Pogo Redux

Reuters:  "The United States has increased its military presence in Iraq, ordering 300 more troops   ....."  

LOL LOL.  "We have engaged the enemy and we is  QUAGMIRED!"

Our National Impotence & Inadequacy

It was barely over two weeks since Obama’s vaunted “re-set” of U.S. foreign policy before the neocons lashed out again, this time through a Cheney & Daughter Duo fighting “to restore American, strength, power and influence around the world.”

In an amateurishly designed web page with a badly photo-shopped image of the Stars and Bars, Cheney and Daughter decried the “reverses” to American power and prestige under the fumbling the Obama administration,

"We stand at a critical moment in the life of our nation. The policies of the last six years have left America diminished and weakened. Our enemies no longer fear us. Our allies no longer trust us. ....  Threats to America’s security are on the rise."

The Alliance for a Strong Amurka will, they said,

"advocate for the policies needed to restore American power and pre-eminence;

"explain the indispensable role America and American power must play in the world in order to defeat the broad array of threats we face today;  and

"fight to restore the strength of America's military -- the greatest fighting force and the greatest force for good the world has ever known... "

We tried to find out who the culprits of this political sleaze were, but “Home,”  “About Us” and “About the Cheneys” produced nothing more than that Cheney and Daughter put this 501(k) project together themselves.

Well..... one can’t get more freedumb luvin and ‘murkan than a father and daughter raising their voices to do what they think is best for our beloved, god-blessed, land.

 

But Cheney never does anything alone. He is a focal point for a vortex of interests.  So we clicked away, and sure enough under the “news” section of the home-made blog  found a list of “resources”

Sooo... it was the same ol’ same ol’ crowd with the same ol’  same ol’ names.  Looking into the links [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] was like looking into a basket — not of vipers — but of slimy, repulsive, poisonous creep crawly things.

We have no compunction in saying that these people are an infection.

We have said recently and before that the difference between a neocon and a (neo)liberal is primarily one of tone, and the Strong Murka page bears us out.

There is no difference between Liz Cheney crowing that "America is the exceptional nation" and Obama’s declaration at West Point that “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being”),

Nor is there any real difference between talking about the indispensible role America must play in the world in order to defeat the broad array of threats we face (Cheney) and talking about the the right to use force  “unilaterally if necessary, ...  when our people are threatened; when our livelihood is at stake; or when the security of our allies is in danger." (Obama)  They are both assertions of  top dog status which trumpet  the necessity of extending American power and preeminence throughout the world.  Both statements are fundamentally exceptionalist.

The difference between the two camps remains what it has always been since the days of George F. Kennan: degree of swagger.  Obama would prefer to work through established institutions, quietly, covertly and on the cheap,  Cheney et al.  want to go for broke and bomb every “potential threat” into oblivion.

The chief difference between Obama and the neocons is not so much over policy as it is over profits.  Cheney is remarkably candid when he says that his goal is to “fight to restore the strength of America's military...”

Surely he is not advocating more pushup in training! No, what Cheney means is that he wants to shovel more trillions into the maw of the defense industry.  It was not big oil that was pushing the New American Century agenda but rather Raytheon (which funded the PNAC).  The footprints of the sleaze involved in these “projects” lead back either to AIPAC or to the defense-establishment and industry.

The two interests dovetail over rubblizing.  The more the Middle East is bombed into oblivion the more profit defense industries make and the more secure Israel feels.  This much was explicitly stated in the Neocon letter to President Clinton of 26 January 1998, in which the noncom crowd urged the “removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

The letter went on to say that it was uncertain whether Iraq currently possessed weapons of mass destruction but “[s]uch uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.”

Thus, “[t]he only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action....”

The letter concluded by urging Clinton to “act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.”

Whom would be “threatened” by the uncertain “possibility” that Iraq might have weapons of mass destruction?  Certainly not the American “homeland.”  When it is said that the threat is  against “the U.S. or its allies” what was actually meant was Israel, which was and is the only entity which might with some degree of plausible possibility be affected. 

It was a match made in hell.  The defense industries would get trillions in full spectrum capacitation and deployment and Israel gets a no-man's land of rubble between itself and (what is left) of the “rest” of the Arab world.

Neither Clinton or Obama have deviated from the fundamental premises at issue.  They simply want to accomplish the objectives by going for less broke.  Cheney and the Neocons, invited the United States to shoot for the moon in what amounts to a colossal political whack job.

Which brings  us to what really fascinates us about the Cheney & Daughter Duo.  It ought to be a point of fatal derision that Cheney (who moves nowhere without doctors and oxygen tanks in tow) stands before a  backdrop of High Ponderosa, looking like none other than The Big HOSS,

The Hoss Speaks

He that dwelleth in Sanity, shall laugh them to scorn!

But not in this exceptional land of ours. The baffling and frightening thing about ‘uhmurka” is that this sort of insanity works.   Plain talkin’ country folk talkin’ plainly about our National Impotence and Inadequacy.

We are left “diminished and weakened” ... in danger of not keeping it up... Obama has put on the “path of decline” ... We need to be hard and to project our power ... For Iran is marching!  Obama has kept us in the dark as to “the true nature of the threat we face”  For there is no doubt that there are dark dangers lurking in the murky corners of our bedroom.  How do we know this?  Because the corners would not be dark if they weren’t hiding something. 

A person who spoke this way would be certified as insane.   Bombast and belligerence are nothing uniquely American and at least half the country is sick of the wages of war.   At the same time, far too many Americans are susceptible to a toxic brew of self-doubting self-righteousness coupled with the fearful certitude of lurking, unseen fears ready to devour  us in an instant unless we strike out against them in God's Name.  Hoss would have wanted  it.

©Barfo 2014 

The Beast is Us

Unlike most people, we never liked horror movies or, for that matter, roller coasters.  The notion of scaring your own pants off always struck us as a non-starter.  [continue reading]

.

The Clown Act of U.S. Policy

Was it even a decent interval?  Two weeks after Obama’s vaunted “policy reset” in which he committed the United States to “partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria captured Mosul and came into control of a crescent of territory stretching from the outskirts of Aleppa (Syria) to the outskirts of Baghdad (Iraq).

A more contemptuous kick in the teeth was hard to imagine.  The U.S. satrap in Baghdad, Al-Maliki, set up a pathetic wail for help to which Obama replied, with impressive emphasis, that all options were on the table.

Ridi Pagiliacci.

Now, this blog was among the first to point out (LINK) that the actual aim of U.S. “full spectrum” strategy is to promote degradation, destruction and chaos, so that what appear as ostensible failures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya are in actuality crypto-successes. 

This strategic objective flows from the stated premise of neocon policy “to prevent the emergence of potential rivals.”  The best way to prevent a man from becoming a possible rival is to break his legs as a child, deny him an education and get him addicted to drugs.  It’s brutal, simple and a form of genocide.

But sometimes a limp dick is just a limp dick and  Obama is reduced to blathering redundancies and pieties.  Since the U.S. has no stomach for re-introducing troops and since economic sanctions (oil) would be a boomerang in the face, the only “option” left is to drone and bomb the place to smithereens.  But we already did that.  There is a limit to how much you can pulverize; and in case anyone in Air Command has noticed, neither area bombing nor droning ever break the enemy’s resistance.

Oh... and to make matters all the more pathetic, the U.S. is all but back in bed with Arch-Foe, Demon Iran, Existential Enemy to Holy Israel whose cross-eyed moles were the anvil beaters who forged the preemptive belligerence which was the whoop and awe for the New American Century.

