During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.

I am reading with increasing dismay about the steady march of Ethanol into the North American psyche as an alternative to buying fuel in the form of light, sweet crude oil from those mean, nasty Arabs. On the surface the idea behind biodiesel and ethanol is appealing and touches all of the perceived pain points of the modern, SUV-driving, suburbanite nuclear family: we can be energy-independent in North America, since the one commodity we have plenty of is space. Canola and Corn, the prime sources for biodiesel and ethanol, are hearty plants that can grow with less effort than potatoes, lettuce, or other food sources, too; theoretically in places where growing those latter crops can be tough. The promise, therefore, of guilt-free living is a simple one with universal appeal: we can have our gas-guzzlers, and eat it, too!

Indeed, this whole Ethanol fuel thing would be all hunky-dory if only it didn’t take dozens of gallons of oil derivatives per acre on a seasonal basis to grow it. The ONLY reason why Ethanol is a “cheaper” source of fuel is because of all of the government subsidies which exist in the US and Canada to nurture the growth of canola and corn instead of real crops that could end up on our dinner table, not to mention subsidies at the pump in the form of tax breaks for the oil companies. Those subsidies of course find their way into the coffers of companies like Monsanto, BASF, and Bayer CropScience, who market genetically-modified crops and integrated pesticides, controls, fertilizers to cash-strapped farmers. But here’s the hitch: we still need to import oil to grow our gasoline in an Ethanol scenario. Without oil-based fertilizers and pesticides, and diesel for tractors and farm equipment, we would have no corn.

Our fields should be used to grow food, not gasoline. Show me a country that doesn’t subsidize corn as a crop, and I’ll show you a country that thinks that Ethanol is a big fat joke.

A Harper’s Article recommended a few years ago that we simply follow the money. As we know, that path usually leads us to politicians.

BUSH is of course a big Ethanol supporter because it suits the short-sighted needs of his constituents: namely, red-state farmers and their enslavers: biotech companies like Monsanto who collectively spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year lobbying in Washington and suing farmers for such inanities as “breach of patent”. For Bush, it’s also a way to show the voting public that the oh-so-progressive Republicans are taking direct action to avoid the perceived impending oil crisis.

North America in particular is addicted to corn, and it’s affecting us around every corner:

• Our obesity epidemic is in large part the result of the overuse of High Fructose Corn Syrup as a replacement for sugar,
  
• The evolution of new species of control-resistant weeds and insect is due to the corruptive influence of Genetically-Modified Corn and Canola,
  
• And now, we’re hooking ourselves up to the Ethanol addiction. Yippee!
  

Soon enough every square inch of arable land will be occupied by canola and corn destined for soft drinks, junk food, and gas tanks. We’ll be paying less at the fuel pump but exponentially more for imported wheat, vegetables, and other food stuffs. And the intricate system of subsidies which allows people to declare that HFCS is cheaper than sugar, and ethanol is cheaper than crude oil, will continue to skew the economic system so that these crops look viable, until someone has the cojones to stand up and declare how ridiculous the whole circle jerk has become.

Politicians frequently meddle in the economics of our food supply with dramatic, though unintended, consequences. That’s how we ended up with corn subsidies in the first place. Of course, no politician wants to confront the reality here, which is that North American farming practises have become so poor that hearty weed-like plants such as Corn and Canola are just about the only remaining crop that can grow in the increasingly depleted soil table of our farmlands, a problem which Europeans confronted centuries ago — by changing (gasp!) their behaviour.

Like Hydrogen, Ethanol is a storage medium for fuel. It’s not a source.

-Ian.

> From: “Meltsner, Kenneth”
> Date: Tue Sep 23, 2003 8:18:04 PM US/Pacific
> To:
> Subject: if there’s ever a Nuerenberg trial for food crimes, here’s a
> candidate….
>
> I’m appalled, and I’m living in Wisconsin — I thought nothing could
> surprise me in the fried/cheese-bearing foods category…
>
> Ken
>
> September 23, 2003
> Cheeseburger and Fries, Wrapped Up in One
> By TANIA RALLI
>
> If the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association has its way, beef will
> not be just for dinner anymore.
>
> Looking to emulate the success of Chicken McNuggets and fried
> mozzarella sticks, the group is hoping to inject some red meat into
> the American snack food diet with cheeseburger fries. The fries, which
> look like a squat version of standard French fries, are made of a
> meat-and-cheese compound that tastes — as the name suggests — like a
> cheeseburger.
>
> Breaded, then deep-fried and served with ketchup or barbecue sauce,
> cheeseburger fries have found their way onto menus in several states
> including Nebraska, Minnesota and Texas since June. There is also a
> version being made available to public school cafeterias.
>
> “The challenge is getting people to think of other ways to eat beef,”
> said Betty Hogan, director of new product development for the
> association.
>
> Beef, mostly in the form of hamburger, still dominates the menus of
> fast-food restaurants and bars across the country. But even the
> enduring popularity of the hamburger is not enough to counteract the
> long-term decline in national beef consumption. Twenty years ago
> Americans ate 77.1 pounds of beef per capita and 51.3 pounds of
> chicken. In 2001, the figures were 66.2 pounds of beef per capita and
> 75.6 pounds of chicken.
>
> That reversal took place in part because of the popularity of
> McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, which were introduced in 1983, altering
> the public’s perception of chicken by turning it into a quick and
> convenient food. Beef was still largely relegated to the evening meal,
> and the National Beef Council’s popular slogan — “Beef: It’s What’s
> for Dinner” — seemed out of step when fewer families were sitting down
> to dinner together.
>
> Looking for other avenues into the American diet, the beef industry
> noticed that restaurants sell over 900 million portions of chicken
> strips and fried cheese sticks, many of them as appetizers.
>
> “You just don’t see beef-based appetizers,” Rob McLaughlin, vice
> president for product management at the Advance Food Company in Enid,
> Okla., which is manufacturing cheeseburger fries.
>
> The fries themselves are surprisingly light, weighing only about one
> ounce each. The meat, so that it holds together, is firm like a
> meatball. And while the taste is not distinctly beef, biting into one
> does impart the lingering flavoring of processed cheese.
>
> Steve Mason, owner of the Brass Rail restaurant in Beatrice, Neb.,
> said he served five fries in a portion and charged $2.95. “They’re
> very profitable,” he added.
>
> Like most bar snacks, cheeseburger fries pack quite a dietary wallop.
> Each individual fry has about 75 calories and four grams of fat. The
> fries for schools have less beef per serving but still have about 60
> calories and, in fact, more fat — a total of 6 grams — in each fry.
> And nobody eats just one.
>
> Developing a beef-based snack was a process that took about two years.
> According to Dr. Tony Mata, the technical coordinator of the
> association’s research and development branch, the final shape of
> cheeseburger fries was almost an accident. “There’s an interesting
> twist to how this product came about,” he said. “We were actually
> working on a cheeseburger by the slice.”
>
> The idea had been to manufacture precooked patties that tasted like a
> cheeseburger by combining ground beef and cheese.
>
> “It was supposed to have the same dimension of a regular hamburger
> patty,” Dr. Mata said. The consumer would simply heat the burger in a
> pan or microwave, place it in a bun, and dress it like a regular
> burger.
>
> “It looked good on paper,” Dr. Mata said. “Then we tried it at the
> laboratory, and the initial appeal was horrible.”
>
> Dr. Mata and the development group decided to rework the product,
> changing its shape, adding batter and bread and dropping it into the
> deep fryer.
>
> The new prototype was tested in Evanston, Ill., at the Keg of
> Evanston, a popular bar near Northwestern University. Satisfied with
> the response, the association enlisted a food scientist, Steve Moore,
> who is known in the business for his expertise in developing breaded
> coatings. In the past Mr. Moore worked on breading projects like onion
> rings, jalapeño peppers, seafood and even French toast sticks (in
> effect, adding breading to bread).
>
> “I started the project by putting a variety of flavors together with
> coatings,” Mr. Moore said about the cheeseburger fries.
>
> He likened the coating process to walking a tightrope, since the
> moisture of the meat and cheese must be carefully controlled for the
> breading to adhere. Otherwise, when the product is deep-fried, the
> heat of the oil will produce enough steam to blow off the breading.
>
> “You always follow wet by dry,” he said. So, before the meat and
> cheese could be battered and breaded, the shaped mixture had to be
> coated in a fine flourlike substance called predust to dry the surface
> of the moist mixture.
>
> Picking the right cheese was also an issue. Mr. Moore tested
> everything from premium sharp cheddar cheese to processed American
> cheese.
>
> “We didn’t want it so cheesy that we overwhelmed the beef flavor,” he
> said.
>
> “When people bite into it, you want them to get the wow effect: `Wow,
> this tastes just like a cheeseburger,’ ” Mr. Moore said.
>
> After testing different types of cheeses, Mr. Moore settled on a
> processed restricted-melt cheese, meaning that it is manufactured to
> withstand high temperatures.
>
> “Some cheeses are so restricted melt that we bit in and it looked like
> little yellow pieces of plastic,” he said.
>
> He created three flavor profiles. The first tasted like plain beef
> with salt and pepper. Then he made a prototype mimicking the flavor of
> beef fried on a flat-top grill, as at McDonald’s, and another that
> suggested a charbroiled flavor, like a Burger King hamburger.
>
> Tasters like the charbroiled flavor, but said it did not make sense to
> have something like that also taste deep-fried.
>
> “It’s hard to please everyone,” Mr. Moore said.
>
> When Advance Food began producing the cheeseburger fries at the
> beginning of the year under license from the cattlemen’s association,
> the company limited distribution to the central states but the product
> is now available across the country.
>
> “We think that we will sell about a million dollars’ worth this year,”
> Mr. McLaughlin said.
>
> All this, of course, pleases the National Cattlemen’s Beef
> Association. “We want beef in dessert if we can get it there,” Ms.
> Hogan said.
>
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
>

September 10, 2003 A Letter to President Bush By  Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

Dear President Bush:

You probably don’t know Joel Phagoo. He is a 21-year-old college student who decided to go fishing in New York’s Jamaica Bay with his kid brother and a cousin. They ended up washing up just off Runway 4 Right at JFK International Airport, after the weather turned.

They wandered about the tarmac for an hour, then turned themselves in to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey Police.

These were innocents. But their ability to move freely beneath the underbellies of jumbo jets just goes to show: Two years after the worst terror attacks on United States soil, repeat events are all too easy to envision.

An evildoer can still load explosives into a 20″ rolling travel case and ride into a major train station in any large metropolis—and blow it up. Shoulder-mounted missile launchers can, without much trouble, take down airplanes from the visitor center at the south end of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport or, as Joel Phagoo discovered, Runway 4 Right at JFK. A kayak could do the trick at the Port of Oakland, right beneath Ray Boyle, the man in charge of securing the fourth most-active seaport in the United States.

We’re all thankful that there hasn’t been a repeat of the twin towers tragedy. But is it understating the case to say not enough has been done in the 730 days that have passed to make our people feel safe again?

Creating a permanent solution starts at home.

First, there must be economic security. Unless this country continues to prosper, there won’t be the wealth necessary to finance safety anywhere inside our borders. Or to pick up the tab of occupying foreign nations.

That means applying the greatest fortune of this country, its intellectual assets, to the task at hand. Just like presidents before you, create a clear objective and mission for the smartest minds we call our own. World War II put them to work solving the mystery of atomic fission. The Cold War put them to work transporting humans to the moon. This war on terror should put them to work on not one but two projects that our core competency—the creation, deployment and operation of information systems and advanced technology—can solve.

Energy: There has not been a serious attempt to wean this country from its dependence on petroleum-based fuels since the Carter administration. Just think what could have been accomplished by now, if we had kept up research, testing and development of natural, renewable sources of energy such as solar, wind and water power, and if we had made up our minds and stuck with it? Or if a willing citizenry had just been called on to conserve? We would reduce the stress on our deteriorating electricity grid. And, if we could just reduce our dependency on oil by 20%, we wouldn’t need Saudi Arabia. Then you could really prosecute a war on terror.

