SEPTEMBER

MONDAY SEPTEMBER 11th 2006

THE BUSH BIN LADEN SYMBIOSIS

The War on terror shows no signs of ending soon, but then why would it, when it satisfies so many aspects of the raison d' etre of both George W, Bush and Osama Bin Laden?

Five years on … the images, the moment of the planes slamming into the World Trade Center towers, the people trapped above the burning floors jumping, and then when the towers themselves collapsed, still retain a disturbing power to shock.

A fact (maybe) not captured by the cameras — and with which I only became acquainted a couple of weeks back, reading a review of Lawrence Wright's recent "The Looming Tower: al Qaida's road to 9/11," was that "jumpers landed on several firemen, killing them instantly." It shocks to the core.

In Martin Amis's recent fictional account of Mohammed Atta's last hours he questions the notions of instantaneous death. In Atta's case smashing into the towering concrete of one of the world's tallest buildings — and all who flew with him or were in the path of the airplane he piloted — crushed or engulfed by the fireball, but cognisant for the split seconds post-immediate-impact, the brain severed from bodily systems, but momentarily lingering before it too was pulverised or fried.

Being now allowed to see the images of jumpers, and now exploring the darker avenues that five years ago our broadcasters deemed too be much for our senses, only compounds the shock.

Shocked but not surprised … or perhaps we were surprised, but only in the manner with which the attacks were carried out, rather than with the symbolic targets they were directed at. And it seems the only reason why we do not feel such utter shock about US bombs slamming into buildings in Fallujah or Israeli bombs raining down on Lebanon is that we simply are not allowed to see it in prime time. The extra mile we have to go to search out the visual history of the war on terror as prosecuted by the US, Britain and Israel in the Middle East is what makes it once removed rather than the 'instantaneous' death of 9/11. That safe distance keeps us anaesthetised for just long enough to let them get away with it. The Abu Ghraib torture picture, being the exception to the rule, but proving the point.

To varying degrees, the mainstream media, now in September 2006 seemed politely resigned to the basic fact that the 'war on terror' launched in the wake of 9/11has been on many levels nothing short of disastrous. On the lingering coverage on the evening of the fifth anniversary, BBC News 24 interviewing Dan Rather (no friend of the Bush administration) acknowledged that now the majority of Americans do not buy the Bush line — that things are getting better in Iraq — but that the idea that America does not 'cut and run' still wields an extraordinary mythological power in the national psyche. When asked about the Iraq war in comparison to the Vietnam war, and by implication why there was not such a vocal protest movement against the Iraq war as there was against the Vietnam war, Mr Rather was unhesitatingly adamant that the difference was 9/11 — that the US was attacked on home soil.

Rather, Mr Rather, 9/11 was only part of the difference, the other two factors being there is no official conscription in the US at present as there was during the Vietnam War and there is no prime-time coverage of anti-war protest today as there was in the Sixties. Donald Rumsfeld, a vociferous opponent of official conscription even in the nineteen sixties, saw it for what it was — a complete PR disaster. The liberal mainstream in its chastisement of Michael Moore for "Farenheit 911" for being too blunt in his approach, mostly ignored the fact that the whole second half of his film dealt with the 'unofficial' (once removed) conscription from the povertied ranks of young US males, and in fighting the Republican's PR war against Moore for them, the liberal media only further enable the US Armed Forces get the necessary supply of road-side-bomb-fodder without having to make it compulsory for all. Rumsfeld is right. Imagine the world brand leader of 'freedom loving equal opportunity' societies officially conscripting teenage girls? They would never get out an invasion force out of the barracks for the blockades and the TV crews.

The fact that the mainstream media is largely kept on-message by government news management teams, and almost completely ignores anti-war protest in the twenty first century is the result of the lessons learned from the late Sixties coverage of the Vietnam War. The dead conscripts coming back in body-bags, protestors on the six o' clock TV news had the 'auto-catalytic' effect — 'one that catalyses itself in a positive feedback cycle, self-replicating itself faster and faster once it has started' — of mobilising the masses against a war which underground activists had been protesting for years.

August holidays over, September dawns and the new political season in the US traditionally begins in earnest. Bush Senior chose September 1989 to launch his 'war on drugs' which steadily built up to the Invasion of Panama by December of that year. The PR campaign for the invasion of Iraq launched in September 2002 should have told us beyond doubt that the point of no return had already been passed. I don't buy the conspiracy theories but 9/11 could not have fallen at a more opportune time in the political calendar for George W. Bush. One commentator remarked that the current 9/11 fest is doing Bin Laden's work for him, but then perhaps he as semi-aware in the timing of the attacks that September was the prime time month in the US?

It is certainly doing Bush's work and coming off the back of the 'could have been worse than 9/11 airline plot of August 2006' (see below) the fifth anniversary of 9/11 falls nicely for him to re-market 'fear of a Muslim planet' as the key issue for the mid-term elections in the US. We thought perhaps George Bush could not get re-elected in November 2004 but he did. And if Karl Rove pulls off another coup this November then it is all eyes on Iran.


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FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 1st 2006

LEBANON … WHAT WAS THAT?

A long overdue ceasefire in Lebanon, though both sides seemingly thrusted every last ounce of firepower as the deadline approached.
In trying to understand some of what really happened we may do far worse than to read Seymour Hersh's article "Watching Lebabnon - Washington's Interest in Israel's War." (The New Yorker, August 21st 2006)
As we suspected, Bush (with Blair in tow) were deliberately keen to enable Israel to have enough time to try and takeout Hezbollah by air strikes. As one source put it: Blair "drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in Washington." Hersh's sources say it goes deeper than that with "the Bush Administration (being) closely involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks (on Lebabnon).

