Deja Vu, Again  

The onset of the spring propaganda offensive has seems to have completed the rousing of the bear-like Billmon fom his cave, with a spate of new posts appearing on the confrontation with Iran. Billmon isn't the only person to emerge from hiding, with Karl Rove taking a break from avoiding grand juries to label Bush's Iranian counterpart "irrational". Pot, kettle, black ?

First up from Billmon, a comment on warnings in a prestigious journal about the clear and present danger posed by a dangerous rogue state seeking to expand its weapons of mass destruction program.

According to this article in the latest issue of the prestigious journal Foreign Affairs, a dangerous rogue state is currently seeking a nuclear first strike capability -- as part of a carefully planned bid for world domination.

According to the article, the country in question is working to develop more accurate and more powerful bunker-busting warheads, specificially designed to destroy the defensive capabilities of the world's other nuclear states and decapitate their civilian and military command structures:

If [this] nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country's nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the . . . modernization program. The . . . force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a preemptive disarming strike . . .

The intentional pursuit of nuclear primacy is, moreover, entirely consistent with [the ruling regime's] declared policy of expanding its global dominance.

When you combine this intelligence with what we already know about the country's leader -- an unstable, impulsive man who is deeply unpopular with his own people, but who believes God has chosen him to destroy his country's enemies -- it's clear the international community has an extremely serious WMD problem on its hands.

This sounds like another job for the coalition of the willing. While we may not be certain the regime's intentions are aggressive, we can't afford to take chances. After all, we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

I've commented on the Foreign Affairs article a couple of times previously, so I'll say no more other to quote Past Peak (who has also been quoted by MonkeyGinder).

These people are preparing to take us down a very dark path indeed. As Bill Hicks used to ask, "How does it feel to find out we are the Evil Empire?"

Consider for a moment how utterly devoid all this is of any form of democratic input. We can only discern our own country's policy with respect to something as momentous and horrific as a nuclear first-strike (and we're talking here about attacks that would, in the case of a country like Russia, have to involve many hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons) by doing what we would do to discern another country's policy: we have to look at what kind of weapons are being developed and reverse-engineer their intended purpose.

All of this is happening far from public view, with exactly zero public input. No doubt it's entirely obvious to the Russians and Chinese what's going on. It's no secret to them. It's a secret only to the American public, and it is completely out of our control. So much for democracy.

Billmon kicked off his look at the Iran situation this week with a great piece on "Mutually Assured Dementia" - I quote quite some long sections below that contain some of the pithier pieces of prose but its worth reading the whole thing - Billmon is the best political blogger in the business in your scribe's humble opinion.

Maybe it's just me, but I've been at least a little bit surprised by the relatively muted reaction to the news that the Cheney Administration and its Pentagon underlings are racing to put the finishing touches on plans for attacking Iran – plans which may include the first wartime use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki.

I mean, what exactly does it take to get a rise out of the media industrial complex these days? A nuclear first strike against a major Middle Eastern oil producer doesn't ring the bell? Must every story have a missing white woman in it before the cable news guys will start taking it seriously?

I suppose I could understand it if all we had was Sy Hersh's word that the administration is planning another "pre-emptive" war in the Middle East. After all, we're talking about the same reporter who peddled all those crazy, unsubstantiated allegations about torture at Abu Ghraib prison. You can't be too careful with a journalistic loose cannon like that.

But now that Sy's Iranian nightmare – including the nuclear aspect of it – has been confirmed by the semi-official media, you'd think we could expect a little more ruckus about it from someone other than Helen Thomas. (No disrepect intended to Thomas, but she's probably the media personality the White House would most like to see taking point on this story.)

Even by the corrupt and debased standards of our times, this is a remarkable thing.

The U.S. government is planning aggressive nuclear war (the neocons can give it whatever doublespeak name they like, but it is what it is); those plans have been described in some detail in a major magazine and on the front page of the Washington Post; the most the President of the United States is willing to say about it is that the reports are "speculative" (which is not a synonym for "untrue") and yet as I write these words the lead story on the CNN web site is:

ABC pushes online TV envelope

ABC is going to offer online streams of some of its most popular television shows, including "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost," for free the day after they first air on broadcast TV.