Physical Security: We’ve made it possible to ride in airplanes at 600 mph and still talk on the fly to someone speeding down a highway at 70 mph—and we curse if the call breaks apart. We’ve made it possible to know exactly when every can of soup moves out of a Wal-Mart SuperCenter, but we can’t tell when a college student like Joel Phagoo docks at one of our busiest airports. Now, we better figure out how to create invisible fences—permeable and impermeable—that guard against unauthorized humans, at our borders, airport grounds and other open, but vital spaces.

Apply technology intelligently. A good first step would be to challenge and properly fund our scientists and information technologists to devise the analytical systems that finally figure out how photovoltaics, fuel cells and the air itself can effectively free us from the addiction to oil that colors all our military and economic policies. A second step would be to challenge software and hardware developers to figure out what combination of low-cost antennae, sensors, transmitters, repeaters and other systems are needed to provide real security at all public and private places, without taking away privacy.

If running Iraq as a 51st state is worth $4 billion a month, just imagine what a similar investment could produce if it brings both true economic and physical security to this remarkable nation, and keeps our greatest resource, our brains, at work, on our shores.

Mr. President, this is what we are fighting for.

Halliburton: All In The Family* April 27, 2003

After dropping more than 28,000 bombs on Iraq, the United States has now begun the business of rebuilding the country.

And it promises to be quite a business. With at least $60 billion to be spent over the next three years, the Iraqi people won’t be the only ones benefiting. The companies that land the biggest contracts to do the work will cash in big-time.

Given all the taxpayer money involved, you might think the process for awarding those contracts would be open and competitive. Well, so far, it has been none of the above. And the early winners in the sweepstakes to rebuild Iraq have one thing in common: lots of very close friends in very high places, *correspondent Steve Kroft* reports.

One is Halliburton, the Houston-based energy services and construction giant whose former CEO, Dick Cheney, is now vice president of the United States.

Even before the first shots were fired in Iraq, the Pentagon had secretly awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root a two-year, no-bid contract to put out oil well fires and to handle other unspecified duties involving war damage to the country’s petroleum industry. It is worth up to $7 billion.

But Robert Andersen, chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers, says that oil field damage was much less than anticipated and Halliburton will end up collecting only a small fraction of that $7 billion. But he can’t say how small a fraction or exactly what the contract covers because the mission and the contract are considered classified information.

Under normal circumstances, the Army Corps of Engineers would have been required to put the oil fire contract out for competitive bidding. But in times of emergency, when national security is involved, the government is allowed to bypass normal procedures and award contracts to a single company, without competition.

And that’s exactly what happened with Halliburton.

“We are the only company in the United States that had the kind of systems in place, people in place, contracts in place, to do that kind of thing,” says Chuck Dominy, Halliburton’s vice president for government affairs and its chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

He says the Pentagon came to Halliburton because the company already had an existing contract with the Army to provide logistical support to U.S. troops all over the world.

“Let me put a face on Halliburton. It’s one of the world’s largest energy services companies, and it has a strong engineering and construction arm that goes with that” says Dominy.

“You’ll find us in 120 countries. We’ve got 83,000 people on our payroll, and we’re involved in a ton of different things for a lot of wonderful clients worldwide.”

“They had assets prepositioned,” says Anderson. “They had capability to reach out and get sub-contractors to do the various types of work that might be required in a hostile situation.”

“The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants, and I know that it’s a perception that those at the very highest levels of the administration, Democrat and Republican, get involved in procurement issues. It can happen. But for the very most part, the procurement system is designed to keep those judgments with the career public servants.”

But is political influence not unknown in the process? In this particular case, Anderson says, it was legally justified and prudent.

But not everyone thought it was prudent. Bob Grace is president of GSM Consulting, a small company in Amarillo, Texas, that has fought oil well fires all over the world. Grace worked for the Kuwait government after the first Gulf War and was in charge of firefighting strategy for the huge Bergan Oil Field, which had more than 300 fires. Last September, when it looked like there might be another Gulf war and more oil well fires, he and a lot of his friends in the industry began contacting the Pentagon and their congressmen.

“All we were trying to find out was, who do we present our credentials to,” says Grace. “We just want to be able to go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, here’s who we are, and here’s what we’ve done, and here’s what we do.’”

“They basically told us that there wasn’t going to be any oil well fires.” Grace showed /*60 Minutes */a letter from the Department of Defense saying: “The department is aware of a broad range of well firefighting capabilities and techniques available. However, we believe it is too early to speculate what might happen in the event that war breaks out in the region.”

It was dated Dec. 30, 2002, more than a month after the Army Corps of Engineers began talking to Halliburton about putting out oil well fires in Iraq.

“You just feel like you’re beating your head against the wall,” says Grace. However, Andersen says the Pentagon had a very good reason for putting out that message.

“The mission at that time was classified, and what we were doing to assess the possible damage and to prepare for it was classified,” says Andersen. “Communications with the public had to be made with that in mind.”

“I can accept confidentiality in terms of war plans and all that. But to have secrecy about Saddam Hussein blowing up oil wells, to me, is stupid,” says Grace. “I mean the guy’s blown up a thousand of them. So why would that be a revelation to anybody?”

But Grace says the whole point of competitive bidding is to save the taxpayers money. He believes they are getting a raw deal. “From what I’ve read in the papers, they’re charging $50,000 a day for a five-man team. I know there are guys that are equally as well-qualified as the guys that are over there that’ll do it for half that.”

Grace and his friends are no match for Halliburton when it comes to landing government business. Last year alone, Halliburton and its Brown & Root subsidiary delivered $1.3 billion worth of services to the U.S. government. Much of it was for work the U.S. military used to do itself.

“You help build base camps. You provide goods, laundry, power, sewage, all the kinds of things that keep an army in place in a field operation,” says Dominy.

“Young soldiers have said to me, ‘If I go to war, I want to go to war with Brown & Root.’”

And they have, in places like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo and now Iraq.

“It’s a sweetheart contract,” says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center For Public Integrity, a non-profit organization that investigates corruption and abuse of power by government and corporations. “There’s no other word for it.”

Lewis says the trend towards privatizing the military began during the first Bush administration when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, commissioned the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to do a classified study on whether it was a good idea to have private contractors do more of the military’s work.

“Of course, they said it’s a terrific idea, and over the next eight years, Kellogg, Brown & Root and another company got 2,700 contracts worth billions of dollars,” says Lewis.

“So they helped to design the architecture for privatizing a lot of what happens today in the Pentagon when we have military engagements. And two years later, when he leaves the department of defense, Cheney is CEO of Halliburton. Thank you very much. It’s a nice arrangement for all concerned.”

During the five years that Cheney was at Halliburton, the company nearly doubled the value of its federal contracts, and the vice president became a very rich man.

Lewis is not saying that Cheney did anything illegal. But he doesn’t believe for a minute that this was all just a coincidence.

“Why would a defense secretary, former chief of staff to a president, and former member of congress with no business experience ever in his life, not for a day, why would he become the CEO of a multibillion dollar oil services company,” asks Lewis

“Well, it could be related to government contracts. He was brought in to raise their government contract profile. And he did. And they ended up with billions of dollars in new contracts because they had a former defense secretary at the helm.”

Cheney, Lewis says, may be an honorable and brilliant man, but “as George Washington Plunkett once said, ‘I saw my … seen my opportunities and I took them.”

Both Halliburton and the Pentagon believe Lewis is insulting not only the vice president but thousands of professional civil servants who evaluate and award defense contracts based strictly on merit.

But does the fact that Cheney used to run Halliburton have any effect at all on the company getting government contracts?

“Zero,” says Dominy. “I will guarantee you that. Absolutely zero impact.”

“In fact, I wish I could embed [critics] in the department of defense contracting system for a week or so. Once they’d done that, they’d have religion just like I do, about how the system cannot be influenced.” Dominy has been with Halliburton for seven years. Before that, he was former three-star Army general. One of his last military assignments was as a commander at the Army Corps of Engineers.

And now, the Army Corps of Engineers is also the government agency that awards contracts to companies like Halliburton.

Asked if his expertise in that area had anything to do with his employment at Halliburton, Dominy replies, “None.”

But Lewis isn’t surprised at all.

“Of course, he’s from the Army Corps. And of course, he’s a general,” says Lewis. “I’m sure he and no one else at Halliburton sees the slightest thing that might look strange about that, or a little cozy maybe.”

Lewis says the best example of these cozy relationships is the defense policy board, a group of high-powered civilians who advise the secretary of defense on major policy issues – like whether or not to invade Iraq. Its 30 members are a Who’s Who of former senior government and military officials.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but as the Center For Public Integrity recently discovered, nine of them have ties to corporations and private companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts. And that’s just in the last two years.

“This is not about the revolving door, people going in and out,” says Lewis. “There is no door. There’s no wall. I can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. I’m dead serious.”

“They have classified clearances, they go to classified meetings and they’re with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts. And their disclosures about their activities are classified. Well, isn’t that what they did when they were inside the government? What’s the difference, except they’re in the private sector.”

Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the defense policy board last month after it was disclosed that he had financial ties to several companies doing business with the Pentagon.

But Perle still sits on the board, along with former CIA director James Woolsey, who works for the consulting firm of Booz, Allen, Hamilton. The firm did nearly $700 million dollars in business with the Pentagon last year.

Another board member, retired four-star general Jack Sheehan, is now a senior vice president at the Bechtel corporation, which just won a $680 million contract to rebuild the infrastructure in Iraq.

That contract was awarded by the State Department, which used to be run by George Schultz, who sits on Bechtel’s board of directors.

“I’m not saying that it’s illegal. These guys wrote the laws. They set up the system for themselves. Of course it’s legal,” says Lewis.

“It just looks like hell. It looks like you have folks feeding at the trough. And they may be doing it in red white and blue and we may be all singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” but they’re doing quite well.”

© MMIII, CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved.

-Ian.

—- http://www1.iraqwar.ru/iraq-read_article.php?articleId”11&lang=en

The Real But Unspoken Reasons For The Iraq War – OIL U$ Dollar vs. Euro 08.04.2003 [12:37]

