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CounterPunch
March 11,
2003
The Gangs of DC
Bush
Bruisers Cast Eyes on the Pearls of the Orient
By CHRIS FLOYD
"And the war came."
Abraham Lincoln
The war is always coming, it's always here, either
in utero, full fury or chaotic aftermath. The newest war--the
invasion of Iraq--will come because a gang of like-minded men
is willing it into being. They want it--it's as simple as that.
They want what they believe this war will give them: wealth,
dominion, and empire.
The ultimate goal is not Iraq--that bombed,
blockaded state partially controlled by a witless thug whom the
gang once succored--but domination of the world's oil supplies
in the coming century, when the surging nations of China and
India will reach their economic peak. These vast entities could
eventually tilt the imbalance of world wealth away from the Anglo-American
elites who have for so long held the high and palmy ground of
privilege. But the voracious economies of the Asian behemoths
will require unstinting draughts of the oil reserves now locked
under the sands of Iraq and Saudi Arabia. There is oil elsewhere,
yes--but nowhere else in the world are there reserves deep enough
to satisfy the thirsts of China and India as they come into their
own.
Therefore it is imperative for the Anglo-American
elites to dominate this indispensable resource, if they are to
maintain their wonted ease beneath the palms. Or so they believe.
Actually, the narrowly-concentrated wealth of the West is so
staggeringly great that these elites could quite easily devote
abundant resources toward developing new forms of energy, national
self-sufficiency, and what used to be known in Lincoln's day
as "internal improvements"--roads, schools, hospitals,
parks, the extension of liberty, leisure and opportunity--and
still keep their corpulent noses planted deep in the trough of
their unearned riches.
But alas, they too--like the thugs they
hire and fire so easily (Noreiga, Saddam, bin Laden)--are moral
idiots. They don't care about their own nations. They don't care
about the hapless people they rule--except, of course, as cannon
fodder or hired help. The "national interest" is what
best serves the elites and their retainers.
Throughout history, elite factions have
always acted in similar ways to maintain and augment their dominance.
At various times, for various reasons, their interests converge
and they act loosely in concert; at other times, they tear each
other to shreds--killing millions of people in the process. You
can see this pattern of behavior--the belligerent lust for dominance
coupled with crafty temporary alliances--at work among many primate
groups. Our modern "elites" (the Ba'athist clique,
Al Qaeda, the Bush Regime, the British Establishment, etc.) are
simply secretions of the most primitive and ape-like elements
still lurking in our brains. They're a kind of heavy scum that
forms on the free-flowing, light-dazzled stream of human existence.
So the attack on Iraq isn't really a
war for oil, not in the strictest sense. The United States doesn't
need Iraq's oil. In recent years, America has been carefully
diversifying its own sources of foreign oil, and is no longer
overly dependent on the Arab-held fields. In fact, that's one
reason the long-planned attack on Iraq is coming now. Before,
America couldn't risk a military takeover of one of the major
oil states (minor Kuwait, of course, has been occupied since
1991): too much could go wrong, irreplaceable supplies could
be cut off. Now, however, the game is worth the candle; even
in the highly unlikely event of disaster--an Arab oil embargo,
a long, intractable war--the Bush Regime believes they can ride
it out until the situation stabilizes by drawing on other sources:
Africa, Venezuela, Russia, plus the oil still lying off America's
coasts and under its few remaining wildernesses.
Iraq is not the end, but the means. What
America needs--or rather, what the thugs in the Bush Regime desire--is
dominance of Middle Eastern oil in order to hold the economies
of China and India hostage in the coming decades. The aim is
not conquest, in the classic sense; our elites are imperialists,
not colonialists. They don't want to settle amongst all those
funny-looking foreigners; heaven forefend! It's bad enough there
are so many of them in God's country already, where, as one august
national leader, Republican Representative Sue Myrick, noted
recently, they "run all the convenience stores," thus
posing the ever-present danger of gustatory terrorism. ("What's
that white powder on my donuts? Aieee!")
No, what is sought--what is demanded,
what will be enforced with human cannon fodder and treasure extorted
from ordinary citizens ("You're under attack! Give us your
money!")--is that the emerging powers become pliant "friends"
and business partners, along the lines of Western Europe. Naturally,
this will require a heavy U.S. military presence in the vicinity
for generations, as in Europe (58 years and counting); naturally,
as in Europe, obedience to U.S. "interests" will be
mandatory--or else, as warlord Donald Rumsfeld recently threatened
Germany, there will be "punishment": the threat of
economic ruin. And of course, there will be the overarching "missile
shield," the exciting "new generation" of nuclear
weapons the Regime is developing, and the "full spectrum
dominance" of space-mounted superweapons to provide that
hint of violent coercion so essential to any warm friendship.
So the game's afoot; the knives are out;
the gangs are on the march. What happens next, no one can tell,
but this much is certain--whatever the cost, in lives and lucre,
the elites will not be paying it.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Yesterday's
Features
Bill and Kathleen Christison
On
the Road to Iraq: First Stop Amman
Uri Avnery
An Approaching Emergency
Ray Close
A CIA
Analyst on Forging Intelligence
Michael Neumann
An
Unfounded Rush to Cynicism: a Rebuttal of Perry Anderson
Gary Leupp
Bush's
"Press" Conference
Kurt Nimmo
Perle's Slurs: Smearing Sy Hersh
Terry Jones
Bush
Goes in for the Kill
CounterPunch Wire
Vietnam 2 Pre-Flight Check
Alexander Cockburn
What Will the US Find If It Invades Iraq?
Robert Fisk
Blix
Undermines Bush War Plan
Website of the Day
The
Blix Report
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