"WRH: THE MUST-HAVE WAR"
" by Michael Rivero
A lot of Americans have been surprised by George Bush and Israel's renewed belligerence towards Iran. After all, for any sane human being, the recently released (in order to prevent the greater embarrassment of a leak) of the National Intelligence Estimate pretty much ended the claim that Iran was some kind of threat to the UNited States. Especially in the wake of the now exposed-to-the-world lies about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, most Americans expected President Bush to take a short pause, at least long enough to ship up an imitation of a sheepish grin and at least the pretense of repentance for having tried the same stupid lie twice in a row. Fool me twice?
But no, Bush has, following his obligatory groveling before the government of Israel, stated flat out that the National Intelligence Estimate does not represent his own 'beliefs' about Iran. In other words, having tried to dump the blame for the lies about Iraq's WMDs on the nation's intelligence agencies, Bush's new position is that he doesn't listen to them anyway; he listens to that little voice inside his head, or in the bottle, whichever comes first.
People are scratching their heads and wondering just what it the agenda driving this push for yet another war in Iran. Figuring out Israel's agenda is easy. Israel just does not like it's neighbors and as long as American blood gets spilled into the sand to kill Israel's enemies, Israel is perfectly happy to see the situation continue along for as long as possible. Hey, it's not THEIR kids getting killed.
But as for Bush and his Cabal, what is the agenda for invading Iran. Observers have suggested that our government is being bribed and blackmailed, again by Israel, to send Americans to die in wars on Israel's enemies. It is no secret that AIPAC pours millions of dollars into Congressional and Presidential campaigns. AIPAC has a long track record of being able to remove anyone from Congress who does not toe the Israeli line. You can ask Paul Findlay and Cynthia McKinney about that.
But in my opinion, the real agenda is not war on Israel's enemies, or US enemies. The agenda is the existence of war itself. That is, the agenda is simply to start a major where, and the location and target are irrelevant.
President Bush has literally bet the nation on these wars. Vast sums of money were removed from domestic spending programs such as levee maintenance, wildfire prevention, bridge inspections, etc. and spent on the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever. Vast more sums were "borrowed" from the Federal Reserve. I use quote marks because the Federal Reserve does not actually have the money it loans to the US Government; it simply prints it up, or adds a few zeroes to a computer register someplace. To the Federal Reserve it is just bookkeeping. But to the rest us os, this is real money, real DEBT, which we will be expected to repay at full face value, at interest, unto the fourth and fifth generations to come. Just how much money has been created to fund the wars is not known. The books get fudged. Trillions have simply vanished into thin air over at the Pentagon. We will never know where because the office inside the Pentagon that was trying to find where all that cash vanished to was struck by a passenger jet on 9-11. Indeed, the passenger jet literally flew past the Pentagon, then doubled back, in order to hit that particular part of the Pentagon. Go figure.
For a while, the flood of new money pouring into the economy was not a problem because the soaring real estate market was a "cash sink." Money was printed up, spent on the defense contractors, entered the economy, then was sucked back out of the economy as citizens tried to prove that they could pay a quarter million dollars for the same home their parents paid forty thousand dollars for. For a while, the scam worked. People felt their lives were improving because even though they still lived in the same house, that house at least on paper was now a mansion! Inflation was under control. Most of the military spending for the wars was off the books as far as Congress was concerned and therefore not a source of political embarrassment.
And it might have all worked had the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq been quick ones.
But it didn't.
So, here we are in 2008. The economy is in a shambles. The real estate market has tanked and no longer functions as a cash sink. So all that printed-up cash being poured into the defense plants and form there into the general economy is starting to pile up, and when you have too much cash chasing too few goods and services, you get price increases, which is what we are starting to see now.
This surplus of dollars creates another effect. Whether you define the dollar as the net worth of the nation divided by how many dollars there are, or whether you simply look at it from the point of view of supply versus demand, the fact is that all those extra dollars push the value of each dollar downward.
For a long time, the US Government did not worry about the value of the dollar, because following WW2, the value of the dollar was set in stone, via an agreement called Bretton Woods. Bretton Woods set the dollar at a specific value. All the others signers agreed, and the dollar became the de facto global currency against which all other currencies were set.