Summary Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking – it an an oil CURRENCY war. The Real Reason for this upcoming war is this administration’s goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. THE REAL REASONS FOR THE UPCOMING WAR IN IRAQ A Macroeconomic and Geostrategic Analysis of the Unspoken Truth By W. Clark wrc92 [at] aol [dot] com “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be … The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.” Those words by Thomas Jefferson embody the unfortunate state of affairs that have beset our nation. As our government prepares to go to war with Iraq, our country seems unable to answer even the most basic questions about this war. First, why is there virtually no international support to topple Saddam? If Iraq’s WMD program truly possessed the threat level that President Bush has repeatedly purported, why is there no international coalition to militarily disarm Saddam? Secondly, despite over 300 unfettered U.N inspections to date, there has been no evidence reported of a reconstituted Iraqi WMD program. Third, and despite Bush’s rhetoric, the CIA has not found any links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. To the contrary, some analysts believe it is far more likely Al Qaeda might acquire an unsecured former Soviet Union Weapon(s) of Mass Destruction, or potentially from sympathizers within a destabilized Pakistan. Moreover, immediately following Congress’s vote on the Iraq Resolution, we suddenly became aware of North Korea’s nuclear program violations. Kim Jong Il is processing uranium in order to produce nuclear weapons this year. President Bush has not provided a rationale answer as to why Saddam’s seemingly dormant WMD program possesses a more imminent threat that North Korea’s active program? Strangely, Donald Rumsfeld suggested that if Saddam were “exiled” we could avoid an Iraq war? Confused yet? Well, I’m going to give their game away – the core driver for toppling Saddam is actually the euro currency, the â,. Although completely suppressed in the U.S. media, the answer to the Iraq enigma is simple yet shocking. The upcoming war in Iraq war is mostly about how the ruling class at Langley and the Bush oligarchy view hydrocarbons at the geo-strategic level, and the overarching macroeconomic threats to the U.S. dollar from the euro. The Real Reason for this upcoming war is this administration’s goal of preventing further OPEC momentum towards the euro as an oil transaction currency standard. However, in order to pre-empt OPEC, they need to gain geo-strategic control of Iraq along with its 2nd largest proven oil reserves. This lengthy essay will discuss the macroeconomics of the “petro-dollar” and the unpublicized but real threat to U.S. economic hegemony from the euro as an alternative oil transaction currency. The following is how an astute and anonymous friend alluded to the unspoken truth about this upcoming war with Iraq… “The Federal Reserve’s greatest nightmare is that OPEC will switch its international transactions from a dollar standard to a euro standard. Iraq actually made this switch in Nov. 2000 (when the euro was worth around 80 cents), and has actually made off like a bandit considering the dollar’s steady depreciation against the euro.” (Note: the dollar declined 15% against the euro in 2002.) “The real reason the Bush administration wants a puppet government in Iraq – or more importantly, the reason why the corporate-military-industrial network conglomerate wants a puppet government in Iraq – is so that it will revert back to a dollar standard and stay that way.” (While also hoping to veto any wider OPEC momentum towards the euro, especially from Iran – the 2nd largest OPEC producer who is actively discussing a switch to euros for its oil exports). Furthermore, despite Saudi Arabia being our ‘client state,’ the Saudi regime appears increasingly weak/ threatened from massive civil unrest. Some analysts believe a “Saudi Revolution” might be plausible in the aftermath of an unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq (ie. Iran circa 1979) (1). Undoubtedly, the Bush administration is acutely aware of these risks. Hence, the neo conservative framework entails a large and permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf region in a post Saddam era, just in case we need to surround and grab Saudi’s oil fields in the event of a coup by an anti-western group. But first back to Iraq. “Saddam sealed his fate when he decided to switch to the euro in late 2000 (and later converted his $10 billion reserve fund at the U.N. to euros) – at that point, another manufactured Gulf War become inevitable under Bush II. Only the most extreme circumstances could possibly stop that now and I strongly doubt anything can – short of Saddam getting replaced with a pliant regime.” Big Picture Perspective: Everything else aside from the reserve currency and the Saudi/Iran oil issues (i.e. domestic political issues and international criticism) is peripheral and of marginal consequence to this administration. Further, the dollar-euro threat is powerful enough that they’ll rather risk much of the economic backlash in the short-term to stave off the long-term dollar crash of an OPEC transaction standard change from dollars to euros. All of this fits into the broader Great Game that encompasses Russia, India, China.” This information about Iraq’s oil currency is censored by the U.S. media as well as the Bush administration & Federal Reserve as the truth could potentially curtail both investor and consumer confidence, reduce consumer borrowing/ spending, create political pressure to form a new energy policy that slowly weans us off middle-eastern oil, and of course stop our march towards war in Iraq. This quasi “state secret” can be found on a Radio Free Europe article discussing Saddam’s switch for his oil sales from dollars to the euros on Nov. 6, 2000 (2). “Baghdad’s switch from the dollar to the euro for oil trading is intended to rebuke Washington’s hard-line on sanctions and encourage Europeans to challenge it. But the political message will cost Iraq millions in lost revenue. RFE/RL correspondent Charles Recknagel looks at what Baghdad will gain and lose, and the impact of the decision to go with the European currency.” At the time of the switch many analysts were surprised that Saddam was willing to give up millions in oil revenue for what appeared to be a political statement. However, contrary to one of the main points of this November 2000 article, the steady depreciation of the dollar versus the euro since late 2001 means that Iraq has profited handsomely from the switch in their reserve and transaction currencies. The euro has gained roughly 17% against the dollar in that time, which also applies to the $10 billion in Iraq’s U.N. “oil for food” reserve fund that was previously held in dollars has also gained that same percent value since the switch. What would happen if OPEC made a sudden switch to euros, as opposed to a gradual transition? “Otherwise, the effect of an OPEC switch to the euro would be that oil-consuming nations would have to flush dollars out of their (central bank) reserve funds and replace these with euros. The dollar would crash anywhere from 20-40% in value and the consequences would be those one could expect from any currency collapse and massive inflation (think Argentina currency crisis, for example). You’d have foreign funds stream out of the U.S. stock markets and dollar denominated assets, there’d surely be a run on the banks much like the 1930s, the current account deficit would become unserviceable, the budget deficit would go into default, and so on. Your basic 3rd world economic crisis scenario. The United States economy is intimately tied to the dollar’s role as reserve currency. This doesn’t mean that the U.S. couldn’t function otherwise, but that the transition would have to be gradual to avoid such dislocations (and the ultimate result of this would probably be the U.S. and the E.U. switching roles in the global economy).” In the aftermath of toppling Saddam it is clear the U.S. will keep a large and permanent military force in the Persian Gulf. Indeed, there is no “exit strategy” in Iraq, as the military will be needed to protect the newly installed Iraqi regime, and perhaps send a message to other OPEC producers that they might receive “regime change” if they too move to euros for their oil exportsâ¤. Another underreported story from this summer regarding the other OPEC ‘Axis of Evil’ country and their interest in the selling oil in euros, Iran. (3) “Iran’s proposal to receive payments for crude oil sales to Europe in euros instead of U.S. dollars is based primarily on economics, Iranian and industry sources said. But politics are still likely to be a factor in any decision, they said, as Iran uses the opportunity to hit back at the U.S. government, which recently labeled it part of an “axis of evil.” The proposal, which is now being reviewed by the Central Bank of Iran, is likely to be approved if presented to the country’s parliament, a parliamentary representative said.”There is a very good chance MPs will agree to this idea …now that the euro is stronger, it is more logical,” the parliamentary representative said.” More over, and perhaps most telling, during 2002 the majority of reserve funds in Iran’s central bank have been shifted to euros. It appears imminent that Iran intends to switch to euros for their oil currency (4) “More than half of the country’s assets in the Forex Reserve Fund have been converted to euro, a member of the Parliament Development Commission, Mohammad Abasspour announced. He noted that higher parity rate of euro against the US dollar will give the Asian countries, particularly oil exporters, a chance to usher in a new chapter in ties with European Union’s member countries. He said that the United States dominates other countries through its currency, noting that given the superiority of the dollar against other hard currencies, the US monopolizes global trade. The lawmaker expressed hope that the competition between euro and dollar would eliminate the monopoly in global trade.” Indeed, after toppling Saddam, this administration may decide that Iran is the next target in the “war on terror.” Iran’s interest in switching to the euro as their standard transaction currency for oil exports is well documented. Perhaps this recent MSNBC article illustrates the objectives of the neo conservatives (5). “While still wrangling over how to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, the Bush administration is already looking for other targets. President Bush has called for the ouster of Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat. Now some in the administration⤔and allies at D.C. think tanks⤔are eyeing Iran and even Saudi Arabia. As one senior British official put it: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” Aside from these political risks regarding Saudi Arabia and Iran, another risk factor isactually Japan. Perhaps the biggest gamble in a protracted Iraq war may be Japan’s weak economy (6). If the war creates prolonged oil high prices ($45 per barrel over several months), or a short but massive oil price spike ($80 to $100 per barrel), some analysts believe Japan’s fragile economy would collapse. Japan is quite hypersensitive to oil prices, and if its banks default, the collapse of the second largest economy would set in motion a sequence of events that would prove devastating to the U.S. economy. Indeed, Japan’s fall in an Iraq war could create the economic dislocations that begin in the Pacific Rim but quickly spread to Europe and Russia. The Russian government lacks the controls to thwart a disorderly run on the dollar, and such an event could ultimately force and OPEC switch to euros. Additionally, other risks might arise if the Iraq war goes poorly or becomes prolonged, as it is possible that civil unrest may unfold in Kuwait or other OPEC members including Venezuela, as the latter may switch to euros just as Saddam did in November 2000. Thereby fostering the very situation this administration is trying to prevent, another OPEC member switching to euros as their oil transaction currency. Incidentally, the final “Axis of Evil” country, North Korea, recently decided to officially drop the dollar and begin using euros for trade, effective Dec. 7, 2002 (7). Unlike the OPEC-producers, their switch will have negligible economic impact, but it illustrates the geopolitical fallout of the President Bush’s harsh rhetoric. Much more troubling is North Korea’s recent action following the oil embargo of their country. They are in dire need of oil and food; and in an act of desperation they have re-activated their pre-1994 nuclear program. Processing uranium appears to be taking place at a rapid pace, and it appears their strategy is to prompt negotiations with the U.S. regarding food and oil. The CIA estimates that North Korea could produce 4-6 nuclear weapons by the second half of 2003. Ironically, this crisis over North Korea’s nuclear program further confirms the fraudulent premise for which this war with Saddam was entirely contrived. Unfortunately, neo conservatives such as George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearle fail to grasp that Newton’s Law applies equally to both physics and the geo-political sphere as well: “For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction.” During the 1990s the world viewed the U.S. as a rather self-absorbed but essentially benevolent superpower. Military actions in Iraq (90-91′ & 98′), Serbia and Kosovo (99′) were undertaken with both U.N. and NATO cooperation and thus afforded international legitimacy. President Clinton also worked to reduce tensions in Northern Ireland and attempted to negotiate a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, in both the pre and post 9/11 intervals, the “America first” policies of the Bush administration, with its unwillingness to honor International Treaties, along with their aggressive militarisation of foreign policy, has significantly damaged our reputation abroad. Following 9/11, it appears that President Bush’s “warmongering rhetoric” has created global tensions – as we are now viewed as a belligerent superpower willing to apply unilateral military force without U.N. approval.Lamentably, the tremendous amount of international sympathy that we witnessed in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th tragedy has been replaced with fear and anger at our government. This administration’s bellicosity haschanged the worldview, and “anti-Americanism” is proliferating even among our closest allies (8). Even more alarming, and completely unreported in the U.S media, are some monetary shifts in the reserve funds of foreign governments away from the dollar with movements towards the euro (China, Venezuela, some OPEC producers and last week Russia flushed some of their dollars for euros) (9). It appears that the world community may lack faith in the Bush administration’s economic policies, and along with OPEC, seems poised to respond with economic retribution if the U.S. government is regarded as an uncontrollable and dangerous superpower. The plausibility of abandoning the dollar standard for the euro is growing. An interesting U.K. article outlines the dynamics and the potential outcomes (‘Beyond Bush’s Unilateralism: Another Bi-Polar World or A New Era of Win-Win?’)