What we are seeing now is the fall which cometh after the pride.  Et dispersit superbos in mente cordis suis.  

Good. 

Frustration ...

"My biggest frustration so far is the fact that this society has not been willing to take some basic steps to keep guns out of the hands of people who can do just unbelievable damage," Obama said.

Like the Pentagon? 

 . 

Two Creations & the Old Lie

Rather by chance, we came across Lully’s Marche Royale on Youtube which was gallantly pleasing as these marches go.   Far more impressive, though, were the accompanying video-stills taken from the Cathedral d’Albi a late medieval structure in Toulouse, France built between 1287 and 1480. 

We were, it should be said, blown away by its beauty.  But the thought which recurred most in our mind was: hands — the myriad of human arms, hands and fingers that put this beautiful leviathan together.  

With each frame we imagined the backs that carried, the arms that cut, the hands that chiseled, the fingers that set and gilded the host of myriad details, each its own little soul, which joined in harmony to create this reflection of heaven on earth.

We imagined, also, the master masons drafting their plans late into the night, the surveyors measuring ground in the fresh of morning, the drivers and donkeys bearing cartloads of brick and stone to the site, the apprentices laughing and breaking for bread, onions and wine at noon... and of course, the accountants tallying their receipts and balances. 

There was more than mere architectural harmony at work here and the whole edifice made one rather disposed to forgive the human race its manifold follies, vices and crimes.

As fate would have it, however, this morning we came across another video —  a propaganda film made in anticipation of the D-Day landing in Normandy.

The film was mostly a paean to the united logistics that enabled the invasion.  It detailed with swelling pride the jeeps, the tanks, the planes, the rolling stock, the landing craft, the crates of supplies and murderous widgets, all of which were  “the fruition of four years of planning...”

And not least was the vast expense of human labor that so manifestly infused the entire enterprise on every point along the assembly line of war...

“...every man knew just where he was to fit into the gigantic pattern...   intoned the narrator,

“...every jeep every tank... was assigned its place in the grand strategy of attack...”

Every single piece of which -- from belt buckle, to rifle bore, to screwed in detonator, the work of human hands.

Two things such propaganda films rarely show are: drudgery and death — the sheer boring, exhausting, sweating, aching business of unloading 3,000 boxes, of parking 1,000 tanks, of standing in line waiting for something to get done, before some other tedium can slowly unfold; and, of course, the denouement of it all which consist in blowing concrete, earth and flesh to bits in a million moments of destruction, mutilation and death. 

And so, we were left to contemplate what might be called the Two Creations, each the inverse image of the other — one a reflection of what we hope is heaven, the other an embodiment of what we know is hell.

Today, June 6th, the leaders of the Allied Nations, together with sycophants from defeated Germany, gathered in Normandy to commemorate what is styled as the Liberation of Europe, but which would be more honestly be styled as the Great Destruction.

I wish to make very clear that I raise no objection to a penitential remembrance of loss and waste and suffering; and, in this regard, to remember that this remembrance includes the other side, as a 93 year old  English veteran struggled to remind us.

But the truer remembrance, in my view, is the one uttered by Wilfred Owens almost a century ago,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

you would not tell with such high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

When at least, as the Queen has always done, the remembrance is left to silence, no attempt is made to “bawl allegiance to the state” (Owens).  But once the speeching and preaching begins we are simply rehearsing the Old Lie. 

And this is what was done at the Anglican service on June 5th when the Army Chaplain, sanctimoniously intoned,

“for in the end, greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down lay down his life for his friends...”

The problem with this statement (as we recently discussed) is that it is a sophistical canard which shuffles between the soldier as an individual and as a piece in the “gigantic pattern” of a country at war.

Let us return to d’Albi.  Does it matter that a mason, carpenter or glass-maker may have gotten drunk after work or beat his wife the day before?  Of course not.  His individual sin does not detract from the harmony of the work of the whole as a whole.  The cathedral remains a reflection of man at his best. 

Conversely, the fact that an individual soldier took heart in fear or threw himself down on a grenade to save his buddy does not redeem the vileness of the enterprise of nations. 

This shuffle between the one and the many which extracts from the pain, sorrow and heroism of individuals an insinuation of just cause for the many is the vial of poison used by preachers who whore themselves to war.

And no one whored himself better than Obama, whose  teleprompted remarks on the beaches of Normandy were a paradigmatic example of how the language of crusade is used to justify ongoing war.

After his trademark treacle about “the child who runs his fingers over colourful ribbons he knows signify something of great consequence,”  Obama went on to memorialize the sacrificial heroism of one Wilson Colwell, one Harry Kulkowitz, one Rock Merritt, and then rattled on to commend the present service of one Melvin Cedillo-Martin, one Jannise Rodriguez and one “sergeant First Class Brian Hawthorne” who “just yesterday, [ ] reenlisted in the Army Reserve."    These personal testimonials served as simple, tear-jerking buttresses to the real cathedral of Obama’s argument which was that

These men waged war so that we might know peace. They sacrificed so that we might be free. They fought in hopes of a day when we'd no longer need to.   ... We have to honour those who carry forward that legacy today, recognising that people cannot live in freedom unless free people are prepared to die for it. ...May  God bless our veterans and all who served with them, ... And may God bless all who serve today for the peace and security of our world.

In so saying, Obama honey coated the slipped-in assumption that we still need to wage war for peace today.  He was not remembering but advertising.  The solemnification Obama engaged in was a bawling praise of war tricked out in the Old Lie dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 

The syllogism of the lie is always the same: you are laying down your life pro patria, for your friend, on behalf of others and, therefore, the war of which you were an exploited part was good.  Just as the lie confuses the motives of individuals with those of the State, it seeks to disconnect the act of war from its the inherent nature.

The issue is, in my view, fundamentally simple.  A person who engages in an assault does so for one undeniable purpose: to hit the other person.  The moment one says that the assault is committed for another purpose or for another person or for another concept, one has introduced a disconnect between the act and its ineluctable natural purpose.  Ulterior motive becomes the justification for what is actually done.  But this ulterior purpose bears no necessary relation to the act.  It is simply a tacked-on assertion.  This is the  syllogism of all crusades, the teleology of which Wilfred Owens categorically rejected. 

But once the commemorations at Normandy are seen as the reiteration of a crusade, we are brought to a discomforting intersection of the Two Creations.

The Cathedral d’Albi was built in the wake of the Albigensian conflict during which the government mounted a brutal crusade to suppress the Cathar heresy. In the aftermath of the bloodshed, the cathedral's dominant presence and fortress-like exterior were intended to convey the power and authority of the orthodox Christian faith.

In short, the awesomely beautiful cathedral was built to impress the locals with the magnificence and rightness of the imposed order of things; and, by implication, with the justness of the previous slaughter.

Here a further discomforting intersection arises; for the phrase often attributed to General Patton was first uttered on the eve of the mass slaughter of the Cathars. 

How to distinguish the Catholics from the heretics in the city? it was asked. "Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius" – (“Kill them all! The Lord discerns which are his”.)  And so,

"... crying "to arms, to arms!", within the space of two or three hours they crossed the ditches and the walls and Béziers was taken. Our men spared no one, irrespective of rank, sex or age, and put to the sword almost 20,000 people. After this great slaughter the whole city was despoiled and burnt, as divine vengeance raged marvelously.” (Letter of legate Almaric to Pope Innocent, 1209)

What would Almaric have said of allied carpet bombing? we wonder.   But it is certain that the slaughter of innocents, (which always seems to occur when we heroically and sacrificially die for fellow man) is a horror which requires a commensurate justification which is made as unquestionable as the slaughter it excuses.

