The No Exit Strategy

The president’s speech today was bizarre. He starts out in typical goofy fashion by saying that “I appreciate Carl Gershman…I appreciate Chris Cox, who's the chairman of the U.S. Security (AHEM---GET THE NAME RIGHT PLEASE!) and Exchange Commission….I appreciate the secretary of state, Condi Rice.

You don’t appreciate them being there, you just appreciate them. Period. How sweet.

From there he jumps off the deep end, with “the militants believe that controlling one country will rally the Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in the region and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people and to blackmail our government into isolation.”

So, this ragtag group of disparate and unconnected cells of thugs, while admittedly capable of causing havoc and criminal damage, could “establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia,” DESTROY Israel, intimidate EUROPE and ISOLATE the United States? Oh please. From there he moves into a completely inappropriate comparison of “terrorism” with “communism.” Of course the “communism” that confronted the United States was the apparatchik-laden statism of the Soviet Union as compared to the stateless wanderers of modern “terrorism.”

You might attribute this to a simple-minded man speaking about things he doesn’t understand in the usual hyperbole, dragging out all the old shibboleths that let him lie a nation into war before. You might wonder about his mental health, if he has again taken up the bottle or become Marlon Brando’s Col. Kurtz from Apocalypse Now.

I however, think there is something more sinister afoot. We all know why we invaded Iraq (if anyone out there thinks that Saddam Hussein had massive stockpiles of “weapons of mass destruction” that provided an “imminent threat” to our “national security.” STOP READING NOW. Log off and resume your fascination with small shiny objects.) We invaded Iraq because the 9/11 attacks provided the harmonic convergence allowing this “president” the excuse to exorcise his familial insecurities while promoting a bizarre neocon agenda once played out in think tanks but now elevated to the halls of power that called for a “re-engineering” of the Middle East to make it more U.S. and Israel-friendly.

In the neo-con’s perfect little world, an invasion of Iraq that everyone expected to succeed with ease would be followed by the effortless installation of a U.S. puppet government (insert “Chalabi” here). But lo and behold, the Shi’a majority in Iraq didn’t want to play the part of the compliant stooges, and the Sunni minority did not take kindly to being overthrown and marginalized. The end result is of course the administration being forced to put forth all of this nonsense about “elections” and “democracy” with the predictable outcome of us being in the middle of a low-grade civil war.

What always puzzled me was the question of why, in this low-grade civil war, we were taking the side of Shi’a fundamentalists who wanted to establish an Islamic republic closely allied with Iran. Why would we want to “train” and turn over authority to an inherently radical and hostile regime?

Then it dawned on me (Hello, McFly????) We ARE not turning over authority because WE ARE NOT LEAVING. In Iraq, we have engineered a “constitution” guaranteeing a permanently hostile Sunni minority, and many of them will act as an armed resistance. Violence justifies our staying, as the “Iraqi” (insert `Shi’a militias’ here) forces cannot “stand up” so we cannot “stand down.” A tailor-made excuse for a permanent occupation, accomplishing directly (the U.S. military) what we could not do indirectly (the puppet-stooge state.)

As Deep Throat once advised, follow the money. Dick Cheney told us to prepare for “decades” of war. Barely hours after this poorly-received speech, we have a “credible threat” in New York. Credible, right? Follow the money. Years of contracts for Halliburton, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Bechtel, Halliburton, etc.

The reason that there is no exit strategy is that there is no exit strategy. A truism, but it is oh so true. This is not a war on terror or violent extremism. It is a war on peace.

I hate to drag out an oldie but a goody, but may I remind you of Randolph Bourne’s thoughts in 1918, coming out of the nightmare of World War I. He said that “war is the health of the State. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate cooperation with the Government in coercing into obedience the minority groups and individuals which lack the larger herd sense…minorities are rendered sullen, and some intellectual opinion bitter and satirical, but in general, the nation in wartime attains a uniformity of feeling, a hierarchy of values culminating at the undisputed apex of the State ideal, which could not possibly be produced through any other agency than war. Loyalty - or mystic devotion to the State - becomes the major imagined human value. Other values, such as artistic creation, knowledge, reason, beauty, the enhancement of life, are instantly and almost unanimously sacrificed”

The state may then be quite healthy for some time to come!