Thelma and Louise Imperialism
The Nation: Reckless Bush Putting U.S. On Edge Over Iran
written by Tom Engelhardt.
Let me make an argument about the possibility that a regime-change-style,
shock-and-awe air assault might someday be launched on Iranian nuclear
facilities and associated targets - based on no insider knowledge, just
the logic of George and *****'s Thelma and Louise-style imperialism.
Of course, we all know at least half the story by now. Is there anybody in
official Washington - other than our President, Vice President, the Vice
President's secretive imperial staff, assorted neocon supporters, and
associated right-wing think tanks - who isn't sweating blood, popping
pills, and wondering what in the world to do about our delusional leaders?
Senators, House members, former top officials and high military types are
now crawling out of the Washington woodwork to offer the kinds of dire
warnings that, not so long ago, would have been confined to the distant
peripheries of political argument.
After all, to anyone not delusional - which leaves out you-know-who and
his Vice President - a massive air assault on Iran, surely involving
staggeringly powerful bunker-busting missiles, would seem to be an act of
madness. It would be immensely destructive to Iran (and yet almost surely
a rallying point for its fundamentalist regime); bloody in its
repercussions for US soldiers in Iraq; imperiling to US allies in the
region; and, for the global economy, a potential energy catastrophe. A
series of explosive events could unravel the oil heartlands of the planet,
making the Administration's last several years in Iraq little more than an
hors d'oeuvre before a banquet of catastrophe.
You don't have to rely on me for this. In his confirmation hearings,
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered his own bloodcurdling scenario
for the aftermath of such an assault:
"...[While] Iran cannot attack us directly militarily, I think that their
capacity to potentially close off the Persian Gulf to all exports of oil,
their potential to unleash a significant wave of terror both in the -
well, in the Middle East and in Europe and even here in this country is
very real... Their ability to get Hezbollah to further destabilize Lebanon
I think is very real. So I think that while their ability to retaliate
against us in a conventional military way is quite limited, they have the
capacity to do all of the things, and perhaps more, that I just
described."
Fatwa Time
The possibility of an attack on Iran has long been on the horizon. You'd
have to start back before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, when, as Newsweek
reminded us, one quip of the bolder neocons was: "Everyone wants to go to
Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran." You'd have to go back to January
2005, when reporter Seymour Hersh, in a New Yorker piece , "The Coming
Wars," wrote, "In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next
strategic target was Iran."
You'd have to go back to August 2005 when, in the American Conservative
magazine, former CIA official Philip Giraldi warned: "In Washington it is
hardly a secret that the same people in and around the Administration who
brought you Iraq are preparing to do the same for Iran" - possibly
involving an "unprovoked nuclear attack" on that country. A contingency
plan was, he claimed, being drawn up in the Pentagon, "acting under
instructions from Vice President ***** Cheney's office."
You'd have to check out a second Hersh piece from April 2006 in which he
reported that, increasingly, insiders believed the President's goal was
not simply aborting the Iranian nuclear program, but Iraq-style "regime
change," and that, against Pentagon opposition, "the nuclear option" - the
possibility of using a "bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon" - had made
it into initial Iran planning. You'd have to check out the work of former
UN arms inspector Scott Ritter, who recently published a book whose title
says it all: Target Iran.
These men - some classic conservatives - are now, if anything, even more
passionately convinced that the Administration is headed for the Iranian
cliff, possibly as early as this Spring.
But it took more than their work for so much of official Washington to
panic. It took the Administration's decision to send the USS John C.
Stennis, a second aircraft carrier task force into the Persian Gulf (with
hints that a third could follow); it took the announcement of what Juan
Cole has termed George Bush's " fatwa," allowing the US military to take
out Iranian agents anywhere in Iraq; it took the detention by US forces of
various Iranian officials in Iraq and the invasion of an Iranian office in
Irbil in Iraqi Kurdistan; it took the President's announcement of a
decision to emplace Patriot anti-missile systems in the smaller Gulf
states; it took a sudden, massive, eerily familiar ratcheting up of
Administration rhetoric about Iran and Iranian influence in Iraq and the
cherry-picked intelligence to go with it.; it took the refusal of
officials like John Negroponte to say whether they believed the
Administration already had the right to whack Iran without returning to
Congress for permission; it took reports about the readying of new bases
in Bulgaria and Romania for a future Iranian air campaign; it took rumors
that the Pentagon's latest strike plan against Iran includes "more than
2,300 'high value' targets."
And it took, of course, the Administration's ongoing catastrophe in Iraq,
which drives everything before it, as well as Bush's pugnacious (if
hopeless) "surge plan" reaction to rejection in the November midterm
elections; it took the President's insistence on victory in a situation
where loss was so obvious that you didn't need scads of dollars and the
sixteen agencies of the US intelligence community to make the point in a
National Intelligence Estimate; it took Vice President Cheney's
insistence, in a duke-it-out interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer, that the
Administration's Iraq policy would be "an enormous success story."