The solemnities at Normandy and in Paris are not only a commemoration of the Allied Effort on D-Day, they are, more fundamentally, a solemnification of the post-war world order.  The war is fobbed off as a crusade, the unstated but absolutely necessary premise of which is that we were right and noble whereas the other side was dastardly,  shameless, heretical and consummately evil.  This is a post-war article of faith, which it is illegal and blasphemous to question in any way or to any degree because to do so would begin to question the Old Lie.


©WCG, 2014

Delusions of Office

"Bigger nations must not be allowed to bully the small, or impose their will at the barrel of a gun or with masked men taking over buildings."

Yes, Obama really said that.   He made the remarks during  his tour of the Eastern Front... 

Apparently,  history (that is fact-based history) isn't taught at Columbia anymore.   The list of U.S. retaliations, punitive expeditions and invasions omits hardly a single year since 1776.   

Not atypical are entries such as: "1854 – Nicaragua: On July 9–15, naval forces bombarded and burned San Juan del Norte (Greytown) to avenge an insult to the American Minister to Nicaragua"

Many of the expeditions are cast in terms of hunting out "pirates" or "protecting American interests" -- you know, like Aunt Emma's suitcase or perhaps bananas....

The workers of the banana plantations in Colombia went on strike in December 1928. They demanded written contracts, eight-hour work days, six-day work weeks and the elimination of food coupons. The strike turned into the largest labor movement ever witnessed in the country until then.  The United States threatened to invade with the U.S. Marine Corps if the Colombian government did not act to protect United Fruit’s interests.   An army regiment from Bogotá was dispatched by the government to deal with the strikers, which it deemed to be subversive. The troops set up their machine guns on the roofs of the low buildings at the corners of the main square, closed off the access streets and after a five-minute warning opened fire into a dense Sunday crowd of workers and their wives and children who had gathered, after Sunday Mass... (Banana Massacre)

But that was nothing compared to McKinley's massacres in the Phillippines or the aggregate massacres in Guatemala, Nicaragua and San Salvador by U.S. trained death squads.


But is Obama really and truly that ignorant?  After all, it was masked Right Sektor men who took over the Ukrainian Parliament at the connivance of Obama's under-secretary of state, while Senator John McCain personally cheered them on.    And this was just three months ago. 

Of more interest than a tiresome rehash of U.S. global bullying is the proposition that Obama truly sees no contradiction.   He is not playing the hypocrite because his consciousness of contradiction has been erased from his mind.   Orwell tell us that

the truest believer of Big Brother's lies, is Big Brother himself.

The Resentful Spirit of Republicanism

No sooner than the ink was dry on Juan Carlos’ abdication than a noisy swarm of republicans swelled the streets of Spain demanding the abolition of the monarchy and, in what must certainly qualify as an act of useless, political nostalgia, chanting the anthems of the Second Republic or perhaps even of the  year long  First.

The usual complaints are advanced: (1) Why should they get to live in palaces while I don’t? (2) I am not anyone’s subject! (3) Their luxurious upkeep is a waste of public treasure; and (4) The country would be better off being a democracy.

A bigger heap of resentful nonsense is hard to imagine.

Why should anyone get to live in a palace while others don’t?  Why can’t everyman have his own palace?  Because, in case republicans might not have noticed, unequal fortune is a fact of life.  The rich we always have with us.

Are there no rich in republics?  Is their wealth any better?  Do these republicans truly believe the canard that in democracies the rich earn their wealth through their own hard work and therefore deserve it?   You know, like Carlos Slim who was simply given Teléfonos de Mexico by the president and who is now the first or second wealthiest man in the world? 

Those who resent the “privileges” and “luxuries” monarchs supposedly enjoy “unfairly” might better direct their resentments against common oligarchs like Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon and the “Walmart Brothers.”  Does anyone think they acquired their hyper-fortunes fairly?

In all events, picking  on the Borbons for luxuriating in wealth is a stupidity based on a falsehood.

The House of Borbon is worth a paltry 5 million!! The Queen of England is worth a mere 450 million dollars.  In contrast, the “republican” Silvio Berlusconni is worth $6.2 billion.  The republican Sebastián Piñera is worth $2.4 billion. Even Fidel Castro is worth more than the King of Spain, weighing in at $900 million.  (Stats. per Wiki)

Oh but how we choke on the wealth and privileges of monarchs!   Republicanism is merely the spirit of resentment.

It does not diminish me in the slightest to pledge loyalty to a superior. In fact, most cooperative endeavors in the world are based on flesh and blood loyalties.  One of the principle dysfunctions of the modern world is that it is based on economies of alienation rather than those grounded in personal loyalties.

Men are not moved by algebra.  It is a stupid conceit of the French “enlightenment” that Cartesian abstractions are more solid and inspiring than “carne y hueso” (Ortega y Gasset).

Animals and humans alike are drawn to and motivated by presence and plumage.  It is nothing to be suppressed or ashamed of.  From prides to teams to platoons to board rooms alpha’s are recognized and followed as surpassing the rest of us in some way.  People around the world loved John Kennedy because they delighted in his presence, and personality not because he was a constitutional office holder.  And he was just as much the creature of privilege as any monarch.  

Most dynasties began with some commanding personality and it was assumed (not without reason) that the “genius” of the father would be passed to the son.  That was sometimes, but not always the case. Genes being the mysterious things they are, there was no shortage of imbeciles and incompetents in the grand lineages of blue blood. 

In times passed, monarchs ruled as well as reigned, their rulership appropriate to the social complexity and political economies of the times.  As with anything there were good and bad and ugly monarchs.  But it is highly debatable whether, on the whole, their record approaches the depravity, mass-cruelty and destruction wreaked upon the world by bourgeois republics. 
 
In any case, the point is academic.  Western monarchs do not rule but only reign.  They are flesh and blood symbols of the State and of the “all of us together” of each nation.  They represent history, continuity and a sense of community.  They are paid to look pretty and act pretty.  They are far superior totems to the glitzy ostentation of Hollywood or Washington that Americans are relegated to gushing over.

Constitutional monarchs provide a physical focus for animating loyalties and overcoming the calculations of partisan interests.  It is precisely in the momentary suppression of self which the presence of a monarch inspires that provides for a suspension of personal partisan striving which admits the transcending importance of the greater whole now and in historical progression.

Those who admire republicanism so much might well take a look at the United States — a republic, the highest symbol of which is a juridical document which no one reads much less understands, although they all swear allegiance to it with utmost solemnity.  Theorems and propositions are the conceits of a few but they never inspired the many. 

Of what value is republicanism?   The value of some uninspiring, drab, academic from nowhere representing the nation in an undertaker’s overcoat?   If anyone thinks that these republican heads of state are immune from mediocrity or corruption he is not living in the real world. 

The castigated “cost” of maintaining a monarch is simply a function of state-business.  Do republicans really equate the State with a monastery?  States have state functions, state dinners, state ceremonies all of which cost money whether republican or monarchical in form. 

Ah! comes the supposedly irrefutable gambit: “But presidents don’t ride around in gilded carriages.” No.. they ride around in armored vehicles called “The Beast” each one of which costs $1.5 million (there are 12), gets 3.7 miles to the gallon and requires a C-17 Globemaster transport air-craft to be hauled from place to place.  Then there is Air Force One.

