. Is the balance now slipping away toward global war? Or will enough of us find enough compassion, integrity, and strength to turn it back?
I have become structurally depressed.
The reason? Many people will think Russ Baker's new book, Family of Secrets is "oh another Bush Book............."
It isn't.
This is the best analysis of Bush royalty ever, with NEW MATERIAL ABOUT H.W. Bush in Dallas on 11/22/63. This book is by an editor of the Columbia University Review.
Also it overcomes the false dichotomy between conspiracy and structural analysis. One can quasi-litterally hear Olivia Newton John singing "let's get structural," as the author explores the relationship between the oil industry,its related insdustries like Dresser industies, and US banks.
Also the best summary and analysis of why the traditional Woodward does Watergate version is wrong. This book cannot be put down, even in the passive tense.
----Please read JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, or people will remain thinking that the Presidents Chosen by Wolf Blitzer will change everything, and we-- as a species will devlove into quivering lime Jello, and not even cold quiverin
Why be depressed? Baker's book made me feel better! Many of my ideas about organized crime have been fleshed out here. Still more to come! Connecting the dots is hard to do...alone. Baker does speculate - and is too nice to Nixon, but compared to these morons in Texas nixon shines. So Woodward may not want to admit being a pawn, but I am sure he prefers that to the alternative. The combine giveth and the combine taketh away. What we need here is a body count! How many dead americans did it take to put 41, and 43 in power?
Why be depressed? Baker's book made me feel better! Many of my ideas about organized crime have been fleshed out here. Still more to come! Connecting the dots is hard to do...alone. Baker does speculate - and is too nice to Nixon, but compared to these morons in Texas nixon shines. So Woodward may not want to admit being a pawn, but I am sure he prefers that to the alternative. The combine giveth and the combine taketh away. What we need here is a body count! How many dead americans did it take to put 41, and 43 in power?
And Barack Obama has gathered a cabinet that would do Mr. Bush proud.
Stay tuned for more of the same.
Bush Inc. are not out of office yet. From the very beginning these men covered their crimes with the thinnest of veneers. This told me that they didn't care who knew what, or at least that they knew that their 'cover' only needed to last a short time because there would come a point where they were truly above any law, above any accountability. Did these men usurp such power only to lay it down? I think not. I have heard it said that when leaders take blatant license it is time to be afraid. What does it mean for a whole nation to be bitch slapped by a dictator in an alleged democratic republic, a nation of laws and not of men? It tells me that they are beyond arrogant, and that 'law', 'justice', and 'democracy' are long gone. I can only hope that their arrogance is baseless. I think there may be some basis for it, since a criminal syndicate has siezed control of the mightiest military machine on earth (the one we paid for) and has pointed it at EVERYONE - We the People included. I wouldn't be counting chickens before they're hatched. I'll believe that Bush Inc. is long gone when they're in prison or hanged by the neck until dead (after a fair trial, of course). If these bastards get away with it then I can only assume that the coup succeeded, and is still in effect. Mr. Obama is not inspiring hope in me. I fear a world war is brewing.
this is an excellently historically sweeping article.
below is an article - very plausible - since the USA has proven its impotence , despite its Grand Army, to even control a mere BAGHDAD -- let alone had any lasting "victories" in its hundreds of military expeditions abroad for the last 150 years -- which gives a scenario SHOULD the USA instigate a WAR against its "next in line" enemies like China or Russia...or even IRAN...in which russia and china have SERIOUS interest as part of their protection of what they perceive as THEIR neighbhorhood....
read it and see how IMPOTENT the USA really will be...and already is...when its attacks of "shock and awe" really have been against VERY SMALL, or VERY POOR, or VERY WEAK nations that can NOT fight back ........AT ONCE......
with China or Russia -- it is an ENTIRELY different ballgame -- if the USA dares to go that far...for it will cost the usa MORE dearly than it would cost the russians or chinese , especially in terms of what THEY are WILLING and READY to give up as a price of defending their homelands -- compared to how COSTLY the devastation of CITIES in the USA will be TO americans .
include also the POPULATION - especially with china -
if two countries willing to go to war are WILLING and PREPARED to lose lives -
WHICH country will survive the war in the end?
the country that can NOT afford to LOSE 300,000,000 citizens (USA) or the country that can afford to lose 300,000,000 citizens out of 1 BILLION 300 MILLION?
