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It was necessary to understand the mindset of the dominant
personalities in this administration (I do not place Bush in that
category, by the way, I think Cheney and Rumsfeld could convince Bush of
anything if you locked them in a room for twenty minutes), but it is
more important to understand their actions.
Many have commented that America is almost invulnerable compared
to most countries in the world, and that it is absurd that our citizens
and government still seem so terrified of everything.
Those of us who have not bought into the administration’s lies
may be inclined to agree with this assessment.
But for an imperial America ruling with an iron fist, there are
three real threats:
1)
Terrorism: The
threat of terrorism has proven to be grossly exaggerated thus far, but
if America continues to pursue an imperial path, there will be an
increasing number of people in this world who feel they have no other
recourse. Terrorism pops
the bubble of real-politik; it breaks the rules of the Geneva Convention
which, amongst other nobler things, ensures that whomever has the most
powerful army will always win. The
prospect of terrorism means that a weak, hopeless, powerless group (such
as the Palestinians), can inflict losses on a country that not even a
hawkish regime (such as Sharon’s) can consider acceptable.
This fact has an almost immediate implication of a cycle of
violence that is nearly impossible to break.
Realistically, the neoconservatives can fear nothing more than an
Israeli-Palestinian crisis on a global scale.
Even the most oppressive regime cannot exist without some level
of submission from its people. The neoconservatives hope that the
seduction of the corporate world will ease the conquered into
submission, but this calculation largely ignores the factors of
personal, nationalistic, and ethnic pride, which are at the root of
Middle Eastern terrorism to begin with.
This administration has already set us on a course for a
confrontation with the rest of the world in which they will have to
either submit to us in full, or begin the resistance- a confrontation
the results of which will not easily be reversed.
It will take another president to abandon this path and avoid
that confrontation; if Bush is reelected, we may well see the full
confrontation emerging by the time his second term is up, at which point
the neocons will hope to find another puppet president to manipulate.
2)
Rogue States with Nuclear Weapons:
No, chemical weapons are not a threat so far as the
administration is concerned. The
haphazard invasion of Iraq was far more likely to ensure the possibility
that Saddam would use chemical weapons than it was to prevent that
possibility. It seems the
most likely possibility, to me, that those weapons (assuming there were
some) are in the hands of terrorists right now, having been given to
them only because we dethroned Saddam, and that those terrorists are
trying to figure out an effective use for them as we speak.
No, the only weapons that are a serious threat to this
administration are nuclear, and we have seen the neoconservative
administration essentially throw its hands up in its attempts to resolve
the North Korean crisis. It
appears that Kim Jong Il is probably just sane enough to be deterred,
but the slim possibility that he is not is enough to represent a real
threat, and one that is unsolvable under the neoconservative approach.
3)
Oil: Oil is
America’s Achilles’ heel. The
fact that this administration is saturated with oil executives is not so
much a sign that they are looking to slick their own pockets with oil
money (although this seems true to some degree) as much as it is an
indication that oil is the administration’s, and probably the
Republican party’s absolute top political priority.
And this is not so absurd, particularly coming from a party that
represents corporate America, since there is no question that our entire
economy, and indeed the entire world’s economy, rests on this one
resource. And as it
happens, half of the entire world’s oil lies under the feet of the
most virulently anti-American, anti-Western population in the world.
The Arab population, in the neighborhood of one billion people,
is the largest group as yet un-seduced by corporate dependency.
For
the first threat, terrorism, we have seen the administration acting in
the short-term on the Sharonian fallacy that every individual terrorist
can actually be caught or killed. That
is a fallacy because for every terrorist killed, ten more are created. In the long-term, the neocons view some level of terrorism in
the US as in the category of acceptable losses in the reordering of the
world. They probably
naively assuage themselves with the idea that eventually the Middle East
will also be seduced into dependency and out of fundamentalism, but in
reality terrorism is much less of a serious concern to the neocons than
they would have us believe.
The approach to the second threat is yet to be resolved, and
they can only hope that nobody insane beyond deterrence comes into
possession of nuclear weapons. It
may be that in that situation they would attempt a deal behind closed
doors as Reagan (Bush’s idol) did with Iranian hostages and the
Iran/Contra scandal, in which the neocons can declare themselves
victorious while quietly giving the “blackmailers” everything they
desire. It is not
impossible that they have already begun enacting that plan with North
Korea. The third threat
will be the focus of Part III of this piece…
Jesse Lee is a recent graduate of Trinity College in Hartford with
a degree in Political Science and Philosophy. He works as a paralegal in
Washington, D.C. where he was born and raised. He also volunteers with
MoveOn and The Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC). He
encourages your comments at kirkout79@hotmail.com. |
