THE ROVING EYE In God, and terror, we
trust By Pepe Escobar
"This battle will take time and resolve. But
make no mistake about it: we will win." - George
W Bush, September 12, 2001
"Can we win the
war on terror? I don't think you can win it." -
Bush, August 31, 2004
The war in Iraq is part of
the "war on terra". You're either with us, Republicans,
or with the terrorists. Be afraid. Be very afraid. And
count on us to deliver you from fear - somewhat. Fear
not what you can do to support us, fear for the world if
you don't.
This, in essence, is the Republican
platform for "four more years" of the president of
permanent war. A slightly milder, softer version is
being sold by the Republican National Convention (RNC)
in New York this week via party moderates such as
Senator John McCain, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani
and the California Gubernator. Warning: what you see is
not what you get. These party moderates will vanish as
soon as the convention is over, because as much as KBR
is a subsidiary of Halliburton, the real Grand Old Party
(GOP) nowadays is a subsidiary of Bush-Cheney '04, its
platform micro-managed by an ultra-authoritarian White
House and the Republican campaign "war room" in
Virginia.
Pre-packaged, sanitized, make-believe,
Wizard of Oz America is now being enacted inside Madison
Square Garden at the RNC just after another part of
America - in the form of half a million New Yorkers -
roared in the streets this Sunday to express their
yearning for regime change in Washington. This was
probably the largest political - and peaceful -
demonstration in New York for decades, and all but
preempted any message emanating from the convention. And
just like in February 15, 2003 - when more than 10
million people around the world marched against the war
on Iraq - civil society fell victim once again to a
double whammy: the criminalization of protest and
dissent in the US coupled with vast disinformation by US
corporate media. According to this twisted logic, any
reasoned criticism of the Bush administration is labeled
as "Bush bashing", without the thrust of the argument
even being considered.
Najaf doesn't make it
to New York The Bush administration badly needed
a Najaf "victory" to spin at the RNC. At the first siege
of Najaf, in April, General Mark Kimmitt was emphatic,
"[Muqtada] al-Sadr must be killed or captured." He was
not - as he was not, again, last week. Winning "hearts
and minds" in Iraq was never part of the Bush
administration's plan. The sieges of both Fallujah and
Najaf suggest neo-colonial repression to any form of
indigenous resistance.
Once again, like
clockwork, the Bush administration was defeated in
Najaf. No amount of spinning will raise the US profile
in Iraq and the Arab world after Najaf's old city and
sacred burial grounds were practically reduced to
rubble. The US-imposed Iyad Allawi government's
credibility is in shambles. Grand Ayatollah Ali
al-Sistani reasserted his moral authority big-time -
adding impeccable Iraqi nationalist credentials to his
profile as a moderate who wants the end of the
occupation. And Muqtada - who has already humiliated
former proconsul L Paul Bremer, not to mention Allawi -
is free to continue his own brand of resistance: his
Mahdi Army of urban, disfranchised, Shi'ite
lumpenproletariat remains ready to roll.
The 1,000th US soldier will die very soon in
Iraq. For the Bush administration these poor Americans
fighting a dubious war to pay for their college tuition
simply don't exist: no wonder New Yorkers told Asia
Times Online contributor Tom Engelhardt (Voices from the march to
nowhere, August 31) the most powerful message
on Sunday's march was the 1,000-coffin protest, the
carefully assembled cardboard copies carried by
volunteers and solemnly draped with the US flag.
On the internal front, the enormous Republican
advantage in fundraising disappeared as the campaign of
Democratic rival John Kerry is also awash in donations.
The economic recovery is a myth. Jobs are disappearing
by the hundreds of thousands. Bush is in serious danger
in the crucial swing states. Ohio - 250,000 lost jobs -
is swinging pro-Kerry by 9%. Florida is swinging
pro-Kerry by 6%. Pennsylvania, with its huge Boeing
plant in the Ridley Park suburb of Philadelphia, is also
swinging pro-Kerry. Analysts point to 2.6 million
undecided voters nationwide - which both parties may
have identified almost to a man and woman. But as Ruy
Teixeira of the Emerging Democratic Majority suggests,
the recent surge in Bush's numbers may have more to do
with more undecideds than with increased support for the
president.