======================
AMERICA'S ACUPUNCTURE POINTS
PART 1: Striking the US where it hurts
By Victor N Corpus
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
A noted Chinese theorist on modern warfare, Chang Mengxiong, compared China's form of fighting to "a Chinese boxer with a keen
knowledge of vital body points who can bring an opponent to his
knees with a minimum of movements". It is like key acupuncture points in ancient Chinese medicine. Puncture one vital point and the whole anatomy is affected. If America ever goes to war with China, say, over Taiwan, then America should be prepared for the following "acupuncture points" in its anatomy to be "punctured". Each of the vital points can bring America to its knees with a minimum of effort.
I Electro-magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack
China and Russia are two potential US adversaries that have the capability for this kind of attack. An EMP attack can either come from an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), a long-range cruise missile, or an orbiting satellite armed with a nuclear or non-nuclear EMP warhead. A nuclear burst of one (or more) megaton some 400 kilometers over central United States (Omaha, Nebraska) can blanket the whole continental US with electro-magnetic pulse in less than one second.
An EMP attack will damage all electrical grids on the US mainland. It will disable computers and other similar electronic devices with microchips. Most businesses and industries will shut down. The entire US economy will practically grind to a halt. Satellites within line of sight of the EMP burst will also be damaged, adversely affecting military command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR). Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles will be rendered unserviceable in their silos. Anti-ballistic missile defenses will suffer the same fate. In short – total blackout. And American society as we know it will be thrown back to the Dark Ages.
Of course, the US may decide to strike first, but China and Russia now have the means of striking back with submarine-launched ballistic missiles with the same or even more devastating results. But knowing China's strategy of "active defense", when war with the US becomes imminent, China will surely not allow itself to be targeted first. It will seize the initiative as mandated by its doctrine by striking first.
China has repeatedly announced that it will not be the first to use nuclear weapons. But as an old Chinese saying goes: "There can never be too much deception in war." If it means the survival of the whole Chinese nation that is at stake, China will surely not allow a public statement to tie its hands and prevent it from seizing the initiative. As another saying goes: "All is fair in love and war."
2 Cyber attack
America is the most advanced country in the world in the field of information technology (IT). Practically all of its industries, manufacturing, business and finance, telecommunications, key government services and defense establishment rely heavily on computers and computer networks.
But this heavy dependence on computers is a double-edged sword. It has thrust the US economy and defense establishment ahead of all other countries; but it has also created an Achilles' heel that can potentially bring the superpower to its knees with a few keystrokes on a dozen or so laptops.
China's new concept of a "people's war" includes IT warriors coming, not only from its military more than 2-million strong, but from the general citizenry of some 1.3 billion people. If we add the hackers and information warriors from Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria and other countries sympathetic to China, the cyber attack on the US would be formidable indeed.
So, if a major conflict erupts between China and America, more than a few dozen laptops will be engaged to hack America's military establishment; banking system; stock exchange; defense industries; telecommunication system; power grids; water system; oil and gas pipeline system; air traffic and train traffic control systems; C4ISR system, ballistic missile system, and other systems that prop up the American way of life.
America, on the whole, has not adequately prepared itself for this kind of attack. Neither has it prepared itself for a possible EMP attack. Such attacks can bring a superpower like America to its knees with a minimum of movement.
3 Interdiction of US foreign oil supply
America is now 75% dependent on foreign imported oil. About 23.5% of America's imported oil supply comes from the Persian Gulf. To cut off this oil supply, Iran can simply mine the Strait of Hormuz, using bottom-rising sea mines. It is worthwhile to note that Iran has the world's fourth-largest inventory of sea mines, after China, Russia and the US.
Combined with sea mines, Iran can also block the narrow strait with supersonic cruise missiles such as Yakhonts, Moskits, Granits and Brahmos deployed on Abu Musa Island and all along the rugged and mountainous coastline of Iran fronting the Persian Gulf. This single action can bring America to its knees. Not only America but Japan (which derives 90% of its oil supply) and Europe (which derives about 60% of its oil supply from the Persian Gulf ) will be adversely affected.
