Getting Played, Again, and How to Predict the Future

ISIS, ISIL, IS, Khorosan, and so on. It’s time for bombing again. Time for just a few boots on the ground again. Time for aid to doubtful “allies” again. Time for completely mishandling the situation, yet again. It’s time to get played again, by the propaganda masters in the deserts of the Middle East and offices in Washington, D.C., for they are symbiotic. Both need a legitimate enemy, the more hateful and frightening the better.

The timing of our about-face on Saddam Hussein (remember him?) was not random. We lost our legitimate enemy, the Soviets, and needed a new one. Hence our message to him, through Ambassador Glaspie, that “..your Arab vs. Arab conflicts are of no interest to us. We view them as an internal matter.” This, when he was massing troops on the Kuwaiti border, a week before invading.

This is why we never pressed our agreement with the Taliban government of Afghanistan to cooperate on the killing of Osama bin Laden back in 2000.  The military industrial complex and its servants needed bin Laden. He was so much more valuable out there somewhere.

Well, Hussein was hanged and bin Laden was shot, so what is the military-security-fear industry to do? 12,000 Sunni rebels have flowed into the vacuum created by our Shia-ization of the Iraqi state (de-Baathification, meaning purging Sunnis from the Iraqi military) and the near destruction of the Syrian state. They face 195,000 Kurdish fighters and a similar number of Iraqi soldiers, plus the Syrian military. And they are, somehow, an existential threat to us. So we are told. Billions of dollars surge into the accounts of bomb, missile, and aircraft manufacturers. Security firms get their share of the take. Looks as if the war on whoever is next in line will go on forever. 

How to predict the future of U.S. foreign policy: It will be done in the most expensive way possible. Effectiveness is irrelevant. Capital intensiveness is the predictor. This includes intelligence, military operations, humanitarian foreign aid, the works. Most of this money will be stuffed into the accounts of large corporations.

Bombs are the ultimate in planned obsolescence; make it (in secrecy), transport it, drop it, buy another. Political negotiations are labor intensive and capital light, and therefore undesirable to the military industrial complex.

This ties into the whole concept of supply side versus demand side solutions. The corporate conglomerate that runs this country prefers supply side solutions. Drugs? Spend billions trying to interdict the supply and imprison users and dealers. Oil? Spend billions protecting international supplies and developing domestic sources (even though we only have 3% of world reserves). Terrorism? Spend billions on weapons and surveillance.  Fail, fail, fail. If we spent a tenth of the money on demand side management, meaning drug treatment, energy efficiency, humanitarian aid, plus some effort at political reconciliation, we’d get better results. The problem, in the eyes of the CEOs, is that we’d spend a tenth of the money.

So, we get played again. The debate in the corporate media isn’t about a range of responses to ISIS, it’s about the range of *military* responses.

Here are a couple of ideas, thrown into the public debate like a pine tree air freshener into a sewage treatment plant.

Tell the Iraqi government to get some Sunnis into real positions of power and to rein in the Shiite militias or we’re out of there. No money, no weapons, the Green Zone empty. Reconciliation, REAL reconciliation, or they are on their own. If they don’t reconcile their factions the whole place will implode no matter what we do.

Tell the auto makers that they will double their fleet mileage in five years or we’ll nationalize them (in the case of U.S. manufacturers) or ban them. When they scream, point out that we are having a serious crisis and refer them to the companies that converted from typewriters to rifles in 1942. That would eventually lower worldwide oil demand by about 5%, which in turn would temporarily collapse the price of oil, leaving the Russians and the Middle Eastern monarchies extremely short of cash. Work out the knock-on effects for yourself.

Ban speculation in energy commodities. If you buy the futures, you have to take physical delivery from the tanker. That would knock 20-40% off the price of oil all by itself. See Russians and M.E. royalty, above.

Defund a few gold plated weapons systems and sink the money into nationwide energy efficiency programs. Aim for a 20% reduction in oil use. See R’s and M.E.R., above.

But this won’t happen. Go back to the link under, “Billions of dollars surge into the accounts of bomb, missile, and aircraft manufacturers.” Look at the timing of stock price increases of all the major players in the military supply chain. Middle East chaos isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Everything I write on policy comes back to corporate power and money in politics.