 Ah yes.  The economies of a republic!

The British Monarch’s State Coach was built in 1762 and has supposedly been bought and paid for.  Her armored Bentley cost a mere $700.00.   The King of Spain’s official limousine is an Audi RS6 estimated to $100,000.  But why be conservative?  Quadruple the price for assumed “special features” — the bottom line is still lower than republican.

These comparisons are merely illustrative. The cost of state occasions depends on the weight and power of the state in question.  It all depends on popular preferences.  The British like theatrical pomp (from which they incidentally derive hefty tourist revenues) and are willing to front the costs (or seed money). Continental monarchies prefer a more economical mode and Juan Carlos’s “palace” can hardly be considered extravagant.

In caviling about the “costs” of monarchy republicans show themselves up for what they really are: joyless political puritans.

How is Spain not a democracy?  Do they not have elections at all levels?  Are the people prevented from venting their stupidities from the rooftops?  Did they not freely, fairly and democratically elect one incompetent clown after another for the past two decades?  How in the world is getting rid of the Borbons going to improve the degeneracy of Spain’s political class?

The idiots assembled in Puerta del Sol seem to have forgot that Spain is not ruled by an absolute monarchy.  In fact it is even a misnomer to speak of “constitutional monarchy.”  The present day monarchs of Europe are ceremonial monarchies. 

The crowd of agitated republicans in Spain, and their affiliates elsewhere, would better serve themselves by overthrowing the austerities of the banker-tyranny that actually rules them.

Instead, indulging what can only be regarded as a political fetish, the republicans of Spain think nothing of slandering a monarch who brought them freedom and gave them all they could reasonably hope for.   A poster making the rounds suggests that Juan Carlos and Felipe are continuations of Franco

What a vile canard!  Of course Juan Carlos was Franco’s chronological successor; but it is a truly nasty falsehood to insinuate that he represents a continuation of Franco’s regime. Far from continuing Franco’s Movimiento Nacional, he transformed it with the skill and delicacy of a political surgeon.

Inheriting the powers of an absolute despot from Franco, it was the King’s choice to appoint the prime minister from a short-list submitted to him by the Council of the Realm, then stacked with Franco loyalists.  Behind the scenes Juan Carlos arranged to have a Adolfo Suarez, a relatively junior technocrat in Franco’s administration, included on the list as a dark-horse.  No one seriously  expected his appointment. It was all merely a show of “openness” for the closed circle of the Franquista elite.

It was also the stuff of Shakespeare.  Juan Carlos did appoint Suarez prime minister and once in office the latter, dropped his carefully maintained mask  and began the process of democratization.  He legalized the Communist and Socialist parties (1976) and, with their participation, convoked a Constituent Assembly which  promulgated the present constitution. 

The constitution included provisions of social rights (health, education, housing) and, at the instance of Santiago Carillo, the head of the Communist party, the right of State intervention in private companies in the public interest and the facilitation of access by workers to ownership of the means of production were also enshrined in the Constitution  - a provision cribbed from the Article 123 of the “socialist” Mexican Constitution of 1917.

The Republic of the United States should be so monarchical.
  
One of the arguments republicans in Spain revert to, is that Juan Carlos’ “turn” to democracy was merely a bowing to the inevitable and is therefore nothing he should be praised for or credited with. 

The facts belie the claim. Although the hands on political work was done by Suarez, republicans studiously forget that it was Juan Carlos who held the loyalties of the army.  Franco was dead but his spirit was not.  Despite his manipulative massaging of Falangism, his coy flirtation with monarchists and his ultimate acquiescence in the economic reforms of Opus Dei “technocrats,”  Franco was at bottom and foremost a military man.  His ideology was himself, his support was the army and he was good at maintaining both.  Once El Caudillo was dead, his mantel passed to Juan Carlos and it was his command of the Army’s loyalty to his person, as king and commander,  that kept the Army in line and later suppressed the attempted coup in 1981.

But let it be assumed that Juan Carlos “merely” bowed to the inevitable.  If Juan Carlos recognized that democracy was inevitable and if he chose not to obstruct it with the support of the Army and the absolute powers conferred upon him by Franco, he is to be praised not maligned for that choice. Should he have instead emulated the example of the Imperial Imbecile, Ferdinando VII?   Please.

And here we come to the guts of republican grievances.  They are still bitching and moaning over the fact that they lost the Civil War and are looking for some last act of revenge.

The Spanish Civil War was a terrible episode with atrocities committed on both sides. What republicans seem to forget is that it was a civil war; that is, a country divided against itself. (The election of 1936 was virtually a 50/50 split between the Popular and the National fronts.)  It is not a solution to anything to go on insisting that one half the country is wrong and only your half is right.

In a broader sense the Civil War was a 20th century continuation of the political fissures which had convulsed Spain (and the Spanish Empire) since the abortive promulgation of the liberal 1812 constitution.   By the 1930's, each side was a collection of factions: communists, anarchists, social-democrats, trade-unionists and capitalists on the left versus capitalists, national-syndicalists, latifundists, monarchists and/or “Carlists”  on the right. The left was at least secular and typically virulently anti-clerical and atheist. The right was at least culturally, and typically devotionally, Catholic.   The left abetted a break-up or federalization of the country along regional lines; the right insisted on national unity even at the cost of repressing regional identities.

It is hard to hypothesize what the result would have been had the Republicans won.  Because they were riven by internal strife and advocated federalization there is a good chance that Spain would have simply broken apart or, in the alternative, have been taken over by Stalinist bolshevik cadres which were in the Republican ranks.  The matter is entirely speculative, but republicanism did reflect strong centripetal tendencies.

History does tell us what happened upon the Nationalist victory.  Franco ruthless suppressed all rumors of a left and skillfully played off one rightist faction against the other.  His political vision was that of a pious policeman and his achievement was a pall of quiet in Europe’s most querulous nation. 

What can be seen from this summary but long-view of events is that the present constitutional monarchy is history’s necessary and natural compromise.

 

 
The institution of the monarchy satisfies the monarchists and appeases the Army and nationalist tendencies. The government itself is within the post-war spectrum of  European “social-capitalism”.  It gives a de facto primacy to Catholicism and both legal and de-facto autonomy to the regions.  No one is suppressing Catalan or the Basque language or writing their histories and cultures out of the books.  Very serious socio-economic problems confront Spain at the present, as they do the rest of Europe; but the constitutional structure of the State is, as such, sound.  It represents a felicitous compromise to over 200 years of bitter wrangling.

With this perspective in mind, the Republican rallies can be seen for what they are: a massive, immature temper tantrum that insists on what it thinks it wants and on winning (in some merely formal sense) the war it lost.

Anyone who peruses the photographs of the era cannot but notice the pained silence with which Juan Carlos stood for twenty years in Franco’s shadow. In this, he represented his country; and when he emerged from the shadows he led his country not simply “into democracy” but into a resolution of its long internecine divisions.  Whereas Franco maintained nationalism through suppression, the monarchy seeks to offer a point of general convergence which makes room for political and cultural diversity.

El Principe de Asturias comprometiendo dedicarse

 a "una nación, una comunidad social y política unida y diversa".

That was the promise Prince Felipe extended on his first public comment since the abdication.  We wish him well.  