In the event of a major conflict involving superpower America and its allies (primarily Japan and Britain) on the one hand and China and its allies (primarily Russia and Iran) on the other, Iran's role will become strategically crucial. Iran can totally stop the flow of oil coming from the Persian Gulf. This is the main reason why China and Russia are carefully nurturing intimate economic, cultural, political, diplomatic and military ties with Iran, which at one time was condemned by US President George W Bush as belonging to that "axis of evil", along with Iraq and North Korea.
This is also the reason why Iran is so brave in daring the US to attack it on the nuclear proliferation issue. Iran knows that it has the power to hurt the US. Without oil from the Gulf, the war machines of the US and its principal allies will literally run out of gas.
A single blow from Iran or China or Russia, or a combination of the three at the Strait of Hormuz can paralyze America. In addition, Chinese and Russian submarines can stop the flow of oil to the US and Japan by interdicting oil tanker traffic coming from the Middle East, Africa and Latin America. On the other hand, US naval supremacy will have minimal effect on China's oil supply because it is already connected to Kazakhstan with a pipeline and will soon be connected to Russia and Iran as well.
One wonders: what will be the price of oil if Iran blocks the Strait of Hormuz. It will surely drive oil prices sky high. Prolonged high oil prices can, in turn, trigger inflation in the US and a sharp decline of the dollar, possibly even a dollar free-fall. The collapse of the dollar will have a serious impact on the entire US economy.
This brings us to the next "acupuncture point" in the US anatomy: dollar vulnerability.
4 Attack on the US dollar
One of the pillars propping up US superpower status and worldwide economic dominance is the dollar being accepted as the predominant reserve currency. Central banks of various countries have to stock up dollar reserves because they can only buy their oil requirements and other major commodities in US dollars.
This US economic strength, however, is a double-edged sword and can turn out to be America's economic Achilles' heel. A run of the US dollar, for instance, which would cause a dollar free-fall, can bring the entire US economy toppling down.
What is frightening for the US is the fact that China, Russia and Iran possess the power to cause a run on the US dollar and force its collapse.
China is now the biggest holder of foreign exchange reserves in the world, accumulating $941 billion as of June 30 and expected to exceed a trillion dollars by the end of 2006 - a first in world history. A decision by China to shift a major portion of its reserve to the euro or the yen or gold could trigger other central banks to follow suit. Nobody would want to be left behind holding a bagfull of dollars rapidly turning worthless. The herd psychology would be very difficult to control in this case because national economic survival would be at stake.
This global herd psychology motivated by the survival instinct will be strongly reinforced by the latent anger of many countries in the Middle East, Eurasia, Southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America that silently abhor the pugnacious arrogance displayed by the lone Superpower in the exercise of its unilateral and militaristic foreign policies. They will just be too happy to dump the dollar and watch the lone Superpower squirm and collapse.
The danger of the dollar collapsing is reinforced by the mounting US current account deficit, which sky-rocketed to $900 billion at an annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2005. This figure is 7% of US gross domestic product (GDP), the largest in US history. The current account deficit reflects the imbalance of US imports to its exports. The large imbalance shows that the US economy is losing its competitiveness, with US jobs and incomes suffering as a result.
These record deficits in external trade and current accounts mean that the US has to borrow from foreign lenders (mostly Japan and China) $900 billion annually or nearly $2.5 billion every single day to finance the gap between payments and receipts from the rest of the world. In financial year 2005, $352 billion was spent on interest payment of national debt alone - a national debt that has ballooned to $8.5 trillion as of August 24.
The International Monetary Fund has warned: "The US is on course to increase its net external liabilities to around 40% of its GDP within the next few years - an unprecedented level of external debt for a large industrial country."
