COMMENT In God - or reality - we
trust By Pepe Escobar
"We
will export death and violence to the four corners of
the Earth in defense of our great nation." -
George W Bush in Bob Woodward's Plan of
Attack
It all boils down to Iraq. Will the
majority of Americans reject George W Bush because of
his defining moment - launching an indefensible
preemptive war?
No matter what happens on
election day - or days or weeks if the
multibillion-dollar special again goes to the Supreme
Court - the fact is that at least half of the nation,
and the majority of its cultural and intellectual elite,
has already rejected Bush as a divider, not a uniter,
someone who did not even have a popular mandate to begin
with.
The choice now is stark, between
faith-based domination and rational leadership; between
a messianic cult backed by vast corporate power and the
"reality-based community". For the Bush administration,
power creates reality - and hubris is an alien concept.
It's a non-reality-based paradigm, as a senior Bush
official told the New York Times: "We're an empire now,
and when we act, we create our own reality. And while
you're studying that reality ... we'll act again,
creating other new realities, which you can study too,
and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just
study what we do."
Studying what they do
In late spring and early summer, Asia Times Online
crisscrossed the US on the road. At the time - during
the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, before the party conventions
- the United States was a 45%-45% country, with
10% undecided. Now it's roughly a 48%-48% country, with
4% undecided. What we saw was an extraordinary gulf
between the little man - the working guy living in a
dreary outer suburb surrounded by malls, fast-food joints and
churches - and the so-called liberal elite (those
"debased, atheist homosexuals who drink Bordeaux").
In a nutshell, we
saw support for the Karl
Rove-packaged, tough-talking, shoot-from-the-hip Bush in the red (Republican) states
as a powerful expression of resentment toward
the elite, a sentiment masterfully capitalized on by
the Republican machine. Thus the
Christian evangelist, God-fearing, anti-gun-control, anti-abortion, anti-stem-cell-research
and anti-United Nations crusading armies defending
true "American values". Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky or Mao
Zedong never thought about this: working-class masses supporting
a political party that lavishes tax cuts on
the wealthiest 1% of the population and that is fully
committed to destroying the civil institutions that
support the working class.
These Bush-voting
armies consider themselves under siege, are fiercely
anti-intellectual (like the president himself) and
in essence anti-modern. So no wonder this translates
into a very ugly, aggressive brand of American
nationalism. The "other" - especially the foreign Muslim
other - is the ultimate enemy. The Bush administration's
response to September 11, 2001, was a "war on terror", a
misguided tactic (war) against a concept (terrorism).
But the concept of "war on terror" was brilliant -
because it inextricably linked this ugly,
Bible-quoting American nationalism to the Republican
agenda.
Thus Bush's mantra that there cannot
be another commander-in-chief apart from himself:
after all, he's on a mission from God. Thus his appeal to
an "al-Qaeda" (base) of millions of believers who await
the day of "rapture" when Jesus will come back to Earth
and kill everyone in sight - except them. Bush's
trademark hostility toward the factual world just mirrors
the cognitive dissonance of the crusading
God-fearing armies: no wonder the Bush administration lives
in fantasyland.
If John Kerry wins, he may have
the bulk of progressive America on his side: workers in
the knowledge economy, most of the women's vote, most of
the Hispanic vote, most of the black vote, the majority
of the 18-to-30 vote, a good slice of the working-class
vote and yes, most of the dreaded Bordeaux-sipping
cultural elite. But will it be enough to prevail over
the crusading, God-fearing armies?
What kind
of election is this? This is no national
election: these are 51 separate state elections
(including Washington, DC). They are not exactly 100%
democratic because they are indirect elections. This
means that for dozens of millions of voters in, say,
almost 40 states, it doesn't matter what they say or do.
The voters who really elect the president are in the
swing states: roughly Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Iowa,
Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin.
Of all six final national polls, Bush leads in four
by a maximum margin of 3 percentage points and
Kerry leads in two by a maximum margin of 2. Bush has
an average support of 47.9%, which is really bad for an
incumbent president. Much more revealing are the polls
Fox News has released every day since Friday. These are
the results: Friday, Bush +5; Saturday, Bush +2; Sunday,
tied; Monday, Kerry +2. One week ago, Bush was 14 points
ahead of Kerry on handling Iraq; now there's no margin.
He was 22 points ahead on handling terrorism; now the
margin has fallen to 11.
Osama bin Laden's
spectacular irruption as the third party in the election
might have benefited Bush by reinforcing the atmosphere
of fear; but voters seem to be more annoyed by the fact
bin Laden is still very much alive and kicking. The fact
that Bush outsourced the Afghan war and took the eye off
the ball to switch to Iraq (How Bush blew it in
Tora Bora, Asia Times Online, October 27) is a
story that won't go away - although corporate media
largely ignore it: Mike Kasper of the website
topdog04.com has an excellent Tora Bora-Iraq planning
timeline. And Asia Times Online readers are also
alerting that unlike the Bush administration spin, bin
Laden did not threaten new attacks against the US: a
correct, full transcript of his speech can be found at
the al-Jazeera website.
It's fair to assume an enormous turnout in this election.
In 2000, only 111 million of 203 million eligible
voters showed up at the polling booths (55%). Now many
polls expect a turnout of at least 120 million. Bitter
accusations are flying of a concerted, nationwide
Republican voter suppression campaign in predominantly
black neighborhoods. But the Republican polling firm of
Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates has already
concluded that if Kerry gets out the black vote, the
election is in the bag; according to their polls, Kerry
may be ahead by 5% overall in all swing states.