A Wolf Hiding under Tufts of Wool

Obama read a speech yesterday which is being billed as a signaling a “shift” in foreign policy.  Nonsense.  As we have said before, “Empires do not go Swiss.”  United States’ strategies may change but its goals remain the same as they have been since 2001 and, in fact, since 1947. 

But even on the level of strategies, Obama’s speech was a mere matter of packaging; and, as to packaging, it was more of the same, treacly, homiletic, sentimentalism for which this president surely deserves a prize.

Larded between what was supposedly the announcement of a new “leaner” and more “muscular” strategy was such fat as: “a world where school-girls are not kidnapped;”  “where the aspirations of individual human beings matter” and  “where the truths written into our founding documents can steer the currents of history ... to do what is right and just.”

Ah yes!  No Obama speech would be complete without some reference to our Seminal Founding Document. “Tonight we gather to affirm the greatness of our nation ... ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men...” (2004)  “The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; ... that noble idea... the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.” (2009)   “We recall that what binds this nation together ... What makes us exceptional is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration....” (2013)  Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.

For all that, Obama’s text warrants analysis to see how things remain the same and to understand the fundamentals on which plus ça change are predicated.

Historical Preliminaries.

It has been tritely said that those who fail to grasp history's mistakes are doomed to repeat them.  It would more accurately said that those who fail to grasp the past cannot understand the present.


Part of the Exceptionalist Cant, which Obama effusively reaffirmed at the Academy (“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being”), is the notion that, arriving on these Virgin Shores, animated by religious conscience, “pilgrim feet  with stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat  across the wilderness!" (America the Beautiful)  And ever beating for freedom threw off the yoke of a Mad Tyrant who did Awful Things.

Again Nonsense. The animating spirit of the country was gain.  Once commercially viable enterprises had established themselves on the coast, the Colonists looked west on French & Indian lands which they coveted and the Crown's protection of which was one of the chief grievances listed in our Seminal Document. 

As the Count of Aranda wrote to King Charles III of Spain in 1783: “This Federated Republic is born, shall we say, a pygmy  ... But tomorrow, as it consolidates its constitution, it will be a giant; and after that it will become an irresistible colossus in those regions.”  (Memorandum from the Count  of Aranda to  His  Majesty King Charles III on the Independence  of  the  English  Colonies  in  America.)

Aranda understood the social and political strengths of the new-born pygmy (among which he listed the advantages of religious pluralism, heretical and sinful as that might be). But he also understood the socio-economic “DNA” of the pygmy which demanded imperialist growth.  He understood that unless Spain took effective measures (which it failed to do), the pygmy would “gobble up” the Floridas, Mexico and Spanish possessions in the hemisphere (which it did).

In fact, after Pilgrim Feet had tramped to the end of the continent, they beat across the waves, where the Great White Fleet blasted the wild, impassioned natives in the wilderness over there into civility and freedom.

Was there ever a time when the United States was not at war with somebody?  Even the Civil War was a war over preferred modes of economic expansion.  Present day Americans are not ignorant of these conflicts  -- with Spain, Canada, Britain, Mexico, Canada (again) Spain (again) -- they just don't see them for what they are.  In the 19th Century, American policy makers were not embarrassed to speak of “Empire.”  They crowed about it.  After all, everyone else was.  Why not us? 

But Woodrow Wilson was a prudish Presbyterian. Wilson felt more comfortably righteous decking out “Manifest Destiny” in terms of waging a war for peace and freedom.  “Making the World Safe for Democracy”  he called it. But this was just packaging.  It only fooled Americans.  As French president Georges Clemenceau put it, “Wilson speaks like Jesus Christ, but acts like Lloyd George.”

Although U.S. geo-economic interests were closely identified with British, the central aim of both country’s policy was to prevent the emergence of a “strong central European power” and to undermine or contain regimes whose aims might be viewed as inimical to their financial or industrial capital.

Americans tend to slide gracefully over the fact that Mr. Safe-for-Democracy invaded Mexico and Nicaragua to depose regimes he did not like and a few years later invaded Russia to depose the Bolsheviks there. Making the world “safe for democracy” was code for making it “hospitable to U.S. economic interests.” 

Nothing changed in the sequel to the Great War.  Although there are those for whom it is convenient to play up the myth of a moral crusade, A.J.P. Taylor, the well known British historian, had it right when he chalked up the World War (2nd) to a struggle for economic hegemony. (The Origins of the Second World War (1961).)

As Taylor put it: “No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.”

In fact, the White House Jesus did not disagree. “Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here, that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?”  (President Woodrow Wilson, at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.)

Empires are indeed about “values” but the value at issue is profit and plunder (called “peace and prosperity”) and these are decked out in the tissues of freedom, democracy and family unity.  The American Empire was forged under the banner of “Free Trade” at home and abroad. At home and abroad, it was the mantra of the 18th century Liberal class allied against the “oppression” of feudalism and government control — that is, against economies tied in some measure to concepts of obligation.

Containment & Zones of Democratic Freedom

In 1945, the pygmy turned colossus stood astride a blasted and impoverished world. France, which had been spared physical devastation, was so impoverished that it’s tin franc weighed as much as a foil-wrapped “coin” of bubblegum.

Only Argentina had gold reserves worth counting; and those were puny compared to what the United States commanded.  Suddenly there no enemy left!

It was an intolerable situation and the United States was quick to discover a New Bete Noire to crusade against: a country which had lost 20 million of its citizens, whose two major cities had been pulverized and whose European half consisted of charred fields and occupied rubble.

In 1947, George F. Kennan proposed and the United States officially adopted the policy of “containment”.  It would build an iron cordon sanitaire around the Soviet Union while simultaneously seeking to establish “zones of democratic freedom” in “un-affiliated” areas of the world.  These “zones” were the ol’ Fort Apache in Injun Territory, trucked out on a global scale. They were comprised of client states “tied” to us by “democratic values” and  “free trade” as backed up by “financial assistance” (loan indebtedness to the I.M.F.) and/or “military assistance and support” (as in U.S. trained Guatemalan death squads).

Truman Announcing His Doctrine

“Democratic values” did not refer to those honeyed sentiments conjured up by our Seminal Founding Document but rather to juridical concepts and mechanism which protected private property, investment, free-trade and un-free copyright. 

“Containment” was also a likely euphemism.  Its ultimate aim, said Kennan, was “to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.” (Foreign Affairs, X-Article, 1947.)

In so saying, Kennan went beyond “resisting Soviet aggression” (the favorite slogan of the Fifties) and was clearly indicating the gradual and indirect roll-back and subversion of the Soviet Union.

Like Monopoly, a key element of the roll-back was the gradual constriction of soviet power by economic and military means short of conventional war. The battle for the hearts, minds and resources of non-allied nations (i.e. the “third world”) was a question a “securing and extending” zones “tied” to the U.S. order of things.

Not unexpectedly, the Soviet Union did not take all this lying down. It pushed back and sought to set up its own zones of “popular democracy.”  But “tu quoque” does not mean “non sumus”.  That the Soviet Union might have been doing it too, does not mean that the U.S. wasn’t doing it at all; and, once the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States continued to do it.

Full Spectrum Preeminence

Forty five years from and after 1945, the United States faced the same dilemma:  the Soviet Union collapsed; USA  had won.  No one was left.  What was to be done with its vast military-industrial complex?  Just as importantly, what  was to be done with resources that were now up for grabs?  The United States re-fitted Containment into a policy of ongoing unilateral war against “potential enemies.”

