THE ROVING
EYE Exceptional America
rules By Pepe Escobar
SAN FRANCISCO - Make my day, punk. Dirty
Harry - and his double - showed up big time at the
"foreign policy" debate in Boca Raton, Florida,
on Monday, although sometimes the show looked more
like a trashy American Idol rehearsal than
a polished ode to American Exceptionalism.
It was all about the world's
"indispensable power" (President Barack Obama),
the humongous, bipartisan
military-industrial-congressional-media complex
gobbling up everything like one of those medieval
devils depicted in frescoes by Italian Renaissance
geniuses. It was all about Imperial Projection - a
sort of gleaming mega-special effects outfit sold
like it was innocently high-tech
Industrial Light
and Magic.
Obama and the Robot camouflaged
as a Product (or is it the other way around), Mitt
"Binders Full of Women" Romney droned on in
agreement on shadow-war droning and Afghanistan,
with barely a dissent on Iran and the wider Middle
East. No hard questions, no pressing on nuance, no
smashing of preconceived misconceptions by meek
moderator Bob Schieffer - who might as well have
stayed home watching the San Francisco Giants. As
for America, it might as well elect a drone for
president.
To keep with the San Francisco
theme, I was watching the debate in a fabulous
house in Marin county with radio star and
political campaigner Peter Collins; we got so mad
with the theater of the absurd - which would have
elicited approval from pataphysics master Alfred
Jarry - that we interrupted the thing every two
minutes to express our outrage or emit roaring
laughter.
I could have pulled a Ginsberg
and hit the streets of placid San Anselmo at
night, starving, hysterical, naked, looking for a
nugget of truth. It felt more like Jimmy Stewart
in Vertigo - minus the solace provided by
Kim Novak. Or maybe I could get the Roving
Eyemobile and go on a Bullitt binge and
crash it on a wall of No Expectations. No, this
was more like a Dirty Harry-style shootout. A punk
out-punking a punk.
One could actually see
- and feel - Romney's brain striving oh so hard to
process and enounce all those facts from those
weird faraway lands, without resembling to
understand even why he began a sentence in the
first place. And this is a candidate for president
who has been prepped, over-prepped and
uber-prepped not only for a few months, but for no
less than six years.
As President Obama
comfortably settled down on his Dirty Harry role -
no empty chairs apply here - Mitt started to sweat
profusely and entered lockdown, if not terminal
failure mode. His Pakistan rant will have the
Inter-Services Intelligence in
Rawalpindi/Islamabad gaming for years.
He
obviously was not prepped enough to negotiate his
conceptual u-turn from extremist hawk to centrist
dove - or, as the slimy president of the
Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, put
it, an "intelligent, reasonable" man. Do robots
dream of electric elections?
The best
Romney could come up with was an "I am not George
W Bush" shtick. Well, he certainly is as
geographically challenged as Dubya. America - and
the world - have just learned that "Syria is
Iran's only ally in the Arab world. It's their
route to the sea." As for the Persian Gulf, it's
obviously an evil Iranian invention, like their
bomb. Oh, but this "route to the sea" thing -
anybody got Iraq and Turkey's opinion? - it has
been going on for quite
a while.
Then a top Romney adviser
suggested that the "World Court" should arrest
evil Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, as
Romney suggested ("He should be indicted under the
Genocide Convention") and thus cut off the head of
the snake - to use a metaphor the House of Saud is
very fond of. Romney's advisers actually believe
Ahmadinejad runs the Tehran show.
But what
should anyone expect? After all Romney was prepped
in the last 48 hours before the debate by that
oceanic mediocrity Dan Senor, former spokesman for
Paul Bremer's infamous Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) in Baghdad. An illiterate Taliban
commander would have been a better teacher.
Sea cruise, anyone? Mitt was
relentless on Russia as the most dangerous
"threat" to the US; no, the Cold War never died,
it only went cryogenic. Yet if he was out-punked
even by Professor Barack, Mitt better not pick a
fight with judo master Vladimir Putin.
Still his foreign policy "vision" boils
down to bullying "our friends" and forcing "our
enemies" to roll over and die. Forget about Mitt
explaining how he's going to war with Iran - and
who's going to pay for it (Beijing already said
"your credit card is maxed out").
And
forget about the oh-so-moderate moderator even
hinting on the possibility of the US curbing any
of the almost 900 outposts in the worldwide Empire
of Bases. Forget about him even hinting there is a
direct connection between no wars in the "arc of
instability" and more investment in US education
and decaying infrastructure.
My friend
Vijay Prashad, author of Arab Spring, Libyan
Winter and the inestimable The Darker
Nations: A People's History of the Third
World, made a crucial point. He was thinking
about
the rest of the world - it was about
4:00 in the morning in Iran, it was about maybe
6:00 in the morning in India ... people were
awake in many of these countries following the
debates. I mean, imagine watching the debates
through their eyes. What they were seeing was a
deeply sadistic foreign policy that kept trying
to talk about "crippling" and such. You know,
that's really not the language even of
diplomacy. That's already a very aggressive
tone, it sets the agenda that it's either that
places like Iran either follow an American
diktat or they will face the consequences.
There's no understanding that on the other side,
Afghanistan, India, Pakistan - the regional
partners - are heavily engaged with
Iran.
I was especially thinking about
the Big League reactions inside the Zhongnanhai in
Beijing and the Kremlin. They know what kind of
unified War Party they are dealing with - and they
will (forcefully) react accordingly.
Still, in a few days Washington will have
three aircraft carriers harassing Iran anyway, in
seawaters that according to Mitt Romney do not
exist; after all Iran needs to go to Syria to
reach the sea. So it's back to our way or the
highway (into the sea?).
Forget about
statecraft. Forget about diplomatic nuance. The
Bushobama continuum rules supreme; Iran is nothing
but a bunch of criminal mullahs - and they will go
down, one way or another. This is a Modern
Republic in action. Make my day, punk.
All
that sound and fury ... And the day after,
everyone had already forgotten about it. All that
was left was tabloid
fodder and speculation on who got the best tie
and the best zingers.
Dirty Harry and his
double couldn't care less, in fact. Back to
business; it still boils down - by 50% - to
getting those undecided ladies in Ohio. Crucially,
as experienced political campaigner Collins told
me, "it's close enough to steal". And on top of it,
what the hell do undecided Ohio voters know about
Iran's route to the sea?
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