A vote to bury the neo-cons
Because the stakes are so high, this is a world election by
any means. Americans may be polarized by a rather
silly question: do you like or hate the other guy? The rest
of the world has already decided. A recent poll
by GlobeScan and the University of Maryland of 35
countries around the world found that in 30, a majority
or plurality favored Kerry: on average, Kerry won by
more than 2-1. Even the Financial Times and The Economist
- conservative establishment's Bibles - have voted
Kerry: this in essence means that Bush is bad for
business, as George Soros would also attest.
According to a poll by Der Spiegel, 79% of Germans would
vote for Kerry. The website of Spain's El Mundo has
been urging its Hispanic readers in the US to vote for
Kerry. Carlos Fuentes, a leading Mexican novelist and
a great admirer of the United States, laments that
under Bush it became "an incompetent hyperpower,
incapable, like Frankenstein, of controlling the
monsters it has protected in the past - the tyrant
Saddam Hussein, the odious bin Laden", and having at its
command men like Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "the
Dracula of the Pentagon". China - via its former vice
premier Qian Qichen - has launched a devastating attack
on Bush's foreign policy.
This is an election to
bury the neo-cons. As Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke
put it succinctly in America Alone: The
Neo-conservatives and the Global Order (Cambridge University Press,
2004), "Neo-conservatives see themselves in a world of
Hobbesian state-of-nature primitivism and conspiracy
where perpetual militarized competition for ascendancy
is the norm, and moderation (even of the sort envisioned
by Hobbes) by the community of nations is impossible,
where the search for a social contract a la
Locke or Rousseau is illusory, where trust among
human beings is elusive, and where adversaries (defined
as anyone who does not share the neo-conservative
world view) must be preemptively crushed
before they crush you."
It
took only eight neo-cons
to take over the whole US government (namely the
chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the
Department of Defense; the under secretary of defense
for policy; the deputy secretary of defense; the
secretary of defense; the under secretary of state for
arms control; the chairman of the Defense Policy Board;
the vice president; the chief of ataff to the vice
president; and the deputy national security adviser).
They are all members of the ultra-right-wing Project for
a New American Century and they all signed the 1996
document "A Clean Break" written for the Likud Party in
Israel - both of which have been calling for a war
against Iraq since the mid-1990s.
This is an
election to bury the real acting president, Dick Cheney,
the ultimate architect of an ultra-secretive,
anti-democratic, crony-capitalist-fueled Bush
administration. But the fact is the neo-con-spun,
non-reality-based paradigm really worked.
The numbers speak for themselves.
In the faith-based universe versus the "reality
community", 55% of Bush supporters still believe Iraq
was supporting al-Qaeda; 72% believe Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or a program to
develop them; 69% believe Bush supports the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty; 61% believe that if Bush knew there were no
WMD he would not have gone to war; 60% believe most experts
believe Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda; 58% believe that the
recent Duelfer report concluded that Iraq had
either WMD or a major program to develop them; 57% believe
that the majority of people in the world would prefer
a second Bush term; 55% believe the 9-11 Commission Report concluded
Iraq was supporting al-Qaeda; 51% believe Bush supports
the Kyoto treaty; and 20% still believe Iraq was
directly involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
The 'war on terror'/Iraq record
A recent joint report by researchers at Johns
Hopkins University, Columbia University and the
al-Mustansariya University in Baghdad concluded that 100,000 or
more Iraqis may have died because of the war, and "most
individuals reportedly killed by coalition forces were
women and children".
National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice should have resigned or been fired for
allowing Bush to start a preemptive war based on false
information and extremely incompetent analysis. Rumsfeld
should have resigned or been fired over, among other
things, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the human-rights abuses
in Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo, for waging two wars on the
cheap, for backing the convicted fraud and Iraqi
exile Ahmad Chalabi, and for failing to preview the Iraqi
liberation struggle/guerrilla movement.
"Bin
Laden Determined to Strike in the US", read the Central
Intelligence Agency briefing of August 6, 2001; Bush's
reaction was to take a month-long vacation. As bin Laden
mocked him in his recent speech, Bush kept reading My
Pet Goat while planes-turned-to-missiles
were devastating the World Trade Center. He opposed the
9-11 Commission and in the end only talked to its
members under Cheney's wing. Radio-controlled by the
neo-cons, he implemented their Hobbesian militaristic
agenda, alienated key US allies around the world and
mocked the United Nations as "irrelevant". There were no
WMD in Iraq. But there are plenty in Pakistan and North
Korea.
There is no rational explanation
why revenge for September 11 got diverted into
the catastrophic occupation of Iraq: Hamburg, Germany
(where much of the September 11 plot may have been
organized), and Hollywood, Florida (where several of the
hijackers, according to the US government, had lived),
had much more to do with September 11 than Iraq. And
there's no rational explanation for why Afghanistan,
apart from Kabul, remains a de facto disaster area run
by warlords while the Taliban and al-Qaeda are alive and
kicking along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Bush was not elected by the majority in 2000. If
he is really elected now - with or without the majority
of the popular vote - this will send a strong signal to
the whole world that Americans support the neo-con
agenda. The sequence is predictable: more corporate tax
cuts, an even more repressive Patriot Act, more wars in
the Middle East, more geopolitical chaos. The stakes
couldn't be higher. The crusading armies may legitimize
"exporting death and violence to the four corners of the
Earth". Or progressive America may rejoin reality and
punish the Bush administration for what it is: an
illegitimate aberration.
(Copyright 2004 Asia
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