(10) “The most likely end to US hegemony may come about through a combination of high oil prices (brought about by US foreign policies toward the Middle East) and deeper devaluation of the US dollar (expected by many economists). Some elements of this scenario: 1) US global over-reach in the “war on terrorism” already leading to deficits as far as the eye can see — combined with historically-high US trade deficits – lead to a further run on the dollar. This and the stock market doldrums make the US less attractive to the world’s capital. 2) More developing countries follow the lead of Venezuela and China in diversifying their currency reserves away from dollars and balanced with euros. Such a shift in dollar-euro holdings in Latin America and Asia could keep the dollar and euro close to parity. 3) OPEC could act on some of its internal discussions and decide (after concerted buying of euros in the open market) to announce at a future meeting in Vienna that OPEC’s oil will be re-denominated in euros, or even a new oil-backed currency of their own. A US attack on Iraq sends oil to â,40 per barrel. 4) The Bush Administration’s efforts to control the domestic political agenda backfires. Damage over the intelligence failures prior to 9/11 and warnings of imminent new terrorist attacks precipitate a further stock market slide. 5) All efforts by Democrats and the 57% of the US public to shift energy policy toward renewables, efficiency, standards, higher gas taxes, etc. are blocked by the Bush Administration and its fossil fuel industry supporters. Thus, the USA remains vulnerable to energy supply and price shocks. 6) The EU recognizes its own economic and political power as the euro rises further and becomes the world’s other reserve currency. The G-8 pegs the euro and dollar into a trading band — removing these two powerful currencies from speculators trading screens (a “win-win” for everyone!). Tony Blair persuades Brits of this larger reason for the UK to join the euro. 7) Developing countries lacking dollars or “hard” currencies follow Venezuela’s lead and begin bartering their undervalued commodities directly with each other in computerized swaps and counter trade deals. President Chavez has inked 13 such country barter deals on its oil, e.g., with Cuba in exchange for Cuban health paramedics who are setting up clinics in rural Venezuelan villages. “The result of this scenario? The USA could no longer run its huge current account trade deficits or continue to wage open-ended global war on terrorism or evil. The USA ceases pursuing unilateralist policies. A new US administration begins to return to its multilateralist tradition, ceases its obstruction and rejoins the UN and pursues more realistic international cooperation.” As for the events currently taking place in Venezuela, items #2 and #7 on the above list may allude to why the Bush administration quickly endorsed the failed military-led coup of Hugo Chavez in April 2002. Although the coup collapsed after 2 days, various reports suggest the CIA and a rather embarrassed Bush administration approved and may have been actively involved with the civilian/military coup plotters. (11) “George W. Bush’s administration was the failed coup’s primary loser, underscoring its bankrupt hemispheric policy. Now it is slowly filtering out that in recent months White Houseofficials met with key coup figures, including Carmona. Although the administration insists that it explicitly objected to any extra-constitutional action to remove Chavez, comments by senior U.S. officials did little to convey this.” “The CIA’s role in a 1971 Chilean strike could have served as the working model for generating economic and social instability in order to topple Chavez. In the truckers’ strike of that year, the agency secretly orchestrated and financed the artificial prolongation of a contrived work stoppage in order to economically asphyxiate the leftist Salvador Allende government.” “This scenario would have had CIA operatives acting in liaison with the Venezuelan military, as well as with opposition business and labor leaders, to convert a relatively minor afternoon-long work stoppage by senior management into a nearly successful coup de grace.” Interestingly, according to an article by Michael Ruppert, Venezuelan’s ambassador Francisco Mieres-Lopez apparently floated the idea of switching to the euro as their oil currency standard approximately one year before the failed coup attempt… Furthermore, there is evidence that the CIA is still active in its attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Chavez administration. In fact, this past December a Uruguayan government official recently exposed the ongoing covert CIA operations in Venezuela (12): “Uruguayan EP-FA congressman Jose Bayardi says he has information that far-reaching plan have been put into place by the CIA and other North American intelligence agencies tooverthrow Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias” “Bayardi says he has received copies of top-secret communications between the Bush administration in Washington and the government of Uruguay requesting the latter’s cooperation to support white collar executives and trade union activists to “break down levels of intransigence within the Chavez Frias administration” Venezuela is the fourth largest producer of oil, and the corporate elites whose political power runs unfettered in the Bush/Cheney oligarchy appear interested in privatizing Venezuela’s oil industry. Furthermore, the establishment might be concerned that Chavez’s “barter deals” with 12 Latin American countries and Cuba are effectively cutting the U.S. dollar out of the vital oil transaction currency cycle. Commodities are being traded among these countries in exchange for Venezuela’s oil, thereby reducing reliance on fiat dollars. If these unique oil transactions proliferate, they could create more devaluation pressure on the dollar. Continuing attempts by the CIA to remove Hugo Chavez appear likely. The U.S. economy has acquired several problems, including as our record-high trade account deficit (almost 5% of GDP), $6.3 trillion dollar deficit (55% of GDP), and the recent return to annual budget deficits in the hundreds of billions. These are factors that would devalue the currency of any nation under the “old rules.” Why is the dollar still strong despite these structural flaws? Well, the elites understand that the strength of the dollar does not merely rest on our economic output per se. The dollar posses two unique advantages relative to all other hard currencies. The reality is that the strength of the dollar since 1945 rests on being the international reserve currency and thus fiat currency for global oil transactions (ie. “petro-dollar”). The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of these fiat petro-dollars, which are then used by nation states to purchase oil/energy from OPEC producers (except Iraq, to some degree Venezuela, and perhaps Iran in the near future). These petro-dollars are then re-cycled from OPEC back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, real estate, etc. The “old rules” for valuation of our currency and economic power were based on our flexible market, free flow of trade goods, high per worker productivity, manufacturing output/trade surpluses, government oversight of accounting methodologies (ie. SEC), developed infrastructure, education system, and of course total cash flow and profitability. While many of these factors remain present, over the last two decades we have diluted some of these “safe harbor” fundamentals. Despite imbalances and some structural problems that are escalating within the U.S. economy, the dollar as the fiat oil currency created “new rules”. The following exerts from an Asia Times article discusses the virtues of our fiat oil currency and dollar hegemony (or vices from the perspective of developing nations, whose debt is denominated in dollars). (13) “Ever since 1971, when US president Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard (at $35 per ounce) that had been agreed to at the Bretton Woods Conference at the end of World War II, the dollar has been a global monetary instrument that the United States, and only the United States, can produce by fiat. The dollar, now a fiat currency, is at a 16-year trade-weighted high despite record US current-account deficits and the status of the US as the leading debtor nation. The US national debt as of April 4 was $6.021 trillion against a gross domestic product (GDP) of $9 trillion.” “World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies.To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central bank must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that in turn forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars. Everyone accepts dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.” “By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in US assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. Even after a year of sharp correction, US stock valuation is still at a 25-year high and trading at a 56 percent premium compared with emerging markets.””The US capital-account surplus in turn finances the US trade deficit. Moreover, any asset, regardless of location, that is denominated in dollars is a US asset in essence. When oil is denominated in dollars through US state action and the dollar is a fiat currency,the US essentially owns the world’s oil for free. And the more the US prints greenbacks, the higher the price of US assets will rise. Thus a strong-dollar policy gives the US a double win.” This unique geo-political agreement with Saudi Arabia has worked to our favor for the past 30 years, as this arrangement has raised the entire asset value of all dollar denominated assets/properties, and allowed the Federal Reserve to create a truly massive debt and credit expansion (or ‘credit bubble’ in the view of some economists). These current structural imbalances in the U.S. economy are sustainable as long as: 1)Nations continue to demand and purchase oil for their energy/survival needs 2)The fiat reserve currency for global oil transactions remain the U.S. dollar (and dollar only) These underlying factors, along with the “safe harbor” reputation of U.S. investments afforded by the dollar’s reserve currency status propelled the U.S. to economic and military hegemony in the post-World War II period. However, the introduction of the euro is a significant new factor, and appears to be the primary threat to U.S. economic hegemony. More over, in December 2002 ten additional countries were approved for full membership into the E.U. In 2004 this will result in an aggregate GDP of $9.6 trillion and 450 million people, directly competing with the U.S. economy ($10.5 trillion GDP, 280 million people). Especially interesting is a speech given by Mr Javad Yarjani, the Head of OPEC’s Petroleum Market Analysis Department, in a visit to Spain (April 2002). He speech dealt entirely on the subject of OPEC oil transaction currency standard with respect to both the dollar and the euro. The following exerts from this OPEC executive provide insights into the conditions that would create momentum for an OPEC currency switch to the euro. Indeed, his candid analysis warrants careful consideration given that two of the requisite variables he outlines for the switch have taken place since this speech in early 2002. These vital stories are discussed in the European media, but have been censored by our own mass media (14) “The question that comes to mind is whether the euro will establish itself in world financial markets, thus challenging the supremacy of the US dollar, and consequently trigger a change in the dollar’s dominance in oil markets. As we all know, the mighty dollar has reigned supreme since 1945, and in the last few years has even gained more ground with the economic dominance of the United States, a situation that may not change in the near future. By the late 90s, more than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions, and half of all world exports, were denominated in dollars. In addition, the US currency accounts for about two thirds of all official exchange reserves. The world’s dependency on US dollars to pay for trade has seen countries bound to dollar reserves, which are disproportionably higher than America’s share in global output. The share of the dollar in the denomination of world trade is also much higher than the share of the US in world trade. Having said that, it is worthwhile to note that in the long run the euro is not at such a disadvantage versus the dollar when one compares the relative sizes of the economies involved, especially given the EU enlargement plans. Moreover, the Euro-zone has a bigger share of global trade than the US and while the US has a huge current account deficit, the euro area has a more, or balanced, external accounts position. One of the more compelling arguments for keeping oil pricing and payments in dollars has been that the US remains a large importer of oil, despite being a substantial crude producer itself. However, looking at the statistics of crude oil exports, one notes that the Euro-zone is an even larger importer of oil and petroleum products than the US.” “From the EU’s point of view, it is clear that Europe would prefer to see payments for oil shift from the dollar to the euro, which effectively removed the currency risk. It would also increase demand for the euro and thus help raise its value. Moreover, since oil is such an important commodity in global trade, in term of value, if pricing were to shift to the euro, it could provide a boost to the global acceptability of the single currency. There is also very strong trade links between OPEC Member Countries (MCs) and the Euro-zone, with more than 45 percent of total merchandise imports of OPEC MCs coming from the countries of the Euro-zone, while OPEC MCs are main suppliers of oil and crude oil products to Europe.” “Of major importance to the ultimate success of the euro, in terms of the oil pricing, will be if Europe’s two major oil producers ⤔ the United Kingdom and Norway join the single currency. Naturally, the future integration of these two countries into the Euro-zone and Europe will be important considering they are the region’s two major oil producers in the North Sea, which is home to the international crude oil benchmark, Brent. This might create a momentum to shift the oil pricing system to euros.” “In the short-term, OPEC MCs, with possibly a few exceptions, are expected to continue to accept payment in dollars. Nevertheless, I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future. The Organization, like many other financial houses at present, is also assessing how the euro will settle into its life as a new currency. The critical question for market players is the overall value and stability of the euro, and whether other countries within the Union will adopt the single currency.” Should the euro challenge the dollar in strength, which essentially could include it in the denomination of the oil bill, it could be that a system may emerge which benefits more countries in the long-term. Perhaps with increased European integration and a strong European economy, this may become a reality. Time may be on your side. I wish the euro every success.” Based on this important speech, momentum for OPEC to consider switching to the euro will grow once the E.U. expands in May 2004 to 450 million people with the inclusion of 10 additional member states. The aggregate GDP will increase from $7 trillion to $9.6 trillion. This enlarged E.U. will be an oil consuming purchasing population 33% larger than the