[Mb-civic] Why we "need" wars...AND....why well-meaning rock stars may damage Africa

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

Here are two very excellent articles that will illuminate your understanding of  
our very strange world.  The first one, by WR Pitt, explains why we will keep 
having wars and lies to justify them until we change the underlying 
economics.  If you have a bit more time and stamina, you will appreciate the 
2nd one, about rock stars and Africa and Bush/Blair.  As a professioal healer, 
I am absolutely convinced that understanding your world, even if the details 
are nasty, is good for your mental and phyical health......
--Mha Atma


www.truthout.org/docs_2005/062305X.shtml

t r u t h o u t | Perspective    Thursday 23 June 2005

The thing we don't talk about

By William Rivers Pitt

With the revelation of the secret Downing Street Minutes, which exposed
the fact that George Bush and Tony Blair had decided to invade Iraq in
April of 2002, a heated debate has blown through media, congressional and
activist circles. The decision to go to war in Iraq was made before any
public debate was initiated, before the United Nations was brought into
the conversation, confirming that Bush's blather about wanting peace and
leaving war as the last resort was just that: blather.

So why did we go?

It had been suspected, and has now been confirmed by the Minutes, that
Bush took us to war on false pretenses and by way of a whole constellation
of lies and exaggerations. First it was the weapons of mass destruction
that were not there. Then it was connections between Saddam Hussein and al
Qaeda that did not exist. Finally, it became about bringing freedom and
democracy to the region, which has emphatically not happened.

Threaded through the discussion was the belief that Bush and his
petroleum-company allies lusted after Iraq's oil. There was also the idea
that Bush wanted Saddam's head because of the "unfinished business" left
by his father in 1991. Some whispered that Iraq had intended to change the
monetary basis of its petroleum dealings from the dollar to the Euro, an
action that would have spelled financial disaster for the boys in Houston.
Finally, many believed Bush ramped up a war push in order to give
Republicans a flag-waving platform to run on in the 2002 midterms.

All of these were on the table as reasons for an invasion, though most of
them were not included in public debate. Yet the real reasons behind this
war, the real reasons for many of our military actions over the years,
were never discussed. As with almost everything we deal with today in the
foreign policy realm, the real reasons we invaded Iraq harken back to
World War II and the Cold War.

When the United States jumped into World War II, President Roosevelt
ordered the American economy be put on a wartime footing. This was a sound
decision: the country had to speed its industrial capabilities up to a
sprint in order to manufacture a huge fighting army out of whole cloth.
The action was successful beyond measure. The economy was invigorated, 
the
war was won, and in the process the military/industrial complex, so named
by President Eisenhower, was established as a power player in the American
economy.

In 1947, President Harry Truman put forth the Truman Doctrine, a broad
policy of foreign intervention to combat the feared spread of Communism
around the world. The Doctrine was essentially created by a small band of
men like Paul Nitze, who were the precursors of what we now call
neo-conservatives. Nitze, it should be noted, was the mentor of Paul
Wolfowitz, who went on to be the mentor of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick
Cheney.


The establishment of the Truman Doctrine, the establishment of the
"permanent crisis" that was the Cold War, required that the American
economy remain on a wartime footing. There it has remained to this day,
despite the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the threat of a
global communist takeover. Ten thousand books have been written on this
subject, on the impact of our wartime economic footing upon domestic
policy, the environment, global affairs and politics. In the end, however,
the fact that our economy is set on a wartime footing means one simple
thing.

We need wars.

Without wars, the economy flakes and falls apart. Without wars, the
trillions of dollars spent on weapons systems, military preparedness and a
planetary army would dry up, dealing a death blow to the economy as
currently constituted. Without wars or the threat of wars, the populace is
not so easily controlled and manipulated.

Let us be clear, however. When I say "we," I do not refer to your average
working man and woman on the street. The man running the shoe store or the
woman managing the bar does not need war to remain economically viable.
The "we" I speak of is that overwhelmingly wealthy and powerful few who
have wired their fortunes into the manufacture of weapons, the plumbing of
oil, and the collection of spoils through political largesse.