The importance of conditional terminology to what has been labelled "neocon" doctrine cannot be stressed enough.  Simply put, American policy was no longer a fight against a perceived and actual opponent, it was a fight against a non-existent one.  The mere potential to cause a threat (i.e. a potential harm) to the United States, was stated to be a casus belli. 

The essentials of post-soviet U.S. policy were “power projection” to “preserve American preeminence” and advance American “principles and interests” by “securing and extending zones of democratic peace,” and “removing the Homeland’s security perimeter eastward,” using short-term ad hoc alliances without long-term commitments, backed up by a flexible military consisting of full force conventional strength on the one hand and specialized, civil-military units, on the other, with their own intelligence and agit-prop capabilities whose soldiers would be “equipped with skin patch pharmaceuticals.” 

All of these quoted buzz-words and concepts are taken from Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney’s 1992 Defense Planning Guide  [1] or the P.N.A.C’s 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses [2], later rolled into George Bush’s 2002 National Security Policy of the United States.  [3]   In capsulated form, they summarize the essentials of the neocon retrofitting of post-war American policy.

The immediately perceived zonal conflicts were: the Balkans,  “South West Asia” (i.e., the Middle East) and ultimately China.

But the Russian bugbear was never far from neocon minds. In his  Grand Chessboard (1997) Zbigniew Brzezinski echoed Kennan and announced that “"The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power..."  (p. xiii)  Nevertheless, he said, “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America. " (Ibid. p xiv.)    

Dick Cheney’s Defense Planning Guide was somewhat more nuanced,

"We do not dismiss the risks to stability in Europe from a nationalist backlash in Russia ...  [However, for the foreseeable future], the continued fragmentation of the former Soviet state and its conventional armed forces have neutralized a Russian threat."

Nevertheless "our strategy must refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global competitor"

 "The  best means of assuring that no hostile power is able to consolidate control over the resources within the former Soviet Union is to support its successor states (especially Russia and Ukraine) in their efforts to become peaceful democracies with market based economies.  ... to demilitarize their societies, convert their military industries to civilian production, ... radically reduce their nuclear weapons...”  

These quotes illustrate that the core of U.S. geopolitical policy is an inverse correlation between the United States and everyone else, particularly including Russia and, next, China. The policy is directed not at actual enemies but at any potential rival.  The essential idea is that in order for us to be “up” everyone else must be kept “down.”   It is  American Exceptionalism with a vengeance. 

As for Russia, if it could be reduced to a de-facto client state “with market based economies” which allowed Western control over the resources within the Russo-Asian land mass, fine and dandy.  If not the cat would have to be skinned by other means.

Nominally speaking, neocon policy passed from containment to breakup. But as I have already indicated, “containment” was always a euphemism.  Neocon doctrine simply continued the logic and dynamic of containment.  

These same quotations also illustrate that the distinction between “liberals” and “neo-cons” is utterly spurious.  The sole difference between the two is simply one of tone.  The actual policies advocated are the same.

It is true that the U.S. foreign policy establishment was “divided” over whether containment was limited to countering Soviet advances at various “flash points” or whether it included a full or partial economic and/or military roll-back of the Soviet Union. But this “division” was a semantic distinction without any ultimate difference. To speak of “tendencies [i.e. strategies] which must eventually find their outlet in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power” is to posit the diminution of any rival in favor of U.S. preeminence. 

Given that rivals come in all shapes, sizes and circumstances, American responses to these potential rivalries must likewise be encompassed within a full spectrum range of military-economic-political options and mechanisms.  In concept and substance this had been U.S. policy prior to 1992 and it remained U.S. policy thereafter.

Taking the long view, U.S. policy, from the founding of the nation, has been “liberal” — that it is, it has espoused juridical and political structures which protect private property and promote free trade.  But trade necessarily includes trade across borders with parties in other countries.   Liberalism necessarily strives for expansion and implicates globalism. 

To speak of “neo-liberalism” is to say no more than that U.S. policy has remained fundamentally liberal: grounded in “free trade”  by the economically privileged.   Nothing has changed because that it was what empires are about.   Neo-conservatism was simply bluster and swollen military budgets in service of the same underlying goals.

All Empires exalt their material interests in the loftiest of sentiments. To say as much is not to excuse us from understanding what drives the United States but, on the contrary, to focus on “what any child” must surely understand.

I do not mean to suggest that the United States has no redeeming qualities or that ordinary Americans are devoid of those altruistic sentiments and praiseworthy endeavors common to all men.  But any political diagnosis worth the name must ascertain the true causes and essential characteristics of the subject in question.  America set out to be, was and will remain an Empire until the end. 

Sicut Erat in Principio:  Obama’s Four Points

In 2004, an up and coming young politician from Illinois, took to the podium of the Democratic Convention to loftily intone that “out of this long political darkness a brighter day will come.”  One might have be forgiven for thinking that Obama was hearkening to an emergence from the darkness of Cheney-Bush bluster, aggression, lies, tortures and subversion of civil rights. 

But if one used the tools of the English language to parse what Obama was saying — i.e. if one listened carefully to the teleprompter text — it became clear that Obama was merely intoning a change of tissues.  He never actually specified what “political darkness” referred to.  He might equally have meant emerging from the shock and grief and trauma of experiencing some blow-back from the non-exceptional part of the world.

In the aftermath of 2001, Americans were in the mood for belligerence.  Bush happily obliged the heehaw animus that always lurks beneath the thin surface of Puritan do-goodism.  American policy became decked out in bragging and bully-tones.  Obama, offered blarney instead.  As we wrote, on the morrow of his election in 2008,

A neo-con is simply a neo liberal gone punk.  Domestically and diplomatically Obama will provide some emollients and better manners, but I doubt little else.  He may take a few paltry steps towards realizing  Bismarckian social benefits and he may go back to an Eisenhoweresque diplomacy of working "through" allies and international institutions.  

And so it has been.

Now, a little over a year away from being an official Lame Duck, Obama supposedly “resets” American foreign policy. That anyone (including the New York Times) should believe such nonsense would be laughable were it not so pathetic.

Once the historical background is taken into account, Obama’s speech can be parsed for the soggy pancake it is.   Like the huckster he has always been, Obama has simply repackaged the same ol’ same ol’.  But in doing so, he has inadvertently admitted that the Empire is in its deceitful decline.

Addressing the  newly minted Second Lieutenants of the United States Army, Obama enunciated four points.

1.    The United States, Obama said, reserves the right to use force  “unilaterally if necessary, when our core interests demand it – when our people are threatened; when our livelihood is at stake; or when the security of our allies is in danger.”

This statement was an almost laughable no-brainer.  What state does not “reserve the right” to “unilaterally” defend itself when it is attacked?  Such a right is the principal attribute of sovereignty. 

But Obama's neo-con speech writers subtly massaged the text. “Threatened” refers to a potential not to the actuality of an attack or some harm.  “At stake” is similarly equivocal.  In using these terms Obama merely reiterated the Cheney-PNAC doctrine of unilateral response against perceived potential harm to our interests (whatever those interests might be). 

2.    Obama then announced that, for the foreseeable future, “the most direct threat to America at home and abroad remains terrorism.”  He called for a “shift [in] our counter-terrorism strategy” so as to “more effectively partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold.”

Once again, Obama fell back on near laughable but nonetheless obfuscating sophistries.  First off, he never defined “terrorism” which (as a result) serves as an empty variable for all occasions.  From that amorphous non-point his “shift” glided lightly over the inconsistency between a “direct threat” to the homeland and nefarious “networks” seeking a foothold in far away countries. 