U.S., and over half of OPEC crude oil will be sold to the EU as of mid-2004. This does not include other potential entrants such as the U.K., Norway, Denmark and Sweden. I should note that since this speech the euro has been trading at parity or above the dollar since late 2002, and analysts predict the dollar will continue its downward trending in 2003 relative to the euro. Further, if or when the U.K. adopts the euro currency, that development could provide critical motivation for OPEC to the make the transition to euros. It appears the final two pivotal items that would create the OPEC transition to euros will be based on if and when Norway’s Brent crude is re-dominated in euros, and when the U.K. adopts the euro. Regarding the later, Tony Blair is lobbying heavily for the U.K. to adopt the euro, and their adoption would seem imminent within this decade. Again, I offer the following information from my astute acquaintance who analyzes these matters very carefully regarding the euro: “The pivotal vote will probably be Sweden, where approval this next autumn of adopting the euro also would give momentum to the Danish government’s strong desire to follow suit. Polls in Denmark now indicate that the euro would pass with a comfortable margin and Norwegian polls show a growing majority in favor of EU membership. Indeed, with Norway having already integrated most EU economic directives through the EEA partnership and with their strongly appreciated currency, their accession to the euro would not only be effortless, but of great economic benefit. As go the Swedes, so probably will go the Danes & Norwegians. It’s the British who are the real obstacle to building momentum for the euro as international transaction & reserve currency. So long as the United Kingdom remains apart from the euro, reducing exchange rate costs between the euro and the British pound remains their obvious priority. British adoption (a near-given in the long run) would mount significant pressure toward repegging the Brent crude benchmark – which is traded on the International Petroleum Exchange in London – and the Norwegians would certainly have no objection whatsoever that I can think of, whether or not they join the European Union.” Finally, the maneuvers toward reducing the global dominance of the dollar are already well underway and have only reason to accelerate so far as I can see. An OPEC pricing shift would seem rather unlikely prior 2004 – barring political motivations (ie. motivations of OPEC members) or a disorderly collapse of the dollar (ie. prolonged high oil prices due to Iraq war causes Japanese bank collapse)- but appears quite viable to take place before the end of the decade.” In otherwords, around 2005, from an economic and monetary perspectivem, it will be logical for OPEC to switch to the euro for oil pricing. Of course that will devalue the dollar, and hurt the US economy unless it begins making some structual changes – or use its massive military power to force events upon the OPEC states… Facing these potentialities, I hypothesize that President Bush intends to topple Saddam in 2003 in a pre-emptive attempt to initiate massive Iraqi oil production in far excess of OPEC quotas, to reduce global oil prices, and thereby dismantle OPEC’sprice controls. The end-goal of the neo-conservatives is incredibly bold yet simple in purpose, to use the “war on terror” as the premise to finally dissolve OPEC’s decision-making process, thus ultimately preventing the cartel’s inevitable switch to pricing oil in euros. How would the Bush administration break-up the OPEC cartel’s price controls in a post-Saddam Iraq? First, the newly installed regime (apparently a U.S. General for the first several months) will convert Iraq back to the dollar standard. Next, with the U.S. military protecting the oil fields, the Bush junta will undertake the necessary steps to rapidly increase production of Iraq oil, quintupling Iraq’s current output – and well beyond OPEC’s 2 million barrel per day quota. Dr. Nayyer Ali offers a succinct analysis of how Iraq’s underutilized oil reserves will not be a “profit-maker” for the U.S. government, but it will serve as the crucial economic instrument used by the Bush junta to leverage and hopefully dissolve OPEC’s price controls, thus causing the neo conservative’s long sought goal of collapsing the OPEC cartel (15): “Despite this vast pool of oil, Iraq has never produced at a level proportionate to the reserve base. Since the Gulf War, Iraq’s production has been limited by sanctions and allowed sales under the oil for food program (by which Iraq has sold 60 billion dollars worth of oil over the last 5 years) and what else can be smuggled out. This amounts to less than 1 billion barrels per year. If Iraq were reintegrated into the world economy, it could allow massive investment in its oil sector and boost output to 2.5 billion barrels per year, or about 7 million barrels a day. Total world oil production is about 75 million barrels, and OPEC combined produces about 25 million barrels. What would be the consequences of this? There are two obvious things. First would be the collapse of OPEC, whose strategy of limiting production to maximize price will have finally reached its limit. An Iraq that can produce that much oil will want to do so, and will not allow OPEC to limit it to 2 million barrels per day. If Iraq busts its quota, then who in OPEC will give up 5 million barrels of production? No one could afford to, and OPEC would die. This would lead to the second major consequence, which is a collapse in the price of oil to the 10-dollar range per barrel. The world currently uses 25 billion barrels per year, so a 15-dollar drop will save oil-consuming nations 375 billion dollars in crude oil costs every year.” “The Iraq war is not a moneymaker. But it could be an OPEC breaker. That however is a long-term outcome that will require Iraq to be successfully reconstituted into a functioning state in which massive oil sector investment can take place.” The American people are largely oblivious to the economic risks regarding President Bush’s upcoming war. Not only is Japan’s economy at grave risk from a spike in oil prices, but additional risks relate to Iran and Venezuela as well, either of whom could move to the euros, thus providing further momentum for OPEC to act on their “internal discussions” and switch to the euro as the fiat currency for oil. The Bush administration believes that by toppling Saddam they will remove the juggernaut, thus allowing the US to control Iraqi’s huge oil reserves, and finally break-up and dissolve the 10 remaining countries in OPEC. This last issue is undoubtedly a significant gamble even in the best-case scenario of a quick and relatively painless war that topples Saddam and leaves Iraq’s oil fields intact. Undoubtedly, the OPEC cartel could feel threatened by the Bush junta’s stated goal of breaking-up OPEC’s price controls ($22-$28 per barrel). Perhaps the Bush administration’s ambitious goal of flooding the oil market with Iraqi crude may work, but I have doubts. Will OPEC simply tolerate quota-busting Iraqi oil production, thus delivering to them a lesson in self-inflicted hara-kiri (suicide)? Contrarily, OPEC could meet in Vienna and in an act of self-preservation re-denominate the oil currency to the euro. Such a decision by would mark the end of U.S. dollar hegemony, and thus the end of our precarious economic superpower status. Again, I offer the astute analysis of my expert friend regarding the colossal gamble this administration is about to undertake: “One of the dirty little secrets of today’s international order is that the rest of the globe could topple the United States from its hegemonic status whenever they so choose with a concerted abandonment of the dollar standard. This is America’s preeminent, inescapable Achilles Heel for now and the foreseeable future. That such a course hasn’t been pursued to date bears more relation to the fact that other Westernized, highly developed nations haven’t any interest to undergo the great disruptions which would follow – but it could assuredly take place in the event that the consensus view coalesces of the United States as any sort of ‘rogue’nation. In other words, if the dangers of American global hegemony are ever perceived as a greater liability than the dangers of toppling the international order (or, alternately, if an ‘every man for himself’ crisis as discussed above spirals out of control and forces their hand). The Bush administration and the neo conservative movement has set out on a multiple-front course to ensure that this cannot take place, in brief by a graduated assertion of military hegemony atop the existent economic hegemony. The paradox I’ve illustrated with this one narrow scenario is that the quixotic course itself may very well bring about the feared outcome that it means to preempt. We shall see!” Under this administration we have returned to massive deficit spending, and the lack of strong SEC enforcement has further eroded investor confidence. Regrettably, the flawed economic and tax policies and of the Bush administration may be exacerbating the weakness of the dollar, if not outright accelerating some countries to diversify their central bank reserve funds with euros as an alternative to the dollar. >From a foreign policy perspective, the terminations of numerous international treaties and disdain for international cooperation via the UN and NATO have angered even our closest allies. Lastly, and despite President Bush’s attempt to use the threat of applying military force to OPEC producers who may wish to switch to the euro for their oil payments, it appears their belligerent neo conservative policies may paradoxically bring about the dire outcome they hope to prevent – an OPEC currency switch to euros. The American people are not aware of such information due to the U.S. mass media, which has been reduced to a handful of consumption/entertainment and profit-oriented conglomerates that filter the flow of information in the U.S. Indeed, the Internet provides the only source of unfiltered “real news.” Synopsis: It would appear that any attempt by OPEC member states in the Middle East or Latin America to transition to the euro as their oil transaction currency standard shall be met with either overt U.S. military actions or covert U.S. intelligence agency interventions. Under the guise of the perpetual “war on terror” the Bush administration is manipulating the American people about the unspoken but very real macroeconomic reasons for this upcoming war with Iraq. This war in Iraq will have nothing to with any threat from Saddam’s old WMD program. This war will be over the global currency of oil. Sadly, the U.S. has become largely ignorant and complacent. Too many of us are willing to be ruled by fear and lies, rather than by persuasion and truth. Will we allow our government to initiate the dangerous “pre-emptive doctrine” by waging an unpopular war in Iraq, while we refuse to acknowledge that Saddam does not pose an imminent threat to the United States? We seem unable to address the structural weakness of our economy due to massive debt manipulation, unaffordable 2001 tax cuts, massive current account deficits, trade deficits, corporate accounting abuses, unsustainable credit expansion, near zero personal savings, record personal indebtedness, and our dependence and over consumption of cheap Middle Eastern oil. How much longer can we reliably import our oil from middle eastern states that dislike or despise us because of our biased foreign policy towards Israel? Lastly, we must bear in mind Jefferson’s insistence that a free press is our best, and perhaps only mechanism to protect democracy, and part of today’s dilemma lies within the U.S. media conglomerates that have failed to inform the People. Regardless of whatever Dr. Blix finds or doesn’t find in Iraq regarding WMD, it appears that President Bush is determined to pursue his “pre-emptive” imperialist war to secure a large portion of the earth’s remaining hydrocarbons, and then use Iraq’s underutilized oil to destroy the OPEC cartel. Will this gamble work? Undeniably our nation may suffer not only from economic retribution, but also from increased Al-Qaeda sponsored terrorism as well. Will we stand idle and watch CNN, as our government becomes an international pariah by discarding International Law as it wages a unilateral war in Iraq? Is it morally defensible to deploy our brave but naÃve young soldiers around the globe to enforce U.S. dollar hegemony for global oil transactions – via the barrel of their guns? Will we allow imperialist conquest in the Middle East to feed our excessive energy consumption, while ignoring the duplicitous overthrowing of a democratically elected government in Latin America? Shall we accept the grave price of an unjust war over the currency of oil? We must not stand silent and watchour country become a ‘rogue’ superpower, relying on brute force, thereby forcing the industrialized nations or OPEC to abandon the dollar standard – thus with the mere stroke of a pen – slay the U.S. Empire? Informed citizens believe this administration is pushing us towards that dire outcome. Remaining silent is not only misguided, but false patriotism. This need not be our fate. When will we demand that our government begin the long and difficult journey towards energy conservation, the development of renewable energy sources, and sustained balanced budgets to allow real deficit reduction? When will we repeal of the unaffordable 2001 tax cuts to create a balanced budget, enforce corporate accounting laws, and substantially reinvest in our manufacturing and export sectors to move our economy from a trade account deficit position back into a trade account surplus position? Undoubtedly, we must make these and many more painful structural changes to our economy if we are to restore our “safe harbor” investment status. Ultimately we will have to make sacrifices by reducing our excessive energy consumption that we have become accustomed to as a society. It is imperative that our government also begins economic and monetary reforms immediately. We must adopt our economy to accommodate the inevitable competition to the dollar from the euro as an alternative international reserve currency and oil transaction currency. The Bush administration’s seemingly entrenched political ideology appears quite incompatible with these necessary economic reforms. Ultimately We the People must demand a new and more responsible administration. We need leaders who are willing to return balanced, conservative fiscal policies, and to our traditions of engaging in multilateral foreign policies while seeking broad international cooperation. It has been said that all wars are fought over resources or ideology/religion. It appears that this administration may soon add “currency wars” as a third paradigm. I fear that the world community will not tolerate a U.S. Empire that uses its military power to conquer sovereign nations who decide to sell their oil products in euros instead of dollars. Likewise, if President Bush pursues an essentially unilateral war against Iraq, I suspect the historians will not be kind to his administration. Their agenda is clear to the world community, but when will U.S. patriots become cognizant of their modus operandi? “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” “The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” – Joseph Goebbels, German Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945 END OF ESSAY

