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Why
Bush Wants War |
The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 was a vicious act that took the lives over 6,000 people. Terror, or the premeditated, politically motivated acts of violence perpetrated against non-military targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, is usually done to influence a wider audience, and to make a statement. It's the 6 o'clock news syndrome that comes packaged with sticks of dynamite. In this case the deadly vehicles were four commercial airplanes traveling at over 450 MPH and each carrying about 26,000 gallons of highly flammable aviation fuel in addition to innocent passengers.
But while the act of terror and irresponsible disregard for human life must be condemned in the strongest possible way, behind the new jingoism about a "call to arms" and "America's new war" a la CNN, pushed with almost gleeful stupor, must be a clear and sober analysis of the situation and the underlying reason(s) why the Osama bin Laden attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon still stinks and reeks of hanky panky. Call me a skeptic, but I'm more than a bit perturbed when the Administration ratchets up the rhetoric dividing up the world into "the civilized world and "them," and starts building coalitions to do war with Third World nations, and the same reconstituted evils that they helped create, nurture and grow.
Indeed, sympathy for the family and victims of those who loss their lives and those who lost loved ones should not and must not blind focused, well-intentioned people to the fact that even as CNN, ABC, MNBC and the mainstream print media milk this tragedy in the most biased, disgraceful, and shameful way, powerful interests are quietly welcoming this event as a big business bonanza. In New York, for example, the City Comptroller has already awarded contracts worth $4 billion to local big businesses. On top of that there is a federal loan guarantee of $10 billion that must have the banking industry wringing its hands with glee and almost wetting itself in the process.
But cash bonanza and all, little of this bread will be spread in the Black and minority communities. Sure, these communities will benefit indirectly from the labors and employment of a few Blacks working in construction companies that are unionized, but beyond that little of this money will be seen in the outer boroughs. Very few minority contractors will get piece of the action and the few that do get will have to subcontract with large exploitative firms that will pay them pittances compared to their friends.
All that aside, it is important to note that modern wars are predicated on a cause that creates the justification to attack another country. And every major war or conflict that the United States have been part of was based on some serious event that resulted in an enraged public calling for retribution and revenge. The trigger for involvement in war, or the decision to go to war, in this case was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. While ordinary Americans have quite naturally become enraged, and are clamoring for revenge, and to teach Afghanistan a lesson, other sinister and opportunistic forces are also at work exploiting the genuine grief and the confused emotional state of the people.
In this climate of mass hysteria and the shameless exploitation of the natural patriotism of a hurting American people, civil liberties that have been long protected have been ripped down and trampled upon. Xenophobia, the mantra of the American ultra-right has been given a new lease on life and is now manifested in the enforcement of the most rabid sections of the 1996 Immigration Laws. The push to grant the CIA and other intelligence agencies the right of assassination suggests that the Administration is about to sanction extrajudicial executions [similar to Israel's "self-defense" murders of targeted Palestenians] based solely on the opinion of a few people with a narrow and jaundiced view of the world. And lastly, the John Ashcroft Justice Department's position that immigrants suspected of terrorism could be held indefinitely by law enforcement and then summarily deported is a telling blow to the legal notion of due process before the law and the usurption of the rights and perogative of the court system. All that is out of the window now.
The imposition of a militaristic agenda on the American people means big bucks for the military industrial complex. And the true nature of this domestic policy of party accommodation is evident by the fact that BOTH the Democrats and the Republicans are on the same page. The Democratic Party's pretense at opposing the Republicans lends credence to the new mood prevailing in Washington that "we're in this together." The Bush Administration has declared that a war in the Middle East with America leading a coalition of nations is the only possible response to the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
But let me back up a bit. The timing of these attacks could not have come at a better moment for the Administration. First, Bush was facing a declining approval rating and an economy that is now in a recession. His rise to the presidency was also still very much under scrutiny and the commonly held consensus that he is an illegitimate president. New foreign policy snafus China, Taiwan, North Korea, and the muddle that is the Israeli-Palestine policy all helped to create the view that here was an Administration in crisis or at best in disarray. And Bush's massive tax rebate to Americans and the dwindling budget surplus was forcing him to reverse himself and start dipping into the Social Security piggy bank.
By mid-August the New York Times was saying that the United States was in the midst of a recession and claimed that the Bush Administration was still putting a bright spin on a gloomy picture. Coupled with these problems was the fact that Fortune 500 companies were massively laying off workers and the Stock Market was doing a set of not too pleasing antics . Unemployment, at the time of the attack, stood at 4.9 percent in August with over one million jobs lost in just that month alone.
Moreover, the Bush vs Saddam Hussein fandango was boring the United States' traditional allies with France and Germany expressing open inclinations to trade with the Lion of Baghdad. And the once steady and stable United Nations was the scene of more and more independent revolts that had the United States holding the sticky end of the stick. Bush and his cronies, pushing a foreign policy of "go-it-alone," Lone Ranger tactics were becoming more and more out of step with America's friends as the rapidly growing global social protests consistently fingered America's hypocritical policies as one of the causes of people's problems.
War, in the short run, would help deflect the American people from these pressing issues and the fact that America was becoming increasingly unpopular abroad. By calling the American populace to arms and to rally around the flag the Bush Administration will make sure that it seizes the opportunity both to wage war abroad under the banner of fighting terrorism, while enforcing anti-democratic social policies at home. By casting a broad net that traps and stifles civil liberties, give the government the legal right to listen to any conversation that it pleases, read any mail it chooses, and to detain and keep locked up indefinitely anybody it deems a threat to internal security, the Bush Administration is using the "war against terrorism" as the excuse to put in place measures that would never have passed muster had not September 11 occurred.
Herein lie the real reasons for the war. Those and the urge by western nations to control the vast oil reserves in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Or is it to carve up the Middle East once more and lay the pretexts for a lasting war that nobody can ever win?