How in the world do a supposed bunch of guys with AK-47s and bombs in the jungles of wherever pose a “direct threat” to the United States Homeland?  They don’t, unless “homeland” is redefined so as to include resources in far away places and the effect “at home” of loosing unimpeded access to those resources.  Once again, bananas and oil.

In fact, the Pentagon has done precisely that in its National Infrastructure Protection Plan, of February 2009, authorised by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 7.  

The Patriot Act (2001) defines "critical infrastructure" as "systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital to the United States [that] the incapacitation or destruction of such systems and assets would have a debilitating impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety or any combination [thereof].”

Implementing the Act, the February 2009 NIPP directive lists three pages of “critical” resources and infrastructures in all five continents, such as: “Congo (Kinshasa): Cobalt (Mine and Plant)  ... Australia Manganese - Battery grade,  ... China: C2C Cable Network undersea cable landing, Chom Hom Kok .... Austria: Immune Globulin Intravenous (IGIV) Octapharma Pharmazeutika, Vienna, Austria  ...Denmark: Smallpox Vaccine Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals, Inc.  ... Germany: Critical to the production of mortars TDW-Gasellschaft Wirksysteme, Schroebenhausen, Germany  ... Djibouti: Bab al-Mendeb: Shipping lane is a critical supply chain node ... Tunisia: Trans-Med Gas Pipeline ...Kazakhstan: Ferrochromium Khromtau Complex, Kempersai, (Chromite Mine) India: Orissa (chromite mines) ... Russia: Novorossiysk Export Terminal Primorsk Export Terminal. Nadym Gas Pipeline Junction: The most critical gas facility in the world  ....”

Simply put, the whole world is our “critical homeland.”  Obama’s “strategy shift” is nothing more than a call to pursue the same policy more “effectively” by “partnering” with countries that have what we want.  But this is no different than “partnering” with Pinochet (copper) or the Shah (oil).

3.    Moving to a higher plane, Obama’s  third principle of American leadership was to “strengthen and enforce international order.... from NATO and the United Nations, to the World Bank and IMF.”  Although concededly imperfect, he said,  “these institutions have been a force multiplier.”

In so arguing, Obama simply extended neo-con military doctrine into the economic sphere.  Rebuilding America’s Defenses (2000), advocated “partnering” with host countries in the following terms:

“[F]orward operating bases can range from relatively modest agreements with other nations as well as modest improvements to existing facilities and bases. ... Such installations would be a “force multiplier” in power projection operations, as well as help solidify political and security ties with host nations.”  (Ibid, p. 20.)

The critical question here is “force multiplier” for what?  Answer: for the purpose of “securing and extending” zones of democratic freedom, which is to say, a force multiplier in advancing unchallenged American preeminence, zone by democratic zone.   Obama’s third point explicitly applies the “force multiplier” principle to financial and diplomatic institutions: the United Nations as forward diplomatic base and the I.M.F., as financial power projection. 

But even this is nothing really new. Since Bretton Woods, it has been no secret that the World Bank, the I.M.F. and “economic development” NGOs were strategic tools in advancing U.S. (corporate) interests.

4.    Obama’s first three points grandiloquently culminated in a fourth, which he declared was “our willingness to act on behalf of human dignity. America’s support for democracy and human rights goes beyond idealism – it’s a matter of national security.  Democracies are our closest friends, and are far less likely to go to war. Free and open economies perform better, and become markets for our goods."

A greater heap of tautological tinsel is hard to imagine. Since “democracy” and “human rights” are code-words for liberal political-economies, countries that protect private property and open themselves to investment are obviously our “friends” and just as obviously perform better for the one percent and become markets for our goods.

Needless to say, Obama skipped over the  fact that “open economies” also open their resources to U.S. “investment” and “harvesting”.

He likewise side-stepped the problem that western economies are far from performing better, in case anyone might have noticed.

Similarly, Obama leaped over the glaring issue of whether “friendship” trumped “democracy” as in the case of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait.  Whatever the case, it is sufficient to believe that whatever we do we do so “on behalf of human dignity.”

In sum, Obama’s new policy speech was such a pathetic rehash that it did not even measure up to a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was more like a wolf sporting a few tufts of wool on its ears.

Cats Escaping the Bag

Nevertheless, Obama’s speech did make some telling admissions about the present day execution of the policy.

In discussing point three, Obama observed that sending American troops overseas tended to “stretch thin” our military capacities and “stir up local resentments.”  Rather than go broke playing the Ugly American, it was cheaper and more effective to train the locals to do the dirty work.  He therefore announced a  “new Counter-Terrorism Partnerships Fund of up to $5 billion, which will allow us to train, build capacity, and facilitate partner countries on the front lines.”

So saying, Obama disclosed that, in line with this partnering policy, “we trained hundreds of thousands of Afghan soldiers and police” — a huge number bearing in mind that the total number of police officers in the United States amounts to 706,000.   Evidently “partnering” includes the creation and funding of client armies to do the fighting for us with the added benefit being that the locals will hate our mercenaries rather than us, directly.

Anyone thinking that these “partnership” spanning the globe will cost a mere five billion dollars is not living in the real world.  Perhaps, Obama was thinking of the recently disclosed five billion spent on “assistance” and “partnerships” in the Ukraine. 

Even so, five plus billions is less than the daily-billions it takes to deploy carrier groups and air-lifted troops.  Obama’s Counter-Terrorism Partnerships Fund is all but a frank acknowledgement that the Empire is broke.

Hardly a surprise. The millennium began with a massive multi-trillion dollar giveaway of public wealth to the makers and droppers of bombs, which has now all gone up in smoke. [4]  In tandem, another trillion dollars or so was returned to the wealthiest two percent of the country in tax cuts [5] while corporations who took in more than states and countries in revenues paid no taxes at all.  And all this was followed by massive give aways and “easings” in favor of global financial institutions, including (it is seldom reported) foreign banks.   No wonder the Empire is forced to speak of a “leaner” more “muscular” policy.

But a return to infiltration, subversion and vassal armies is nothing new.   Obama's "reset" is nothing more than an admission that Eisenhower's "partnering" with the Guatemala Junta to "eradicate" the Maya terrorists was more cost-effective than Wilson's "sending in the Marines." 


Obama’s second admission involved Syria and the acknowledgement that one of our key strategies is to stir up trouble so as to afford ourselves an excuse to intervene through our “partners” in the United Nations, NATO or the I.M.F. 

“A critical focus of this [partnering] effort,” Obama said,  “will be the ongoing crisis in Syria.”  He promised to “ work with Congress to ramp up support for those in the Syrian opposition who offer the best alternative to terrorists and a brutal dictator.”

Ramp up support for the Syrian opposition?  This, no less, on the day after it was disclosed that the U.S. has in fact been training and equipping the so-called grassroots rebels in Syria, despite all its previous sanctimonious denials.

In other words, the Obama Doctrine calls for a yet lower spectrum of full spectrum dominance called “astro-turfing”  — the use of civilian NGO’s, students, muhadjeen, skinheads or any ostensibly “grass-roots” assortment of patsies to serve as disruptive wedges for our interests.

To be sure, the United States has always used “affiliated” trade and academic organizations to promote its interests in foreign countries.  In fact, so long as it remains truly civil and peaceful, it is fair game in the ongoing jockeying for influence that passes for “international relations.”  Kennedy’s vaunted Alliance for Progress was a fairly benign example of the technique.