The picture of the US federal budget deficit is equally grim. Dennis Cauchon, writing for USA Today said:
The federal government keeps two sets of books. The set the government promotes to the public has a healthier bottom line: a $318 billion deficit in 2005. The set the government doesn't talk about is the audited financial statement produced by the government's accountants following standard accounting rules. It reports a more ominous financial picture: a $760 billion deficit for 2005. If social security and medicare were included - as the board that sets accounting rules is considering - the federal deficit would have been $3.5 trillion. Congress has written its own accounting rules - which would be illegal for a corporation to use because they ignore important costs such as the growing expense of retirement benefits for civil servants and military personnel. Last year, the audited statement produced by the accountants said the government ran a deficit equal to $6,700 for every American household. The number given to the public put the deficit at $2,800 per household ... The audited financial statement - prepared by the Treasury Department - reveals a federal government in far worse financial shape than official budget reports indicate, a USA Today analysis found. The government has run a deficit of $2.9 trillion since 1997, according to the audited number. The official deficit since then is just $729 billion. The difference is equal to an entire year's worth of federal spending.
The huge US current account and trade deficits, the mounting external debt and the ever-increasing federal budget deficits are clear signs of an economy on the edge. They have dragged the dollar to the brink of the precipice. Such a state of economic affairs cannot be sustained for long, and the stability of the dollar is put in grave danger. One push and the dollar will plunge into free-fall. And that push can come from China, Russia or Iran, whom superpower America has been pushing and bullying all along.
We have seen what China can do. How can Russia or Iran, in turn, cause a dollar downfall? On September 2, 2003, Russia and Saudi Arabia signed an agreement on oil and gas cooperation. Russia and Saudi Arabia have agreed "to exercise joint control over the dynamics of prices for raw materials on foreign markets". The two biggest oil and gas producers, in cooperation, say, with Iran, could control oil production and sales to keep the price of oil relatively high. Sustained high oil prices, in turn, could trigger a high inflation rate in the US and put extreme pressure on the already weak dollar to trigger a more rapid decline.
Russia is now the world's biggest energy supplier, surpassing Saudi Arabia in energy exports measured in barrel oil equivalent or boe (13.3 million boe per day for Russia vs 10 million boe per day for Saudi Arabia). Russia has the biggest gas reserves in the world. Iran, on the other hand, runs second in the world to Russia in gas reserves, and also ranks among the top oil producers. If and when either Russia or Iran, or both, shift away from a rapidly declining dollar in energy transactions, many oil producers will follow suit. These include Venezuela, Indonesia, Norway, Sudan, Nigeria and the Central Asian Republics.
There is a good chance that even Saudi Arabia and the other oil-exporting countries in the Middle East may follow suit. They wouldn't want to be left with fast-shrinking dollars when the shift from petro-dollar to euro-dollar occurs. Again, the herd psychology will come into play, and the US will eventually be left with a dollar that is practically worthless. Considering the strong anti-American sentiments in the world caused by American unilateralism, especially in the Middle East, a concerted effort to dump the dollar in favor of the euro becomes even more plausible.
When the dollar was removed from the gold standard in August 1971, the dollar gained its strength through its use as the currency of choice in oil transactions. Once the dollar is rejected in favor of the euro or another currency for global oil transactions, the dollar will rapidly lose its value and central banks all over the world will be racing to diversify to other currencies. The shift from petro-dollar to petro-euro will have a devastating effect on the dollar. It could cause the dollar to collapse; and the whole US economy crushing down with it - a scene reminiscent of the collapse of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. But this one will be a thousand times more devastating.
A successful assault on the US dollar will make America crawl on its knees with a minimum of movements. And this assault can come from China, Russia or Iran - or a combination of the three - if they ever decide that they have had enough of US bullying.
5 Diplomatic isolation
In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed from its own weight, the US emerged as the sole superpower in the world. At that crucial period, it would have been a great opportunity for the US to establish its global leadership and dominance worldwide. With the world's biggest economy, its control of international financial institutions, its huge lead in science and technology (specially information technology) and its unequaled military might, America could have seized the moment to establish a truly American Century.
But in the critical years after 1991, America had to make a choice between two divergent approaches to the use of its almost unlimited power: soft power or hard power. The exercise of soft power would have seen America leading the world in the fight against poverty, disease, drugs, environmental degradation, global warming and other ills plaguing humankind.
It would have pushed America in leading the move to address the debt burden of poor, undeveloped or developing countries; promoting distance learning in remote rural areas to empower the poor economically by providing them access to quality education; and helped poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America build highways, railways, ports, airports, hospitals, schools and telecommunication systems.
