Gold9472
12-05-2006, 02:17 PM
The Surreal Politics of Premeditated War
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1203-21.htm
by R.W. Behan
12/3/2006
George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of “war president,” was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war—a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation’s history.
Two elements of the repudiation seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length of its gestation period—those six years—and how tepid it was. Given the documented record of the Bush Administration—lying us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid contracts, spying secretly on the nation’s citizens, selling public policy to Jack Abramoff’s clients, stating even their intent to ignore laws with dozens of “signing statements”—one would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner, and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress (and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en masse two years ago.
The victorious Democrats’ response was even more surprising, and also unreal. “Impeachment is off the table” quickly became the mantra: let us instead proceed with raising the minimum wage. Apparently the Bush Administration’s record is flawless, showing nothing remotely approaching a high crime or a misdemeanor. Impeachment would be a “waste of time.”
There is a good reason for these strange results: we practice a politics of surrealism, and have done so since George Bush was first put in office.
Ron Suskind of the New York Times learned how the Bush Administration works, from a “senior advisor to Bush” (Karl Rove is a suspect): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” They have done that, incessantly, and it is the source of the surrealism. Spins, evasions, omissions, jingoisms, distortions, “perception management” (i.e., propaganda), and deliberate lying all contribute to a political discourse adrift from what is honest, true, and reliable.
The Clear Skies Act allowed more pollution, the Healthy Forests Act caused more trees to be cut down, the Patriot Act scarred the Bill of Rights, No Child Left Behind was a step toward privatizing public education, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry and began the process of dismantling Medicare, the Military Commissions Act fostered torture and suspended habeas corpus.
But no such manufactured reality is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the “global war on terror.”
It took six years for a tardy and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because the trusting American people believed the “war on terror” was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.
The recent electoral turnaround was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today, the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose, went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism has been so successful.
We need to strip away the created reality of the “war on terror” to see the true nature of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.
The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn’t possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated—conceived, planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.
(Yes, there have been premeditated military incursions in the past—Panama, Grenada, and Kosovo come to mind—but none was of the magnitude and duration of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. Never before have we unleashed full scale combat, unprovoked, on sovereign foreign nations and then installed permanent military bases to occupy them.)
Though it has not been addressed in the mass media, the factual story of the President’s premeditated wars is clearly visible, and when the story is read at one sitting, the dreamlike quality of our politics is apparent.
The story to follow will not be a great revelation to anyone who has read, perhaps a bit more than casually, about our recent political, military, and diplomatic past, and has spent some time searching the Internet for corroboration and details. On the other hand, it is far from common knowledge, because in the manufactured reality crafted by the Bush Administration, it does not exist.
Two strands of history converged in the Bush years. One led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the other to the invasion of Iraq, and the strands came together on September 11, 2001.
The opening chapter of the story reveals a photograph dating to the Reagan years of Donald Rumsfeld cordially shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We supported Saddam in his war with Iran. But history convulses: on January 26, 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld and 17 others, members of the Project for a New American Century, wrote a letter to President Clinton, urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. If we fail to do so, they were candid in asserting, “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will be put at hazard.”
This could be considered the fountainhead of our surreal politics. The PNAC proposed premeditated war explicitly, in a bizarre retrogression to the centuries of unapologetic European imperialism. Since World War II and the birth of the United Nations, however, the world has been seeking to surpass imperialism, struggling to settle international difficulties peaceably—and here was an open, sad, and radical rebuff.
(In addition to Mr. Rumsfeld, 10 others of the signatories would serve in the Bush Administration: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, William Schneider, Jr., Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz.)
When George W. Bush took office, a concern for the “significant portion of the world’s oil supply” was never far from view, because the Administration’s personal linkages to the oil industry were intimate, historic, and numerous. The president and vice president were just the first examples: eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor were recruited directly from the oil industry, and so were 32 others in the secretariats of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
The Bush Administration came to power anxious, we know from published sources, to fulfill the PNAC’s vision of regime change in Iraq.
In his second week in office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. The supersecret “Energy Task Force,” as it came to known, was composed of officials from the relevant federal agencies and beyond question heavily attended by energy industry executives and lobbyists. (The full membership has yet to be revealed, but Enron’s Kenneth Lay was conspicuously present.)
One brute fact had to be apparent to the Task Force: in the Caspian Basin, and beneath the Iraqi deserts there are 125 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and the potential for 433 billion barrels more. Anyone controlling that much oil could break OPEC’s stranglehold overnight.
By early March, 2001, the Task Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”—dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn’t easy—the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court—but the maps and documents can now be seen and downloaded at : http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml.)
Not a single U.S. oil company, however, was among the “suitors,” and that was intolerable. Mr. Cheney’s task force concluded, “By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.”
Condoleezza Rice’s National Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo to “cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy.” The NSC was ordered to support “the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”
The Bush Administration seemed clearly to be drawing a bead on Iraqi oil—long before the “global war on terror” was envisioned and marketed. But how could the “capture of new and existing oil fields” be made to seem less aggressive, less baldly in violation of international law?
