Bush Turns to Fear-Mongering
Creation of "Islamic" Bogeyman
The Bush administration obviously wishes it were waging war on Nazi Germany. Even the old Soviet Union would be fine, these nostalgic Cold Warriors seem to think. Something big and menacing that would scare the blue-haired grannies in Peoria into voting Republican because, everyone knows, in addition to being good for business (except for that Depression unpleasantness), Republicans are mean s.o.b.'s and would as soon shoot a potential menace to the US as glare at him.
The Bush administration has the misfortune to have no powerful enemies it is brave enough actually to take on. China and Russia are not exactly enemies any more, and are the only potential state challengers to United States freedom of action as the sole superpower. And they don't go beyond potential. Too busy making money while Washington bleeds itself dry with military adventures. Waiting in the wings to pick up the pieces.
So what enemies does Bush see that he really will confront? Here they are:
1. North Korea.
2. Syria, population 19 million. Poor, militarily weak. Gross Domestic Product of $26 bn. [I.e. nothing.] Minority ruling clique of Alawi Shiites (think New Age California Shiism). State ideology, secular Baath Socialist Arab Nationalism, an ideology founded by Arab Christians and which has nothing much to do with Islam. Would make peace with Israel and the US in exchange for the return of the Golan Heights and an equitable resolution of the plight of the Palestinians.
2. The 1.3 million Shiites of southern Lebanon and the slums of south Beirut (or what used to be the slums of south Beirut), who largely support the Hizbullah Party-Militia. No one had ever heard of them as a threat back in Eisenhower's era. That is because they only organized a militia after the Israelis kept invading and brutally occupying them.
3. The 6 million Sunni Arabs of north, central and western Iraq. Many are secular Iraqi nationalists. A handful are radical Sunni fundamentalists. They had all been encompassed by the secular Iraqi Baath Party before Bush destroyed it.
4. Iran. Population 69 million. GDP per capital $2,825 (exchange rate method). Only some 15-20 percent support their religious, populist government. Weak air force and navy. Iran has not launched a war on a neighbor since the late 1700s.
5. Pushtun guerrillas in southern Afghanistan who don't like foreign troops in their country
6. Al-Qaeda and similar tiny terrorist organizations around the world, in Saudi Arabia, the UK, France, Algeria, Pakistan, India, etc. Often consist of cells of 4-8 persons not in direct contact with traditional al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is proven dangerous, and should be combatted by good police and counter-terrorism work. But it is small and mostly disrupted or under surveillance. If its ideology were so challenging to Bush, then he should shut up those videotapes by capturing Bin Laden and Zawahiri. He has not done it.
This isn't a coherent enemy, it is a laundry list of places Bush would like to control because they have oil or gas, or are key to its development, or have other strategic benefits for the US and/or its regional allies, especially Israel.
So Bush tried to unify the Bogeyman by condemning radical Sunni Islam and then equally condemning radical Shiite Islam.
It doesn't help with North Korea, and signally does not work for Syria or most Iraqi Sunnis.
Of course, it also raises questions as to why Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the ideology of which is not traditionally so very different from that of the radical Sunni fundamentalists, is in with the good guys. (I'm not saying Wahhabis are dangerous, I'm saying most Salafis are not.) So too is the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which was formed by Ayatollah Khomeini, and the Iraqi Da'wa Party, which conducted terrorist attacks on US facilities and personnel in the 1980s. Shiite Islamism in Iraq is good, the same thing in southern Lebanon is bad.
And then of course the United States has more friends among regimes ruling Muslim-majority populations than virtually any other set of governments in the world. Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain are all non-NATO allies. Turkey is a full NATO ally. Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, etc-- all dear friends.
So Bush is basically saying that the US is threatened by a congeries of Middle Eastern movements and governments that have nothing to do with one another, and only one of which has struck directly at the US since Bush came to office. Plus North Korea.
And this is the reason for which he needs to keep 140,000 troops in Iraq, to stop the Muslim fundamentalists from taking it over. But of course, the Da'wa Party, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the Sadr movement have *already* taken it over.
Nor is it plausible that "al-Qaeda" could take over Iraq! The United States couldn't take over Iraq. The Shiites and Kurds would never put up with it. Bush doesn't need to stay in Iraq to fight al-Qaeda there. If Bush weren't in Iraq, neither would al-Qaeda be. There less than 1,000 such foreign fighters, anyway.
