28 Feb. - 6 March 2002
Issue No.575
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 28 Feb. - 6 March 2002 Issue No.575 |
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Reflections
Multiple personality disorder
At Boeing's high-tech factory in St Charles, Mo., reports The Washington Post, three shifts are working 24 hours a day turning out smart bombs to replenish Air Force and Navy inventories, which ran "dangerously low" during the Afghan war.
Afghanistan has been merely "the first theatre in the war against terror," President Bush does not tire of repeating: "This nation must seize the moment. If we blink, the rest of the world will blink as well." And while the American president's Asian tour seems to have shown him that two of the three members of the "axis of evil" are proving somewhat difficult as prospective bomb-and-peanut butter sandwich markets, Iraq continues to be easy pickings.
Capitalism is on a rampage -- a bloody, shameless and ever-"enduring" rampage, with no apparent end in sight. War, profits and national (or is it civilisational, cultural, ethnic, racial, religious?) bigotry have not been so flagrantly intertwined since the Third Reich. The war in Afghanistan alone ("the first theatre") is going to cost American taxpayers $30 billion before the end of this year, according to Pentagon estimates; this is nearly double the emergency allocation of $17.4 billion, zealously handed over to the generals and their business buddies by a revenge-thirsty Congress and American public in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks. As of 31 January, the Pentagon had spent or committed to contracts some $11.9 billion. These, interestingly, include $61 million for humanitarian supplies (the ubiquitous peanut butter sandwiches?), $19 million for holding Al-Qa'eda prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, $100 million for a murky category called "additional security assistance and defense cooperation expenses" (otherwise known as bribes), but exclude the $1.1 billion necessary to replace the 18,000 bombs and missiles that have been used to date in the war.
Under the banner of the war against terror, US annual military spending has been hiked by a staggering $48 billion for fiscal 2002. The increase alone is larger than the military budget of any other country in the world, while, at $379 billion, the American military budget is (according to the Washington-based Council for a Livable World) six times larger than the third largest military spender in the world, Russia; higher than the combined military budgets of the next 25 countries on the list of military big spenders; and more than 26 times as large as the combined military budgets of the seven countries traditionally identified by the Pentagon as America's most likely adversaries (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria). The "axis of evil" collectively spends a paltry $21 billion.
Not one to blink first, the "Enron Administration," thanks to the war against terror, easily shrugged off its largest campaign contributor's scandalous collapse. The Carlyle Group, after all, is doing very well out of the war. The Wall Street firm, which has Bush Sr on its payroll, made $237 million in a single day during December, through the sale of shares in United Defence Industries, the Army's fifth-largest contractor. The Los Angeles Times last month quoted Charles Lewis, director of the Center for Public Policy, as commenting: "It's the first time the president of the United States' father is on the payroll of one of the largest US defence contractors." He added: "Between [former State Secretary James] Baker and [former Defence Secretary and close friend of Donald Rumsfeld Frank C] Carlucci, not to mention dear old dad, the relationship of the president with this particular company is as tight and close as, well, anyone can imagine."
But then the Bush family and their various government buddies have many fingers in a whole range of corporate pies, not least in oil, which fact had various ever-hopeful Arab analysts celebrating Jr's Third Worldish electoral win. And what with Gulf War II in the works, the time is more than ripe to open up Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling. It is, the president told Americans last Sunday, a matter of "national security." "America is already using more energy than our domestic resources can provide and unless we act to increase our energy independence, our reliance on foreign sources of energy will only increase," Bush said. Polar bears be damned, there is money to be made, even if the arguments used in its defence would put a Third World leader in the WTO/World Bank/IMF dog-house. "Independence" in the age of the global village is a dirty word.
Profits, jingoism, racial and "civilisational" supremacism, attacks on civil liberties, radical solutions to Third World immigration, sleaze -- the war against terror is proving an answer to capital's wildest dreams; its overwhelming turnover is particularly amazing in view of its total absurdity. From the very start, it was obvious that, if anything, it was designed to promote Islamist radicalism rather than eradicate it, while its "success story" (the ridiculously easy overthrow of the equally ridiculous Taliban regime) has been shown for the farce that it is, with American forces shooting, arresting and torturing Mr Karzai's men while protesting: "It's impossible to say these people are on this side and these people are on the other side. People [in Afghanistan] are on multiple sides, and they switch sides," as Pentagon spokesperson Victoria Clarke had the gall to tell the ever-compliant American press following a particularly gruesome incident of this sort. Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem in the same briefing complained that it was hard to "pin down" the real identities of people in Afghanistan. "They've got multiple identity cards. They've got multiple passports. They've got multiple names and certainly multiple stories. And so you really find... how problematic this part of the world is."
Afghanistan's liberators, itching to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein and having dropped over 18,000 bombs and missiles on the country, have discovered they were fighting "a shadow war" against "shadowy people who don't want to be found." (Stufflebeem). And, "[to say] that ... conditions in Afghanistan are confusing is an understatement, you know." (Clarke).
The sheer audacity of these and similar statements, their utter inanity and the fact that a prosperous, highly educated people could unquestioningly swallow such utter rubbish while issuing heated avowals about protecting their "civilisation" and "way of life": this is what is truly frightening about this phantasmagoric shadow war against shadowy terror.
And meanwhile, back at Boeing's high-tech factory in St Charles, three shifts will go on working 24 hours a day. Next stop, Iraq.
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