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Yes, the Kuwaitis had called in their marker. Like a warlord of old, Bush used the US military as a private army to help his business partners. After an extensive bombing campaign that openly even gleefully mocked international law in its targeting of civilian infrastructure (a tactic repeated in Serbia by Bill Clinton now regarded as an "adopted son" by Bush), the brief 100-hour ground war slaughtered fleeing Iraqi conscripts by the thousands while, curiously, allowing Saddam's crack troops, the aptly-named Republican Guard, to escape unharmed. Later, these troops were used to kill tens of thousands of Shiites who had risen in rebellion against Saddam at the specific instigation of George Bush, who not only abandoned them to their fate, but specifically allowed Saddam to use his attack helicopters against the rebels, and also ordered US troops to block Shiites from gaining access to arms caches.
Think the Texas Board of Education will put that in their
textbooks?
Now Barack Obama and his "Justice" Department are working
overtime to protect Bybee -- and the rest of the war-and-torture fomenters --
from even the slightest mussing of their hair for their facilitation of acts
that are clearly war crimes under United States law, the Geneva Conventions and
the
Principles of the Nuremberg Tribuna l. Obama will not acknowledge these
atrocities for what they are; he will not investigate these atrocities; he will
not prosecute these atrocities. And the reason for this inaction is simple: he
approves of these atrocities, and is himself facilitating their
continuation and expansion. And why does he do this? Because that is why he came
to power: to direct the empire toward its traditional ends of geopolitical
domination and oligarchic enrichment. His actual policies give ample
demonstration of this fact. (Alexander Cockburn lays out
the case here.)
But as we noted, facts are stupid things. No one much
wants to hear them; and fewer and fewer people can even recognize them when they
float up, in broken bits and jagged pieces, from the rancid swill of our
political "discourse." And even though the Obama Administration is employing the
exact same tactics in demonizing Iran that the Bush Administration employed with
Iraq -- right down to the use of the highly respected, internationally renowned
New York Times as a "stovepipe" for warmongering propaganda -- no one seems able
to grasp what is happening. We still get earnest debates and fretful questions
about the "direction" and "intentions" of the current administration's policies
toward Iran.
The intention is this: domination, by any means necessary.
This is the bedrock, bipartisan consensus of the American ruling class and its
outriders, sycophants, courtiers and toadies. It was spelled out with crystal
clarity by two years ago by Admiral William Fallon, the predecessor of General
David Petraeus in the very cockpit of the war machine, Central Command. Fallon,
as you may recall, enjoyed a brief frisson among progressives for an erroneous
report that he had declared there would be no military action against Iran on
his watch. And while it was true that he was skeptical about immediate action --
putting him in the "moderate" camp described above -- he left no doubt about his
adherence to the imperial consensus. As I noted at the time:
Fallon himself has long denied the hearsay evidence that he had declared, upon taking over Central Command, that a war on Iran "isn't going to happen on my watch." And in fact, the article itself depicts Fallon's true attitude toward the idea of an attack on Iran right up front, in his own words. After noting Fallon's concerns about focusing too much on Iran to the exclusion of the other "pots boiling over" in the region, Barnett presses the point and asks: And if it comes to war? Fallon replies with stark, brutal clarity:
"'Get serious,' the admiral says. 'These guys are ants. When the time comes, you crush them.'"
When the time comes, you crush the ants. If anyone asks you to define the "American Way" in the 21st century, just quote them that one sentence.
**UPDATE: The eagle eye of Jason Ditz at
Antiwar.com caught this story on the wing: the Obama administration is
moving a massive amount of weaponry, including hundreds of bunker buster bombs,
to Diego Garcia. As Ditz notes:
The Sunday Herald report also cites numerous experts as saying that the lack of publicity for the move, just one of several examples of the Obama Administration adding major amounts of weaponry to the area around Iran, suggests they believe a confrontation is more likely.
Diego Garcia, you may recall, is one of the more
sinister jewels in the imperial crown. As we reported here back in 2008:
Britain and America cut a secret deal: land for nukes. London sliced off a sliver of its imperial dominions and gave it to Washington, in exchange for a price reduction on some sleek new nuclear missiles. Together, the two great democracies then drove the inhabitants of the sliver from their homes by force, dumping them into poverty-ridden exile hundreds of miles away. Washington built an imperial outpost on the stolen land, a military base which it used to "project dominance" over strategic regions in Central Asia and the Middle East. Later, the outpost became yet another link in Washington's chain of "black sites" -- secret prisons where captives snatched without charges or due process could be hidden from the world and tortured.
This is the story of the Chagos Archipelago, a chain of small islands in the Indian Ocean whose inhabitants were forced from their land forty years ago to make way for a military base on the island of Diego Garcia. The base, built and staffed largely by the Americans but operated jointly with the British, has been the launching pad for countless air strikes against Iraq (in two wars) and Afghanistan. It has also served as one of the sinister way stations in America's global gulag. In return for its use of the ethnically cleansed land, Washington graciously knocked off $14 million from the price tag of some Polaris nuclear missiles that Britain craved, in its never-ending struggle to retain some crumbs of its own, now-faded "projection of dominance" on the world stage.
As John
Pilger reported after the British high court rejected the Islanders' appeal
to return to their homes:
"To get us out of our homes," Lizette told me, "they spread rumors we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs. The American soldiers who had arrived to build the base backed several of their big vehicles against a brick shed, and hundreds of dogs were rounded up and imprisoned there, and they gassed them through a tube from the trucks' exhaust. You could hear them crying. Then they burned them on a pyre, many still alive."
Lizette and her family were finally forced on to a rusting freighter and made to lie on a cargo of bird fertilizer during a voyage, through stormy seas, to the slums of Port Louis, Mauritius. Within months, she had lost Jollice, aged eight, and Regis, aged ten months. "They died of sadness," she said. "The eight-year-old had seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. The doctor said he could not treat sadness."
***
NOTE: No one has covered
America's slide toward war with Iran -- and indeed, the accelerating moral rot of militarist empire in general --
with more depth and insight than Arthur Silber. He is in extremely low water
right now, suffering from severe health problems. He has been able to post only
a small handful of articles since the first of December -- and nothing at all
for several weeks now. Yet his blog is his sole means of support. I don't know
what his precise situation is at the moment, but it is certain to be dire. If
you are able to contribute anything to help him out, I would urge you to go to his
site and drop something in the donation jar.
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