By Mathew Maavak
“For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.” – Sun Tzu, in The Art of War
The new rainbow era in Iraq that was given much pre-war hype by the US is fast becoming a dark, Stygian trap for the invaders. If the US were indeed after Iraqi oil, business interests, vassalage, democracy (in the correct order of merit) and other trappings that are fast disappearing in the US itself, then it would do well to heed the words of China’s ancient martial-sage.
Instead, we have daily shootings, and the post-war coalition casualties will soon surpass the Pre-May 1 toll, when major combat was declared over. Long back, Robert Fisk had predicted of the weasel words that would accompany this scenario, like "Ba’athist remnants" and "Saddam loyalists."
There are some Iraqis who "hate freedom" so much that they are willing to risk life and limb to fire rocket propelled grenades and snipers at the most powerful army in the world.
Even suicide bombers have something to hope for, and I don’t mean 70 (or 72) virgins in paradise. Its called liberation, and that’s precisely what might be unfolding in Iraq right now.
The US behaviour seems to follow some kind of fuzzy logic. They have conquered an enslaved nation, deposed its tyrant, won a degree of goodwill despite the snafus, and people are still hoping for a turnaround to their fortunes.
And what exactly is transpiring? The sole superpower can’t get its act right over basic supplies and repair the national infrastructure it blew to smithereens. The war took three weeks, but reconstruction hasn’t really taken off more than two months after the war was over. This is the nation that could build a "liberty ship" within four days during WWII. But it had the irreplaceable Rosie the Riveter then.
There is absolutely no indication that we will be seeing some real opaline skies soon. I remember an ex-WW11 British veteran’s reminiscence of how even in 1947, two years after the war, there were countless Germans living in makeshift hovels amidst the rubble that once amounted to five billion cubic yards (1946). Surely, a lot more than what was needed to build the tower of Babel or maybe the Chalabi-Bremmer partnership will never match the feat of Konrad Adenauer.
Paul Bremmer intends to win over the Iraqis by declaring "We are going to fight them (the more recalcitrant ones) and impose our will on them and we will capture or... kill them until we have imposed law and order on this country. We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." (Guardian, July 1). Chief Sitting Bull must have heard something like this long back.
The briefcase-lugging vultures are wasting no time by picking through the dessert, with contracts to rebuild a nation while thousands of cluster bomblets and unexploded munitions are generously strewn about. But that’s a problem for curious or famished children. Is this the way, to win "the hearts and minds" of an enemy nation? Either Operation Iraqi Freedom, including its psy-ops, was entirely daft from the onset or there were plenty of oversight.
There is a third possibility that, it was meant to be this way a la Nixon’s Madman Theory, replete with its threats of excessive force and nukes. Remember that vintage wisdom?
"I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached a point where I might do anything to stop the war." Plus "you had to strike out savagely from time to time."
I Guess Sun Tzu is no longer vogue in the postmodernist art of war.
British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon was sabre-rattling the nuke option during the build up to the Iraq War. One can infer that the only nuclear weapons in the Gulf region are in coalition hands. The proven uranium stocks now in Iraq come not from Niger, but from depleted uranium shells used by the coalition forces. One wonders if the Iraqi Survey Team has Geiger counters to sniff out Saddam’s yellow cakes from those "Made in USA."
Anti-war activists, including myself, had long thought that the casus belli for the war was oil; not WMD, the one-time ally’s butcheries or Al Qaeda.
The only terrorist caught was the Achille Lauro hijacker Mohammed Abbas who had long gone into oblivion and was enjoying retirement from his heydays of firing Kalashnikovs. The Iraqis need them now, mainly for their protection as the liberators are still having their heads stuck in the dessert sand, while somehow their guns keep hitting a civilian bulls-eye. Add some "kick ass" routines during house-to-house searches and you have an exemplary showpiece of occupation.