Unfortunately, such was not to be. If there was any effort at the exercise of soft power at all, it was minimal. In fact, it is not America which is practicing soft power in diplomacy but a rising power in the East - China. China has been busy in the past decade or so exercising soft power in almost all countries in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and the Middle East, winning most of the countries in these regions to its side. Through the use of soft power, China has created a de facto global united front under its silent, low-key leadership.
The US, on the other hand, decided to employ mainly hard power in the exercise of its global power. It adapted the policy of unilateralism and militarism in its foreign policy. It discarded the United Nations and even the advice of close allies. It unilaterally discarded signed international treaties (such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty). It adapted the policy of regime change and preventive war. It led the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the 78-day bombing of Serbia purportedly for "humanitarian" reasons. It invaded Afghanistan and Iraq without UN sanctions and against the advice of key European allies like France and Germany.
The US-led war in Iraq was a tactical victory for the US initially, but has resulted in strategic defeat overall. The Iraq war caused the US to lose its principal allies in Europe and be isolated, despised and hated in many parts of the world. Without too many friends and allies, the US is likened to an "emperor with no clothes".
So in a major conflict between America and China, isolated America cannot possibly win against a global united front led by China and Russia.
This brings us to the question of alliances, another "acupuncture point" in the anatomy of the superpower, which will be addressed in the second part of this report.
Tomorrow, Part 2: Faced with a China-Russia-Iran triumvirate
Victor N Corpus is a retired brigadier general of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP); former chief of the Intelligence Service, AFP; and holds a master's degree in public administration from the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)
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“If the Americans are determined to interfere [then] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China's National Defence University.
“We . . . will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds . . . of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”
GEneral ZHU - chinese Military "hawk".
1.3 BILLION people "prepared" for "destruction of all of our cities east of Xian?" --
in exchange for 300 Hundred MILLION people "prepared" to lose "hundreds of cities?" in the USA?
who is going to win? in a real shooting war?
the USA will first cease to exist before even HALF of the chinese are finished. ..with plenty to spare. and this is NOT counting assistance from the now emerged "triumvirate" of China, Russia and Iran and Central asian nations...
what EXACTLY is the USA empire going to do about that if it instigated a shooting war with China ALONE? the neocons- obama, or hillary, or whomever -- THINK they can intimidate China or russia, much less "shock and awe" them to submission? and SURVIVE ITS own attempt at taking on some "monsters" a bit TOO BIG for its mouth to swallow?
this "global full spectrum" dominance project of the neocons and the USA establishment is becoming , if it were not so tragic and frightening in its POINTLESSNESS and DESTRUCTIVENESS, is ..........at the very least
LAUGHABLE!
Those folks who think that justice will be served to high profile criminal leaders should consider that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot,& Idi Amin,never were tried or punished. They all died of naural causes.
It is wishful thinking to expect Bush and co will be tried and convicted for a mere 200,000 deaths.
Dumddown - The generally accept number of Iraqi deaths is not the MSM reported 'mere' 200,000, but rather the Lancet's calculated total of more thatn 1.2 MILLION.
And guess what, bubby? That puts it in the realm of genocide.
Yes, Bush and his oily cabal will probably be given a walk by Barrak Obama, not wanting to rock the political boat by upsetting what remains of the Republican party, who could still arrange for an 'accident' or 'plane crash' to rid them of this interminent black man.
But in doing so, Obama will erase any good will or fellow feeling the US has left. It will become a pariah state on par with Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwei.
All while the US and world economy comes crashing down around Barrak Obama's ears...
Walk in peace.
"That puts it in the realm of genocide."
You're making that up. Genocide has a very particular and specific meaning, made up of 3 elements : 1) pre-planned; 2) attempt; 3) to iradicate a whole group, whether a religious, ethnic, or other group.
The Nazis planned and attempted to iradicate the Jewish people: THAT'S genocide. It doesn't need to be successful to be genocide, as long as there'a a plan, and an attempt to iradicate all members of a group.
As any reasonable person, I was and am completely against the invasion of Irak. It is a horrible, hideous crime which has destroyed the country. But it's not a genocide. Exaggerating doesn't help; quite the opposite.