And, of course, it took all those eerie parallels with the
Administration's behavior in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, not to
speak of the realization that this Administration, devoted to an
unfettered commander-in-chief-style of presidential power, believed it
already had authorization aplenty to attack Iran. All of this brought home
the possibility that our leaders might one day actually take the house
down with them, that they might gun the car and head directly for the
cliff with something between sneers and smiles on their faces.
Over the Cliff?
An attack on Iran, if it were to happen, promises a special mixture of two
fundamentalisms that will make up a single lethal brew. Though our
President claims to be a Christian fundamentalist, neither of these
Washington fundamentalisms are, in the normal sense, religious or
particularly Christian.
The first - the bedrock faith of the Bush Administration and its neocon
supporters since September 12, 2001 - is the religion of force. Our
self-styled "wartime" Commander-in-Chief, and the Vice President head an
Administration that has long been in love with the dazzling military
possibilities that seemed open to them as leaders of the last standing
superpower. Its high-tech destructive capabilities, they believed, gave
them the power to go it alone in the world, shocking and awing a post-Cold
War assemblage of lesser states into eternal submission.
Back in 2001-2003, they saw force as their own special Tao, their Way in
the world; at their depths - now - reaching into their problem-solving
quiver, they naturally find only the same arrow that's always been there;
a belief system, a religion for all occasions.
In the case of a possible future assault on Iran, the larger
fundamentalism of the Church of Force will surely combine with the only
significant force the Pentagon has on hand - air power. The belief in air
power's ability to fell regimes and bring whole peoples to their knees, is
long-lasting and deep-seated. Since well before World War II, we've been
living with a military belief system in which bombing others, including
civilian populations, is a "strategic" thing to do; in which air power
can, in relatively swift measure, break the "will" not just of the enemy,
but of that enemy's society; and in which air power is the royal path to
victory.
That this has not proven so; that it did not prove so in Afghanistan, in
shock-and-awe Iraq, or in Israel's air assault last summer on Lebanon
matters little. Faith in the efficacy of air power (as opposed to its
barbarism) is fundamentalist in nature and so not disprovable by the facts
on the rubble-strewn ground.
As a result, the strength of the belief that "it" - force, air power -
will do the trick the next time, if only you have the nerve not to listen
to the Nervous Nellies, if only you commit to it, should not be
underestimated.
Do you remember that period before the invasion of Iraq when the neocons
and their various admirers were proclaiming us the New Rome, hailing a Pax
Americana globally (and a Pax Republicana domestically) that would last
forever and a day? They were then intent on describing a jungle world of
failed states at the global peripheries that needed an imperial power
like...well, like us...for order. That was before the Bush Administration
managed to bring a jungle world to Iraq and so to the heart of the global
energy system - and they all fell imperially silent.
I've been wondering in their stead: What sort of empire are we? Empires
are usually settled, ruled areas (except at their frontiers), not jungle
worlds. So if, say, the Congo or Afghanistan or Somalia is a failed state,
are we then, under George and *****, simply a failed empire? Do we now rule
(as opposed to threaten) anything? Are we an empire at all - even at home
where a vast, ungainly government is being privatized into ever more
expensive chaos and the federal budget is being driven over a
military-industrial cliff - or are we Kong? Or are we a Three Stooges
version of the imperial, or is it just that ***** and George, all four
hands on the spinning wheel of state, are heading for that cliff intent on
liberating us all?
In that over-the-top interview with CNN's Blitzer, Cheney accused him of,
as the Washington Post put it, "embracing defeat."
What an apt phrase for ***** himself - and his presidential pal! Having
long embraced a fantasy of victory, they now show every sign of wrapping
their arms around their own Iraq defeat as if it were victory, and - with
the enthusiasm of Thelma and Louise trapped by all those cop cars - taking
the only path that seems open to them. As the alternatives grow ever more
stark - surrender to those "Democrat" electees, to the critics, the
cavilers, the ragtag insurgents, the alien Mullahs, even panicked
Republicans in their own ranks - what's left but that liberating,
exhilarating trip over the cliff?
Unlike the movies, where reviews can tell you the ending before you even
enter the local multiplex, political life, even geopolitical life, is a
remarkably unsettled, as well as unsettling thing.
Nothing assures us that some predetermined fate will actually drive us all
over that cliff. But if, before November 2008, we do head in that
direction, a small suggestion: Don't bother to buckle your seatbelt. It's
not going to be that sort of a trip to the bottom.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/02/16/opinion/main2486332.shtml
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