This is not the way to plunder a nation, as the old sage can testify! Logic dictates that Washington should accelerate the rebuilding of basic infrastructure, ensure food supply and ground-level security and unleash a process of democratisation. After that, a vanquished lot, seeing the relative improvements in their lives, and the absence of torture chambers and "plastic shredders," would turn a blind eye to any sweetheart deals struck with the conquerors. At least for a profitable time. Sounds too simple or has sabotage become endemic in Iraq, from a rump, disorganised lot?
Perhaps Bush and co prefers more complex stuff.
The Guardian (June 23) reports "that the United States government, meanwhile, with its usual sense of priorities, is about to allocate $25m or more on media projects to destabilise the government in neighbouring Iran." The same report mentioned a certain £4,000 allocation to train Iraqis on basic journalism, a sum not attributed to US authorities but the Arab Press Freedom Watch. The Iraq Media Network seems not to be working, hence the shifting of priorities to Iran. The opportunity seems to be lost.
Instead, a hungry, humiliated and fearful lot are wreaking vengeance on their liberators. If they are "Saddam loyalists," why not publish their names and previous rank in the Ba’athist hierarchy when they are apprehended and incarcerated in God knows where? And this is about oil? Retribution for Sept 11? It doesn’t make sense unless we see Uncle Sam’s meddling in world affairs. Here is an encapsulation.
It arguably started in WW1, tilted power in the direction of Entente Powers and later imposed suffocating retribution on a bankrupt Germany during the Treaty of Versailles. Kaiser Wilhelm II was allowed to escape with his vast wealth. Concurrently, the US became the largest creditor nation in the world, the British Empire was eclipsed and London forever lost its omphallic status to the upstart New York. Their then Japanese allies were incensed, by among other things, the denial to a proper victor’s spoils and the refusal to accommodate racial equality within treaty. The Germans, in desperation, kept chanting heerlos, wehrlos, ehrlos – "disarmed, defenceless, dishonoured." Things needed to be set right.
Enter the successors of a diabolical General Yamagata Aritomo to set the course for Peal Harbour, and a certain Adolph Hitler who should have met a pauper’s death in the streets of Vienna, instead of a meteoric rise through a National Socialist Party he was initially sent to spy upon in the post war chaos that followed. The Japanese empire and Nazi Germany needed to be tamed again within three decades. This time, both nations were thoroughly beholden, the former because too many Type-A war criminals were running the show thereafter (easy for blackmail) and the latter was never allowed again – partly through a subliminal, holocaust flak machine - to wield political/military power on a global scale.
Germany would not even have been an economic superpower if the Morgenthau Plan was implemented instead of its Marshall counterpart. How, Bush and co might wish that the former was applied to all of the Old Europe then? Not really an option in the late 40s with the mighty Red Army camped next door and cries of aux barricades (a large number of them with communist intonations) still resonating in the living room. So, munificence took precedence, with those like Alfried Krupp and Rheinhard Gehlen eventually restored to their former glory.
At the end of the day, both nations, and the rest in Western Europe, were politically/militarily weakened, their spines bent and their fangs extracted. Besides, who else in a devastated world needed American products most?
Next came the Korean War, Vietnam, swashbuckling adventures in Central America, South America and everywhere else except the Antarctica. Did Uncle Sam leave behind a single legacy of democracy behind? Frankly, I can’t think of any, except Europe, but as I said there was no choice besides the racial disposition. Apartheid South Africa held out for a long time though. South Korea emerged as a democracy through a militant, indigenous, people-power movement. The same with Taiwan, the Phillipines, East Timor and you name it.
When dictators lose the game, the White House does a summersault to declare regimes it once trained and armed as illegal or tyrannous. Sounds familiar? This doctrine was attested by President George W. Bush during his recent Fourth of July address.
"With Americans’ active involvement in the world, tyrants learn to fear, and terrorists are on the run." He didn’t mean Pervez Musharraf, the House of Saud, Ariel Sharon or even the IRA. Not now, at least.
All in all, the world is inextricably paying tribute to the sole Superpower. The oxymoron, Pax Americana, is now a pervasive reality. See a pattern emerging here?