It appears our long national journey towards complete idiocy is over. We've arrived.

Idiots, of course, don't need a reason to be idiots. But to the extent there is a rational excuse for treating a nuclear strike on Iran as the journalistic equivalent of a seasonal story about people washing their cars, it must be the cynical conviction that the Cheneyites aren’t serious – they're just doing their little Gen. Jack Ripper impression to let the Iranians know they really mean business.

This may seem plausible – that is, if you were in a catatonic stupor throughout 2002 and the early months of 2003 (which is just another way of saying: if you were a member in good standing of the corporate media elite.) But the rest of us have learned that when Dick Cheney starts muttering about precious bodily fluids, you'd better pay attention. He really does mean business, and when Dick Cheney means business, bombs are likely to start falling sooner rather than later.

Maybe the idea of the United States would launch a nuclear first strike – albeit a "surgical" one – is too hard for most Americans, including most American journalists, to process. (I'm talking about normal people here, not the genocide junkies over at Little Green Footballs) It's even harder to square with our national self-image than the invasion of Iraq.

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What I'm suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, even though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully – thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president – for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.

More to my point, though, I think it's possible that even something as monstrously insane as nuclear war could still be squeezed into the tiny rituals that pass for public debate in this country – the game of dueling TV sound bites that trivializes and then disposes of every issue.

We’ve already seen a lengthy list of war crimes and dictatorial power grabs sink into that electronic compost heap: the WMD disinformation campaign, Abu Ghraib, the torture memos, the clandestine repeal of the 4th amendment. Again, why should a nuclear strike be any different? I can easily imagine the same rabid talk show hosts spouting the same jingoistic hate speech, the same bow-tied conservative pundits offering the same recycled talking points, and the same timid Beltway liberals complaining that while nuking Iran was the right thing to do, the White House went about it the wrong way. And I can already hear the same media critics chiding those of us in left Blogostan for blowing the whole thing out of proportion. It’s just a little bunker buster, after all.

Why should anyone or anything change? When a culture is as historically clueless and morally desensitized as this one appears to be, I don’t think it’s absurd to suppose that even an enormous war crime – the worst imaginable, short of outright genocide – could get lost in the endless babble of the talking heads. When everything is just a matter of opinion, anything – literally anything – can be justified. It’s only a matter of framing things so people can believe what they want to believe.

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If America has few real friends, Iran has even fewer, at least among the world’s ruling regimes. It’s hard to imagine Russia or China challenging the U.S. diplomatically – much less militarily – over an attack on Iran, oil or no oil. Russia doesn’t need the oil (and in fact would reap windfall profits from any disruption in the Iranian supply.) China would have to balance its need for Iranian oil (currently about 15% of its total imports, which in turn are about half of total oil consumption) against its overall military weakness, its lucrative U.S. export trade and its enormous investment in U.S. debt. Those countries that do rely heavily on Iran oil – Europe, Japan – are still notional allies, and in any case completely under the American military thumb. Finally, most of America’s allies (protectorates) in the Middle East would welcome a strike on Iran, since they either share our paranoia about Iranian nukes, or dread the rise of Shi’a influence in the region.

The bottom line is that most of the world’s powers – and nearly all of its weak countries – have a vested interest in sucking up to the hegemon, or at least in not antagonizing it. And this would still be true even if the hegemon turns out to be a full-fledged nuclear war criminal. If the realists are correct (and their batting average has been pretty high lately) neither morality nor democracy are likely to change that fact. States run by religious lunatics and self-appointed messiahs are still the exception, not the rule, in the global cockpit. Most states are as single-minded and relentless in the pursuit of their interests as your average Renaissance pope – like sharks, in other words, although not as warm and cuddly.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m dead wrong about the short-term effects of a strike on Iran. It could quickly lead to economic catastrophe and a wider war, or evolve into a full-fledged U.S. invasion and occupation of Iran – i.e. “regime change.” This may be the entire essence of the neocon plan. The resulting quagmire could make the Vietnam War look like a minor colonial skirmish with the natives. But even if none of these nightmares come to pass, it’s still a fair bet – based on recent experience – that the long-term consequences of war with Iran would be wholly bad, both for America and the world.

