|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Chuck Munson
|| If you look at the Propaganda Model, the U.S. is in need of a new
|| bogeyman right now. An ongoing war against terrorism would fit the need
|| to have a constant threat to keep Americans scared and obedient to
|| authority. The U.S. needs a statist target in order to use its military.
|| Iran and Iraq fit the bil and most Americans remember these countries as
|| anti-American enemies. The U.S. also has no interest in conducting
|| assymetrical warfare against Al Queda. An at-large Osama bin Laden fits
|| the development of the new bogeyman.
I think you're right insofar as the US capital is state-dependent and is accustomed to allying itself to the US military to penetrate new territory and collect govt pork. Statist economies are the ideal target; the US cooks up some bogeyman pretext, moves in its muscle, and then starts squeezing the country for every cent it's got. The WP article on the US-SA relationship I posted is a perfect case study, and one that's being repeated all over Central Asia. Needless to say, the military-capitalist complex has one hand in oil dictators' pockets, and the other in the US taxpayers', who pay through the nose for these billion-dollar-a-day US raids.
But in the case of the "axis", something else is going on. It's not an imperialist raid and it's actually detrimental to US interests secured through previous raids. Oil War I (Desert storm) was a succesful raid that yielded appreciable short-term economic benefits in the form of huge defence contracts, landing the Sauds deep in debt. It kicked Iraq out of the oil market, which benefited the Sauds, and therefore the US military-capitalist complex. With Iran & Iraq "double contained" and left hanging above the Saudi monarchy like a sword, the US seemed to have put a perfect stranglehold on the region. There was no reason to change anything. Sanctions were keeping Iraq to feeble too attack anyone and it was being bombed daily all through the 90's.
But somebody was extremely unhappy about this, and I'm not talking about ObL. The sight of the US getting cozy with the fundamentalist Saudis rankled Ariel Sharon deeply. To his mind, the only reason the US was restraining him from rolling out his final solution for the Arabs was its strategic alliance with SA. Sharon could see several ways of breaking up this unholy union: Demonizing Saudi wahhabism was the first, an easy target. Enter ObL and Qaeda. Suddenly, the fundamentalist agents of the Saudis are revealed to be bloody killers, a fact that the CIA, FBI, and the British MI's have been trying to keep secret for a decade. The Saudis are unmasked, the clash of civilizations comes back on the agenda, and Sharon finally sees his chance to go for Arafat's throat.
Phase two. Sharon's men in the US admin, Paul Wolfowitz and James Woolsey, and his numerous colaborators in Congress and the media start an anti-Iraq crusade. First, it's the fabrication that an Iraqi agent met Atta. Then, it's the anthrax attacks, again falsely attributed to Iraq. After that, it's the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, once more revealed to be a fabrication. Finally, most of the mud slung at Iraq having stuck, Wolfowitz gets the backing of the Pentagon and defence contractors and puts his "axis of evil" into the SotU speech, setting off a chain reaction that has alienated US allies from the EU to South Korea, pushed Russia into cold war mode, and prepared the ground for a popular upheaval in the ME that the Afganistan war failed to provoke. If and when the US attacks Iraq, the ME could be fatally destabilized and turned into one giant Lebanon circa 1975.
That is exactly what Sharon is waiting and praying for: A giant kill zone in which to unleash his army one last time before he goes, conquering new land for Israel, something that has been his lifelong obsession.
Hakki