In the first instance Bush and Cheney "were convinced … that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns," but also Washington was viewing it as a test case and necessary precursor "to a potential American preemptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground."

Israeli sources said they were gearing to have to take Hezbollah out sooner or later, and by implication that the increasingly provocative actions of Hezbollah by its kidnapping of Israeli soldiers, was ideal as a trigger to go sooner. Israeli sources said they were going to get Hezbollah whatever, but if that suited the US then fine. A different source said that Israel and the US had discussed plans for attacking Hezbollah before the July 12th kidnappings. Whilst it did not make the mainstream news cross-border sniping along the Israeli-Lebanon border had been going on for months in a secret war, during which the Israel's were gearing up for the big hit on Lebanon and where certain faction along the Hamas-Hezbollah axis having secured no progress with Israel as a result of their respective legitimate election victories, felt they had "to go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government."

The reasons the US wanted to see the attack happen were:

a) to see if the military plan was effective as a strategy in taking out Hezbollah with a view to their own plans for Iran. And, tactical discussion on this front apparently went all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. In other words, "it would be a demo for Iran," though sources were divided on whether Rumsfeld himself was clearly in favour, some suggesting he was "delighted that Israel is our stalking horse,' whilst others said that the Defense Secretary is worried about an expansion of the war into Iran would leave US troops in Iraq, many more times fatally exposed than they are at present.

b) because taking out Hezbollah's missile capability would actually be essential to a US attack on Iran, in terms of preventing them retaliating against Israel for a US attack on Iran.

c) to diminish Hezbollah's political power and in its place promote the Bush /neo-con democratization franchise "with Lebanon as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy." Of course the west's refusal to deal with the democratically elected members of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, reveal the shallowness of US democratization efforts, in that Saudi Arabian despots are still feted in Washington and democracy is only lauded if it elects Washington friendly candidates, which has been the story thus far in Iraq.

Of course on the surface none of this seems to have worked for Israel or the US. The near complete destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and the hit and miss bombing of Hezbollah's underground tunnels may have weakened it militarily, but the degree to which this can be called a tactical success is unknown. And, instead of rallying the Lebanese people against Hezbollah it seems to have had the opposite effect. Hezbollah's popular standing — to be the first Arab state to have withstood a full scale attack by Israel since the inception of Israel in 1948 — has increased throughout the Middle East, and Hezbollah's efforts to cement such popularity by being the first to help Lebanese civilians rebuild their homes only bolsters their position as the local government of choice for local people.

In terms of it being a test case for Warplan Iran, Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's former deputy in the W's first term said: "If the most dominant military force in the region — the Israeli Defense Forces — can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of seventy million."

Whilst there may be dissent within Washington circles about whether to whack Iran before Bush leaves office in January 2009, what remains clear is that there are still those factions actively pushing for it. And as Hersh points out instead of being put out of business by the failure of Israel's air war on Lebanon, they remain active at the highest levels, believing their own spin and cherry-picked intelligence, and their fantasies about being the essential catalysing force in pushing Iranians into pro-western revolution.

Instead of realising the obvious that the US's air wars against Afghanistan and Iraq have not been successful in any meaningful way in terms of improving the lives of the people in those countries, there are those in the inner sanctums of US power that still believe you can continue to bomb and kill from a great height, to continue "to do the same thing … expecting a different result."

There is of course the worry that having seen Plan A — for US soldiers to be welcomed in Iraq with flowers, for Israeli advances into Lebanon be supported by the ordinary Lebanese over the efforts of Hezbollah — fail, that Plan B remains perfectly acceptable to Bush and Olmert et al. Plan B which was pursued in Vietnam with such sadistic vigour is to rain down complete and utter ruin on a country rather than allow it to find its own way. As stated in these pages before, the military industrial fossil fuel lobby in Washington would rather Iraq's oil industry be almost non-existent (as it is today at ) than forgo its future controlling influence upon how Iraqi oil is ultimately distributed. In terms of the bottom line regarding the invasion of Iraq, preventing Iraqi oil falling into the hands of US rivals (Russia and China) as was happening under Saddam Hussein, the war on Iraq remains a 'success'.
As Paul Rogers put it in his book "A War too Far - Iraq, Iran and the New American Century" (Pluto 2006) on Washington's terms, Republican or Democrat, for the reason of future control of Iraqi oil alone " a full US withdrawal from Iraq is so unlikely that, if it were to happen, it would be the biggest foreign policy disaster for the United States in 60 years. It (oil) also remains a core reason for US antipathy to Iran."

In August 2006 Harper's Index put the cost of the financial cost of the Iraq war at the same level as what it would have cost US businesses to sign up to the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. Of course it was this reason of cost to US business that was put forward as the reason for the US rejecting Kyoto. As long as the US remains in the driving seat of a gung-ho petrodollar economy, there will be US troops and future oil wars in the Middle East, not least because the entire hardware of the US military machine runs on oil. They either switch all the trucks, tanks, planes, ships and bombs to hydrogen or electric engines, or they fight the oil wars until every last drop runs out.

The problem is, that if all the oil in the Persian Gulf were burned over a time-scale of the next fifty to one hundred years the amount of CO2 released would fry humanity out of existence. If we want to see less wars and violence in the Middle East and we want to leave the world in a fit state for our children then the answer is the same … we have to end the utter dependence on oil that our political and business leaders continue to foist upon us without restraint.




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