Triumph of Lunacy
The military-industrial complex,
the Christian right, and the "liberal media"
by Edward S. Herman
www.zcommunications.org/, June
2, 2008
The public in the United States doesn't
like what is going on and fully 81 percent feel that the country
is moving in the wrong direction. But there doesn't seem to be
much the public can do about it. It was widely felt that the 2006
election was a vote against the Iraq war, but the victorious Democrats
failed to make any significant moves toward stopping the war or
even halting, let alone reversing, Bush's attacks on constitutional
government, and they have left the lame duck and discredited Decider
in charge with a steady flow of additional funds to escalate the
Iraq war.
Even more spectacular, Bush-Cheney seem
headed toward a war against Iran, and the Democrats, while making
a few chiding remarks, have actually given Bush-Cheney a quasi-legal
basis for attacking Iran, with Pelosi removing from an Iraq War-funding
bill a clause requiring Bush to obtain congressional sanction
before starting a war on Iran, and the Democrats in the Senate
voting unanimously for the Kyle-Lieberman bill declaring the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps, a segment of the Iranian army, a "terrorist
organization." There are many other indications of a possible
U.S. attack on Iran in the next few months by the lame duck administration-the
removal of Admiral William Fallon from head of Central Command
and replacement by Bush lap-dog David Petraeus; the recent Petraeus-Crocker
stress on Iran's alleged involvement in the Iraq war; the further
bolstering of U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf; open warnings
that military attack is one option under consideration (Ann Scott
Tyson, "U.S. Weighing Readiness for Military Action Against
Iran," Washington Post, April 26, 2008); congressional funding
of more "bunker-busting" bombs and extra bombers to
carry them-all without serious Democratic Party response or media
and "international community" concern and counter-action.
UN chief Ban Ki-Moon is very upset about China's repressive actions
in Tibet, but says nothing about the possibility of yet another
"supreme international crime" against Iran, the form
of action that was the main focus of the UN Charter under which
Ki-Moon supposedly operates.
Other difficulties abound. The wars in
Afghanistan and Pakistan continue and grow with the United States
and NATO determined to impose their version of "stability"
on those distant lands. The Israelis continue to expand settlements
and mercilessly grind down the Gaza strip population, with unremitting
U.S. and "international community" support. The Western
powers (mainly the United States, Britain, France, and Israel)
all work toward improving their nuclear arms and only very selectively
support the Non-Proliferatiion Treaty, accommodating the U.S.
moves toward war with Iran; and weapons budgets and arms sales
continue to grow. The economic growth of China and India and the
move to ethanol-based fuel have helped push up the price of oil
and food, threatening a major food shortage crisis across the
globe. Income inequality continues to advance within and between
countries under the regime of neoliberalism (i.e., advanced class
warfare). No important steps have been taken to meet the challenge
of global warming and, in fact, the coal industry and coal-fueled
power plants are expanding in China and elsewhere. Finally, the
debt- and speculation-based growth in the United States has produced
a financial and economic crisis there and beyond that is not yet
resolved, and the failure to add any new regulations to constrain
the financial casino market bodes ill for future stability.
It may be argued, however, that there
is great hope in the discrediting of the Bush-Cheney administration
and its prospective replacement by a Democratic administration
in 2009. This hope may be mistaken or at least seriously exaggerated.
It fails to recognize that the problems and threats are based
on structural facts that the election results won't alter and
that are actually discernible in the election process itself.
One fact is the power of U.S. militarism, centered in the military-industrial
complex (MIC), including the Pentagon, the vast army of contractors
(47,000 prime contractors, over 100,000 subcontractors, in one
recent estimate), its support base in the rest of the business
and financial community, and the MIC employees-but extending to
the closely related pro-Israel lobby, the Christian right, and
the right wing and much of the "liberal" media. Furthermore,
the steadily increasing concentration of business, media, income,
and wealth has helped normalize a growing inequality and made
any "populist" moves difficult to carry out given their
unacceptability to the dominant power elite. This centralization
of wealth and power has helped further plutocratize the election
process, with any competitive candidate up to his or her ears
in financial obligation to power elements that want a big military
budget and wars and who will oppose any serious reversal of the
Bush upward redistribution program.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have
not proposed cuts in the military budget or a scaling down of
foreign bases or any major redistribution program and it is evident
that neither is prepared to fight hard against the insurance and
pharmaceutical lobbies on health care reform. Neither is putting
any weight on building up the labor movement as an oppositional
base. Recall that Bill Clinton was going to "put people first,"
but quickly bowed down to the bond market and then to the "free
trade" lobby. He and Gore did literally nothing progressive
on the environmental front. Under their rule the prison population
soared and so did the stock market bubble (and inequality). When
Bush carried out his early attacks on the labor movement-ending
restrictions on awarding government contracts to anti-union firms,
prohibiting airline industry strikes, limiting use of union dues
to support political candidates, etc.-the Democrats did not respond.