The peoples of the Lands Between Two Rivers have endured a Holocaust waged upon them by forces or surrogates of the West since 1981 with many millions killed, wounded and displaced. Since 1991, the US Empire has sowed the very ground with poisonous depleted uranium that will last for hundreds of thousands of years and cause untold thousands of deaths, still births, miscarriges, birth defects, and cancers--A WHOLESALE ABOMINATION. And you Poo-Poo it all. Clearly, you are a Barbarian, as your pained attempts at civility show too well.
Another great analysis and commentary from Tom E. I think he summarizes the horror of the past 8 nightmarish years better than anyone out there. Joe Bageant comes close, and Greenwald and even occasionally David Michael Green when he isn't sounding like a DP operative.
But this article should be sent to Obama and he needs to read it carefully (yeah, right) because we cannot let these last 8 years pass as if unnoticed. If Obama permits Bush, Cheney and the Whole Sick Crew to get away with it, he cannot possibly be the kind of leader that will bring about significant or meaningful change. Not that I expect he will, in any case. If it's not his call but instead the AG's, Obama can certainly give him the go-ahead. If all this is just too impossible and would never get anywhere in the courts, or would be stonewalled by Congress or whatever excuse anyone gives for the mandatory amnesia Americans always readily assent to, so we can Move Forward as if nothing criminal or even all that objectionable happened between 2001-2009, then we're signalling to the entire world that we're committing suicide over here and won't they hurry up and just finish us off already. Much of the rest of the world would be happy to oblige, and who can blame them?
Bush, Cheney and the rest must be held accountable, and if Obama thinks this is just too untidy or "divisive" to his purported bi-partisan purposes for him to handle, then he'll be confessing to us that he really isn't up to the job. And the direction he steers public policy in will suffer, too. Only the mealy-mouthed centrists will take him seriously, and he'll play right into the hands of the reactionaries who brought us the Bush catastrophe. By 2012 we'll be looking at Jeb Bush as Number 45.
The Constitution elevates the president to "chief magistrate" or top law officer in the land, as is revealed in the presidential oath of office. The AG would offer advice, but it is not "his call," it's Obama's.
The market is eliminating the unproductive with extreme prejudice.
WE should hold the Clintons and the Bush Family for selling out our industrial base to China, in a move that has destroyed our economy forever.
It is no accident that Bill Clinton has recieved maybe Billions of Dollars from
Foreign countries and we still don't know why. Why is Hillary the new
Sec of State in view of this outrage? The Stimulus bill is just an excuse to
get around the fact that we are in a major depression that was brought on by
the Sell-out of our country by the Clintons and the Bush Family.
It will not rescue us. It will prolong our misery.
I find it revealing that in the Bush regime's waning lame duck days, their legacy spinmeisters (Dick Cheney in particular) respond to body count/cost accounting narratives like Tom's descrption of their disasterous eight year reign of rampant greed and warfare by resorting to an imaginary counter balancing act. Had we not done what our duty called upon us to do (they argue), then everything certainly would have been far worse.
Because there has not been another 9/11 attack on American soil, we must be doing something right. Because ordinary Americans feel safer now than they did on 9/12/01, we have proof positive that militarism works if you're only steadfast enough stay the course.
Because a nominally democratic government - one compliant with Washington's strategic and American corporate economic interests - has replaced the evil tyrant Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, then history will declare the American invasion, occupation, and Bush's 2008 surge to be a success (so long as a fragile stability, compared to the daily carnage seen at the height of the insurgency and sectarian cleansing, is merely sustained inside Iraq). After all, a new round of elections, those long sought after oil contracting bids, and a long term framework for a US military force presence, now are all in place.
Because we're still over there, and they are not over here, this proves we won.
Never mind Lebanon, never mind Gaza. Never mind the looming disintigration of Afghanistan, the tribal regions, or Pakistan itself as the Taliban resurge and the rising forces of radical anti-American jihad spreads. At least Iran was prevented from getting a nuclear bomb, and Pakistan's nukes have been kept safely out of Osama's hands.
So never mind North Korea either, nor Georgia for that matter. Never mind Barcelona, London, or Mumbai.
