But now after two years of random and unilateral killings, gross military intimidation, total support of Israel, and the war on Iraq, they can be credibly assumed to exist. So ultimately, the war on Iraq was about creating the conditions of endless war on ground, then using the reactions to these created events as the pretext for installing a long list of righwing national security measures, including the domestic police state Patriot Act.
Since we are at war, anything is justified as in the best interest of national security.
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Right, this is precisely the point of the war metaphor and the actual war being waged to give the metaphor 3-dimensionality.
In fact, during his Stalin-light-esque performance last night, Bush (via his speechwriters and, ultimately we can guess, Karl Rove) addressed the question of why the US waged war and spoke of war when policing and investigation seems to be the appropriate way to deal with terrorist organizations.
His non-answer was that 'on September 11 the terrorists declared war on the United States and war is what they got!' (cue applause).
Good enough it seems for many (perhaps most) people who were startled by the Hollywood scale spectacle of mass murder into a state of deep suggestiveness - enhanced by a near complete lack of background info and murky preconceptions of Islamic societies.
Geo-political and petro-dollar considerations aside (just for moment now) we can re-think the Iraq war as part of an effort to create - through a 'deed of negative daring' as the mid 20th century militarists of Japan described such things - a situation no successor administration can walk away from with ease.
Since the US cannot leave, the agenda of the Perles of the earth has a greater chance of being pursued - whether Bush is in office or not.
They may have succeeded in creating the conditions they wanted, a meta-state beyond the reach (they believe) of conventional politics. Given the enthusiasm of warrior liberals such as Paul Berman and company (including some of the Dem contendors) for the contradictory and really, quite mad dream of 'benevolent empire' it is not clear that a Democratic President would take the necessary steps to divert this lava flow.
As Zizek has written, they want to rewrite the norms of domestic life (all surveillance, all the time) and international life (un-apologetic aggression masked by Baudrillardian simulations of virtue - at least the Romans had the good manners to announce your impending death was because you were in the way of SPQR's glorous expansion).
There is as much killer clown circus as psycho-pathology as murderous geo-politics at work in the present moment as any practical hegemonic concerns.
...
Let me take a moment here to thank William Gibson and Phillip K. Dick for mentally preparing me for our slow but steady national descent to new depths of bizareness.
DRM