Kurt Nimmo
Another
Day in the Empire
Saturday, January 13, 2007
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate,”
declares Strother Martin, playing the captain of Road Prison 36
in Stuart Rosenberg’s classic film, Cool Hand Luke. Martin,
of course, was talking about the recalcitrance of his ward, Luke,
played by Paul Newman, but the phrase works as well in another
context—the corporate media failing to communicate reality,
a common enough occurrence in Bushzarro world.
For instance, consider Craig Crawford, writing for that trusty
enough war tool, the New York Times. For Crawford, the interaction
between neocons, by way of their front man, George Bush, and docile
house servant Democrats, translates into “yet another nuanced
competition to inch the polls one way or the other, despite the
flood of polling showing that about two-thirds of the public has
decided the war has become folly.”
Folly is but another word for foolishness, and the Iraq “war,”
actually an occupation tasked with destruction, is anything but
foolish. It is part of a premeditated plan to reduce the Arab
Middle East and Persia to the east into a social and cultural
wasteland.
Mr. Crawford criticizes as a “symbolic gesture” the
“ineffectuality of such a minor uptick” of troops,
more than 20,000, the neocons will send into the Iraqi meat grinder
in the coming weeks. “Even the president’s most ardent
supporters on the war counseled that at least 40,000 more troops,
possibly many more, would be needed to make any difference.”
In fact, as conventional wisdom dictates, in order to defeat
an organized “insurgency,” the United States will
need ten soldiers for every person who picks up a weapon or IED
and resists. In other words, if conservative estimates of the
numbers of the resistance are correct, the neocons need between
500,000 and a million boots on the ground, possibly more.
As Crawford rightly notes, the ludicrous “surge”
idea was contrived in part by William Kristol and the neocon intellectuals,
that is if you can call Straussian nihilists and armchair Malthusians
intellectuals. “In a constitutional democracy that works
as this one was designed to work, the Kennedy and Kristol forces
would be forced to find common ground. But the leaders above their
pay grade are not really talking to one other. They are only talking
at one another.”
Thus the “failure to communicate,” not between the
Democrats and the neocons, mind you, but between Crawford and
his readers. But then we’re talking about the New York Times
here, the “liberal” newspaper that served as an eager
propaganda organ and staging ground for the lies and brazen fabrications
used in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, although we later
heard a murmur of theatrical regret about this role, or rather
a crocodile tear or so issued as Judith Miller, the servile neocon
conduit, became an embarrassment for her role in the outing of
the CIA operative Valerie Plame, vicious neocon retaliation for
Plame’s husband, Joseph Wilson, writing an op-ed, published
as well in the New York Times, calling the claim Saddam loaded
up on Nigerian yellowcake uranium a big fat lie contrived by a
gaggle of neocons.
Kristol and the Democrats need not find “common ground”
because the differences between them are essentially stylistic.
Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer telegraphed the message, within hours
of the midterm elections (and in the case of Pelosi, before the
election), that they would not investigate the neocons for war
crimes or impeach Bush and would instead play along with the Israel
First plan to make Iraq suffer interminably and then, according
to the script, go after Iran, as the neocons and Israelis obnoxiously
demand without rest or respite. Pelosi and Hoyer simply demand
a new management team.
Crawford deems a mistake Bush’s refusal “to heed
the Iraq Study Group’s call for diplomatic overtures to
Iran and Syria.” Mr. Crawford would have us believe the
ISG offered a radical departure from what the neocons continually
insist, when in fact the “bipartisan task force” created
by Congress was organized simply as an “official damage
control apparatus,” as Larry Chin notes.
In fact, the ISG’s parent is none other than the US Institute
for Peace. “Named in true Orwellian fashion, the US Institute
for Peace is a harbor for elite managers of global warfare. Its
former members have included the most notorious war criminals
in modern history, among them Dick Cheney, Frank Carlucci, Caspar
Weinberger, and Stephen Hadley,” writes Chin.
In Bushzarro world, where black is white and up is down, Craig
Crawford is tagged a “liberal,” as he attempts to
nudge us toward what is characterized a centrism and moderation,
represented by the ISG, a nest of Iran-Contra criminals and neoliberal
yesmen for the ruling elite.
It is, as usual, an oily shell game, not that most Americans
notice, let along care. In the meantime, William Kristol, a scurrilous
Straussian neocon and student of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt,
gets a gig at Time Magazine, the onetime home of CIA assets (under
Operation Mockingbird) such as Charles Douglas Jackson, an expert
on psychological warfare who served in the Office of Strategic
Services in World War II.
Finally, on the “conservative,” or rather neocon
fascist, side of the equation, Kristol said during a Fox News
“panel discussion” following Bush’s “surge”
speech, “I wish there were a little more about winning the
war and a little less about helping the Iraqis.”
Of course, the neocons are dedicated to destroying Iraqi society
and culture, as should be obvious to an observant sixth grader,
so Kristol was simply doing his bit to keep the shell game, the
confidence trick—con, scam, grift, bunko, flim flam—in
motion until the mission is accomplished.
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