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CounterPunch
January
27, 2003
Street Legal:
Neither Protests,
Prayers Nor Diplomacy Will Stop Bush Drive to War
by CHRIS FLOYD
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets
in America last weekend to protest the Bush Regime's planned
invasion of Iraq. It was an impressive outpouring of public will,
cutting across a broad swathe of the social spectrum. In Bush's
own capital city of Washington, for example, an anti-war crowd
of some 200,000 was packed with religious leaders, nurses, store
clerks, military veterans, housewives, hard-hats, office workers
--a host of deep-dyed "Heartland" types.
Just days earlier, the city council of
Chicago, the nation's third-largest city --a tough, no-nonsense,
big-business town --voted 46-1 for a declaration opposing the
Regime's "pre-emptive" aggression. (You might have
missed that story, of course; it wasn't deemed worthy of mention
in those organs of record, the New York Times and the Washington
Post.) Meanwhile, a group of prominent Republican businessmen
took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal declaring
their opposition to Bush's war.
This was all rousing stuff: mainstream
America stirring at last from its long slumber to confront the
preening usurper in the White House. Unfortunately, these protests
--and a hundred more like them --won't make a dime's worth of
difference to the Regime's calculations for war on Iraq.
That decision was made long ago: before
the September 11 attacks, before the November 2000 election --even
before the 1992 election, which saw the temporary ouster of the
Bush oligarchy from public power. During the waning days of that
failed administration, plans were drawn up --by Dick Cheney among
others --to ensure long-term American economic and military dominance
over the world. The plan was refined over the next few years
by the Project for a New American Century, a think-tank whose
members included Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush and several current
Regime officials. PNAC called for the conquest of Iraq, the planting
of military bases throughout Central Asia, and the establishment
of a pipeline through Afghanistan.
Why then didn't Bush the Elder simply
capture Baghdad when he had the chance, during the first Gulf
War? In this case, we can probably take the old deceiver at his
word: "The coalition would have fallen apart." More
to the point, the Saudis and Japanese would not have bankrolled
further combat. People tend to forget that America was an economic
basketcase under the first Bush Regime; even the police action
to chase Saddam out of Kuwait and restore the undemocratic rule
of George I's royal business partners would've been too costly
without the foreign bailout. The Soviet Union --still in existence
at that time, and still regarded as a superpower --also would
have balked.
But what a difference a decade makes.
Years of prosperity filled American coffers to overflowing. The
Soviet Union disappeared, leaving behind a weak and acquiescent
Russia, eager to scoop a few crumbs from the new master's table.
Central Asia was now wide open for the plucking, ruled by the
kind of thuggish crimelords Washington has always preferred to
deal with. All that was missing was what one of the PNAC planners
called a "Pearl Harbor-type event" to galvanize public
support for unlimited military action.
No, we don't hold with the theory that
the Regime planned the Sept. 11 attacks. Nor is there yet a preponderance
of public evidence to indicate that they specifically allowed
it to happen --although their criminal negligence before the
attack, and their strangely lethargic response during it, does
call their competence and morality into severe question. But
it wouldn't have required a nefarious conspiracy --or a crystal
ball --to see that a big blowback from the renegade CIA army
of Islamic extremists was going to hit home sooner or later.
You just had to be ready to exploit it.
And if there's one thing the Bush boys
know, it's how to make hay when the sun shines --or, in this
case, when the smoke rises over the burning corpses of dead Americans.
With a shellshocked public still reeling from the blow, the Regime
seized on the catastrophe to put its long-held plans into action.
At home, it established a virtual dictatorship of the Executive,
running roughshod over ancient liberties --and acquiring unprecedented
power to curb dissent, should it ever prove truly meddlesome.
Meanwhile, cronies and contributors --including "family
firms" like Cheney's Halliburton and Papa Bush's Carlyle
Group --reaped billions in tax cuts and increased military spending.
The PNAC plan was then enshrined as official
policy in Bush's "National Security Strategy," which
commits America to military "pre-emption" around the
world to promote what Bush calls "the single sustainable
model of national existence" --i.e., the Regime's own peculiar
brand of corporacracy. Or as the suddenly-popular President himself
put it just days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "Through my
tears I see opportunity."
So here we are. The newly-installed regime
in Afghanistan is now signing fat deals for foreign consortiums
to build pipelines across its territory. American military bases
--built on open-ended contracts by Halliburton --are going up
all over Central Asia. Some 250,000 troops are massing on the
Iraqi border.
Months ago, the Regime's war-planners
said quite openly that they wouldn't be ready to attack until
the "mid-February time frame." And that's why the war
has not yet come. It has nothing to with the time-killing farce
of UN "debates" and pre-doomed inspections, or with
the moral force of mainstream protests on America's streets.
When the logistics are ready, the assault will begin.
It's very simple; brutally simple. This
war --and the attendant skewing of national priorities toward
a militarized corporate state --is the reason the Regime came
into existence. This is their cherished dream. No one will stop
it now.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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