Another push of the panic button

911! 911! 911! 911! 911! 911! 911! Communism?

PRESIDENT BUSH TODAY: We will confront this mortal danger to all humanity. We will not tire or rest until the war on terror is won.

The images and experience of September 11 are unique for Americans....

No act of ours invited the rage of the killers, and no concession, bribe or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

On the contrary, they target nations whose behavior they believe they can change through violence.

Against such an enemy there is only one effective response: We will never back down, never give in and never accept anything less than complete victory.

Sooooo...Are not we the ones staying in Iraq until we've changed it through violence? Is Mr. Bush serious when he confidently states, ``No act of ours invited the rage of the killers''? This notion would be laughable were it not so tragic and so costly in lives and treasure. Everything in dear leader's actions over the past few years -- including before 9/11 -- expounds in the most stark terms of undeniable reality for those under the American killer aircraft and artillery of city-sized destruction -- that war is what America wants. Cannot everything Bush says be perceived in the 180 degrees opposite direction by those who have been under sustained American bombing, conquest, occupation, detention, and torture for years and years now?

Bush puts the struggle against the racially-charged notion of ``Islamic radicalism'', ``militant jihadism'', or ``Islamo-fascism'' (choose your favorite scare-word from these) in Cold-War terms, worthy of NSC-68-like organizing principles. Bush continues:

The murderous ideology of the Islamic radicals is the great challenge of our new century. Yet in many ways, this fight resembles the struggle against communism in the last century.

Like the ideology of communism, Islamic radicalism is elitist, led by a self-appointed vanguard that presumes to speak for the Muslim masses.

Osama bin Laden says his own role is to tell Muslims, quote, "what is good for them and what is not." And what this man who grew up in wealth and privilege considers good for poor Muslims is that they become killers and suicide bombers.

He assures them that this is the road to paradise, though he never offers to go along for the ride.

Like the ideology of communism, our new enemy teaches that innocent individuals can be sacrificed to serve a political vision. And this explains their cold-blooded contempt for human life. [emphasis added]

Mr. Bush has taken a chapter out of Wolfowitz, and Wolfie's hero, the late Paul Nitze. In the 1950s, fear of the Soviet Union was the organizing principle under which the American public -- for the most part willingly -- gave up astonishing numbers of lives and boatloads of treasure, leaving a legacy of high-technology instruments of death that still may well end current civilization with a cloud of war Bush apparently is insisting be pursued.

Wolfowitz highlighted Nitze's theory of social organization through Cold War in remarks entitled Paul Nitze's Legacy: For a New World and delivered to an Aspen Institute luncheon in Washington, DC on April 15, 2004:

As every student of security policy must know, NSC-68 which was signed by President Truman in 1950, was Nitze’s strategic blueprint for the Cold War. Although written before North Korea rolled south, it was a document that people quickly took up in the wake of the Korean invasion. It is a document that has been read and reread over the course of 50 years. It is a model of long-term strategic planning. NSC-68 addressed not only importance of a nuclear armed Soviet Union, but also the importance of the ideological orientation of the Soviet Union. Paul recognized the Soviet ideology as an inherent evil. And when combined with a formidable military capability, that ideology became an existential threat.

In its opening analysis, NSC-68 says this, quote: "The Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." As we reflect on these words, it is striking how similar they are to what we face today. Although it is called religious, the fanaticism that we are dealing with has roots that stem much more from the ideological zealotry of the 20th century than from the religious origins on which it claims to draw.

Secular or religious, the adversaries we face today are ultimately animated by their own will to power, not by any altruism. While there are important differences between the challenge of our time and the one that Nitze and these other wise men faced 50 years ago, there are striking similarities in the character of the enemy—a similarity summarized, perhaps, with a single word: evil.

Wolfowitz seamlessly weaves the NSC-68 legacy -- a legacy of relentless dumping of public resources into endless production of weapons of planetary destruction in order to stave off the perceived power of the Soviet state -- into the new world evil of Islamic terrorism conducted at random by mostly invisible stateless actors, also requiring an endless American garrison economy.

So none of what Mr. Bush said today is new. For a past example, take the May 25, 2004 speech Mr. Bush gave at the Army War College in Carlisle, PA:

We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus. We must do our duty. History is moving, and it will tend toward hope, or tend toward tragedy. Our terrorist enemies have a vision that guides and explains all their varied acts of murder. They seek to impose Taliban-like rule, country by country, across the greater Middle East. They seek the total control of every person, and mind, and soul, a harsh society in which women are voiceless and brutalized. They seek bases of operation to train more killers and export more violence. They commit dramatic acts of murder to shock, frighten and demoralize civilized nations, hoping we will retreat from the world and give them free rein. They seek weapons of mass destruction, to impose their will through blackmail and catastrophic attacks. None of this is the expression of a religion. It is a totalitarian political ideology, pursued with consuming zeal, and without conscience.

Does not Bush describe what is actually the US agenda in the Middle East -- imposition of a US-approved neoliberal constitutional client state in Iraq with expanding bases, fuel supplies and hegemonic intentions? Nearly everything he says about them applies to us, 1000-fold.

Bush now continues the process of conflating and amplifying the current perceived threats from this ragtag tapestry of disaffected people who feel their very existence is under attack into a new NSC-68-inspired foundation for permanent war. It's just laughable that such an enemy could form an ``empire'' of global stature. Relative personal wealth of a very few of the ``enemy'' individuals hardly matches even a tiny fraction of the American juggernaut, with its global network of bases -- many on the very soil the so-called ``fanatics'' call home. And there lies the true, unspoken challenge for the criminal Bush regime -- how to reinvigorate the rapidly-decaying public consensus behind American taking and holding of the strategic resources acquired by the Iraq invasion.

A friend recently recommended a radio program offering an alternate interpretation of Islamic politics and the nature of not only Islamic but Christian fundamentalism. From the description at Minnesota Public Radio's Midday (October 4, 2005, click through for audio, requires Real Player):

"A militant kind of piety" Best-selling religion writer Karen Armstrong says that the rise of modernity and the rise of religious fundamentalism are linked. In a speech Saturday at St. Mark's Cathedral in Minneapolis, the former nun said that fundamentalist religious movements were both enabled by modernity and arose as a backlash against modernity.

Let's start from the deep understanding of humanity and its troubles offered by Karen Armstrong rather than the deep criminality and hyperbolic mendacity offered by Bush. We must form a political force that limits the impunity of the current regime. Only by wresting power from Bush and his failed mandarins can we begin honestly to stop more US-led war and reduce the likelihood of more terrorism against which the Bush-Blair policy of warmaking has been a colossal, destructive, and long-term debilitating failure.