How Bush gets away with
it Who are these people in New York? Sixty-three
percent declare themselves conservative (compared with
57% of Republicans on a national basis). Two-thirds are
Protestant (compared with 54% nationally). Thirty-three
percent are evangelicals (compared with 27% at the 2000
convention). Forty-five percent are gun owners. The
convention is not preaching to this pretty regressive
bunch of converts, for most of whom New York is worse
than Sodom. By using entertainment to market - and
soften - the really regressive Bush-Cheney '04 agenda,
it is trying, as corporate media insist, to "reach out"
to many Republicans - and even some Democrats - who
simply can't swallow the whole platform.
Three
cinemas in New York are currently showing Bush's
Brain, a documentary based on the homonymous book by
James Moore and Wayne Slater, head of the Dallas Morning
News office in Austin, Texas. The thesis of both book
and film is that Karl Rove, the Republican
Machiavelli-in-charge, is the co-president of the US:
trade policy, fiscal policy, social policies,
environment, education, foreign policy and war,
everything is dictated by the ultimate Rovian imperative
- to win the next election.
So the question
switches to how to counteract Rove's dirty tricks.
Rove's consummate tactic is always to find and place
surrogates to lie for him and for Bush - a lie often
related to a divisive cultural issue. As in the Swift
Boat smear campaign against John Kerry's record in
Vietnam, if the lie gets to Bush, the president can
always get away with it, by "comforting" Kerry for
example, but without ever explicitly condemning the
smear. If the Democrats decided to pull a Rove and start
applying the same mechanism to Bush - attacking his
perceived strength (the tough, anti-terror guy) and not
his many weaknesses - the effects could be devastating.
The real Bush-Cheney '04 campaign strategy is
not, and could never be, on show in New York. Its main
"themes" are fear and character assassination: fear in
the form of perennially evoking the "war on terra", and
character assassination like the Swift Boat smear
campaign. The strategy aims to brainwash and polarize
voters relentlessly with a barrage of lies and
caricature. And it involves never, ever talking about
the Iraq quagmire (best slogan in the New York march:
"Quagmire Accomplished"), unless to tie it up with the
"war on terra". Many Americans are smart enough not to
fall into this trap: according to the latest Gallup
poll, Kerry is now more trusted to handle Iraq (48%)
than Bush (47%) - even considering the fact that still
nobody knows exactly what Kerry would do.
As
much as corporate media insist New York "is not
America", the Sunday mass protest once again underlined
the total failure of the twin pillars of Bush's record -
the economy and especially the "war on terra".
The Sunni Iraqi resistance controls the major
cities in the Sunni triangle and is able to sabotage
pipelines at will. Nobody is even dreaming of investing
in Iraq. Unemployment is close to 70%. Muqtada is a
nationalist leader with popular legitimacy who can cause
endless trouble to the illegitimate US-appointed
government.
The Taliban control at least 40% of
Afghanistan - and warlords control the rest. As a New
Yorker puts it: "The Taliban are killing people in
Afghanistan? Again? That's soooooo 2001 ..."
US-installed Hamid Karzai may win October's presidential
election, but he will control little else apart from his
own chair, as the joke in Kabul goes. Osama bin Laden,
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, these figures were not
"smoked out" as promised, so they were completely erased
from the Bush administration spinning machine - as Iraq
is being erased by complicit corporate media.
Opium-poppy cultivation is the rage in Afghanistan - its
heroin back with a vengeance in Western Europe. Both
Iraq and Afghanistan are under martial law. Their
governments can only survive because they are protected
by US troops - and mercenaries. "Democracy", anyone?
Who cares? In God - and terror - we trust to
keep us indefinitely in power.
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