Chris Floyd: War Without End, Amen: The Sanguinary Vision of Robert Gates

[babylonsister]

War Without End, Amen: The Sanguinary Vision of Robert Gates
Saturday, 13 October 2007
by Chris Floyd

There are actually some quarters where Pentagon honcho Robert Gates is considered a moderate of some kind, one of the few sensible, responsible figures in the Bush Administration able to restrain – or at least moderate – the raging-bull belligerence of Dick Cheney and his crew. This has always been a curious reputation for a man who has spent most of his career hip-deep in militarist skullduggery, as Robert Parry, among others, has amply demonstrated. (Here and here, for example.) But in such desperate and degraded times as these, it's only natural to clutch at the slightest straw of hope that someone, somewhere, will stand between us and the worst excesses of our masters, as we noted here earlier.

(In fact, I'm so old that I can remember all the way back to the year 2000, when Cheney himself was regarded by the peddlers of conventional wisdom as a sensible, responsible figure, a "safe pair of hands" who would restrain the coltish antics of Young Bush and mitigate the extremist zeal of the GOP "base." That really panned out well, didn't it?)

But like Colin Powell – that oh-so-moderate, oh-so-mitigating force of Bush's first term – Gates is just a bagman for the global dominance gang. They whistle and he jumps – then whistles the same tune to his own minions. At this stage of the game, after so much death, deceit, and corruption, it is cretinous folly to believe that anyone picked by the Bush Regime for any job would act otherwise. If they were a different sort of person – if they were indeed sensible, responsible, honorable or moral – they would not be there.

The only "moderation" among these dedicated militarists is in their demeanor. Some, like Gates, prefer the higher hypocrisy of decorous rhetoric and genial backslapping, while others, like Cheney, scorn the mask and nakedly display their bloodlust and bilious scorn for humanity. But when it's time to pull the trigger – or divvy up the public purse among their war-profiteering cronies – they all line up together.

Gates gave us a prime example of this on Wednesday, in a speech to an Army group. In many ways, it was just typical boilerplate: a bland dish without the kind of rabble-rousing red meat that Don Rumsfeld might have served up in steaming heaps. But it underscored again the true nature of the militarist beast that has devoured the Republic – and not just under Bush, of course, but with the avid assistance of every president, of both parties, for many decades.

As the New York Times reports, Gates' theme was the burning need for the Army to prepare itself for many more Iraq-style wars in the future – wars of conquest, occupation and domination, where nations are chewed to pieces, regimes are overthrown and new client states erected in their place, although the decorous SecDef didn't use such frank terms. But the underlying, unquestioned – and probably unconscious – assumptions were clear: that America will be involved in ceaseless military incursions into other nations, in conflicts that "will be fundamentally political in nature and require the application of all elements of national power" – and that it is America's God-given right to do so, to shape "the behavior of friends, adversaries, and most importantly, the people in between"…at the point of a gun.

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http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2618/81/

[Amonester]

1. they R getting ready to destroy the

United States (and the world) more and more each day, each week, each month, each year, and each decade if need be

and for what? power? (they R losing power, not gaining it) possessions? more money? yeah: that's it

fools

they want to be the new germans (they R the new germanics...)

BFEE: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x3087

PNAC: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x223