Iran And Beyond: Total War Is Still On The Horizon |
By Glen Ford
17 July, 2007
Black Agenda Report
The mindset that launched the invasion of Iraq remains embedded in the mentality of the ruling circles of the United States - and compels them to lash out at Iran. Actually, Iran was supposed to have been vanquished, already, rolled up in the euphoria of America-Love that the delusional architects of the Iraq operation imagined existed among the people of the Middle East and the rest of the world. It didn't turn out that way, because it could not. Americans are not loved, because they are not lovable. They kill, big time.
More than half a million deaths later, the same Americans imagine that they can resurrect the cemetery they have created, and make the corpses march under the Red, White, and Blue banner. But that is not possible. There are millions of grieving family members who know who the murderers are: the Americans. These sins will never be forgiven, and they are wounds to the entire Arab family. That's a lot of folks.
When the Bush regime told the generals to cross the Kuwaiti border, and introduced the world to hi-tech "Shock and Awe," they fully expected that the dominoes would fall in Tehran, Damascus and throughout the Arab/Persian/Turkik world. Such was their hubris, and their ignorance. They have not gotten any smarter, in defeat. They still savor taking Tehran, the capital of Iran, and are ramping up for an attack on that nation.
The Bush gang's game plan remains the same: to somehow move beyond Iraq into Iran and Central Asia, to secure the geo-resource space that was the original goal of the Iraqi invasion - to change the world balance of power by military force. The Project for the New American Century was their blueprint for world conquest. It would have carried U.S. forces deep into places in Central Asia that most Americans had never heard of. The Americans planned to plant the flag among happy natives trodding atop vast oil and gas fields, and to effectively partition vast stretches of the planet from the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Europeans and anybody else. That was the plan. It failed, and they have no other plan.
So they go forward with the old plan, the only one they've got. Attack Iran.
In this demonic endeavor, the Bush men have many allies. Democrats like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and everybody else among the Democratic candidates but Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel, act like Dracula when the word Iran comes up. Nuke it! Bomb it! Invade it! Punish it!
By doing so, they give a clear sign to the Bush regime that it's alright to launch another war. Indeed, the Republicans cannot possibly win the 2008 election unless there is another war - something the "American people" can coalesce around. The Iraq war is lost. Let's start another one. Time for a New American Century.
In the corporate media, we hear the same nonsense that we were forced to imbibe in 2003, at the time of the invasion. The same craziness that is rooted in American Manifest Destiny, which maintains that the U.S. is God's gift to the world. God's gift can do no wrong, by definition. America is a good force on the Earth. If half a million people die, that's just collateral damage. On to Tehran.
A larger war is looming. This one will be bigger than the current conflict, and might ultimately consume us. The captains of capital - caught in multiple contradictions of their own making - don't know what to do; they are in a box, with no rational way out. The Great Offensive of 2003, of which the conquest of Baghdad was to have been only phase one, was designed to irrevocably alter the global chess board to establish permanent U.S. hegemony over the earth's most vital resources. China, India and Russia would be reduced to supplicants, begging for entrée to the oil and gas spigots. With the world's actual capital - energy resources - under U.S. control, the artificially inflated dollar would be re-established as the uncontested global currency - monopoly money for the monopoly capitalist class that rules in Washington. No more threat from the euro.
Iraqi nationalists stopped the juggernaut in its tracks, and have broken the back of U.S. ground forces. The Iraq invasion was a wakeup call to the world, a warning that the Americans were determined to enslave...everybody. The warning has been duly noted in every world capital. The elites of Indonesia, Malaysia, Latin America and Europe were shocked and awed into an understanding that the U.S. was out to subjugate them. Since 2003, the Americans have been unwelcome at the table of business, excluded from regional conferences and uninvited from development planning events. Nobody wants the bully in the room. Not even the Europeans.
America has been redlined by the global community. Many American corporations understand that, to their horror. Firms that must cultivate goodwill to do business in foreign lands increasingly view the current regime in Washington as an albatross around their necks, poisoning every prospective deal and soiling the company name. But these companies are not at the heart of the ruling cabal, which is centered on finance and military-industrial capital. These non-productive sectors profit by manipulating markets to create unfair advantage - while creating nothing. They are parasites, retarding global development and standing like George Wallace in the door to prevent solution of the manifold crises that pose imminent threats to humanity.
Ultimately, the parasitic class can only maintain its rule by force. Manufacturing nothing, creating no value except on paper, they must finally call upon the Armed Forces to impose their unearned advantage on the planet. Such was the logic of March, 2003. The Great Offensive failed, but the contradictions that compelled the captains of finance capital to order their political servants to wage war, remain - and are in fact more acute than four years ago. They must wage war, again, to fight their way out of the box.
And so it is on to Tehran, by sea and by air. It does not matter that the attack may ignite an apocalypse; the ruling parasites cannot envision a world in which they are not supreme, in any case. Why not get it over with?
African Americans have no stake in this coming war, but our misleadership has failed to warn us of its imminence. Stuck in Jim Crow politics, we applaud Senator Barack Obama, a pure imperialist who wants to add 100,000 more troops to the Armed Forces to bolster U.S. capability to shape the world's economies to the advantage of his campaign contributors. Although Black Americans are reflexively suspicious of U.S. motives in the world and have opposed every military adventure since the media decided we were worth polling, we are blind-sided by narrow interests of racial pride.
The crisis of capital is coming to a head. It will be very bloody, not because the people of the world want it so - indeed, everyone wants to avoid it - but because the imperatives of a parasitic class require it. They have unfinished business, and war is their only answer.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.