So there are good Muslim fundamentalist movements and bad ones. What seems to distinguish them is whether they are eager to do business with Houston or whether they badmouth Bush.
5,000 al-Qaeda members, probably no more than a few hundred of them actually dangerous to the United States, just cannot justify all Bush's aggressive policies.
So now, even while denying he has anything against Muslims, Bush is creating this "Islamic Fascist" bogeyman, which mostly is a figment of his fevered imagination, or is woefully imprecise as a way of describing the phenomenon, or lacks any real political power, or could be dealt with by containment and decisiveness (remember the Soviet Union), or turns out to be some goatherds on the side of a hill in southern Lebanon.
If you want to know what is really going on, it is a struggle for control of the Strategic Ellipse, which just happens demographically to be mostly Muslim. Bush has to demonize the Muslim world in order to justify his swooping down on the Strategic Ellipse. If demons occupy it, obviously they have to be cleared out in favor of Christian fundamentalists or at least Texas oilmen. And what is the Strategic Ellipse?
Voila.
Bush didn't do anything about al-Qaeda his first 8 months in office. He left the job half done in Afghanistan and ran off to Iraq, which was always irrelevant to al-Qaeda. There were no good targets in Afghanistan, just Bin Laden and Zawahiri. Iraq, now that is prime Ellipse territory.
Bush is undermining our Republic, gutting our rights, spending us into penury, and smearing a great civilization, in order to get his grubby fingers on the Ellipse. You get to pay for it twice, once at the pump and once on your annual tax return.
posted by Juan Cole @ 9/06/2006 12:30:00 AM
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23 Comments:
AMEN! or should I say AMEEN!
Nice summary of Bush's attempt to create a coherent enemy. He's working with the empty concept of "Islamic Fascism" and is trying to stuff anything he can into it.
That map looks awfully simular to Zbigniew Brzezinski's map "Global Zone of Percolating Violence"
The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives
Your map(2006)
His Map(1997)
So it's the energy, stupid! And energy is what propels our economy. It is in our National Interest to protect our access to energy (whereever it may be located) and be in a position to maintain our superpower status and most powerful economy in the world. We are King of the Hill and must do what we have to to maintain our position. (Bush National Security Strategy.)
This map looks like a neat synthesis of Barnett and Spkyman. I strongly disagree with the analysis, though.
Two items.
1. Reuters has the details of a "peace treaty" between Pakistan and Islamic militants, a story first reported last night by ABC news.
and
2. Report: Taliban Taking
Over Again
by Sanjay Suri
LONDON - The Taliban have regained control over the southern half of Afghanistan and their frontline is advancing daily, a group closely monitoring the Afghan situation said in a report Tuesday.
After absorbing Bush's portrait of armaggedon, my mind conjures up a scenario akin to the Spanish conquistadors rather than Hitler and Lenin.
Thousands of dhows sailing up the Hudson, the Saint Lawrence, the Patomac, and the Missisippi. All filled with Islamo fascists dedicated to converting the population to some form of Islamic fundamentalism. And us, like the indigenous cultures of South America, unable to thwart the onslaight.
Meanwhile, the people who live on the northern half of that ellipse, who aren't muslim either, are more than happy to continue making money off of the west and refit their own military.
After all, Lockheed-Martin is happy to sell the best DARPA comes up with to our friends, aren't they?
Strategery at work!
Very good.This analysis implies the Bush regime is fascist. It seeks world supremacy based on military and economic superiority and the control of world resources by a corporate, authoritarian nation-state. That was Hitler's world view. It is the core of the fascist ideology. Welcome folks to the new political reality.
Could you please give the reference for the strategic ellipse? Thanks for your great work
Yes, and when you add events in west Africa, it's clearly the Global War for Oil, with Cheney as Oilfinger. Oh, and there're muslims in west Africa too. Hmmm...
War Crimes for Oil. Perhaps Oil Crimes is a better sound byte. If a really big "enemy" is wanted, radical climate chaos presents a global foe of greater potential power than all the nations' militaries combined--including nukes.
These brief sentences, "Over the past 200 years, human activity has increased carbon dioxide to well outside the natural range and we have no analogue for what will happen next.
"We have a no-analogue situation. We don't have anything in the past that we can measure directly,"
from this short report, http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0905-06.htm cryptically tells us the climate change we humans are forcing has no precedent, although we do know what has happened in the past resulting from natural forcing--melted ice caps, destroyed ecosystems and mass extinctions. That sounds like a huge challenge to prevent; sort of like the planet using climate as a weapon to rebalance itself by ridding itself of the polluters causing the problem.
