Spiraling — but to Where? Regular readers of this blog (yes, there are some) know that I avoid predicting the future, an impossible task which ordinarily resolves to wishful thinking. There are so many ways the latest nitemare in the Middle East can take us, and so many aspects to it, that a quick list of the headings I considered for today's entry, each of which would have taken me in a different direction, should be indicative.
+
"Evil, Triumphal." My first version was more negative: "Evil Triumphant." But that suggested that there was no hope. And I'd like to think that there's always hope. If not, we might as well all become suicide bombers. Israel needs to think about that. But Israel can't think about anything, because Israelis are all, uniformly, idiots, consumed by egotistical madness.
+
"Moral Bankruptcy". The G8 leaders' complicity in Israel's crimes demonstrates the moral worthlessness of both the West (which includes Russia, culturally) and Japan.
+
"And Then They Came for Me." On the silence of the moral leadership of churches and nations in confronting the insanity and evil of Zionism in its latest orgy of mass murder in 58 years of inhuman violence. Why are even Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, the Pope — all the world's moral finger-waggers — silent?
+
"End Times/First Days (of World War III)." On the very real possibility that Israel will plunge us all into full-scale thermonuclear apocalypse, with the active connivance of Rightwing Christian Fundamentalists in the United States, who want the world to end.
+
"Over a Barrel". How the Arab oil-exporting countries can ravage the U.S. economy, using the only power they themselves have to strike back at their oppressors.
+
"Historic Realignment". How Communist China and North Korea can move huge quantities of missiles and other weapons into the Middle East to destroy Israel and drive the United States out of Asia, and unite groups (Hindus, Moslems; modernizers, traditionalists; India, China) that are ordinarily mutually antagonistic against a common foe, the United States. Compare the alliance during World War II of Western liberal democracy and Stalinism.
+
"Not with a Bang but a Whimper". On the end of U.S. hegemony over planet Earth, as forces we have set in motion are now in position to eclipse us and relegate us to the trash heap of history.
+
Let's go with that one, which includes elements of "Over a Barrel" and "Historic Realignment".
+
If the Arabs are smart, they will cut oil deliveries to the United States by 10% for each day that Israel continues its aggression against Islam, and shift long-term supply commitments to China, India, Japan, and the Old World portion of the Third World (leaving Latin America to fall back upon its own petroleum resources and compete for them with the U.S., unassisted, at least for the time being, by the Arab world). Inasmuch as U.S. gasoline prices are already around $3/gallon and plainly hurting scores of millions of Americans, this is the Arabs' best hope of driving a wedge between Zionists and the Christian population of the United States. They can tell Americans, "Get your gas from Israel."
+
China has been concluding long-term exclusive supply contracts for oil supplies all over the world for its growing economy, so Arab nations might well, finally, be able to dispense completely with the U.S. and European markets. Merely threatening to cut off Europe could drive a wedge between the U.S. and its NATO allies, first in making them openly critical of U.S. policy to curry favor with Arabs and second by driving them into the arms of Russia, which has huge reserves of oil and natural gas and which is eager to resume the role of planetary superpower.
+
Likewise, China and India, along with various of the smaller Asian economic "tigers", are now well enuf developed that they might be able to replace the U.S. with each other as trading partners and continue their high rates of economic growth, using the unmet needs of 2½ billion people as the engine of perpetual development — without us.
+
China might well feel itself empowered by its new economic might to engage in aggressive arms sales to the Middle East. Arab countries could use hard currencies received from Western countries in prior years to buy Chinese armaments, including long-range ballistic missiles — even nuclear weapons — or enter into barter arrangements, oil for arms.
+
Asia contains more than half the entire planet's population, and the oilfields of Arabia, Azerbaijan, etc., are all in Asia. Why would it not be largely self-sufficient as to trade and energy, without anything at all from the United States?
+
What could the U.S. do if China were willing to risk its enormous trade with the U.S. to pursue its goal of restoring China to its 'natural' role of "Middle Kingdom" — the center of the world?
+
China could quietly move huge numbers of missiles into Sinkiang, which is only a couple of thousand miles from Iraq and Israel, and into increasingly friendly nations in Central Asia, to protect its interests if the U.S. threatened reprisal for China's flooding the Arab world with arms and advisors to train Arab armies and various guerrilla organizations to attack Israel and U.S. forces occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. China borders Afghanistan! We have 130,000 hostages in Iraq, and 19,000 more in Afghanistan, all within easy striking distance of Chinese missiles with conventional warheads. This could produce a very hot war for the U.S. military, working over 7,000 miles from our shores but only 2,000 miles, or starkly less, from Chinese territory. Afghanistan is pretty much literally in China's backyard, and the Middle East isn't much farther.
+
The U.S. is in no way prepared for full-scale war against China, 1.3 billion people, and U.S. commercial interests would rather sell out their country than lose cheap Chinese imports. It would be extremely difficult for the Bush Administration to move from shipping hundreds of billions of dollars to China in trade deficits — which have richly funded China's military buildup as well as built China's industrial might, the energy demands of which have raised gas prices here — to instead a war footing, even an economic-war footing, because as far as retail giants are concerned, their businesses and the personal fortunes of their managers and shareholders would be the loser in any such conflict, and they just aren't willing to suffer total economic devastation to defend Israel. They can plainly argue that Israel's rash actions threaten to plunge us into a full-scale thermonuclear exchange with China, and that nothing is worth that, not Israel, not Iraq, not the entire Middle East, because 200 million Americans could die in such an exchange, and our civilization and all the hopes we have ever cherished for a major role in world progress would end.
+
Republicans, starting with Nixon, have created the present Chinese Frankenstein, except that the Chinese Frankenstein is not a single monster but an army of monsters, with nuclear weapons bought and paid for with American greenbacks.
+
What if Iran cozies up to China and supplies radioactive material for "dirty bombs" to ride Russian Katyusha missiles fired by Hezbollah into all of Israel's cities? Could the U.S. stop such dirty warheads from reaching their target, before the fact? How much good would retaliation afterward do? And if China pledges that an attack on Iran is an attack on China, what then?
+
China's original timetable to push the U.S. out of Asia called for major action around the year 2020 or 2025. But Israel's fit of madness may have moved that up. Is China ready now to make its move to displace the United States as the world's greatest power? Is it ready to push the U.S. out of all parts of Asia, including Southwest Asia, which we know more commonly as "the Middle East"?
+
I don't know. I doubt China's leaders know.
+
They have been very quiet about the present crisis. Does that signal unwillingness to do a thing about it? or that they are busy devising a response to take advantage of the opportunities presented?
+
Everywhere you look, the Republican Cabal (of which Dubya is just poster boy), which looked so strong not long ago, is looking surrounded, thwarted, drowning in a tsunami of unanticipated events it cannot control.
+
The British newspaper The Independent published, five days ago, an article about the swirl of chaos confronting the Bush Administration, which was reprinted the next day by the Belfast Telegraph online. It sums things up like this:

The White House insists that its policies are on track. If there are “a lot of issues in motion”, according to Stephen Hadley, Mr Bush’s National Security Adviser, “in some sense, it was destined to be. We have a president that wants to take on the big issues and see if he could solve them on his watch.” More probably an administration whose energies have been consumed by the war in Iraq, on which Mr Bush has staked his presidency, may be simply overwhelmed. The separate crises amount to “a perfect storm”, Madeleine Albright, who was Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, told The Washington Post last week. “We have not been paying attention to a lot of these issues.”

In the latest flare-up between Israel and its neighbours, Washington has been almost silent. Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State, who is struggling to orchestrate the response to Iran’s defiance, merely blamed Hizbollah for upsetting “regional stability”, and urged Syria to rein in its radical protégés.

But Washington’s rebukes are far less pointed than a year ago, in the aftermath of the St Valentine’s Day assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri — when the talk here was of “regime change” in Damascus to follow that in Baghdad. The change reflects a growing, if tacit, acceptance that the unilateralist “Bush doctrine”, involving pre-emptive action if necessary to remove a threat, is beyond the power of even the US to implement on its own. Hence the President’s more restrained tone of late, encapsulated by Time magazine’s latest cover, proclaiming an end to “Cowboy Diplomacy”. The problems also reflect a failure to think its policies through. The irony is that Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine achieved their roles in government thanks to democratic elections — exactly what Washington has been advocating for the entire Middle East.

On the periphery of the region, meanwhile, the problems grow more daunting, with the renewed Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan and the apparent seizure of control of much of Somalia, long a potential terrorist redoubt, by Islamic fundamentalist groups.

Further afield, North Korea’s brazen missile tests may be a sign that, like Iran, the reclusive Communist regime does not believe that with so many of its forces tied down in Iraq, Washington has a viable military option.

So what does happen if the Arab oil-exporting states cut off supplies to the U.S.? If China trains Moslem guerrillas and ships hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of advanced armaments — tank killers, surface-to-air missiles — to use against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq and/or Afghanistan? Will American voters rally round the (Bush) flag while paying $5 a gallon at the gas pump, and re-elect a Republican majority to both Houses of Congress? Would the Democrats do anything different as regards Israel's crimes? Or have Zionists so completely taken over U.S. politics, media, and society that we are destined to be destroyed by Zionist madness?
+
I don't know. No one does. We are four months from what may prove the most important election since 1860 (which produced the (first?) Civil War), and no one can know if the major parties can save us from the folly of decades.
+
Of course, there is a remote possibility we won't have to worry about an election in November, because our history will end before then, with a full-scale thermonuclear war brought on by the evil lunatics in Jerusalem and American pulpits.
+
You might want to spend more time with the people you love. Pet the dog, welcome the cat into your lap. Smell the roses.
+
(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,548.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:34 AM