+

Background Information on Hydrocarbons To understand hydrocarbons and how we got to this desperate place in Iraq, I have listed four articles in the Reference Section from Michael Ruppert’s controversial website: ‘From the Wilderness.’ Although some of Ruppert’s articles are overwrought from time to time, their research detailing the issues of hydrocarbons, and the interplay between energy and the Bush junta’s perpetual “war on terror” is quite informative. Other than the core driver of the dollar versus euro currency threat, the other issue related to the upcoming war with Iraq appears related to the Caspian Sea region. Since the mid-late 1990s the Caspian Sea region of Central Asiawas thought to hold approx. 200 billion barrels of untapped oil (the later would be comparable to Saudi Arabia’s reserve base)(16). Based on an early feasibility study by Enron, the easiest and cheapest way to bring this oil to market would be a pipeline from Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan to the Pakistan border at Malta. In 1998 then CEO of Halliburton, Dick Cheney, expressed much interest in building that pipeline. In fact, these oil reserves were a *central* component of Vice President Cheney’s energy plan released in May 2001. According to his report, the U.S. will import 90% of its oil by 2020, and thus tapping into the reserves in the Caspian Sea region was viewed as a strategic goal that would help meet our growing energy demand, and also reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East (17). According to the French book, The Forbidden Truth (18), the Bush administration ignored the U.N. sanctions that had been imposed upon the Taliban and entered into negotiations with the supposedly ‘rogue regime’ from February 2, 2001 to August 6, 2001. According to this book, the Taliban were apparently not very cooperative based on the statements of Pakistan’s former ambassador, Mr. Naik. He reports that the U.S. threatened a “military option” in the summer of 2001 if the Taliban did not acquiesce to our demands. Fortuitous for the Bush administration and Cheney’s energy plan, Bin Laden delivered to us 9/11. The pre-positioned U.S. military; along with the CIA providing cash to the Northern Alliance leaders, led the invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban were routed. The pro-western Karzai government was ushered in. The pipeline project was now back on track in early 2002, well, sort… After three exploratory wells were built and analyzed, it was reported that the Caspian region holds only approximately 10 to 20 billion barrels of oil (although it does have a lot of natural gas) (16). The oil is also of poor quality, with high sulfur content. Subsequently, several major companies have now dropped their plans for the pipeline citing the massive project was no longer profitable. Unfortunately, this recent realization about the Caspian Sea region has serious implications for the U.S., India, China, Asia and Europe, as the amount of available hydrocarbons for industrialized and developing nations has been decreased downward by 20%. (Globalestimates reduced from 1.2 trillion to approx. 1 trillion) (18, 19). The Bush administration quickly turned its attention to a known quantity, Iraq, with it proven reserves totaling 11% of the world’s oil reserves. Our greatest nemesis, Bin Laden, was quickly replaced with our new public enemy #1, Saddam Hussein… For those who would like to review the impact of depleting hydrocarbon reserves from the geo-political perspective, and the potential ramifications to how this may ultimately create an erosion of our civil liberties and democratic processes, retired U.S. Special Forces officer Stan Goff offers a sobering analysis in his essay: ‘The Infinite War and Its Roots’ (20). Likewise, for those who wish to review the unspeakable evidence surrounding the September 11th tragedy, the controversial essay “The Enemy Within” by the famous American writer Gore Vidal offers a thorough introduction. Although published in Italy and a major UK newspaper, The Observer, you will not read Gore Vidal’s controversial essay in the U.S. media. Note: Gore Vidal’s latest book, ‘Dreaming War’ features this as the opening essay (21). Finally, ‘The War on Freedom” by British political scientist Nafeez Ahmed asks disconcerting questions about the 9/11 tragedy (22). FOOTNOTES (1)London, Heidi Kingstone, ‘Middle East: Trouble in the House of Saud’ (January 13, 2003) http://www.jrep.com/Mideast/Article-0.html (2)Recknagel, Charles, ‘Iraq: Baghdad Moves to Euro’ (November 1, 2000) http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2000/11/01112000160846.asp (3)Gutman, Roy & Barry, John, Beyond Baghdad: Expanding Target List: Washington looks at overhauling the Islamic and Arab world (August 11, 2002) http://www.unansweredquestions.net/timeline/2002/newsweek081102.html (4)’Economics Drive Iran Euro Oil Plan, Politics Also Key’ (August 2002) http://www.iranexpert.com/2002/economicsdriveiraneurooil23august.htm (5)’Forex Fund Shifting to Euro,’ Iran Financial News, (August 25, 2002) http://www.payvand.com/news/02/aug/1080.html (6)Costello, Tom, ‘Japan’s Economy at Risk of Collapse’ (December 11, 2002) http://www.msnbc.com/news/845708.asp?0cl=cR (7) Gluck, Caroline, ‘North Korea embraces the euro’ (December 1, 2002) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/2531833.stm (8) ‘What the World Thinks in 2002 : How Global Publics View: Their Lives, Their Countries, The World, America’ (2002) http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID5 (9) ‘Euro continues to extend its global influence’ (January 7, 2002) http://www.europartnership.com/news/02jan07.htm (10) Henderson, Hazel, ‘Beyond Bush’s Unilateralism: Another Bi-Polar World or A New Era of Win-Win?’ (June 2002) http://www.hazelhenderson.com/Bush’s%20unilateralism.htm (11) Birms, Larry & Volberding, Alex, ‘U.S. is the Primary Loser in Failed Venezuelan Coup,’ Newsday (April 21, 2002) http://www.coha.org/COHA%20_in%20_the_news/ Articles%202002/newsday_04_21_02_us__venezuela.htm (12) ‘USA intelligence agencies revealed in plot to oust Venezuela’s President,’ (Dec 12, 2002) http://www.vheadline.com/0212/14248.asp (link now dead) (13) Liu, Henry C K, ‘US Dollar hegemony has got to go,’ (Asia Times, April 11, 2002) http://www.atimes.com/global-econ/DD11Dj01.html (14) ‘The Choice of Currency for the Denomination of the Oil Bill,’ Speech given by Javad Yarjani, Head of OPEC’s Marketing Analysis Department (April, 2002) http://www.opec.org/NewsInfo/Speeches/sp2002/spAraqueSpainApr14.htm (15) Dr. Ali, Nayyer, ‘Iraq and Oil,’ (December 13, 2002) http://www.pakistanlink.com/nayyer/12132002.html (16) Pfeiffer, Dale, ‘Much Ado about Nothing — Whither the Caspian Riches? ‘ (December 5, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/120502_caspian.html (17) Ruppert, Michael, ‘The Unseen Conflict,’ (October 18, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101802_the_unseen.html (18) Jean Charles-Briscard & Guillaume Dasquie, ‘The Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy, Saudi Arabia and the Failed Search for bin Laden’, Nation Books, 2002. (19) Ruppert, Michael, ‘Colin Campbell on Oil.'(October 23, 2002) http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/102302_campbell.html (20) Golf, Stan, ‘The Infinite War and its Roots,’ http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/082702_infinite_war.html (21) Vidal, Gore, ‘Dreaming War: Blood for Oil & the Cheney-Bush Junta,’ Nation Books, 2002. His essay, ‘The Enemy Within’ was first printed in the UK’s Observer (Oct 27, 2002) http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/EnemyWithin.html (22) Ahmed, Nafeez, ‘The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001’, Tree of Life Publications, 2002.

When I hear someone saying something so fervently, I’m often moved to believe that the person they’re really trying to convince is themselves. Here’s a great thread.

-Ian.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dan Lowe > Date: Wed Apr 2, 2003 9:05:48 AM US/Pacific
> To: “‘Ian Andrew Bell'”
> Subject: RE: @F: Fwd: FW: MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>
> Seems strange how you like to shift the argument when it does not suit
> your
> needs? This will be my last email because it sounds as if you are
> incapable
> of reasoning with. You are right Ian, Iraq has not attacked us
> directly,
> but they are in violation of a truce treaty they signed 12 years ago.
> Besides, how many more ties to Al Queda do you need to see? Do you
> honestly
> believe that Sadaam is above having a relationship with Al Queda? One
> final
> question, have you had a father, grandfather, or even great grandfather
> serve in the military to protect the freedoms you enjoy today? What
> you and
> all of those countries and their people fail to recognize is that there
> would be no Belgium, no Switzerland, no france, no Venezuela, etc. if
> we did
> not exist. These countries are only sovereign because of us and the
> threat
> that we pose to world conquering dictators. So brush up on your
> chinese,
> russian and arabic speaking abilities if your ideology becomes the
> opinion
> of the majority in this counrty.
>
> Oh wait, next you are going to tell me it is about oil. Lets end this
> one
> right here and now. Oil companies have already stated that they would
> much
> rather negotiate deals with a sanctioned oil for food Iraq then a
> democrtatic Iraq which command a higher price at the bargaining table.
> Also, why did we leave Kuwait if it is all about oil. Did we stay in
> France
> and Germany to pilage them of their resources or did we prop up their
> governments economic system to help them get back on their feet after
> WW II?
> We are not conquerors we are the defenders of liberty – our liberty
> and that
> of others.
>
> —–Original Message—–
> From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:hello [at] ianbell [dot] com]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2003 10:32 AM
> To: Dan Lowe
> Subject: Re: @F: Fwd: FW: MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>
>
> Sorry… I wasn’t aware that IRAQ had attacked the US.
>
> -Ian.
>
>
> On Wednesday, April 2, 2003, at 06:47 AM, Dan Lowe wrote:
>
>> You want to talk about a REAL abuse of authority. Let’s see, how
>> about a
>> comparison between homeowners associations in the Houston area telling
>> homeowners that they can not put a ‘Support the Troops’ sign in their
>> window
>> or put a flagpole in their front yard compared to radio station
>> managers who
>> conducted online polls from their audience on whether or not to
>> continue
>> playing the Dixie Chicks in which the respondents in cities all across
>> the
>> country voted overwelmingly to take them off the air. I call it
>> democracy
>> in action. If you libs aren’t careful, we will begin to pass
>> legislation
>> approving public displays of patriotism. Why can’t libs join
>> conservatives
>> in the fight with OUR common enemy – rogue states intent on
>> threatening the
>> civilized world with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction?
>> Dan
>>
>> —–Original Message—–
>> From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:hello [at] ianbell [dot] com]
>> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 5:52 PM
>> To: Dan Lowe
>> Subject: Re: @F: Fwd: FW: MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>>
>>
>> You clearly refuse to listen to that which you do not currently
>> believe.
>>
>> Tell me, how did you come upon my email message in the first place?
>>
>> -Ian.
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 03:01 PM, Dan Lowe wrote:
>>
>>> oh excuse me for thinking everyone in your entertainment industry was
>>> driven
>>> by ratings and what the people want. So now the argument has changed
>>> from
>>> ‘a violation of the dixie chicks freedom of speech’ to ‘contractual
>>> obligations’. ‘Abusing of authority’ as it relates to bad cops, over
>>> zealous security guards, the Presidents of France, Russia or Germany
>>> is one
>>> thing, but that is a mighty long reach to say that radio station
>>> managers
>>> who listen to their audience and act appropriately are ‘abusing
>>> authority’
>>> is normally. In fact, I see no abuse of authority. Instead I see
>>> Patriotic
>>> Americans! Freedom of speech is a 2 way street, one who makes
>>> millions from
>>> being in the limelight must also be aware of the repurcussions of
>>> their
>>> actions.
>>>
>>>
>>> —–Original Message—–
>>> From: Ian Andrew Bell [mailto:hello [at] ianbell [dot] com]
>>> Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 4:46 PM
>>> To: Dan Lowe
>>> Subject: Re: @F: Fwd: FW: MORE DIXIE CHICKS
>>>
>>>
>>> Go for it… be mad, be pissed off. Call the radio stations and
>>> state
>>> your platform … fill your boots! But when programmers at radio
>>> stations take them out of the rotation they are abusing their
>>> authority
>>> and eschewing their responsibility as broadcasters on spectrum that
>>> all
>>> of us, Canadian or American, pay to administer.
>>>
>>> -ian.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Tuesday, April 1, 2003, at 08:59 AM, Dan Lowe wrote:
>>>
>>>> ian,
>>>> you can let all of your dixie chick buddies know that the only
>>>> organized
>>>> group I belong to is called the United States of America. You guys
>>>> can’t
>>>> stand the fact that this many people are disgusted by the comments
>>>> of
>>>> the
>>>> singing idiots, and think there has to some kind of conspiracy going
>>>> on. In
>>>> all actuality, 8 out of 10 support Pres. Bush and the troops and
>>>> think
>>>> her
>>>> comments were out of line with the majority of Americans whom she
>>>> thought
>>>> incorrectly that her statements more closely resembled. And another
>>>> thing,
>>>> I believe most concert ticket sales took place before the comments.
>>>> Somebody better put a muzzle on natalie or they will end up an
>>>> overseas act
>>>> exclusively like Madonna. Why the double standard? If Natalie is
>>>> free to
>>>> open her mouth and say what she thinks then why aren’t we free to
>>>> voice our
>>>> displeasure with what she said. Nobody is trying to lock them up
>>>> and
>>>> throw
>>>> away the key. They are still being shuffled around in limos, living
>>>> in posh
>>>> hotels and being treated like little queens by their pamperers, so
>>>> why
>>>> can’t
>>>> the public be outraged and active in their outrage because it
>>>> disgusts
>>>> them
>>>> so.Why can’t we?
>>>>
>>>> Dan Lowe

Practice to Deceive Chaos in the Middle East is not the Bush hawks’ nightmare scenario–it’s their plan.

By Joshua Micah Marshall

Imagine it’s six months from now. The Iraq war is over. After an initial burst of joy and gratitude at being liberated from Saddam’s rule, the people of Iraq are watching, and waiting, and beginning to chafe under American occupation. Across the border, in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, our conquering presence has brought street protests and escalating violence. The United Nations and NATO are in disarray, so America is pretty much on its own. Hemmed in by budget deficits at home and limited financial assistance from allies, the Bush administration is talking again about tapping Iraq’s oil reserves to offset some of the costs of the American presence–talk that is further inflaming the region. Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence has discovered fresh evidence that, prior to the war, Saddam moved quantities of biological and chemical weapons to Syria. When Syria denies having such weapons, the administration starts massing troops on the Syrian border. But as they begin to move, there is an explosion: Hezbollah terrorists from southern Lebanon blow themselves up in a Baghdad restaurant, killing dozens of Western aid workers and journalists. Knowing that Hezbollah has cells in America, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge puts the nation back on Orange Alert. FBI agents start sweeping through mosques, with a new round of arrests of Saudis, Pakistanis, Palestinians, and Yemenis.

To most Americans, this would sound like a frightening state of affairs, the kind that would lead them to wonder how and why we had got ourselves into this mess in the first place. But to the Bush administration hawks who are guiding American foreign policy, this isn’t the nightmare scenario. It’s everything going as anticipated.