Things could have been a hell of a lot worse. You got to sit back and look at the big picture.
I believe the ancient Greeks (or maybe the Latins) had a term for this type of fundamentally flawed rhetorical argument. Whatever, it permeates the evening news and passes for conventional wisdom.
No matter what the body count was or is, no matter what the catastrophic cost measurable in blood and treasure ultimately does turn out to be, we are reminded we should all be thankful because the entire world has not yet gone entirely to hell in a handbasket, and Little George did not fail on his presidential watch on an even more calamitous scale.
Tom's right. It's much like the mentality underlying a giant Ponzi scheme.
The shills tell us to shut up, ante up, and wait - anxiously poised to blame the collapse of the whole house of cards upon the new dealer who's about to come in, take over control of the table, and deal the next round.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill - the Greek term you are looking for is called *hubris*.
Walk in peace.
although one must never forget...that the Greeks developed the concept NOT to stand alone. the greeks...so devoted to orderly thinking ...raised the concept to great importance ONLY as the half of a TWIN concept:
"HUBRIS eventually meets NEMESIS".
hubris being "overweaning arrogance and confidence"..
nemesis being a god (or goddess) of RETRIBUTION.
of course it doesn't mean George or his cronies are going to , themselves, get their comeuppance , in what people might hope they deserve...but the greeks obviously used examples as a warning for the over-all reality of things.
it really is a variation of "for every force - there is always an equal counteracting force"..and it might not happen with those involved in the things we have seen...buth the CONSEQUENCES of what they have done will come back to THEIR side, one way or another.
you can look at it in a larger context:
it is about THE HUBRIS of the AMERICAN EMPIRE. hubris of "american exceptionalism". hubris of "capitalist power", hubris of the "dollar hegemony"....
hubris of Militarily superiority....
etc. etc. etc.
sooner or later NEMESIS is going to appear...with at least equal force.
just as the greeks said.
"Only a country -- or a punditry or a military -- incapable of facing the depths of destruction that the Bush administration let loose could reach such a conclusion."
I think Israel's claim of no humanitarian crisis in Gaza is cut from the exact same self-absorbed, delusional cloth as this statement indicates of Bush and his gang of super-criminals. Their utterly grotesque indifference to the massive scale and depth of the misery they've caused, should be stunning (and shameful) to any normal human being who respects (what the pro-lifers like to call) the sanctity of life. Ya...sanctified if they do as their told, not so much if they don't. I love that Bush claims to be pro-life, all while he's busy dealing death and destruction on an industrial scale.
Excellent article and recap of the past few years. Except the part where you blame the Republicans for everything and fail to note that the Democrats have strongly backed them every step of the way, and made some enormous fortunes doing so.
How can people blame the Bush administration for the loss of New Orleans? It had a Democratic mayor and Louisiana had a Democratic governor. Aren't the Democrats ever responsible for anything???
And who are people going to blame when Bush-clone Obama continues the exact same policies, as he's made clear he's going to do?
I am sorry, this not a 1 TRILLION DOLLAR WAR.......
When Bush came into office there was a National Debt of less than 3 TRILLION DOLLARS...And Bill had a balanced budget for 2001.........Today the National Debt is over 10.4 TRILLION DOLLARS ........The U.S. had to borrow over SEVEN TRILLION DOLLARS to pay for the extras: Invasions, Mercenaries,Reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan, Oil Pipelines etc.......They borrowed over 4 TRILLION from U.S. Institutions which probably means Social Security.....This year, 2009, the U.S Government must pay back 4 TRILLION DOLLARS to foreign investors. And, the projected deficit for 2009 is an additional 2 TRILLION DOLLARS.....
I am sorry, the experts lie too.....DOD admitted in 2002 that it could not account for 2.2 TRILLION DOLLARS of expenditures...The folowing year, the GAO reported that the DOD could not account for another ONE TRILLION DOLLARS of expenditures. Joseph Sitglitz, an expert, wrote a book, "The Three Trillion Dollar War".
