Image courtesy of Marion Doss under CC BY-SA 2.0.
The Sunday morning talk shows were teaming with administration spokesmen, prepping the public for their boss’s evening pitch for support on Iraq.Here’s Colin Powell on “Face the Nation”:
“It’s going to cost more, and there will be continued sacrifice on the part of our young men and women. Hopefully, in the very near future we’ll get control of the security situation.”
Such talk no doubt made General Anthony Zinni, retired Marine Centcom chief, extremely nervous. It was only last Thursday that he’d issued a warning in a speech to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers:
“My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice. I ask you, is it happening again?”
The garbage and the lies: the State Department dishes out the former, while the Defense Department’s civilian leaders whip up the latter. The War Party‘s kitchen is a busy place: they’re always cooking up something, and there’s a lot on the backburner: Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are all bubbling and boiling, albeit not yet spilling over.
The neoconservative cabal that lied us into war may seem like they’re on the defensive, what with some prominentDemocrats calling for Rummy and Wolfie to resign, and Maureen Dowd chortling over the neocons’ public humiliation. “Tonight,” she predicts, “will be a stomach-churning moment for Mr. Bush, and he must be puzzling over how he got snarled in this nightmare.”
With the excerpts from the President’s speech that were released in advance, however, it was clear before he even opened his mouth that the rest of us were in for some stomach-churning moments of our own. Far from backing down, Bush declared:
“We will do what is necessary, we will spend what is necessary, to achieve this essential victory in the war on terror, to promote freedom, and to make our own Nation more secure.”
This recalls John F. Kennedy’s paean to interventionism delivered in the early stages of the war in Vietnam, invoking the alleged nobility of “sacrifice” and declaring that we’d:
“Pay any price, bear any burden.”
With support for the war – and his reelection – plummeting, a case of the presidential butterflies would not be at all surprising. But Bush’s critics were not doubt surprised to find that he’s not as conciliatory as they think he ought to be. The same Washington Post report leaking excerpts of the speech noted:
“A poll released Saturday indicated that nearly seven in 10 Americans believe it is likely that Saddam was personally involved in the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out by al-Qaida, even though terrorism experts and others describe only loose links between al-Qaida and Saddam.”
Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein have merged into a single vanishing villain, and this successful strategy of conflation underlies the administration’s hard line on the war: invading Iraq was necessary to “protect America” from terrorist attacks, they aver. It’s all part of a long-term strategy to “drain the swamp” that nurtures terrorism in the Middle East. As Bush puts it:
“The Middle East will either become a place of progress and peace, or it will be an exporter of violence and terror that takes more lives in America and in other free nations. The triumph of democracy and tolerance in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and beyond, would be a grave setback for international terrorism.”
Progress and peace in the Middle East? We should only live so long. This has got to mean a decades-long effort, bigger than the Marshall Plan and the occupation of Japan combined. The bill for all this is going to be astronomical. The Post cites one estimate at $70 billion or so, and another congressional insider who said:
“‘I think it could be bigger than $80 billion,’ said a congressional aide, who is familiar with the president’s work in refining how much to request from Congress. ‘I think the expectation is that it’s going to be a very, very big number.'”
He was right: it turned out to be $87 billion. How is the administration going to justify this tremendous expenditure of American treasure – and lives? How can the President overcome rising opposition to his policies, and grumbling within his own party? By constantly invoking the memory of 9/11, this administration and the radical neocons who have hijacked American foreign policy hope to mobilize the American people under a banner of rage and fear. The War Party keeps poking at an open wound, hoping the American public will stay enraged long enough to support their Napoleonic visions of empire. The President prodded this wound in his speech:
“The surest way to avoid attacks on our own people is to engage the enemy where he lives and plans. We are fighting that enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan today, so that we do not meet him again on our own streets, in our own cities.”
This is what kept the Democrats silenced for so long, and re-invoking the terror-stricken atmosphere that created such cowed passivity has got to be Bush’s goal. 9/11 is his trump card, and we can count on him playing it often in the months to come. This is the real meaning of the doctrine of preemptive war. In his speech, the President declared:
“We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence, but at the heart of its power.”
He is referring here not just to Iraq, but to the entire Middle East, which he and his neocon advisors have in their sights. Incredibly, the neocon idea that we were wrong to leave Beirut, and that we should have stood and fought in Somalia, finds expression in the Bush speech:
“They want to shake the will of the civilized world. In the past, the terrorists have cited the examples of Beirut and Somalia, claiming that if you inflict harm on Americans, we will run from a challenge. In this, they are mistaken.”
But Ronald Reagan gave the order to leave Beirut, not because he was “decadent and weak,” as Bush phrased it, but because they were sitting ducks for a terrorist attack – just like our troops in Iraq. Somalia was a classic quagmire: we should never have gone in, and we were right to get out. What the President didn’t mention was the casualties we suffered in Beirut – 241 Marines killed in a single blast.
Although there are conflicting reports on this, the [UK] Telegraph avers that the President is pretty steamed about Iran’s alleged pursuit of nukes. No, the War Party isn’t making a U-turn on the road to empire: they’re just taking a slight breather before they rev up their engines for the next lap of their journey.