But my thought exercise – What if we started a nuclear war and everybody pretended not to notice? – is still useful, if only as a reminder of how easy it can be to lead gullible people down a path that ends in a place no sane human being would ever want to go.

Billmon also has some of his trademark temporally discontinuous sets of quotes in "Deja Vu Times Two" and "Deja Vu Times Three".

Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days, a U.S. State Department official said.

Bloomberg News
Iran Could Produce Nuclear Bomb in 16 Days
April 12, 2006

The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given.

George W. Bush
Radio Address
September 28, 2002

Of course, as Juan Cole points out, the amount and quality of the enriched uranium produced as part of Iran's little publicity stunt is enough to allow the mullahs to make some really cool painted watch dials. And as the Bloomberg story itself notes, way down towards the bottom:

Rademaker said the technology to enrich uranium to a low level could also be used to make weapons-grade uranium, saying that it would take a little over 13 years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon with the 164 centrifuges currently in use.

But no matter -- the scary-sounding "16 days" meme has been successfully inserted into the lizard-like brainstem of the corporate media, and will soon be sledgehammered into the consciousness of the American people through the force of brute repetition.

Clearly, the maestros who craft these propaganda campaigns understand well that the power of a narrative is in the specifics -- 16 days, 45 minutes, 25,000 liters of anthrax, 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX gases.

This is just good, solid storytelling. Or to put it another way: If you're going to lie, be concrete.

And the last Iran post from Billmon (and I'm probably violating blogger etiquette even more than usual by posting vast quotes from a number of posts), a look at reporting from the "New Pravda" - is it good journalism or is it just propaganda work ?

It's at least mildly encouraging to see that the New York Times may not be on board for the drive to war this time:

Analysts Say a Nuclear Iran Is Years Away

It took Tehran 21 years of planning and 7 years of sporadic experiments, mostly in secret, to reach its current ability to link 164 spinning centrifuges in what nuclear experts call a cascade. Now, the analysts said, Tehran has to achieve not only consistent results around the clock for many months and years but even higher degrees of precision and mass production. It is as if Iran, having mastered a difficult musical instrument, now faces the challenge of making thousands of them and creating a very large orchestra that always plays in tune and in unison.

Of course, you could argue that the neocons don't give a flying you-know-what whether the New York Times falls into rank for the march on Tehran, but they certainly seemed to care about the Gray Lady's views in the runup to the Iraq war -- and again during the counter strikes on Joe Wilson's credibility. But maybe that was just because they knew they had an agent of influence in a place on the WMD beat.

Be that as it may, the Times is still, despite past history and all logic, a major player in the shaping of U.S. and global elite opinion. Simple noncooperation in the coming propaganda blitz may not be enough to stop the neocons, but an aggressive effort to report the truth might at least slow them down a bit.

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I should have pointed out that there is an alternative explanation here, which is that the Times still is faithfully relaying the message the administration wants to get out, but at the moment that message is to downplay the risk of war rather than whip up popular support for it. Certainly, David Sanger's piece in today's paper would fit into that theory:

But at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration, officials say the prospect of military action remains remote in the short term and highly problematic beyond that.

Sanger is a complete idiot (I speak from personal knowledge on this) but he's sentient enough to note the possibility that the sudden eruption of war talk may fit into the administration's diplomatic strategy, as a way of convincing the Chinese and the Russians, as well as the Iranians, that they're serious about this.

We can call this the "madman theory" -- after Richard Nixon's famous quip that it might be good for the North Vietnamese to think he was crazy because it would bring them to the table. I hope to post more on this question later. (The fact that Nixon eventually did go crazy, to the point where his own Secretary of Defense felt compelled to issue orders to every U.S. military commander in the world not to obey any orders unless they came through him personally, is one of those historical details that makes the madman theory less than reassuring.)