I believe in the Lancet and Johns Hopkins Institute Studies that have been updated: over 1.3 million Iraqis are dead, and over 4 million Iraqis are living in refugee camps. I know 3.8 million Vietnames died and I know that over 62,000 American soldiers have died fighting for THE Military Industrial Complex...Nobody knows how many more have died from cancers contracted from contact with: Agent Orange, Agent Pink, Phosphorous Bombs, and Depleted Uranium Munitions.....Watch "Zeitgeist" The Movie or "The Camelot Project with Richard Hoagland".....you get an idea who "They" are.
All aided and abetted by rubberstamp Republicans and corrupt GOP-lite Democrats.
the conditions that placed the neo's in power, like rome, were not "built" in a day. the destruction of urban america - and a corresponding body count - the millions of americans who remain disenfranchised and incarcerated in addition to the tens of thousands who were eliminated (including MLK, JFK, RFK)- four decades of pogroms (aka internal state sponsored terrorism) 1968-2008 can ( if they end with OBAMA) be remembered as The Great Repression.
excellent point.
It's genesis was the post WWII anti-communist, nuclear war induced fervor. Americans have been politically manipulated, repressed and scared since then and it continues, unnecessarily, to this day.
I'm pleased Tom ended with the Ponzi Scheme nature of BushCo, and by extension, all previous US presidencies during Henry Luce's "American Century," announced to us in 1940. I would stipulate that none of them was concerned with actually winning, but rather with continuing the Ponzi Scheme of perpetual war so the US eceonomy would enjoy perpetual good times that would serve to mollify that great worry of the elite--democracy/people power--as Tom notes above--"Disaster Capitaliam" to the nth degree.
I wonder if Gore is horrified by the fact that he would have become Bush--a realization he must surely have experienced because he knows how the Imperial game is played. One must wonder if Obama understands that he will soon become a War Criminal and an enemy of all peace and justice advocates (most of the planet's people)? But then he's already voted and opined for death and destruction and their continuation, which makes him either immoral or amoral (as well as most members of congress).
>>>Sooner or later, Madoff, like Charles Ponzi himself, will end up behind bars, while George, Dick, & Co. will be writing their memoirs and living off the fat of the land.<<<
Not if 300 Million Americans wake up to somehow improve their own Karma
by bringing those criminals to justice. And for a change of heart, away from
militarism, they have all reasons.
Karma is not something that happens on a personal level. It happens on
every level. It is beyond limitations. The pile of charcoal formerly known as
Adolf is only one example on the personal level. On the higher frequency
there has never been a Nation in need to be humbled down refused that
necessity. They all went down the drain. From ancient Empires to modern
Nations it is an undeniable truth. What goes around comes around.
Maybe Yellowstone will help to pacify the United States and cover its infinite
militarism with two feet of ashes.
May All Beings Be Blessed.
No Restrictions Or Limitations Shall Apply.
The Ruling Classes cannot and will not change their ways. The word "humility" is not only not in their vocabulary, they had it murdered and then vaporized so no trace could ever be found. So, yes, you're right. "They all went down the drain" and so will we.
George Herbert Wanker Bush, sperm donor for the human blight known as George Wanker Bush, said he is proud of his son who, for eight years, "ran a clean operation". George Wanker Bush does not resemble an Emperor, Roman or otherwise (since that is far far above his paltry abilities) but rather a flunky much further down the power chain, like, say, Pontius Pilate, someone else who never made a mistake and never took responsibility for his actions.
What is it about a president like Bush that wows big media and big business?
Is there a synergy between empty-headedness and corporate rule and opinion making?
Was Mencken right, after all, when he claimed that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people?
Dr Wu, the last of the big-time thinkers
Speaking of Mencken. Bush always made me think of this quote, "As democracy is perfected, the office represents more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
That quote alone assures Mencken's place in the Prophetic Hall of Fame.
Tom
Will there be any change? I doubt it. Every President yearns to be a "victorious Caesar".
We can only hope that Bush will meet a similar fate that Nero had... almost botching suicide in a sewer tunnel.
Walk in peace.
George Wanker Bush should take Saddam Hussein's pistol and walk into an unclean public toilet in the wrong part of town (any town), put the barrel in his mouth and dispatch himself with one missile out the back of his head.
" Perhaps in the future, historians will call him a Caesar--of destruction ". More like Nero--who fiddled while Rome burned!