In their view, invasion of Iraq was not merely, or even primarily, about getting rid of Saddam Hussein. Nor was it really about weapons of mass destruction, though their elimination was an important benefit. Rather, the administration sees the invasion as only the first move in a wider effort to reorder the power structure of the entire Middle East. Prior to the war, the president himself never quite said this openly. But hawkish neoconservatives within his administration gave strong hints. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told Israeli officials that after defeating Iraq, the United States would “deal with” Iran, Syria, and North Korea. Meanwhile, neoconservative journalists have been channeling the administration’s thinking. Late last month, The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Bell reported that the administration has in mind a “world war between the United States and a political wing of Islamic fundamentalism … a war of such reach and magnitude [that] the invasion of Iraq, or the capture of top al Qaeda commanders, should be seen as tactical events in a series of moves and countermoves stretching well into the future.”

In short, the administration is trying to roll the table–to use U.S. military force, or the threat of it, to reform or topple virtually every regime in the region, from foes like Syria to friends like Egypt, on the theory that it is the undemocratic nature of these regimes that ultimately breeds terrorism. So events that may seem negative–Hezbollah for the first time targeting American civilians; U.S. soldiers preparing for war with Syria–while unfortunate in themselves, are actually part of the hawks’ broader agenda. Each crisis will draw U.S. forces further into the region and each countermove in turn will create problems that can only be fixed by still further American involvement, until democratic governments–or, failing that, U.S. troops–rule the entire Middle East.

There is a startling amount of deception in all this–of hawks deceiving the American people, and perhaps in some cases even themselves. While it’s conceivable that bold American action could democratize the Middle East, so broad and radical an initiative could also bring chaos and bloodshed on a massive scale. That all too real possibility leads most establishment foreign policy hands, including many in the State Department, to view the Bush plan with alarm. Indeed, the hawks’ record so far does not inspire confidence. Prior to the invasion, for instance, they predicted that if the United States simply announced its intention to act against Saddam regardless of how the United Nations voted, most of our allies, eager to be on our good side, would support us. Almost none did. Yet despite such grave miscalculations, the hawks push on with their sweeping new agenda.

Like any group of permanent Washington revolutionaries fueled by visions of a righteous cause, the neocons long ago decided that criticism from the establishment isn’t a reason for self-doubt but the surest sign that they’re on the right track. But their confidence also comes from the curious fact that much of what could go awry with their plan will also serve to advance it. A full-scale confrontation between the United States and political Islam, they believe, is inevitable, so why not have it now, on our terms, rather than later, on theirs? Actually, there are plenty of good reasons not to purposely provoke a series of crises in the Middle East. But that’s what the hawks are setting in motion, partly on the theory that the worse things get, the more their approach becomes the only plausible solution.

Moral Cloudiness

Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception. Back in the early 1970s, this group of then-young and still mostly Democratic political intellectuals grew alarmed by the post-Vietnam Democrats’ seeming indifference to the Soviet threat. They were equally appalled, however, by the amoral worldview espoused by establishment Republicans like Henry Kissinger, who sought co-existence with the Soviet Union. As is often the case with ex-socialists, the neocons were too familiar with communist tactics to ignore or romanticize communism’s evils. The fact that many neocons were Jewish, and outraged by Moscow’s increasingly visible persecution of Jews, also caused them to reject both the McGovernite and Kissingerian tendencies to ignore such abuses.

In Ronald Reagan, the neocons found a politician they could embrace. Like them, Reagan spoke openly about the evils of communism and, at least on the peripheries of the Cold War, preferred rollback to coexistence. Neocons filled the Reagan administration, and men like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, and others provided the intellectual ballast and moral fervor for the sharp turn toward confrontation that the United States adopted in 1981.

But achieving moral clarity often requires hiding certain realities. From the beginning, the neocons took a much more alarmist view of Soviet capacities and intentions than most experts. As late as 1980, the ur-neocon Norman Podhoretz warned of the imminent “Finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power,” even raising the possibility that America’s only options might be “surrender or war.” We now know, of course, that U.S. intelligence estimates, which many neocons thought underestimated the magnitude and durability of Soviet power, in fact wildly overestimated them.

This willingness to deceive–both themselves and others–expanded as neocons grew more comfortable with power. Many spent the Reagan years orchestrating bloody wars against Soviet proxies in the Third World, portraying thugs like the Nicaraguan Contras and plain murderers like Jonas Savimbi of Angola as “freedom fighters.” The nadir of this deceit was the Iran-Contra scandal, for which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams, pled guilty to perjury. Abrams was later pardoned by Bush’s father, and today, he runs Middle East policy in the Bush White House.

But in the end, the Soviet Union did fall. And the hawks’ policy of confrontation did contribute to its collapse. So too, of course, did the economic and military rot most of the hawks didn’t believe in, and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev, whom neocons such as Richard Perle counseled Reagan not to trust. But the neocons did not dwell on what they got wrong. Rather, the experience of having played a hand in the downfall of so great an evil led them to the opposite belief: that it’s okay to be spectacularly wrong, even brazenly deceptive about the details, so long as you have moral vision and a willingness to use force.

What happened in the 1990s further reinforced that mindset. Hawks like Perle and William Kristol pulled their hair out when Kissingerians like Brent Scowcroft and Colin Powell left Saddam’s regime in place after the first Gulf War. They watched with mounting fury as terrorist attacks by Muslim fundamentalists claimed more and more American and Israeli lives. They considered the Oslo accords an obvious mistake (how can you negotiate with a man like Yasir Arafat?), and as the decade progressed they became increasingly convinced that there was a nexus linking burgeoning terrorism and mounting anti-Semitism with repressive but nominally “pro-American” regimes like Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In 1996, several of the hawks–including Perle–even tried to sell Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the idea that Israel should attack Saddam on its own–advice Netanyahu wisely declined. When the Oslo process crumbled and Saudi Arabian terrorists killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, the hawks felt, not without some justification, that they had seen this danger coming all along, while others had ignored it. The timing was propitious, because in September 2001 many already held jobs with a new conservative president willing to hear their pitch.

Prime Minister bin Laden

The pitch was this: The Middle East today is like the Soviet Union 30 years ago. Politically warped fundamentalism is the contemporary equivalent of communism or fascism. Terrorists with potential access to weapons of mass destruction are like an arsenal pointed at the United States. The primary cause of all this danger is the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, poverty, and economic stagnation. Repressive regimes channel dissent into the mosques, where the hopeless and disenfranchised are taught a brand of Islam that combines anti-modernism, anti-Americanism, and a worship of violence that borders on nihilism. Unable to overthrow their own authoritarian rulers, the citizenry turns its fury against the foreign power that funds and supports these corrupt regimes to maintain stability and access to oil: the United States. As Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, “The great indulgence granted to the ways and phobias of Arabs has reaped a terrible harvest”–terrorism. Trying to “manage” this dysfunctional Islamic world, as Clinton attempted and Colin Powell counsels us to do, is as foolish, unproductive, and dangerous as détente was with the Soviets, the hawks believe. Nor is it necessary, given the unparalleled power of the American military. Using that power to confront Soviet communism led to the demise of that totalitarianism and the establishment of democratic (or at least non-threatening) regimes from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait. Why not use that same power to upend the entire corrupt Middle East edifice and bring liberty, democracy, and the rule of law to the Arab world?

The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.

The audacious nature of the neocons’ plan makes it easy to criticize but strangely difficult to dismiss outright. Like a character in a bad made-for-TV thriller from the 1970s, you can hear yourself saying, “That plan’s just crazy enough to work.”

But like a TV plot, the hawks’ vision rests on a willing suspension of disbelief, in particular, on the premise that every close call will break in our favor: The guard will fall asleep next to the cell so our heroes can pluck the keys from his belt. The hail of enemy bullets will plink-plink-plink over our heroes’ heads. And the getaway car in the driveway will have the keys waiting in the ignition. Sure, the hawks’ vision could come to pass. But there are at least half a dozen equally plausible alternative scenarios that would be disastrous for us.

To begin with, this whole endeavor is supposed to be about reducing the long-term threat of terrorism, particularly terrorism that employs weapons of mass destruction. But, to date, every time a Western or non-Muslim country has put troops into Arab lands to stamp out violence and terror, it has awakened entire new terrorist organizations and a generation of recruits. Placing U.S. troops in Riyadh after the Gulf War (to protect Saudi Arabia and its oilfields from Saddam) gave Osama bin Laden a cause around which he built al Qaeda. Israel took the West Bank in a war of self-defense, but once there its occupation helped give rise to Hamas. Israel’s incursion into southern Lebanon (justified at the time, but transformed into a permanent occupation) led to the rise of Hezbollah. Why do we imagine that our invasion and occupation of Iraq, or whatever countries come next, will turn out any differently?

The Bush administration also insists that our right to act preemptively and unilaterally, with or without the international community’s formal approval, rests on the need to protect American lives. But with the exception of al Qaeda, most terrorist organizations in the world, and certainly in the Middle East, do not target Americans. Hamas certainly doesn’t. Hezbollah, the most fearsome of terrorist organizations beside al Qaeda, has killed American troops in the Middle East, but not for some years, and it has never targeted American civilians on American soil. Yet like Hamas, Hezbollah has an extensive fundraising cell operation in the States (as do many terrorist organizations, including the Irish Republican Army). If we target them in the Middle East, can’t we reasonably assume they will respond by activating these cells and taking the war worldwide?

Next, consider the hawks’ plans for those Middle East states that are authoritarian yet “friendly” to the United States–specifically Egypt and Saudi Arabia. No question these are problem countries. Their governments buy our weapons and accept our foreign aid yet allow vicious anti-Semitism to spew from the state run airwaves and tolerate clerics who preach jihad against the West. But is it really in our interests to work for their overthrow? Many hawks clearly think so. I asked Richard Perle last year about the dangers that might flow from the fall of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “Mubarak is no great shakes,” he quipped. “Surely we can do better than Mubarak.” When I asked Perle’s friend and fellow Reagan-era neocon Ken Adelman to calculate the costs of having the toppling of Saddam lead to the overthrow of the House of Saud, he shot back: “All the better if you ask me.”

This cavalier call for regime change, however, runs into a rather obvious problem. When the communist regimes of Eastern and Central Europe fell after 1989, the people of those nations felt grateful to the United States because we helped liberate them from their Russian colonial masters. They went on to create pro-Western democracies. The same is unlikely to happen, however, if we help “liberate” Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The tyrannies in these countries are home grown, and the U.S. government has supported them, rightly or wrongly, for decades, even as we’ve ignored (in the eyes of Arabs) the plight of the Palestinians. Consequently, the citizens of these countries generally hate the United States, and show strong sympathy for Islamic radicals. If free elections were held in Saudi Arabia today, Osama bin Laden would probably win more votes than Crown Prince Abdullah. Topple the pro-Western autocracies in these countries, in other words, and you won’t get pro-Western democracies but anti-Western tyrannies.

To this dilemma, the hawks offer two responses. One is that eventually the citizens of Egypt and Saudi Arabia will grow disenchanted with their anti-Western Islamic governments, just as the people of Iran have, and become our friends. To which the correct response is, well, sure, that’s a nice theory, but do we really want to make the situation for ourselves hugely worse now on the strength of a theoretical future benefit?

The hawks’ other response is that if the effort to push these countries toward democracy goes south, we can always use our military might to secure our interests. “We need to be more assertive,” argues Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, “and stop letting all these two-bit dictators and rogue regimes push us around and stop being a patsy for our so-called allies, especially in Saudi Arabia.” Hopefully, in Boot’s view, laying down the law will be enough. But he envisions a worst-case scenario that would involve the United States “occupying the Saudi’s oil fields and administering them as a trust for the people of the region.”

What Boot is calling for, in other words, is the creation of a de facto American empire in the Middle East. In fact, there’s a subset of neocons who believe that given our unparalleled power, empire is our destiny and we might as well embrace it. The problem with this line of thinking is, of course, that it ignores the lengthy and troubling history of imperial ambitions, particularly in the Middle East. The French and the English didn’t leave voluntarily; they were driven out. And they left behind a legacy of ignorance, exploitation, and corruption that’s largely responsible for the region’s current dysfunctional politics.

