At the end of January 2004, my commentary entitled The Neocon Job May Backfire...Big Time was posted at www.americahelhostage.com. While that site ceased to be updated shortly thereafter, it is still online and interested parties can read the full text of my piece. Briefly, it pointed out that US president George Bush had to bow to Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani because of the fact that his people could not only make the occupation forces’ lives far more dangerous, they could also block the only real exit from Iraq into Kuwait. Therefore, it was clear the Neocons would have to agree to elections, whose outcome any schoolchild, possibly even Bush, could predict. But they figured that if they could rig two consecutive elections here at home, why not one in a country being occupied by US military forces? It appears they did fudge the numbers for the al-Sistani slate from close to 60% to below the point where there would have been a sufficient majority to instate a republic based on Islamic law. And so the Kurds were bolstered to the point that the train wreck would at least be slowed, for face-saving purposes if nothing else.

As with most ideologically-driven enterprises, not only have the wheels come completely off, but the dominos are assuredly now falling in quite the opposite direction as intended. The only reason the Neocons thought so little of the Shia is because they had been dominated for 1200 years by a Sunni minority. But they should have looked around the neighborhood a bit to see where this concept of ‘spreading Democracy’ (a backup rationale, though it was) would inevitably lead.

With Iran as a firm anchor, a now-aroused Shia majority in Lebanon and nothing but Shia majorities in between, it is patently clear the American adventures in the oil patch have backfired colossally. The Zionist dream to subjugate the entire area is now in tatters because everyone outside the US and Israel can easily see that the bluff has been called, and nothing short of all-out nuclear warfare, which, given the lad with his finger on the big trigger cannot be ruled out, will stand in the way of the completion of the Neocons’ greatest nightmare: an awakened Shia giant amidst the surrounding US-supported dictatorships that will lead, sooner or later, to collapse from within each client state.

Let us count the reasons for this prediction:

The US has been shown to be a paper tiger militarily by a few thousand ‘dead-enders’ in the Sunni triangle. Sure, the US military can level cities and massacre tens of thousands of non-combatants, but they have failed miserably to combat the element of the resistance that keeps it growing and becoming ever more successful. The Neocons have blundered into a trap from which there is no viable exit without a massive dinner of crow, a taste for which this crew has shown little appetite. The countdown has begun to the day a legitimate Iraqi government, dominated by the Shias, will politely ask the Americans to leave and take their bases with them. Once again, the spectre of a Sunni/Shia alliance with regard to the resistance would be too compelling to ignore. Thus, the Iranians know that there will be no general invasion of their homeland as long as their man in Iraq has the bulk of the US military locked down and using their long-time Sunni foes as the enforcers. The irony resonates on so many levels that I suspect historians of the future will have a difficult time suppressing a laugh or two as they contemplate the official beginning of the end of the American Empire.

The US is broke, and using the sentiment of the population as a gauge, it has only Israel to count on. This is a little like Dad counting on his kids when he goes broke betting it all at the track. The number of actors who are able to begin the US-dollar panic are hard to fully account for when one considers that Warren Buffet has made close to two billion in profits betting against the viability of US currency. With great regret, of course.

With an eroding industrial base, lagging agricultural output, and an insatiable consumer beast, the country is completely at the mercy of foreigners to sustain the illusion of a wealthy and economically healthy US. They will do this only as long as it takes to reduce their exposure to a vanishing dollar, which most central banks are quietly doing as I write. The Chinese are not-so-quietly turning their massive stockpile of US-dollar-based assets into commodities, such as Canadian mining and energy firms. It will be only be too clear when the time comes for foreigners to pull the plug on the credit-addicted US government and their equally leveraged citizenry, when the prop of having its currency as the world reserve standard collapses under the pressure of free-market traders, who know a thing or two about supply and demand. Many European houses no longer deal in US dollars at any exchange rate whatsoever!

As the dollar sinks, the price of oil will begin to affect ever-greater swaths of the US economy, and its legion of energy-hungry SUV owners. While oil company shills are shrilly promoting the ‘Peak Oil’ hoax to explain the crushing rise in energy costs, the reality is that the only thing that has peaked is cheap oil, and recovery costs are irrelevant to this equation. The simple fact is that the US and Britain have been using bribes and gun barrels to subsidize the cost of oil. When the Shia revolution set in motion by the Neocons spreads throughout the Middle East, tinhorn dictators from Kuwait to Qatar will escape to the West with whatever they can steal. At that point, oil will be priced to the advantage of the seller, as opposed to the buyer and oil-rich countries will impose their own version of an oil-depletion allowance. At that point, the American public will either go gently into that fascist good night, or stage a little rebellion of their own. For this question, I demure from a prediction.

