THE ROVING
EYE The
return of the Keyboard
Warriors By Pepe Escobar
Waiting for the end of the world,
Waiting for the end of the world, Waiting
for the end of the world. Dear Lord, I
sincerely hope you're coming ‘cause you really
started something. Elvis
Costello, Waiting for the end of the world
Be afraid. Be very afraid. The Return
of the Keyboard Warriors - a prized Return of the
Living Dead spin-off - is at hand. From Republican
chicken hawks to public intellectuals, right-wing
America is erupting in renewed neo-conservative
revolt. The year 2012 is the new 2002; Iran is the
new Iraq. Whatever the highway - real men go to
Tehran via Damascus, or real men go to Tehran
non-stop - they want a
war, and they want it now.
Go ahead and
jump Exhibit A is an op-ed piece at the
Wall Street Journal [1] - similar to countless
others popping up virtually everyday not only in
this Masters of the Universe vehicle but also in
the Washington Post and myriad rags across
"Western civilization".
The festival of
fallacies ranges from the usual "diplomacy has run
its course" to "the sanctions are too late" -
culminating in the right-wing weapon of choice;
"Iran is within a year of getting to the point
when it will be able to assemble a bomb
essentially at will." Why bother to follow what
the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is
doing, not to mention the National Intelligence
Estimates released by the US intelligence
community?
And why not add imperial
disdain tinged with racism, as in "Iran is a Third
World country that can't even protect its own
scientists in the heart of Tehran". Of course not;
they are being killed by the Iranian terror group
Mujahideen-e-Khalq, merrily trained, financed and
armed by Israel's Mossad, as US corporate media
has just discovered. [2] Everybody in Iran has
known this for months.
As a climax, still
another fallacy - "the Islamic Republic means to
destroy Israel" - unveils the real agenda; "the
broader goal of ending the regime." Oh, if we
could only have our Persian gendarme of the Gulf
back.
This is what passes for geopolitical
analysis in Rupert Murdoch-controlled US corporate
media - read and relinked daily by the Masters of
the Universe. Scary monsters, super freaks
Exhibit B is an op-ed piece at Tina
Brown's The Daily Beast, [3] signed by Niall
Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard, senior
research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, and
senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford.
Recently, I actually took the trouble of
reading Ferguson's latest book, Civilization:
The West and the Rest, during my favorite
West-to-Rest flight, the 16-hour New York to Hong
Kong (from the American century to the Asian
century).
Ferguson sets out to refute the
reasons why Israel should not attack Iran. He
assumes "the Saudis stand ready to pump out
additional supplies" of oil (wrong). He assumes a
"military humiliation" will lead the regime in
Tehran to collapse (wrong). He claims that Tehran
will not "become a sober, calculating disciple of
the realist school of diplomacy ... because it has
finally acquired weapons of mass destruction"
(multiple wrong; Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei is very sober and calculating, and he has
banned nuclear weapons as anti-Islamic).
Former US vice president Dick Cheney would
have been proud to hire Ferguson as an
apparatchik, as he states that "preventive war can
be a lesser evil" and duly advocates "creative
destruction".
Ferguson ranks Israel as
"the most easterly outpost of Western
civilization"; not bad for an isolated,
supremacist theocracy/ethnocracy armed with at
least 200 (undeclared) nuclear weapons whose
favorite sport is to terrorize Palestinians and
now Iranian scientists. Talk about a sponsor of
terror state springing from the womb of "Western
civilization".
Ferguson's toxic fusion of
arrogance and ignorance - about the Middle East,
about Persian culture, about Asia, about the
nuclear issue, about the oil industry, about, in
fact, "the Rest" - would be just innocuous hadn't
he be hailed as a top public intellectual. The
best thing about his piece are actually the
comments, ranging from "I'm shocked that a
research fellow at Jesus College would advocate
the bombing of Muslims" to "What's with all these
Brits that look to the USA as a platform to
re-inflate their dreams of Empire?"
If
this is what passes for intellectual analysis in
the upper strata of the Anglo-American axis, no
wonder the whole business of Empire is doomed.
Far more insidious than The Invasion of
the Keyboard Warriors is its effect on the
warrior-in-chief, US President Barack Obama.
Recently, Obama has been conducting product
placement for Robert Kagan's new book, The
World America Made. Kagan, a neo-con stalwart,
advises Mitt Romney - who may, or may not, become
the Republican presidential nominee, assuming he
wins over the visceral repulsion he provokes in
extreme right-wing circles.
As Andrew
Levine from the Institute for Policy Studies has
shrewdly observed, [4] Obama the neo-con may be a
very clever move to pre-empt Mitt and win even
more votes. But it may be an exercise in
transparency, as Obama, even before his State of
the Union address, has been reciting Kagan to the
letter, as in forget Asia, this will be another
American century, and I will be at the helm; thus
remember, it is I that coined the only change you
can believe in.
And that's when this
really becomes a scary movie; if Obama the neo-con
concludes that to get to his new, dominant
American century first he needs to do some
vacuum-cleaning in Southwest Asia, blowback or
not, he'll do it - to the delight of the Keyboard
Warrior brigade.
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