Another potential snafu for the hawks is Iran, arguably the most dangerous state in the Middle East. The good news is that the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs who have been running the government, exporting terrorism, and trying to enrich their uranium, are increasingly unpopular. Most experts believe that the mullahs’ days are numbered, and that true democracy will come to Iran. That day will arrive sooner, the hawks argue, with a democratic Iraq on Iran’s border. But the opposite could happen. If the mullahs are smart, they’ll cooperate just enough with the Americans not to provoke an attack, but put themselves forth to their own people as defenders of Iranian independence and Iran’s brother Shi’a in southern Iraq who are living under the American jackboot. Such a strategy might keep the fundamentalists in power for years longer than they otherwise might have been.

Then there is the mother of all problems, Iraq. The hawks’ whole plan rests on the assumption that we can turn it into a self-governing democracy–that the very presence of that example will transform politics in the Middle East. But what if we can’t really create a democratic, self-governing Iraq, at least not very quickly? What if the experience we had after World War II in Germany and Japan, two ethnically homogeneous nations, doesn’t quite work in an ethnically divided Iraq where one group, the Sunni Arabs, has spent decades repressing and slaughtering the others? As one former Army officer with long experience with the Iraq file explains it, the “physical analogy to Saddam Hussein’s regime is a steel beam in compression.” Give it one good hit, and you’ll get a violent explosion. One hundred thousand U.S. troops may be able to keep a lid on all the pent-up hatred. But we may soon find that it’s unwise to hand off power to the fractious Iraqis. To invoke the ugly but apt metaphor which Jefferson used to describe the American dilemma of slavery, we will have the wolf by the ears. You want to let go. But you dare not.

And what if we do muster the courage to allow elections, but the Iraqis choose a government we can’t live with–as the Japanese did in their first post-war election, when the United States purged the man slated to become prime minister? But if we do that in Iraq, how will it look on Al Jazeera? Ultimately, the longer we stay as occupiers, the more Iraq becomes not an example for other Arabs to emulate, but one that helps Islamic fundamentalists make their case that America is just an old-fashioned imperium bent on conquering Arab lands. And that will make worse all the problems set forth above.

None of these problems are inevitable, of course. Luck, fortitude, deft management, and help from allies could bring about very different results. But we can probably only rely on the first three because we are starting this enterprise over the expressed objections of almost every other country in the world. And that’s yet another reason why overthrowing the Middle East won’t be the same as overthrowing communism. We did the latter, after all, within a tight formal alliance, NATO. Reagan’s most effective military move against Moscow, for instance, placing Pershing II missiles in Western Europe, could never have happened, given widespread public protests, except that NATO itself voted to let the weapons in. In the Middle East, however, we’re largely alone. If things go badly, what allies we might have left are liable to say to us: You broke it, you fix it.

Whacking the Hornet’s Nest

If the Bush administration has thought through these various negative scenarios–and we must presume, or at least pray, that it has–it certainly has not shared them with the American people. More to the point, the president has not even leveled with the public that such a clean-sweep approach to the Middle East is, in fact, their plan. This breaks new ground in the history of pre-war presidential deception. Franklin Roosevelt said he was trying to keep the United States out of World War II even as he–in some key ways–courted a confrontation with the Axis powers that he saw as both inevitable and necessary. History has judged him well for this. Far more brazenly, Lyndon Johnson’s administration greatly exaggerated the Gulf of Tonkin incident to gin up support for full-throttle engagement in Vietnam. The war proved to be Johnson’s undoing. When President Clinton used American troops to quell the fighting in Bosnia he said publicly that our troops would be there no longer than a year, even though it was widely understood that they would be there far longer. But in the case of these deceptions, the public was at least told what the goals of the wars were and whom and where we would be fighting.

Today, however, the great majority of the American people have no concept of what kind of conflict the president is leading them into. The White House has presented this as a war to depose Saddam Hussein in order to keep him from acquiring weapons of mass destruction–a goal that the majority of Americans support. But the White House really has in mind an enterprise of a scale, cost, and scope that would be almost impossible to sell to the American public. The White House knows that. So it hasn’t even tried. Instead, it’s focused on getting us into Iraq with the hope of setting off a sequence of events that will draw us inexorably towards the agenda they have in mind.

The brazenness of this approach would be hard to believe if it weren’t entirely in line with how the administration has pursued so many of its other policy goals. Its preferred method has been to use deceit to create faits accomplis, facts on the ground that then make the administration’s broader agenda almost impossible not to pursue. During and after the 2000 campaign, the president called for major education and prescription drug programs plus a huge tax cut, saying America could easily afford them all because of large budget surpluses. Critics said it wasn’t true, and the growing budget deficits have proven them right. But the administration now uses the existence of big budget deficits as a way to put the squeeze on social programs–part of its plan all along. Strip away the presidential seal and the fancy titles, and it’s just a straight-up con.

The same strategy seemed to guide the administration’s passive-aggressive attitude towards our allies. It spent the months after September 11 signaling its distaste for international agreements and entangling alliances. The president then demanded last September that the same countries he had snubbed support his agenda in Iraq. And last month, when most of those countries refused, hawks spun that refusal as evidence that they were right all along. Recently, a key neoconservative commentator with close ties to the administration told me that the question since the end of the Cold War has been which global force would create the conditions for global peace and security: the United States, NATO, or the United Nations. With NATO now wrecked, he told me, the choice is between the Unites States and the United Nations. Whether NATO is actually wrecked remains to be seen. But the strategy is clear: push the alliance to the breaking point, and when it snaps, cite it as proof that the alliance was good for nothing anyway. It’s the definition of chutzpah, like the kid who kills his parents and begs the judge for sympathy because he’s an orphan.

Another president may be able to rebuild NATO or get the budget back in balance. But once America begins the process of remaking the Middle East in the way the hawks have in mind, it will be extremely difficult for any president to pull back. Vietnam analogies have long been overused, and used inappropriately, but this may be one case where the comparison is apt.

Ending Saddam Hussein’s regime and replacing it with something stable and democratic was always going to be a difficult task, even with the most able leadership and the broadest coalition. But doing it as the Bush administration now intends is something like going outside and giving a few good whacks to a hornets’ nest because you want to get them out in the open and have it out with them once and for all. Ridding the world of Islamic terrorism by rooting out its ultimate sources–Muslim fundamentalism and the Arab world’s endemic despotism, corruption, and poverty–might work. But the costs will be immense. Whether the danger is sufficient and the costs worth incurring would make for an interesting public debate. The problem is that once it’s just us and the hornets, we really won’t have any choice.

Joshua Micah Marshall, a Washington Monthly contributing writer, is author of the Talking Points Memo.

> From: “DM”
> Date: Tue Mar 25, 2003 11:29:43 PM US/Pacific
> To:
> Subject: te from dm
>
> I’ve heard a report that the Bush team have contracted their first
> American
> company to rebuild the oil well in Iraq. The report is that the huge
> contract went to Halliburton.
>
> You remember – Dick Cheney’s Halliburton company?
>
> Could this be true? Isn’t this just a bit obvious – if true?
>
> Bush should have called his was Operation Iraqi Liberation. That’s
> right
> O.I.L. All this about the time America was beginning to trust this
> appointed
> prez.
>
> If true then all the Liberal Democrats Americans must be laughing their
> butts off. Of course that will permit greater life longevity than the
> lying
> their pants off Republicans and right wing extremists. Tony Blair has
> a red
> face. But Chrétien is smiling. Now what must those ridiculous Alliance
> boys
> be thinking?
>

Without the ability to land tactical teams behind the lines with Blackhawks, and without the ability to see and prosecute targets from the air, the Battle of Baghdad will be a sequel to the Battle of Mogadishu on a massive scale. The US will have to settle for laying siege to Baghdad and starving out the combatants (and the citizens, which will not make for good press coverage) or for going into the city and battling for every corner, incurring heavy losses and inflicting many civilian casualties (which will not make for good press coverage).

In order to defeat the AAA shield, you will need to bomb in unpleasant ways. Presumably the AAA guns are perched atop apartment blocks, hospitals, schools, orphanages, and lots of other non-strategic targets. Again, bombing these in the density required to defeat hard-to-hit AAA guns will not make for good press coverage.

As in Kosovo, if you’re an infantryman you might be better off sitting on top of your Bradley rather than inside of it.

-Ian.

—– http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,5944-622904,00.html March 25, 2003

Enemy will take risks and seek a close, dirty war Military Briefing by General Wesley Clark

IF YOU want a foretaste of the battles around Baghdad, consider what has happened in the last day or two.

US and British forces stormed around Basra and al-Nasiriyah. Coalition expectations were high. These areas were occupied by second-rate Iraqi divisions, we knew. Many expected resistance would collapse quickly. And in these Shia areas, where Sunnis like Saddam Hussein were not popular, the Americans expected to be welcomed as liberators. In fact, initial resistance was minimal.

But since then, even in the areas through which coalition forces had penetrated, Iraqi resistance has reappeared and stiffened. Saddam is not fighting conventionally. He has allowed the initial heavy forces to penetrate Iraqi positions, and then his forces are shooting at the soft logistics and rear area vehicles.

He has shored up weak units with detachments of Republican Guards and Fedayin. Iraqi forces are shooting from buildings. Some of the soldiers are hiding among the civilian population. Others are actually covering their uniforms with civilian clothing and women and children have reportedly been pressed into service as human shields.

By the time the US and British forces arrive in the areas around Baghdad, the Iraqis will have taken our measure. They will have learnt that we are trying to fight with firepower rather than with our ground troops. They will recognise their vulnerabilities to US air power, the reluctance of the US forces to engage and risk hitting women and children, the porous US and British rear areas, and the lack of dismounted US infantry strength.

As we close the ring around Baghdad, the Iraqi tactics are also predictable. The Iraqis are defending in depth for miles around Baghdad. Three Republican Guard Divisions are there, plus the Special Republican Guard. The terrain is largely flat, but criss-crossed by rivers, canals, roads, embankments, and various settlements, villages and towns. More than five million people live there. The Iraqis’ advantages are knowledge of the terrain, willingness to take losses, and their ability to blend with the population. They have all the weapons they need to fight on an almost even basis if they can close in on US forces.

They will use smoke and oil fires to obscure visibility and counter US air power. Their tanks, no match for the M1A1 or Challenger in the open, are still formidable against troops and light vehicles, especially up close. Their rocket-propelled grenades will penetrate light armoured vehicles. Their heavy machineguns are effective against helicopters and low-flying aircraft. Their small arms are accurate, and lay down a heavy volume of fire. The Iraqis will want to fight close and dirty, with Iraqi tanks darting in and out of garages and buildings; they will conduct small-scale offensive actions with dismounted soldiers supported by mortars.

The fighting will be full of the tricks we have already seen and more: ambushes, fake surrenders, soldiers dressed as women, attacks on rear areas and command posts. The Iraqis will be prepared to conduct high-risk missions of a kind we would not consider.

The coalition will use its ground forces to fix Iraqi positions, but will do its best not to close on the ground. Instead we will rely on artillery, attack helicopters, A10s and Harriers to destroy the enemy once their locations are fixed. As we always say, what we can see, we can hit, and what we can hit, we can destroy.

We will advance carefully, with daily movements of a few miles or even a few hundred yards. We will drive corridors between Iraqi positions, to isolate and encircle them, and we will insert helicopter-borne and special operations forces into the Iraqi rear areas. As we clear the areas, we will establish careful defensive positions, with interlocking visibility and fires to guard against small-scale Iraqi penetrations.

And we will eventually, inevitably, have to engage in close combat. We do “own the night” with superior night-vision technology. We are very good, courageous and disciplined. We will “grind it out” if necessary.

Also, we will have to control the civilian population in the areas we have occupied. Many will leave their homes, and we will provide food and shelter, but we will do all this with the knowledge that among the population will be Iraqi agents and soldiers.

As the fighting enters Baghdad, we will try to organise resistance inside the city among the Shia population. And we will continue the campaign to destroy Iraqi command and control. Saddam, in turn, will have to consider whether to use his chemical and biological weapons.

Given our superiority, the ultimate outcome is not in doubt. But for how long, how much it will cost, and how much damage we inflict, depends on the Iraqis’ will to fight. We must do all we can to take it away as we close in to the critical battle of Baghdad.

# General Wesley Clark was Supreme Allied Commander Europe 1997-2000, and led Nato forces during the Kosovo campaign.