The structural obstacles to pro-people
change in a plutocracy with a concentrated and anti-populist media
are formidable. If either Obama or Clinton get elected they would
have to spend a lot of energy and political capital assuring the
establishment (bond market, major donors, MIC, corporate media)
that they are not too progressive. Major moves to "put people
first" would require an awful lot of grass-roots organization
and pressure that would be hard to put together after the success
in just getting a Democrat elected. It will also have to overcome
the drag of the "blue dog" and other conservative elements
in the Democratic Party that have long made it difficult for that
Party to act with unity and make any progressive advance.
Can the Democrats even win the next presidential
election? This is surely far from certain, with the Democrats
in a costly primary contest, and John McCain already benefiting
from the now institutionalized media bias in favor of Republican
and right-wing candidates (see Eric Boehlert, Lapdogs: How the
Press Rolled Over for Bush, 2006; David Brock and Paul Waldman,
Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, 2008; FAIR, "Media
Hold McCain, Obama, to Different Standards," Media Advisory,
March 14, 2008).
The ability of the Swift Boat Veterans
to damage the political prospects of Vietnam War veteran John
Kerry in 2004, with crucial media help, while any criticism of
George W. Bush's record as a Vietnam War evader and National Guard
deserter was effectively buried by that same media, is frightening
testimony to the ability of the right-wing media joint venture
to keep government in the hands of the war-and-inequality party.
Hillary Clinton and Obama should provide even better demonization
targets than John Kerry for the joint venturers.
We have left the world of MAD-Mutually
Assured Destruction-and entered the world of beyond MAD, of Bush-Cheney
and the five high-level NATO military officers who recently put
up a manifesto stressing the need to redeem a first strike nuclear
option to prevent nuclear war. Nuclear war has become more practicable,
in part, because with the Soviet Union gone it has become possible
to think of using nuclear weapons without the possibility of massive
nuclear retaliation. If the United States or Israel uses nuclear
arms against Iran, nuclear-weaponless Iran cannot retaliate in
kind. There may be further nasty and dangerous repercussions,
but perhaps less frightening than a return nuclear strike.
But nuclear warfare has also become more
likely because of U.S. militarization, projection of power, actual
warfare spread across the globe-under the cover of an alleged
"war on terror"-and deliberate fear-mongering. The "clash
of civilizations" is essentially a war of the United States
and its allies against the Third World, with 9/11 providing the
desired "Pearl Harbor" that justified the new crusade.
This has helped reduce moral barriers to barbarism: to mass killing,
pain infliction, and devastation on the growing ranks of "enemies."
Continuous warfare, daily reports of killings and torture, and
fear- mongering, have hardened as well as frightened people, making
them more easily adjusted to formerly beyond-the-pale modes of
killing. The incredible stream of propaganda about an Iranian
nuclear weapons threat to countries that actually possess large
nuclear weapons arsenals has fed the hysteria and caused even
"liberal" hack politicians to proclaim that we must
keep "all options" open and that if nuclear-weaponless
Iran should some day drop a nuclear bomb on Israel we would "obliterate"
Iran-a stupid and gratuitous feeding of the spirit of violence
encouraging the resort to nuclear weapons by those that have them.
The termination of the Soviet Union ushered
in a new era of U.S. triumphalism and a belief on the part of
U.S. elites that they could project power and reshape the world
in accord with U.S. interests without major resistance. One feature
of this perspective was the view that Russia could be ignored
as a power with legitimate geopolitical interests-that it would
or should follow U.S. dictates or that it could be easily coerced
into compliance. This was supported in the Yeltsin years by the
fact that he was compliant, virtually a U.S. agent from within.
He was celebrated here as a "reformer" because, with
U.S. advice and pressure, he destroyed the good as well as bad
in the prior system, shock-therapied Russia into economic and
social collapse, sponsored a highly concentrated oligarchic economic
system based on theft, eliminated Parliamentary government, and
established the basis for a new authoritarianism. (For a good
account, Stephen Cohen, Failed Crusade, 2000, Part 1).
