What is likely to happen? was Re: [Marxism] Alma Powell says Bush used Colin to sell war

[Andy]

On Oct 7, 2006, at 9:16 PM, <g.maclennan at qut.edu.au> wrote:

> So the next few months could take us all to a new level of barbarism.

My evolving thoughts coincide with Gary's.

On the evening of September 11th, 2001, I sat on our back stoop and had 
a vision, if you will.

The American rulers have been hamstrung in their ability to wage 
imperial war ever since Nagasaki.  GHW Bush declared that he had cured 
the nation of the Vietnam Syndrome -- as he ordered the US troops out 
of Iraq.  Clinton's package was "humanitarian war" -- and delivery 
brought "humanitarian" high-altitude and cruise-missile bombing.  We 
might think back much earlier, or expand on the reasons why ...

But (I thought then, with 9.11) they find themselves suddenly free of 
these charades.  They've been walking along with a big hammer in their 
belt loop, caressing it with their fingertips.   And here comes the 
bright green light to go ahead and brandish that hammer.

Of course.  As the chief resident in general surgery once explained in 
the context of reviewing difficult decisions that led a patient to 
undergo an unnecessary operation -- "when the only tool you have is a 
hammer, the whole world looks like a nail."

And so would come the bombs.   How many thousands or millions will 
suffer and die?  Will they use nuclear weapons?  Like so many things in 
American culture, I thought, they will because they can.

In anticipation -- the dread.  This grief-before-the-fact was an 
excruciating realization ( -- Carolyn Forche's "netted fish.")  As I 
tried to understand this idea, a piece of which meant that big 
political problems might be potentially reducible to the swing of the 
American military hammer -- my next thought then was if really they 
would truly propose to send bombs and then more bombs, then events will 
quickly pile upon one another -- each with its own retinue of 
unforeseen consequences, resistance, rebellion, spinning out of control 
and gathering its own dynamic, and so on -- leading to the likelihood 
they will destabilize the entire system! -- _in our lifetimes_.

These ideas, which I shared and sharpened in dialogue back then, 
inspired me with a certain sense of responsibility, to activism.   
(Ourselves -- and our children's lives -- or nothing.)

Since then the events have proven quite dreadful -- oh how they wet 
their pants when their planes that bombed Afghanistan returned safely 
home to Missouri;  how they crowed with blood-lust in advance of the 
"Shock and Awe" conflagration in Baghdad;  DU;  the repeated bombing of 
weddings;  the prisons and the torture... too many examples.

On the other hand we're still finding locally those people who are 
radicalizing, reaching out to them and among these activists, meeting 
new socialists, new revolutionaries.  We are doing what we can, 
starting with what we have and find.

Meanwhile the American capitalist class appears still convinced of the 
need to swing that hammer down and on this there has been no dissent 
from their own (increasingly) homogenized members.  Bush may be running 
along on a thin string - as in the NY Times belated squawk in witness 
of the death of habeas corpus - but where is the evidence of a viable 
back-up plan to neo-Con "leadership"?  I see little but ruling class 
assent for the policies of the hammer, which involve detailed 
preparation of mass human slaughter in Iran, North Korea and, as Bush's 
infamous words at West Point, "any dark corner."


To Gary's sketch I might just add that Russia weighs heavily in their 
calculus, particularly with respect to the American nuclear strategy.

Thank you Fred and Gary

Andy