Now for oil, the energy fix of a hooked world that hardly anyone questions. Here are some interesting snippets. The Soviets, who still couldn’t build a car right in the form of a Zhiguli, flew a modified, hydrogen powered Tupolev-154 in 1988 (Note: This happened at a time when computers were still a novelty, with Intel chips and Moore’s Law yet to be clichés).
The Aussies, not known for their space-age technology, have already made some promising progress with their "scramjet" experiments, despite a very late entry into the field. There are claims that methane technology is almost perfected, making sewerage plants an endless source of cheap fuel. Even India is toying with hydrogen-powered jet technology.
But lets go back, way back, to Nazi Germany when it resorted to the viable Fischer-Tropsch process that fuelled the German war machine for years. The technology was patented in the 1920s and it has since improved! For the laymen, this industrial process extracts oil from coal. And just which country has the largest coal reserves in the world?
It’s the US of A!
"U.S. coal reserves are equivalent to four times the oil of Saudi Arabia, 1.3 times the oil of OPEC and equal to all the world's proved oil reserves." (Partners for Affordable Energy website).
We had more than half a century to develop cheap alternative fuel and despite Honda and Daimler Chrysler putting hydrogen fuel cell cars on Californian streets, there are still mammoth drilling projects being planned. For a complete list of alternative fuel available, trawl through any trusty website daubed green all over them. Somehow, these people don’t seem like loonies anymore. Around 20 years ago, I remember watching a news clip where a modified car was powered with oil extracted from some tree bark. My memory is hazy, but I distinctly remember predicting the demise of the oil industry with all the naivety of a pre-teen yet to grasp more enthralling concepts like the birds and the bees.
Is alternative fuel technology as elusive as the cure for common cold? We are already confident about an imminent vaccine for AIDS. The same guys who developed the crude V2 rocket helped send man to the moon a quarter of a century later. The Russians sent Yuri Gagarin into space earlier, with the technical advances made by Germans snatched from their end, prompting NASA to wonder whether they got the "wrong Germans." Something doesn’t make sense here.
Modern fuel evolution has been long superseded by the rapid advances in much newer fields like geo-satellite technology, first dreamt up in the sci-fi imaginations of Arthur C. Clarke (Wireless World, 1945). The first computer was significantly called Colossus (1943); a ponderous beast compared to the tiny, wireless communication tools we have now. How radically have car engines changed?
Didn’t the 1973 Middle East oil crisis teach America an important lesson? That was contained permanently, presumably for a veiled strategic reason.
Nevertheless, this energy logic must be inchoate as there are gargantuan pipeline projects on the drawing board, like the one to supply natural gas from Russia to UK, through the Baltics.
In his State of the Union address on Jan 28, Bush announced research funding worth US$1.2 billion to explore hydrogen fuel technology. Democratic presidential hopeful Joseph Lieberman was not impressed. He disparaged it as a "pipe dream" and called for better fuel efficiency (CNN, Feb 24). There are higher social goals with immutable priorities; one of them involves waging war.
The budget allocates about US$1bn a day to the US armed forces, and where this money comes from is anyone’s guess. Taxpayers who actually pay taxes? As for efficiency, the oil from Iraq is not flowing out according to clockwork precision, either. Are oil barons that powerless? Or is the Madman Theory not all that mad, but is instead a carefully calculated strategy woven over the years.
It’s great fun to ridicule George Bush, his dyslexicons and his IQ but just watch his mien, especially those eyes when they confront the media. You won’t quite find that mocking sparkle in a silver-tongued Tony Blair.
The White House Demosthenes is no great orator but he is truly vested with enormous power, more through selection than election, and his speeches do effectuate a fear psychosis, ensuring continued leadership.
Read this: "We will not permit any terrorist group or outlaw regime to threaten us with weapons of mass murder."
A cheering crowd loved it!
"We will act, whenever it is necessary, to protect the lives and the liberty of the American people." (July 4).