At the State Department, a policy-development initiative called “The Future of Iraq” was undertaken which would accomplish this. The date was April, 2002, almost a full year before the invasion. The “Oil and Energy Working Group” provided the cover. Iraq, it said in its final report:, “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war…the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources.”
“Capture” would take the form of “investment,” and the vehicle for doing so would be the “production sharing agreement.” In exchange for investing in development costs, oil companies would “share” in the subsequent production. What would happen, though, if the companies’ investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were disproportionately, obscenely large?
That’s the way it will work out. Production sharing agreements (PSA’s) are in place covering 75% of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, soon to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162% on their “investments.” The “foreign suitors” are not quite so foreign now: the players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSA’s, instead of alternative methods of financing infrastructure, however, will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the “investment” program.
PSA’s are favored by the oil companies because the term “production sharing agreement” is a euphemism for legalized theft. PSA’s were not adopted voluntarily by the Iraqis, however: their use was specified by the U.S. State Department and institutionalized by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two “seemingly unrelated areas of policy”—national security policy and international energy policy—have become indistinguishable.
Another line of dots begins with the Carter Administration encouraging and arming the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan, to fend off the Russian invasion there.
And so the next chapter in the story of George Bush’s wars is underway.
The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.
End Part I
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1203-21.htm
by R.W. Behan
12/3/2006
George W. Bush, who proudly claimed the mantle of “war president,” was keenly rebuked in the recent mid-term election. The event was notable, but it merely continued the surreal politics of premeditated war—a politics that has dominated the last six bizarre, hideous years of our nation’s history.
Two elements of the repudiation seem unreal, indeed. Not the fact of it, but the amazing length of its gestation period—those six years—and how tepid it was. Given the documented record of the Bush Administration—lying us into war, torturing prisoners, rewarding cronies with no-bid contracts, spying secretly on the nation’s citizens, selling public policy to Jack Abramoff’s clients, stating even their intent to ignore laws with dozens of “signing statements”—one would expect the political about-face to have occurred far sooner, and the protest to have been a firestorm. Bush loyalists in Congress (and George Bush) should have been turned out angrily and en masse two years ago.
The victorious Democrats’ response was even more surprising, and also unreal. “Impeachment is off the table” quickly became the mantra: let us instead proceed with raising the minimum wage. Apparently the Bush Administration’s record is flawless, showing nothing remotely approaching a high crime or a misdemeanor. Impeachment would be a “waste of time.”
There is a good reason for these strange results: we practice a politics of surrealism, and have done so since George Bush was first put in office.
Ron Suskind of the New York Times learned how the Bush Administration works, from a “senior advisor to Bush” (Karl Rove is a suspect): “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” They have done that, incessantly, and it is the source of the surrealism. Spins, evasions, omissions, jingoisms, distortions, “perception management” (i.e., propaganda), and deliberate lying all contribute to a political discourse adrift from what is honest, true, and reliable.
The Clear Skies Act allowed more pollution, the Healthy Forests Act caused more trees to be cut down, the Patriot Act scarred the Bill of Rights, No Child Left Behind was a step toward privatizing public education, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act was a bonanza for the pharmaceutical industry and began the process of dismantling Medicare, the Military Commissions Act fostered torture and suspended habeas corpus.
But no such manufactured reality is more misleading, fraudulent, and damaging than the “global war on terror.”
It took six years for a tardy and mild electoral protest of the Iraq war to surface, because the trusting American people believed the “war on terror” was the just and moral response of an innocent nation to a brutal terrorist attack. They handily reelected the President who was prosecuting it, proudly supported the troops, and accepted as necessary evils the Bush Administration excesses. But gradually that acceptance weakened, and on November 7, 2006 it was withdrawn.
The recent electoral turnaround was generated largely by the horrific conditions in Iraq today, the savage bloodletting of insurgency and civil war suffered by Americans and Iraqis alike. These conditions finally exceeded public tolerance. But the rationale for the war, its purpose, went unquestioned, because the Bush Administration obscurantism has been so successful.
We need to strip away the created reality of the “war on terror” to see the true nature of it instead, or our weird, unreal politics will continue.
The wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq were not simply justified and honorable retaliations to the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. They couldn’t possibly have been that, because both of them were premeditated—conceived, planned, and prepared long before September 11, 2001.
(Yes, there have been premeditated military incursions in the past—Panama, Grenada, and Kosovo come to mind—but none was of the magnitude and duration of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. Never before have we unleashed full scale combat, unprovoked, on sovereign foreign nations and then installed permanent military bases to occupy them.)
Though it has not been addressed in the mass media, the factual story of the President’s premeditated wars is clearly visible, and when the story is read at one sitting, the dreamlike quality of our politics is apparent.
The story to follow will not be a great revelation to anyone who has read, perhaps a bit more than casually, about our recent political, military, and diplomatic past, and has spent some time searching the Internet for corroboration and details. On the other hand, it is far from common knowledge, because in the manufactured reality crafted by the Bush Administration, it does not exist.
Two strands of history converged in the Bush years. One led to the invasion of Afghanistan, the other to the invasion of Iraq, and the strands came together on September 11, 2001.