Another Death

I was listening to the clock radio alarm yesterday morning, half asleep, when I heard the news. Osama bin Laden was killed by a small team of U.S. commandos in his walled compound, 30 miles from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Please forgive me, but I did not have the urge to jump out of bed and dance around the room. Yes, he deserved it, but his death is ten years late and our response to his crimes has been self-destructive. Thinking pragmatically, there’s no real win here.

We had the chance to kill him back in the winter of 2000-2001. On November 2, 2000 in a hotel room in Germany, representatives of the Taliban government of Afghanistan met with representatives of the Clinton administration and agreed to help us kill Osama bin Laden. The method of choice was to isolate bin Laden and his followers under house arrest in a compound in a village called Daronta and have the Taliban give us coordinates for a cruise missile strike.

(I picked up this story from Counterpunch in 2006 and interviewed the source in 2007.)

Admittedly, there has been considerable debate as to the intentions of the Taliban in these negotiations. Various diplomats and former intelligence operatives have differed as to the seriousness of Taliban offers. Some thought that the Taliban were stalling. Others thought that the U.S. government was missing opportunities due to cultural ignorance; The Taliban kept dropping broad hints that seemed obvious to them, but blew over our heads. Whatever the truth there, it seems to me that with more determination and imagination we could have decapitated al Qaeda before 9-11 at minimal cost.

 Consider the changes the United States has gone through since bin Laden’s biggest plot came to fruition on September 11^th, 2001.

The U.S. government, with our complicity, has discarded major portions of our constitution. The Orwellian USA-PATRIOT Act, passed in a panic-stricken rush, set the stage for our march towards a police state. We have sunk to third-world dictatorship moral status with our government’s embrace of torture, indefinite detention, rendition, military tribunals, and secret prisons. We are subject to warrantless wiretapping and other arbitrary invasions of privacy. Habeas corpus, a settled point of law for four centuries, has become a quaint anachronism. We have, in general, discarded the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th, and 8^th Amendments in the Bill of Rights (covering unwarranted search and seizure, due process, self incrimination, a speedy and public trial, rules of evidence, and cruel and unusual punishment), and key parts of Article 1, Sections 8 and 9 (war powers and habeas corpus). The executive branch has accumulated dangerous and unconstitutional powers.

We invaded Afghanistan when there was still a chance of surgically killing the object of our pursuit, and we remain there a decade later. We committed the ultimate war crime – invading another country without provocation – and Iraq has suffered beyond even its previous sufferings. The blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent lives is on our hands. We have sunk ourselves in debt by pouring trillions of dollars down the bottomless maw of the military industrial complex. This pipeline of cash has snaked back on itself and further corrupted our electoral system.

The truly perverse part of it all is that bin Laden and his followers just blew up a couple of big buildings. He killed fewer people than die in a month on our highways. They were killed in an especially cruel, horrifying, and dramatic way, and I am not trying to minimize their suffering or the suffering of the victim’s families and friends. But stand back a bit and look at all the painful ways that hundreds of thousands of people die in this country every year.

My point is, bin Laden didn’t depopulate us, he didn’t invade us, he didn’t take over our territory, and he didn’t execute a coup and take the reins of our government. As with the usual automotive carnage, we did the work ourselves. Osama bin Laden didn’t stand at the podium in the House or the Senate, arguing for yet another attack on our fundamental rights. Nor did he vote for the idiots who did. That was the work of U.S. citizens, scared into docility and jingoism, eating up the propaganda and lopping off the best parts of themselves to feed the sharks. The sharks being the opportunist politicians and the corporate sociopaths they serve.

At 54 years old, bin Laden beat the average life expectancy of Afghans by about a decade and came close to that of your average Pakistani. He committed an act of mass murder calculated for its emotional impact and then sat back and watched us as we wrecked the foundations of our own society. We are reduced as a nation, morally, politically, socially, and economically. He probably didn’t have much time to reflect in his last few minutes of life, but if he did, I imagine he died with a certain sense of satisfaction.

Yes, I’m glad he’s dead. No, this doesn’t feel like a victory.