By denying climate chaos, Cheney and company don't need to face up to the really big "enemy," one the military-industrial-complex and its allies big oil have no weapons to combat and thus no way to make money from the "war." Indeed, any serious effort defending against increasing the severity of the "war" would necessitate the demise of both those "institutions," which would be wholy in the interests of Humanity, but not in the interest of those very few sitting behind Cheney, Bush, and the rest of "our" war criminals. When Cheney said "Our lifestyle is non-negotiable," he really meant the lifestyle of the two above named institutions. And the history of US imperial behavior proves this to be true.
I sure miss the good old days, when Bush visited a mosque (did he only do it once after 9/11?) and said Islam is peaceful and that he condemned hate crimes against Muslims, and when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said awful things about Islam, Bush actually went and publicly disagreed with them.
I guess those days are gone, he won't even say anything positive about it anymore, too worried about upsetting his "base." Muslims in America are furious, since they voted for Bush in droves in 2000 and took credit for helping him into office, only to be repaid by such a slap in the face.
Correction.
Your map(2006)
His map(1997)
Very interesting summary of the raison d'etre of Bushco's military adventurism--they are indeed grasping at straws trying to conjure up a modern-day boogeyman that appears to be as potent as enemies past. The other serious flaw in their argument is that, unlike communism, it doesn't translate into the Western hemisphere, and all of the Latin American intrigues that the MNCs have relied upon to maintain their power grip on these countries...although given their modus operandi, we may soon be hearing how al Qaeda has formed a partnership with Venezula and Cuba!
Yes, I agree that Iraq and the rest is about controlling access to the bulk of the world's oil. Yet, if that's the case, then pinning it on the demented Bush and his administration is too easy, since the Democrats almost to the person supported the war and still essentially do. That tells us that the Mideast policy is fundamentally about U.S. capitalism and its desire to gain a strategic long-term position relative to it major competitors. Obviously, control of oil is it. To wit, has anyone seen full-page ads in the NYT or elsewhere signed by some segment of major corporation CEOs taking issue with the Iraq war or Middle East policy, as so often happens when some major issue is at hand for the U.S. and things aren't going so well?
Speaking of the current administration, in Carroll's House of War, drawing on LeFeber, he recounts how Rumsfeld brought Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz into the Defense Dept in the Ford Administration, soon to be joined by Colin Powell, Armitage and Condelezza Rice (elder Bush was named CIA Director). They were eventually known as the Vulcans, and were united by a hunger for martial dominance born of the failure in Vietnam. They were hamstrung at the time by Congress' unwillingness to fork up the money to defend the Thieu regime in its final days, followed soon by the Mayaguez fiasco in which Ford bombed and shot up Cambodia and lost 40 marines to trying to save a boat whose crew had been released and set adrift days before. Carrol notes that despite vast differences in scale and intention, the incompetent rescue attempt was an overture of things to come from Rumsfeld et al.
Yes, I agree that Iraq and the rest is about controlling access to the bulk of the world's oil. Yet, if that's the case, then pinning it on the demented Bush and his administration is too easy, since the Democrats almost to the person supported the war and still essentially do. That tells us that the Mideast policy is fundamentally about U.S. capitalism and its desire to gain a strategic long-term position relative to it major competitors. Obviously, control of oil is it. To wit, has anyone seen full-page ads in the NYT or elsewhere signed by some segment of major corporation CEOs taking issue with the Iraq war or Middle East policy, as so often happens when some major issue is at hand for the U.S. and things aren't going so well?
Speaking of the current administration, in Carroll's House of War, drawing on LeFeber, he recounts how Rumsfeld brought Cheney, Perle and Wolfowitz into the Defense Dept in the Ford Administration, soon to be joined by Colin Powell, Armitage and Condelezza Rice (elder Bush was named CIA Director). They were eventually known as the Vulcans, and were united by a hunger for martial dominance born of the failure in Vietnam. They were hamstrung at the time by Congress' unwillingness to fork up the money to defend the Thieu regime in its final days, followed soon by the Mayaguez fiasco in which Ford bombed and shot up Cambodia and lost 40 marines to trying to save a boat whose crew had been released and set adrift days before. Carrol notes that despite vast differences in scale and intention, the incompetent rescue attempt was an overture of things to come from Rumsfeld et al.
