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Invasion of Iraq: The Pirates Have Already Lost Iraq
Posted on Monday, September 01 @ 02:55:50 UTC
Topic: Protect Oil
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 www.blackcommentator.com
For the sake of the future of the world, it is actually a good thing to have all of the idiots reading from the same page.
"The outcome is not in doubt," declared Donald Rumsfeld last Saturday, in San Antonio. The US will prevail in Iraq, no matter what it takes.
"We and our allies must make a generational commitment to helping the people of the Middle East transform their region," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice lectured Black journalists, in Dallas, earlier this month. "Like the transformation of Europe, the transformation of the Middle East will require a commitment of many years." The US will be in Iraq long after her last neuron has died of boredom.
"This is the future for the world we're in at the moment," said Rumsfeld special assistant Lawrence Di Rita, surveying American prospects in Iraq, last month. "We'll get better as we do it more often." The US will keep invading other nations until it achieves imperial perfection.
As long as the Pirates keep talking like that, their failure will be a certainty. Friends of peace should never wince when warmongers shout their intentions – the alternative is that they attack in stealth and win by surprise. It is certain that elites around the globe heard Condoleezza Rice quite clearly when she declared U.S. determination to impose American hegemony as firmly as was achieved after World War Two. That's not how the ruling circles or common folks of sovereign nations plan to spend their futures – under an American thumb. They will conspire to make things turn out otherwise.
Is anyone on the planet holding out hope that the Bush men are capable of civilized behavior? Even the slowest learners must recoil at Di Rita's earnestly stated goal: to get better at war by constant practice. What arguments can the "friends" of America advance among their own people who, thanks to globalization, heard Rumsfeld's aide nonchalantly condemn the Earth to endless agonies?
There is no need for anti-American propaganda when the Secretary of Defense hisses daily through bared teeth that humanity has no rights that Americans are bound to respect. The Pirates' words are elegant in their simplicity. They plan to wage war for generations, are open only to ideas on how to improve their war making skills, and will not permit a future in which the U.S. does not rule. What could be plainer? The world is rapidly becoming as simple as George Bush's brain.
Thus, the Bush men are doomed to failure, because no nation can subdue a world of resistance. No weapons are that smart, and modern economies – including America's – are the opposites of fortifications. The Pirates have given humanity no option but to plot to thwart the United States, by hook, crook, deceit, feint, charm, false supplication, flattery, secret agreements, monetary collusion, or the poor man's ghastly war of terror.
The U.S. is indeed the strongest nation in the world, the only one powerful enough to unite the planet – against itself.
The meaning of failure
Pay little attention to the polyglot soldiers hired to augment and "internationalize" the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The non-Americans (referred to as "foreigners" by the American foreigners) can have no effect but to destabilize and scandalize their own governments.
The Pirate's mission in Iraq is doomed on its own terms. The objective of their crusade is to impose corporate terms of relationships throughout the world – their version of globalization – enforced by the U.S. military and any sepoys they can gather. Bush's people constantly remind us that Iraq is to be a "model" for the New American Century ("This is the future for the world …") The "freedom" they crave for Iraqis requires American corporate domination of the economic and political life of the country. As scholar Tariq Ali points out in the August 27 issue of Counterpunch: "For the US, the main thing in Iraq is to push through the privatisation of Iraq's oil, to achieve the liberalisation of the Iraqi economy and to get the big US corporations in there. They are not too concerned as to how the country will be run, as long as that sort of economic structure is maintained."
The generals are not and have never been in charge, here – this is thoroughly a businessman's jihad.
The ugly and shameless rush to divvy up Iraq's economy and infrastructure even before the invasion had begun shocks the sensibilities of normal humans, but is really just corporate behavior writ large and on display for a global audience. If one sees only pigs squealing at the trough, one misses the central point, which is to transform a nation, region and planet into one big trough for the benefit of pigs.
The purpose of the U.S. occupation is to achieve "transformation" – the key word in every Pirate script. Iraq must be made safe for a U.S. corporate makeover, a shining "example" to the rest of the region of what Dallas-type development can do. Yet that goal is far beyond the horizon, since the U.S. military cannot protect itself at present troop levels, and has no reserves to call upon. U.S. commanders need hundreds of thousands more troops simply to defend themselves and oil pumps and pipelines at the current level of Iraqi resistance. Too late, the corporate media now begin an urgent discussion of the need to "transform" the U.S. military into a force fit for occupation – raising the specter of a draft. "Transformation" appears to be working in reverse.
To meet the "boots on the ground" crisis while avoiding a draft, Rumsfeld offers the all-purpose corporate solution: privatization. His Pentagon numbers crunchers claim to have identified 300,000 uniformed jobs that can be performed by civilians – a huge number that includes many tens of thousands of overseas (read, Iraq) assignments. The problem is, nobody wants to go to Iraq.
According to a July 31 Newhouse News Service report, "U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up." Insurance rates for civilians booked to Iraq have skyrocketed 300 to 400 percent – a price that Halliburton and other contractors are more than willing to pass on to U.S. taxpayers – but it still becomes "harder and harder to get (civilian contractors) to go in harm's way," said Gen. Charles S. Mahan, the Army's logistics chief. "We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kinds of functions."
Businessmen's wars have special constraints, as the Newhouse report revealed:
"You cannot order civilians into a war zone," said Linda K. Theis, an official at the Army's Field Support Command, which oversees some civilian logistics contracts. "People can sign up to that – but they can also back out."
If military contractors cannot induce their own employees to service the needs of the U.S. Army, how can it be expected that non-military businesses will assign personnel to the Iraqi corporate transformation?
The Pirates dreamed of a corporate version of the Oklahoma land rush descending on Baghdad and Basra. The traffic is all headed in the other direction, especially in the wake of the United Nations bombing. The Pirate's fantasy of Dallas and Houston on the Euphrates is finished, over, done. George Bush's childish dare, "Bring 'em on," scares the wrong people.
Lost cause
Meanwhile, the Pirates have not penetrated one inch into Iraqi civil society. U.S. recruitment of Saddam's former secret police (see Washington Post, August 24) is proof that occupation authorities feel surrounded and helpless against the popular forces that have been set in motion in Iraq, and will soon abandon a policy of co-optation in favor of assassination and fomenting civil war. The final nail will be driven into the coffin of the corporate "transformation" of Iraq, and events will unfold along the more familiar paths of national resistance to occupation.
The global audience understands that kind of story. Humanity is also getting an unsolicited, close-up look at how American society is mobilized for war. The Cowboy is a racist who tears down Islamic flags in full view of thousands, reflecting the values of his society. Americans are demonstrating to the world that they are most readily mobilized by hate (fear comes second) and, therefore, are magnets of hatred, whose expulsion is rapidly becoming the common mission of overwhelming numbers of Iraqis.
Aggression does, indeed, have transformative effects.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/53/53_war.html
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