Then the US did something a bit sneaky. After getting the other nations agree to a fixed value for the dollar, the US started printing up more dollars. Other nations had to accept them at full face value because of Bretton Woods and because the value of their own currency was pegged to the dollar. So the United States was buying goods from other countries with printed paper notes that had nothing to back them up, and in this clever manner, exacted an imperial tax on the rest of the post WW2 world. As the US realized that it could just print up more money to buy what it needed from other countries, we stopped making our own products. US dollars began to pile up in the banks for foreign nations which had to hold onto them in order to keep up the value of their own currency.
But, all good things come to an end, and as more and more of the oil producing nations turned to the Euro as their currency of choice, foreign demand for dollars dropped, and this drop is the straw which broke the US camel's back!
Now we are seeing foreign nations trying to slowly reduce their dollar reserves (as a sudden move might trigger a dollar crash), and those nations for whom a dollar peg is not working are already redefining their own monetary system in relation to a "basket" of currencies.
All of this, plus the over-valued and falling stock market paints a very bleak picture of the US economy.
The people of the United States, after surrendering their money to the government which in turn controls their economic lives, are justified in turning on the US Government when the economy goes bad. History is full of instances where Kings have been killed by their own people when the crops failed. That has been true from the slain rulers found bobbing around Europe's peat bogs to Louis XVI to Tsar Nicholas.
The US has been in dire financial trouble before. Twice in the last century, the US was in serious financial trouble, but the people did not blame the government for their reduction in living standards because the government had the perfect scapegoats; WW1 and WW2. Wars are notorious attention-getters, and the people of a nation are far more willing to endure hardships of war then the hardships caused by greedy and incompetent rulers. As the Gilded Age wound down, laissez-faire excesses saw a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the ultra-rich, leading to a great deal of unrest as corporations battled the emerging labor unions. The nation had endured a four-year depression, then the worst in US history. MOst Americans blamed the government for having done too little to reign in corporate abuse.
Then Arch-Duke Ferdinand was assassinated and WW1 kicked off, and with the war, the concerns about the US Government vanished from people's attentions. Everyone was united in the fight against the Kaiser. Their hardships and deprivations now had a purpose. After WW1 ended, and the survivors came home, rebuilding and reconstruction took everyone's minds off the economic problems of the previous decades.
The years before WW2 were in many ways very similar to those prior to WW1. Again, there was labor unrest, a new depression even worse than the previous one, and the Communist movement in Europe and Russia was apreading to the United States, fueled by the anger of the working classes; threatening to end the lives of wealth and privilege of the nation's elite families.
Then Pearl Harbor happened. And in this case, there is little doubt that President Roosevelt MADE it happen, for the purpose of getting the United States into the war against Hitler.
As had happened in WW1, the American people rallied behind the war effort. What was unacceptable levels of hardship during peace was suddenly acceptable. Complaints only aided Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, or so the conventional wisdom said. and again, by the time WW2 was over, the memories of the Depression were decades old, and fading.
So, here we are today. We are not yet in a Depression just yet, and we don't need to be. The American people see what is coming and they do not think that the loss of their high paying jobs, and worse, their homes, is acceptable under the circumstances. Once again we have been seeing a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the ultra-rich.
History is repeating itself, and because history does repeat, no doubt Bush and his advisors are thinking that if they can start a major war, they will be off the hook. Once more the American people will silently endure their hardships for the war effort, silence their complaints, and accept with dignity yet another enforced decline in their standard of living.
For this, to save themselves, Bush and his advisors are willing to risk turning a regional war with Israel's enemies into a wider war, possibly a global war with Russia, possibly with China, possibly with the rest of the entire world as the globe realizes that the United States has become this century's embodiment of the Nazi empire.
It is for this reason that President Bush scarcely missed a step when the National Intelligence Estimate proved Iran innocent of Bush 'a accusations, before trying to stage a new "Gulf of Tonkin" provocation in the Straight of Hormuz. Bush doesn't want this war. Bush NEEDS this war. The entire US Government needs it. Indeed, having already depleted the nation's resources to fund the current invasions, the US Government probably will not be able to survive without a new world war.
Which is why they will do anything, and I stress ANYTHING, to start one."
I'm sure they are working on it right now.