Yeltsin's chosen successor, Vladimir Putin,
halted the "reforms," increased the government's role
in the economy, limited somewhat the power of the oligarchs, and
gradually abandoned the Yeltsin policy of compliance and subservience
to U.S. policy demands. This resulted in large part because of
a series of hostile acts toward Russia which suggested that rather
than being regarded as a U.S. "partner," Russia was
on the list of potential "regime change" targets. These
included aggressive U.S. encirclement of Russia with new military
bases on Russia's borders, encouragement of "regime change"
in Georgia and the Ukraine, and the expansion of NATO into the
Baltic states and Eastern Europe, in violation of a pledge to
Gorbachev to refrain from any such threatening actions at the
time the Soviet Union agreed to allow East Germany to join the
West.
The United States also bullied Russia
in its bombing war against Serbia in 1999 and more recently in
removing Kosovo from Serbia, against Russia's strong opposition.
The United States has also been improving its nuclear arsenal,
now spending over $6 billion a year on renovating and improving
its nuclear weaponry (more than the yearly average spent during
the Cold War), and has officially incorporated nuclear weapons
and nuclear warfare as part of standard war planning operations,
providing "credible military options" in dealing with
potential targets, with Russia named as one such target in the
Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review.
In this context that the United States
has proposed putting anti-missile interceptors in Poland and Czechoslovakia,
allegedly as protection against possible nuclear missile strikes
by nuclear-weaponless Iran. Vladimir Putin has strongly objected
to this plan as posing a national security threat to Russia. Given
the context of hostile U.S. actions, the idiocy of the notion
that Iran poses a nuclear missile threat to Poland or Czechoslavakia
(or the U.S.) and the fact that such missiles near the Russian
border could facilitate a U.S. first-strike on Russia-a country
named as a potential target in 2002-Putin's objections are entirely
credible and rational.
But in the age of a triumphant lunacy,
Putin is seen as engaged in "shrill posturing" and "diverting
attention from his own own thuggery at home" (NYT), although
the Times does acknowledge that the plans to which Putin objects
are a bit misguided and foolish, in good part because the missiles
are not yet proven workable. But it is amusing to see how thoroughly
the New York Times contributes to this lunacy. For one thing,
Putin is now called a "dictator, "who "has so emasculated
the democratic institutions that evolved in the 1990s that it
is apparent he has little confidence in his people" ("Exit,
Russian Democracy," Nov. 27, 2007). It is true that Russia's
democratic institutions are in bad shape, but they devolved into
this condition under the "reformer" Yeltsin, to whom
the Times gave steady accolades, even as he destroyed the conditions
for a real democracy and pushed his majority into poverty. But
he did this with policies pleasing to the United States, a counter-revolution
from above done without consulting or showing the slightest "confidence
in his people" or concern for their welfare. Serve the U.S.
and you are a "reformer," whereas if you fail to cooperate
with this country there is a new concern over "democracy."
The Times does not acknowledge that the
placement of missiles in Poland and Czechoslavakia constitutes
any kind of threat to Russia. The editors state "we don't
buy Moscow's crocodile tears about how a handful of interceptors
pose a threat to Russia's huge arsenal" ("The Poles
Get Cold Feet," Dec. 30, 2007). The editors of course don't
ask why the United States got so upset at the Russian missiles
in Cuba in the early 1960s that could hardly threaten the U.S.'s
huge arsenal nor do they ask how the U.S. would respond today
to a Russian placement of a "handful of interceptors"
in Venezuela. It also never occurs to them that an initial placement
of missiles might be enlarged in the future.
The editors also never directly challenge
the claim that the missiles in Poland and Czechoslavakia would
be aimed at an Iran threat. This is a triple lunacy as Iran doesn't
have any nuclear weapons and won't for a long time, if ever; and
if it did there would be no reason for Iran to aim them at Poland
or Czechoslavakia. Aiming them at Israel or the United States,
except as a desperation defensive action, would be suicidal. But
the Times cannot admit this because both the U.S. war-makers and
Israel have declared the nuclear-weaponless Iran an existential
threat that has no right of self-defense, and a good propaganda
organ like the New York Times must go along with this demonization
and claimed threat. This calls for not challenging, even supporting,
convenient lunacies and, in a great tradition, thereby contributing
to the march toward the next U.S.-Israeli aggression.
Edward S. Herman page
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