Steve at Deconsumption also has a look at Iran ("Iran, We Hardly Knew Ya....") which contains a snippet of tinfoil analysis.

4/11/2006: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announces that Tehran has succeeded in enriching uranium on a small scale for the first time. Even top U.S. intelligence officials insist he must be lying.

4/12/2006: Bloomberg News quotes a U.S. State Department mouthpiece:

"Iran, defying United Nations Security Council demands to halt its nuclear program, may be capable of making a nuclear bomb within 16 days...".

...which by strange fortune puts them right on target (pun intended) with the NeoCons' widely-expected but widely-denied plans. As I've mentioned before, this guy Ahmadinejad could not be a worse leader for the Iranian people if the CIA itself were pulling his strings.... (Pause)

One last non-Iran post from Billmon is a look at "Why People Think the Economy Sucks", which takes a look at some of the trends I've been pondering for a while.

Many conservatives profess to be puzzled by the fact that many Americans don't appreciate the wonderful economic boom we're enjoying, now that the Cheney administration has led us into the supply side utopia.

And it's true, they don't:

Four in 10 – 40 percent – say Bush is doing a good job with the economy, down eight percentage points in a month.

The latest spike in sour feelings can probably be traced to the return, in many parts of the country, of $3-a-gallon gas. But economic sentiment has been unusually negative throughout this recovery – at least when compared to past relationships between consumer confidence and GDP growth, or confidence and the unemployment rate. Even now, with the unemployment rate below 5%, consumer confidence is still about where it was when the last recession officiially ended. Why?

My explanation for our current era of bad feelings is pretty straightforward.





This is what used to be known as the class struggle. It was quite popular back in the day:



It could even make a come back if something isn't done to bring the trends shown above back into better balance. I have no quarrel with corporate profits, particularly if I get to keep some of them, but a situation in which all the benefits of productivity growth flow to capital, and none to labor, not only defies the standard economic textbooks, but probably isn't politically sustainable for long – at least, not without some help from guys like General Pinochet.

Why is this happening? New technologies, skill shortages, outsourcing, downsizing, the decline and fall of the union movement, changing social norms and expectations – or as John Snow might put it, learning to "trust the marketplace." Any of the above, all of the above.

It's sobering to think that what we've seen so far may be just the beginning of our journey back to the good old days of the Robber Barons. The economic effects of integrating China and India into the global labor market – what Laura Tyson describes as the mother of all supply-side shocks – could take decades to play out. And by the time they're done, there's likely to be a host of other low-wage countries lined up outside the factory gates. What Marx called the reserve army of the unemployed has never looked so huge.

Given the current power structure and the elite consensus that globalization can't be stopped, or even slowed, the solution isn't obvious, at least not to me. The New Deal is dead; the New New Deal hasn't been invented yet. But the political effects are easy enough to see. The immigration debate has been saturated by them.

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This isn't going to end well, but like I said, I don't know of any viable solutions – other than to encourage the creation of price bubbles in the assets most widely held by the American middle class. It may be a quick fix, but it works. The popular mood no doubt would be even less enthusiastic about the current "boom" if it weren't for this:

Now, a careless conservative reader might conclude that Billmon is some sort of communist (and quoting Bertholt Brecht at the top of his home page may reinforce that impression), but the point he is making is basically the same one I try to make when I observe the potential for a socialist revival - history shows that certain movements occur when inequality of income (and therefore distribution of resources) becomes too great - and these will be exacerbated in a world where certain crucial resources start to become scarcer.

As far as I can tell, after the second world war the West, on the whole, made the choice to embrace liberalism, which took the realistic view that engaging in an uncontrolled economic competition of survival of the fittest eventually degenerated into fascism and/or communism, and that as these weren't desirable outcomes it was best to make a number of compromises to share the wealth around a bit (forgetting the third world of course - but it was a start).

One of the reasons that I detest the likes of Bush so much is that they've forgotten this basic history lesson and are condemning us to decades of political instability (and worse) if current trends continue too much further...