These are the people who need war. They need it to pile up the contracts
from the Pentagon, to enrich the banking institutions that protect them,
to pay the lawyers who defend them, to pay the lobbyists who sustain them,
to purchase the politicians who champion them, and to buy up the media
that hides them from sight.

Yet though this group is small in number, they are "we," for they are our
leaders and our myth-makers. They have convinced the majority of this
population that war is a necessity. They create the premises for combat
and invasion, they convince and cajole and, when necessary, frighten us
into line. All too often, almost every time, we buy into the fictions they
manufacture, thus sustaining the "permanent crisis" mentality and the need
for war after war after war.

The economic need for war creates the required excuses for war. The
"permanent crisis" of the Cold War motivated the United States to support
the Shah in Iran, a decision that led to the Islamic Revolution and the
establishment of Iran as a permanent enemy. The Cold War motivated us to
support Saddam Hussein financially and militarily as a bulwark against
Iran. The Cold War motivated us to establish the House of Saud in Saudi
Arabia to ensure a steady supply of oil. The Cold War motivated us to
support Osama bin Laden and the so-called "Jihadists" in Afghanistan in
their fight against the Soviet invaders.

Now, we prepare to invade Iran. We have invaded Iraq for the second time
in 15 years. We will never invade Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that this
nation's vast wealth and Wahabbist extremists make it the birthing bed of
international terrorism. We lost two towers in New York City at the hands
of a group that we created in the 1980s to fight the Soviets. Put plainly,
the "permanent crisis" of the Cold War created a cycle of military
self-justification. We build enemies with arms and money, and then we
destroy them with arms and money, thus keeping our wartime economy afloat.

The Cold War ended more than ten years ago, but we still need war, and we
need that "permanent crisis" to continue the cycle of military
self-justification. If a legitimate war is not available, we will create
one because we have to. We have our new "permanent crisis," which we call
the War on Terror, another turn of the cycle created by an attack that our
foreign policy and war-justifications of the last 50 years made almost
inevitable.

We need wars. That's why we are in Iraq. This invasion and occupation of
that nation has given our economy the war it needs, and has also created
the justification for future wars by creating legions of enemies in the
Mideast and around the world. Our wartime economy will tolerate no less.

Talking about Bush's lies regarding weapons of mass destruction, or about
bringing democracy to the region, or about the dollar-to-Euro transfer, or
about the midterm elections, is window-dressing. We invaded Iraq because
we had to. This is the elephant in the room, the foreign policy reality
nobody talks about.

If you want peace, work to change the underpinnings of our economy. Until
that change is made, there will always be wars, invasions, and lies to
brings such things about. It is what it is.

***

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1510808,00.html

The Guardian   Tuesday June 21 2005

Bards of the powerful

Far from challenging the G8's role in Africa's poverty, Geldof and Bono
are giving legitimacy to those responsible

By George Monbiot

'Hackers bombard financial networks", the Financial Times reported on
Thursday. Government departments and businesses "have been bombarded 
with
a sophisticated electronic attack for several months". It is being
organised by an Asian criminal network, and is "aimed at stealing
commercially and economically sensitive information". By Thursday
afternoon, the story had mutated. "G8 hackers target banks and
ministries", said the headline in the Evening Standard. Their purpose was
"to cripple the systems as a protest before the G8 summit." The Standard
advanced no evidence to justify this metamorphosis.

This is just one instance of the reams of twaddle about the dark designs
of the G8 protesters codded up by the corporate press. That the same
stories have been told about almost every impending public protest planned
in the past 30 years and that they have invariably fallen apart under
examination appears to present no impediment to their repetition. The real
danger at the G8 summit is not that the protests will turn violent - the
appetite for that pretty well disappeared in September 2001 - but that
they will be far too polite.

Let me be more precise. The danger is that we will follow the agenda set
by Bono and Bob Geldof.

The two musicians are genuinely committed to the cause of poverty
reduction. They have helped secure aid and debt-relief packages worth
billions of dollars. They have helped to keep the issue of global poverty
on the political agenda. They have mobilised people all over the world.
These are astonishing achievements, and it would be stupid to disregard
them.

The problem is that they have assumed the role of arbiters: of
determining on our behalf whether the leaders of the G8 nations should be
congratulated or condemned for the decisions they make. They are not
qualified to do so, and I fear that they will sell us down the river.