There was unfinished business, like always, as the country was "still at war." Wasn’t that over? You’ll find guttural echoes of this in the 30s and early 40s. There is something intrinsically similar here between a blustering Bavarian wannabe and a genteel Texan cowboy. They resort to reductionism, appeal to emotional blind spots and conveniently invoke an external threat to "us", "we" or the "nation." Those words, in reality, apply to a more privileged citizenry.
Take the instance of the executed Karla Fay Tucker. Bush refused to pardon her, signed her death warrant – all within his legal prerogative – and then cruelly mimicked a condemned woman’s plea for mercy with all the heartfelt empathy of a pre-pubescent kinderfuhrer.
Was the American public sufficiently desensitised to vote in this party of cavalier warmongers? Or are they just slipping into apathy, in an etiolating hothouse where 90pc of the population earns just US$27,000 per year while the mile high club earns a whopping US$174 million (2000 figures, Guardian, June 30).
The latter need not pay taxes too as "the best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place." (Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech).
This is Robin Hood’s ignoble twin speaking, centuries later, where he follows a time-honoured tradition of robbing the poor to reward the rich. Any statistics would reveal an inexorable widening in the wealth gap. I know one American teacher, known for her anti-war outbursts, who made a prayer request once, as her daughter needed a barely affordable dental treatment.
That’s one reason why Americans believe in miracles, something scoffed at by those who perennially hover in some heavenly intellectual stratosphere, perhaps close to the Van Allen belts or beyond. But if their feet ever touch the ground, they will find plenty of Americans attesting to first hand, second hand, or more removed encounters with arcane, faith-based experiences. For these august men and women of science, nothing beats the stellar wizardries of Uri Geller and David Copperfield. With intellectual leadership like this, we still need to get our teeth expensively patched once in a while, don’t we?
That’s when financial elites offer their magic, of a different kind, laden with escape clauses in confounding officialese. Miracles flow out too, in a torrent of entrancing imageries and exhilarating semantics, creating indifferent, languid or dewy eyes that tend to forgive a babbling buffoon when they see one.
At the end of the day, it’s these common, miracle-believing American folks who generate a lot of goodwill among well-travelled foreigners though, many have yet to distinguish Americans from their government. I have come across all sorts of people, including "anti-US" patriots who attest that the Yanks are among the most genial foreigners they had met. A paradox? Like those who burn American flags routinely and apply for green cards? Not really. Ask some Cherokee for his view.
The question for Americans is not "why does the world hate us?” It should be "why do we allow a few tyrants to induce the world to hate us?"
Otherwise, nothing changes. Despite the web of deceit over WMD and other lies, Bush is poised for re-election. And surprise, his Man Friday Blair is proving resilient over "dodgy dossiers" and "sexed up" intelligence through the legerdemains of spinmeister extraordinaire Alastair Campbell.
It might take some time before heerlos, wehrlos, ehrlos is chanted in English with an American accent. Well, maybe not heerlos. The gun lobby, and the Pentagon, will assuredly keep the nation well stocked. Five billion people though can say that whole phrase in a Babel of tongues. The pentagon may well take heed of another Sun Tzu classic – "Do not press a desperate foe too hard."
And what’s behind all these Madman Theories and power plays? There is an idea, as venerable as it is simple. But that has to wait another day. Until then, pose these questions to our savants and lets see what they come up with.
The game’s afoot, Watsons! A $25 million bounty is out for Baghdad-based Saddam, the "mastermind" behind Sept 11, the one with the incurable WMD fetish, the one who wanted to destroy "our freedom" within 45 minutes and the scoundrel who backed Al Qaeda to the hilt (it wasn’t the Saudis really). The tragedy is, more American blood, drawn from the bottom 90 per cent of the population, is going to be spilt for "oil."
By the way, where is Osama bin Laden? The second anniversary of Sept 11 is fast approaching.
Copyright 2003 Mathew Maavak
July 10, 2003
(Originally published in the Online Journal)
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