The opening chapter of the story reveals a photograph dating to the Reagan years of Donald Rumsfeld cordially shaking hands with Saddam Hussein. We supported Saddam in his war with Iran. But history convulses: on January 26, 1998, Mr. Rumsfeld and 17 others, members of the Project for a New American Century, wrote a letter to President Clinton, urging the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime. If we fail to do so, they were candid in asserting, “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will be put at hazard.”
This could be considered the fountainhead of our surreal politics. The PNAC proposed premeditated war explicitly, in a bizarre retrogression to the centuries of unapologetic European imperialism. Since World War II and the birth of the United Nations, however, the world has been seeking to surpass imperialism, struggling to settle international difficulties peaceably—and here was an open, sad, and radical rebuff.
(In addition to Mr. Rumsfeld, 10 others of the signatories would serve in the Bush Administration: Elliott Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Robert Kagan, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, William Schneider, Jr., Robert Zoellick, and Paul Wolfowitz.)
When George W. Bush took office, a concern for the “significant portion of the world’s oil supply” was never far from view, because the Administration’s personal linkages to the oil industry were intimate, historic, and numerous. The president and vice president were just the first examples: eight cabinet secretaries and the national security advisor were recruited directly from the oil industry, and so were 32 others in the secretariats of Defense, State, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and the Office of Management and Budget.
The Bush Administration came to power anxious, we know from published sources, to fulfill the PNAC’s vision of regime change in Iraq.
In his second week in office, President Bush appointed Vice President Cheney to chair a National Energy Policy Development Group. The supersecret “Energy Task Force,” as it came to known, was composed of officials from the relevant federal agencies and beyond question heavily attended by energy industry executives and lobbyists. (The full membership has yet to be revealed, but Enron’s Kenneth Lay was conspicuously present.)
One brute fact had to be apparent to the Task Force: in the Caspian Basin, and beneath the Iraqi deserts there are 125 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, and the potential for 433 billion barrels more. Anyone controlling that much oil could break OPEC’s stranglehold overnight.
By early March, 2001, the Task Force was poring over maps of the Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, tanker terminals, and oil exploration blocks. It studied an inventory of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts”—dozens of oil companies from 30 different countries, in various stages of exploring and developing Iraqi crude. (These documents were forced into view several years later by a citizen group, Judicial Watch, with a Freedom of Information Act proceeding. It wasn’t easy—the Bush Administration appealed the lawsuit all the way to the Supreme Court—but the maps and documents can now be seen and downloaded at : http://www.judicialwatch.org/iraqi-oil-maps.shtml.)
Not a single U.S. oil company, however, was among the “suitors,” and that was intolerable. Mr. Cheney’s task force concluded, “By any estimation, Middle East oil producers will remain central to world security. The Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy.”
Condoleezza Rice’s National Security Council, meanwhile, was directed by a top secret memo to “cooperate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered melding two seemingly unrelated areas of policy.” The NSC was ordered to support “the review of operational policies towards rogue states such as Iraq and actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.”
The Bush Administration seemed clearly to be drawing a bead on Iraqi oil—long before the “global war on terror” was envisioned and marketed. But how could the “capture of new and existing oil fields” be made to seem less aggressive, less baldly in violation of international law?
At the State Department, a policy-development initiative called “The Future of Iraq” was undertaken which would accomplish this. The date was April, 2002, almost a full year before the invasion. The “Oil and Energy Working Group” provided the cover. Iraq, it said in its final report:, “should be opened to international oil companies as quickly as possible after the war…the country should establish a conducive business environment to attract investment in oil and gas resources.”
“Capture” would take the form of “investment,” and the vehicle for doing so would be the “production sharing agreement.” In exchange for investing in development costs, oil companies would “share” in the subsequent production. What would happen, though, if the companies’ investments were only minimal, but their shares of the production were disproportionately, obscenely large?
That’s the way it will work out. Production sharing agreements (PSA’s) are in place covering 75% of the undeveloped Iraqi fields, and the oil companies, soon to sign the contracts, will earn as much 162% on their “investments.” The “foreign suitors” are not quite so foreign now: the players on the inside tracks are Exxon-Mobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP-Amoco and Royal Dutch-Shell.
The use of PSA’s, instead of alternative methods of financing infrastructure, however, will cost the Iraqi people hundreds of billions of dollars in just the first few years of the “investment” program.
PSA’s are favored by the oil companies because the term “production sharing agreement” is a euphemism for legalized theft. PSA’s were not adopted voluntarily by the Iraqis, however: their use was specified by the U.S. State Department and institutionalized by Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority.
So a line of dots begins to point at Iraq, though nothing illegal or unconstitutional has yet taken place. We are still in the policy-formulation stage, but two “seemingly unrelated areas of policy”—national security policy and international energy policy—have become indistinguishable.
Another line of dots begins with the Carter Administration encouraging and arming the Taliban and Osama Bin Laden, in Afghanistan, to fend off the Russian invasion there.
And so the next chapter in the story of George Bush’s wars is underway.
The strategic location of Afghanistan can scarcely be overstated. The Caspian Basin contains some $16 trillion worth of oil and gas resources, and the most direct pipeline route to the richest markets is through Afghanistan.
End Part I