[lbo-talk] Clarke and Kerry

[C. G. Estabrook]

I think we should restrain our enthusiasm about Richard Clarke, a rather
ordinary imperialist apparatchik who's exciting some people on the left
simply because he seems to be embarrassing the administration a bit.  But
the "911 Commission" is our Hutton Inquiry: if it's not so obvious a
whitewash as the latter, the difference lies only in the slightly variant
forms of allowable debate in the US and UK.

The discussion precipitated by Clarke distracts from the foreign policy
("war on terrorism") on which Bush and Kerry agree -- rather like the
debate over "Who Lost China?" fifty years ago, a faction fight within the
American ascendancy that served to distract attention from the
establishment of US post-WWII hegemony.

Just as Sharon assassinated Yassin to keep the war going -- the primary
justification for a militarized government and a state deep in recession
-- so the heated debate today over who wanted to assassinate Osama more,
Clinton or Bush, takes as given the war on terrorism, the successor of the
anti-communist crusade (Powell let the word slip again) as the
justification of US domination.

A serious policy on "terrorism" (as it's meant in the for-profit media)
would be a combination of police work (do we yet have a complete system
for checking airline baggage for explosives? we don't for container
shipments into ports) and a (massive) change of policy in regard to the
Middle East, so that the vast pool of legitimate resentment from which
terrorists are drawn is reduced.  But that's not about to happen.  So we
have another example of "If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
they don't have to worry about answers." --CGE