The alliance of Europe, Russia, China, India, Brazil and Venezuela that has become a new reality, gives the lie to the myth of the US role as sole superpower. It is a fool who thinks  the US can forcibly dictate to the combined economic and military power of that global anti-US bloc. The sad fact is that it really didn’t have to this, but Neocon arrogance once again undercut the old reliable divide-and-conquer strategy the US has counted on to keep these kinds of alliances from congealing. Now that Pandora’s box is open, I suspect the US will be subject to some rather harsh repayment for its past behaviour. No doubt the Neocons will blame it all on Bill Clinton, who is, of course, a Neocon himself.

While I could follow this trail indefinitely, I’ll force myself to place a capstone on my diatribe. Recalling the third entry of this roster, which predicted a sharp downturn or complete collapse of the US economy, American arrogance will vanish into a real cat fight of recrimination in an attempt to establish how it all went so very wrong. It is doubtful that the future Commission established to consider this matter will be as biased as those presided over by Earl Warren and Thomas Keen and will have little trouble tracing the trail of disaster back to its architects. Those readers, keen of wit and with a little recent history under their belts, will quite likely shout: the Neocons! The Neocons indeed. And they left a pile of evidence, proudly published for all to see. But one document will be sufficient to damn them: it is the manifesto of the Neocons known as the Project For A New American Century, a document lovingly entitled ‘Rebuilding America’s Defences’.

On the face of it, it is very difficult to understand how the world’s sole superpower would need to rebuild its defences, particularly since they have never been used for anything but offensive actions. A group which describes itself as “a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: that American leadership is good both for America and for the world; that such leadership requires military strength, diplomatic energy and commitment to moral principle; and that too few political leaders today are making the case for global leadership” fairly reeks of arrogance from the get-go. But the pride of their fleet of publications is almost comical in its school-marmish attitude. I believe their real intent is best understood if one substitutes the word ‘domination’ for ‘leadership’ in the quote above; even a cursory perusal of the noted document shows this to be the real goal. Rather than examine the whole treatise point by point, I will merely suggest that only irrational people drunk on their own arrogance could think that the rest of the world would just stand by and let the American Empire overwhelm them.

My purpose is to find the ‘smoking gun’ regarding the precise point where Neocon hallucinations were implemented as Official American Foreign Policy. In one of their few moments of lucidity, they realized that it was sounding all too ‘empire-esque’ and Americans, known for their revulsion at being seen as global bullies, would not happily send troops and treasure around the world as a means of demonstrating ‘leadership’.

And so they pivoted the entire scheme on something provocatively called ‘a new Pearl Harbor’. That document was published in September 2000. By January 2001, many of the authors and project members were ensconced in the corridors of power at the invitation of the recently selected President Bush. Ten months later, their most fervent wish, the fulcrum of their entire agenda, magically happened. It is a testament to the woeful state of the average American’s attention span, not to mention their basic powers of deduction, that a connection of these rather obvious dots has been made by only a handful of the public, thanks both to Federalized ‘education’ and corporate-dominated media. The first steel-and-concrete buildings in history, one of which was not even damaged by an aircraft collision,  collapsed due to ‘fire’ and the vast majority of Americans were not even curious! There’s no need to laundry-list the anomalies, contradictions, gross impossibilities, and sheer implausibility of the Official Legend of the events surrounding the advent of the ‘new Pearl Harbor’ — others have sifted through the bullshit sufficiently that reinventing the wheel is not required (notably David McGowan (davesweb@cnchost.com)).

But the point here is that someday, sooner or later, the lid will get blown off this scam. It will be seen as just another effort to entice Americans to ditch decades of diplomacy and follow the lead of that notable experiment, Nazi Germany, into unprovoked and unilateral attacks on sovereign nations in the interests of the power elite. Only the incurious among us have failed to learn that the namesake event for 9-11, Pearl Harbor, was an entirely avoidable incident which was used to leverage a reluctant American public into supporting yet another foreign adventure, World War II.

So far, the sentiment exemplified by the ‘our-Government-wouldn’t-do-that-to-its-own-people’ argument has prevailed. What happens when the head-in-the-sand crowd realizes they’ve been had? No predictions from this prognosticator.

Submitted to Axis of Logic by Author 

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