My question for George W. Bush:
"Sir, many people around the globe are confused by your comparison of violent extremists from the Middle East and Fascist Nazis from WWII. Many consider such a comparison hypocritical and deliberately mis-leading, given your own militant, nationalistic, far-right agenda.
Of course, your grandfather, Prescott Bush, was convicted of trading with the Nazis during WWII. Like many wealthy US citizens, Prescott Bush was keen to take advantage of lax post-Depression laws and investment opportunities in Germany as Hitler rose to power.
Indeed, there was a concerted effort by the some of the wealthiest US citizens to ensure that the US did not enter WWII. Many even wanted to enter on the Axis's side, rather than join the Allies. This caused President Roosevelt to warn that "among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing."
Sir, you have stripped US citizens of their civil rights, in defiance of the US Constitution. You have invaded a foreign country on the basis of lies, in defiance of international law. You have overseen the secret rendition, torture and detention without trial of prisoners, in defiance of the Geneva Convention. You have burdened generations of US children with astronomical debts while handing out tax breaks to the richest of the rich.
Is it not true, sir, that you, in fact, are the real Fascist? The real Nazi? The real Terrorist?"
If the graphic is what i think it is, it's from a German website, BGR. That may be a German government agency, i can't tell. i've used the same graphic in class presentations in the past few months.
i've always found it amusing to watch Bush talk about the new rising evil in the world (and North Korea). It's pretty hard to link NK to anywhere else in the world, or at least it used to be. Now Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela are joining hands based entirely on the fact that they are anti-Bush and anti-American interests.
Short memory? Mendacity!
Thank you for posting up the picture (a bit ago) of Rumsfeld chummily shaking hands w/S. Hussein. I wish we had one---does one of you know what the timeline would be---of the senior Bush signing checks to him, or maybe old paystubs from when we were training Bin Laden. These folks (Cheney, Bushes, Rumsfeld, Vulcans) are not just appeasers, they have been massive enablers.
Can't forget hypocrisy! or demagoguery.
And they can't let us remember-- for example, how successful our previous attempt at regime change was in Iran. How well Pinochet turned out. Who helped recruit ultra-wackos to fight the USSR.
...to our shame.
....Thank you Dr. Cole for your ongoing work, and to anyone who might be near Boston, if you don't know about these folks, check them out:
http://www.bostondialogue.org/
I attended their open-to-all-faiths Iftar dinner last year and it was a Very Good Thing. Maybe if more of us band together we can reduce the building wave of prejudice.
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was campaigning against George Bush Snr for the Republican Party ballot, Reagan's camp ran an advertisement which claimed:
"A coalition of multinational corporate executives, big-city bankers, and hungry power brokers... want to give you George Bush... their purpose is to control the American government."
Was this "coalition" ultimately successful in their goal? It certainly looks that way.
Bush Turns to Fear-Mongering
No doubt, but is "turns" the word? When has he played it any other way?
When you consider what your analysis shows – that the real aim of the GWOT is to establish & maintain an American presence on the Eurasian landmass and to control the spigot of oil that not only feeds our economy but even more so the European Community, Japan, and China – then you can see that Iraq truly is a new Vietnam. Why were we in Vietnam? The USA needed to establish its dominance in Asia and Indo-China was then the most unsettled area. The countries of the region (Laos, Cambodia, India. China, etc.) were still determining their borders up to the start of the Vietnam occupation. Of course who were we really confronting in Vietnam? China, of course. And hence the importance of North Korea in the “axis of evil” nonsense since North Korea justifies a continued American military nuclear presence not far from Beijing. We are in Iraq and all the other areas mentioned because we are really confronting the Chinese first and the Russians second. This is the big game of the 21st Century. But our “leaders” have to lead us down to defeat again in a pack of lies. Take any book or good magazine article from the late 60s and early 70s, search and replace the word “Vietnam” with “Iraq” and you’re reading today’s news.
This whole gang has been about fear from the beginning -- even before 9/11. Say you’re Dick Cheney and you’ve got a war to start… You start to pressure the limp-wristed wimps at CIA to do their jobs and dig up the WMD evidence you know is there. Two years, and they're still empty-handed. Hopeless. Even when hand-picked defectors provided by Ahmad Chalabi are set right in front of them, all they do is discredit them. Those crypto-liberals at CIA need to be taught a lesson. And that’s what you do.
You're giving the Bush admin way too much credit for coherency. Remember, these were the guys who didn't know and/or didn't care that there were two kinds of 'Islaofascists' in Iraq before the invasion.
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