But that is not what Obama's policy makers are envisioning.  In Syria, as in the Ukraine and Venezuela, they envision stirring up “peaceful” protests and turmoil which by seemingly natural degrees escalate into violent confrontation and civil war, the disaster and disruption of which then afford us an excuse to sanctimoniously intervene to make the country “safe for democracy” through more direct forms of military and economic intervention.

Obama’s announced “support for democracy and human rights” and the “international rule of law” is, like almost everything this man says, a blatant canard.

Let it be borne in mind that Syria (as Libya, Iraq and Venezuela) is a sovereign country.   One might not like a foreign country’s political system or way of life, but the whole point of national sovereignty is that the internal affairs of one country are no one else’s business.

Suddenly, in Obama’s “new” international order, Syria’s internal affairs are our business.  We get to arm rebels in a sovereign nation, and then once all hell breaks loose restore law and order coupled with regime change.  This is why Obama avoided defining “terrorism.”  To do so would have ripped the fig leaf from his obscenity.

By definition a “terrorist” is a non-state actor.  He is a person who resorts to violence for some supposed political end but who has no political or judicial authority employ force or violence.  That is why anarchist bombers and rebels are and always have been considered criminals. A person who takes up arms or blows up buildings in order to destabilize a recognized and legitimate government (as Assad’s in Syria or Yanukovitch’s in the Ukraine) is a terrorist.   A dictator, brutal as he might be, is not a "terrorist." 

And so, Obama’s Grand Policy Shift which began with a clarion call to “partner with countries where terrorist networks seek a foothold”  ended with a call to foment, arm and support terrorists in order to give them a foothold in Syria.  

Such cynicism is simply sociopathic.

The Greatest Cynicism of All

At least as cynical as Obama’s shuffle over “terrorism” was his once-again reliance on the Just War doctrine, which was slipped in on the back of a conjunction in his first point.

Attentive readers will have noticed that Obama’s first point reserved the right to use first when “our core interests demand it .... or when the security of our allies is in danger.”

Not only did Obama undertake to defend others but he undertook to do so merely when our these un-named allies were “in danger” — that is, not when they were actually attacked, but when there was some assertable  "threat" to their amorphously considered “security.”

Thus, the “core” of Obama’s “leaner” more focused policy was the naked assertion that we reserved the right to do whatever we damned well pleased for whomever and whatever we wanted. 

It is a “core” technique of sophistry to conjoin two not-necessarily connected things by means of an “and” or an “or” so that they either become equated in the listener’s mind or so that natural and self-evident acceptance of the first spills over into a not self-evident acceptance of the second.  It was in this way that Obama’s first point was nothing less than an open-ended invitation to unilateral interventionism at will anywhere.   It could fool only those who willingly wanted to be fooled.

But this sophistry was simply the nutshell for the meat of a more hoary one — one that is relied upon by all aggressors and makers of war.

At Oslo, in 2009, showing off the patina of liberal education for which Obama’s speech writers are famous, Obama “averted” to the doctrine of Just War, which (in true Cliff Notes fashion) he attributed to St. Augustine.

The press was effusive in its admiration for Obama’s erudition.  The pages and air-waves were filled with pronouncements on medieval doctrines most people had only vaguely heard of (if at all) and really could have cared less about.

It was all stuff and nonsense.  St Augustine never advocated a Just War doctrine.  Cicero did. But Cicero’s Just War doctrine was just as much a pile of high-sounding fluff as anything Obama has ever said.  According to Cicero, a just war must have a just cause and must be waged justly (i.e. with moderation and restraint as in not raping women and slaughtering children).  That indeed is the tautological sum and substance of it.

To give Cicero some credit, his advocacy of “just wars” was a step up from the at will, free-roaming  plunder and slaughter which then passed for Roman foreign policy.  But all it really meant, in practice, was that the Senate or the Caesars should come up with some reasonable sounding pretext to whatever they were about, and that they should, as Obama said, not appear to “flout international norms and the rule of law.”

Christians, however, were on record as opposing all war. Like Socrates, the Christian motto was very simply that it was better to suffer evil than to commit it.  And killing was evil whether “justified” or not.

Needless to say, this extreme pacifism conflicted with certain normal animal-human instincts and it certainly embarrassed the actions and alternatives available to the emperors once they became Christians.  Fourth and Fifth century bishops made squirming equivocal noises and for the most part dealt with the dilemma by punting and looking the other way.

However, the embarrassment became acute when Muslim armies advanced on Constantinople in 851 and demanded its surrender.  The Caliph Mutawakkil (no uneducated man) reminded the Christian emissaries, that as followers of Christ they were pledged to pacifism and, it followed, obliged to open the gates to his entry.  After all the Almighty Who ruleth all, had obviously willed it.

Oh what to do? What to do?  The Constantinopolians were foisted on their own petard, until a man called Cyril Constantine stepped forward with a solution.

“It is of course,” he said, “forbidden for a Christian to defend himself!  As Christ, and as for ourselves, we must  follow the Cross even unto death, as meekly as lambs, if that is the Father’s will for us.  BUT! it is salutary, commendable and holy to sacrifice ourselves in defense of others.  We are not (perish the thought) saving our own prideful and sinful skin, but are rather martyring ourselves for the sake of the meek, the weak, the widowed and the orphaned.  And so, it is our bounden Christian duty, as Christ laid down his life for us, for us to lay down our lives resisting you to the utmost, each of us defending not himself but his neighbor!!”  (As paraphrased, see Theandros: An Online Journal of Orthodox Christian Theology and Philosophy Vol. 2, No 3,  Spring 2005.)

The war was on and Cyril-Constantine was declared a saint.

Of course, it was a pure sophistical equivocation between the one and the many, which shuffled the fact that the “collective us” were still defending the “collective us” and were thus — collectively — doing exactly what was forbidden.

Nevertheless, sacrifice in defense of others, has become the just and standard pretext to rush to the slaughter bet to  rescue widows and virgins in Jerusalem (Crusades) or to support aspiring freedom fighters in Syria.   Plus ca change. 

As ultimately evolved, the Just War doctrine of the Catholic and Orthodox churches imposes stringent preconditions and pre-requisites prior to a resort to force which must be absolutely necessary and unavoidable. But, at West Point as in Oslo, Obama’s Cliff Notes version,  dispensed with all of that technical stuff and proffered a mere rehash of Ciceronian rhetoric, the upshot of which is the United States reserves the right to go to war for it self or on behalf of others as it sees fit, provided it can conjure up toney justifications such as defending innocent school girls everywhere...  That Obama proposes to do so more cheaply, on the fly,  under cover, using drones or getting others to do the fighting does not represent a shift in American policy

To conclude where we began.  Leopards do not change their spots and Empires do not go Swiss.  While he may be personally unscrupulous, politically Obama is what he has to be and has no more control over the calculus of history than the swallow in front of the swarm.

The chief illusion of democracy is the self-delusion that a people can cease to be what they have become.  Empires generate and decay and the economic forces which drive them also, ultimately, devour them.   Those who expected change from Obama and those who think change can come through reforms are living a second childhood.   Change will only come (as it will come) when we cease to be what we are.

This is not to say that Obama has accomplished nothing.  As we were wrapping this piece up, a hillbilly acquaintance of ours rang us up to offer a fitting distillation of Obama’s speech:  “Isn’t it marvelous,” he said, “Obama has managed to convince liberals to accept the neo-con agenda where Bush couldn't have in ten terms.”

 

©Barfo, 2014