Take their response to the debt-relief package for the world's poorest
countries that the G7 finance ministers announced 10 days ago. Anyone with
a grasp of development politics who had read and understood the ministers'
statement could see that the conditions it contains - enforced
liberalisation and privatisation - are as onerous as the debts it
relieves. But Bob Geldof praised it as "a victory for the millions of
people in the campaigns around the world" and Bono pronounced it "a little
piece of history". Like many of those who have been trying to highlight
the harm done by such conditions - especially the African campaigners I
know - I feel betrayed by these statements. Bono and Geldof have made our
job more difficult.

I understand the game they're playing. They believe that praising the
world's most powerful men is more persuasive than criticising them. The
problem is that in doing so they turn the political campaign developed by
the global justice movement into a philanthropic one. They urge the G8
leaders to do more to help the poor. But they say nothing about ceasing to
do harm.

It is true that Bono has criticised George Bush for failing to deliver the
money he promised for Aids victims in Africa. But he has never, as far as
I can discover, said a word about the capture of that funding by
"faith-based groups": the code Bush uses for fundamentalist Christian
missions that preach against the use of condoms. Indeed, Bono seems to be
comfortable in the company of fundamentalists. Jesse Helms, the racist,
homophobic former senator who helped engineer the switch to faith-based
government, is, according to his aides, "very much a fan of Bono". This is
testament to the singer's remarkable powers of persuasion. But if people
like Helms are friends, who are the enemies? Is exploitation something
that just happens? Does it have no perpetrators?

This, of course, is how George Bush and Tony Blair would like us to see
it. Blair speaks about Africa as if its problems are the result of some
inscrutable force of nature, compounded only by the corruption of its
dictators. He laments that "it is the only continent in the world over the
past few decades that has moved backwards". But he has never acknowledged
that - as even the World Bank's studies show - it has moved backwards
partly because of the neoliberal policies it has been forced to follow by
the powerful nations: policies that have just been extended by the
debt-relief package Bono and Geldof praised.

Listen to these men - Bush, Blair and their two bards - and you could
forget that the rich nations had played any role in Africa's accumulation
of debt, or accumulation of weapons, or loss of resources, or collapse in
public services, or concentration of wealth and power by unaccountable
leaders. Listen to them and you would imagine that the G8 was conceived as
a project to help the world's poor.

I have yet to read a statement by either rock star that suggests a
critique of power. They appear to believe that a consensus can be
achieved between the powerful and the powerless, that they can assemble a
great global chorus of rich and poor to sing from the same sheet. They do
not seem to understand that, while the G8 maintains its grip on the
instruments of global governance, a shared anthem of peace and love is
about as meaningful as the old Coca-Cola ad.

The answer to the problem of power is to build political movements that
deny the legitimacy of the powerful and seek to prise control from their
hands: to do, in other words, what people are doing in Bolivia right now.
But Bono and Geldof are doing the opposite: they are lending legitimacy to
power. From the point of view of men like Bush and Blair, the deal is
straightforward: we let these hairy people share a platform with us, we
make a few cost-free gestures, and in return we receive their praise and
capture their fans. The sanctity of our collaborators rubs off on us. If
the trick works, the movements ranged against us will disperse, imagining
that the world's problems have been solved. We will be publicly
rehabilitated, after our little adventure in Iraq and our indiscretions at
Bagram and Guantánamo Bay. The countries we wish to keep exploiting will
see us as their friends rather than their enemies.

At what point do Bono and Geldof call time on the leaders of the G8? At
what point does Bono stop pretending that George Bush is "passionate and
sincere" about world poverty, and does Geldof stop claiming that he "has
actually done more than any American president for Africa"? At what point
does Bono revise his estimate of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as "the John
and Paul of the global-development stage" or as leaders in the tradition
of Keir Hardie and Clement Attlee? How much damage do Bush and Blair 
have
to do before the rock stars will acknowledge it?

Geldof and Bono's campaign for philanthropy portrays the enemies of the
poor as their saviours. The good these two remarkable men have done is in
danger of being outweighed by the harm.


-- 
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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