You can have any foreign policy you want, as long as its war for oil

[arendt]

After eight years of Bush mis-rule, you might have thought America had had its fill of neocon military adventurism in Middle East oil fields. You might have thought it had seen through the dangerous nonsense that is the Global War on Some Terrorists - a profitable fraud for contractors, and a civil rights disaster for citizens. You might have thought we had realized that we needed to spend a few dollars patching up our own country before it falls down in a rusting heap. And maybe, for five or ten minutes as they looked at their credit card bills, Americans did.

But, all it took was to put a new (actually, old) boogeyman (i.e., Russia) out front of our permanently militarized foreign policy, and, like a drunken Roman at an orgy who just cleansed his palate with a feather, we are ready to chow down on more war for oil.

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The media has opened a massive propaganda barrage to convince America that its time to re-start the Cold War against the horrible Russians. The same Russians with whom Bush said he could deal. The same Russians with whom Bush was boozing in Beijing when the neocon-backed Georgians sneak-attacked South Ossetia. (But, the Russians, being smarter than us, had a contingency plan for such an obvious eventuality; and that proves they're evil because "thinking is the snare of the devil".)

Whether or not it succeeds in its main mission, the bear-baiting has already succeeded in setting the agenda for the fall campaign - and it is a horrid agenda. It is an agenda of flag-waving and dick-measuring. It is an agenda of machoism and militarism. Forget about the mortgage mess, forget about all our jobs draining to China, forget about the rape of the Constitution, the Treasury, the environment. Drop everything and grab your gun. (This is your rifle, this is your gun. This one's for fighting...)

The general tone of the corporate media-sanctioned debate on this has convinced me that American politics is now completely back under the control of dueling elites. Progressive voices have been kicked to the curb. Diplomacy is for fags. Impeachment is a joke. The Constitution is a joke. Rising inequality is the victim's fault. And, most importantly for elite control, the corporate media will never tell us the truth about what is really going on.

So, I'm on my own trying to figure things out. And, from what I see at DU, I'm fairly on my own here too. Nevertheless, I refuse to stop thinking; and I refuse to forget the history that I have personally witnessed. What follows are my thoughts and guesses as to what's going on. Don't flame me for lack of citations. These are just my opinions. I expect that they will instantly be branded CT.

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1. Yankees and Cowboys

Back when it was possible to talk about elites in American society (you might remember "WASPs") without automatically being labeled a CTer, a quiet professor at Georgetown, named Carroll Quigley (who taught Bill Clinton), coined the phrase "yankees vs cowboys" to describe two factions of the American elites fighting for hegemony. Yankees were internationalists; while cowboys were nationalists. Yankees were interventionists and cowboys were isolationists. Yankees were cosmopolitan, cowboys were nativists and racists.

These two terms do not refer to geography, but to method of rule. Yankees are polite enough to let the masses see what is going on in their name; cowboys just want the masses to shut up and obey. For example, Jimmy Carter was a yankee - vetted by the Council on Foreign Relations. Bush, Sr. and Bill Clinton were also yankees by their political orientation. Reagan and W were/are cowboys, although Reagan went off the reservation and signed a deal with Gorbachev. ( I think you get the picture. If not, google it.)

At first you might think that the neocons are the cowboys and the DLC Dems are the yankees (and the progressives are road kill). But, then, what to make of the still-simmering fight between HRC (and the DLC) and BHO? My opinion - it isn't a simple two-way fight any more. It seems like there are now two tribes of yankees.

2. Sand Yankees and Steppe Yankees

The financial and political elites backing the Democrats (or opposing the neocons from the inside, like Robert Gates) are trying to pry the neocons hands off the steering wheel before they wreck America completely or start WW3. As always, the yankees think that cowboy ways make too many enemies; and enemies are bad for business. Yankees understand that a little bit of nice can go a long way.

The neocons have a heavy overlap with a hard-line faction of the Jewish community, both in the U.S. and in Israel. The neocons are increasingly messing up the balancing act that the U.S. kept going between the Arabs and Israel. They are increasingly pissing off a billion Moslems around the world. The neocons believe they can get away with this because they have divided and conquered the Moslem world by provoking and stoking a Sunni/Shia civil war. They also believe that the U.S. can show itself to be a pack of gangsters and still keep its position in the world.

The DLC has been content to go along with neocon foreign policy. After all, the DLC was started as a way to raise pots of money from the corporate community by selling out the working class. What do they know about warfare? They have been betting that they can get elected by just waiting for Bush's term to expire, and waiting for people to vote against the GOP. So, the DLC has no problem with Bush's foreign policy, only with its tactical execution.

Let's call these yankees "sand yankees", in that they want to grab Middle East oil by force of arms; and, like the neocons, they prefer to use the Israelis as their local cop. But, don't confuse them with neocons. Israel is a lively democracy, with its own jockeying elites. I would assume that the DLC run with a different crowd in Israel than the neocons do. (See the DISCLAIMER at the end.):

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However, there is a faction of yankees who think the whole Middle East focus is the wrong strategy. These are the old Cold Warriors. They never stopped hating the Russians, no matter how much they screwed them over. They never forgave the Russians for kicking out the oligarch vultures that we set upon the corpse of the Soviet Union. Let's call these guys "steppe yankees", because they covet the oil fields under the vast Eurasian steppe, in the "stans". They also think geopolitically, and calculate that Russia is all that stands in the way of world domination by the U.S. military.

The steppe yankees are very sophisticated people. They believe that Christians who have lived under the Russian boot for fifty years are much more likely to support a U.S. petro-grab than Moslem Arabs whom we have been screwing over for fifty years. They probably are correct. The evidence from the CIA-supported "color revolutions" in Ukraine and Georgia is that there is a deep pool of hatred for Russia that can easily be tapped by putting up a charismatic nationalist leader.

Furthermore, if you have created a land-bridge from the -stan oil fields to Europe by installing your own "color" regimes, military supply is easier than the logistical nightmare of the Persian Gulf region. This is another point for the common sense of the steppe yankees.

But, the steppe yankees found they had no leverage in the DLC - probably because of Joe Lieberman's and AIPAC's influence there.

2.1 HRC and BHO

Everyone said that the Democratic nomination was Hillary's to lose, and she did. All by herself. Her and that idiot, Mark Penn, from the dictator-whitewashing PR shop of Burson-Marsteller. However, the person she lost to, Obama, came out of the starting gate with deep pockets and a bunch of former Clinton advisors on his team despite a very thin resume. I had always wondered how/why that happened. What was behind the charismatic, but content-free rhetoric? How did the rhetoric square with the hawkish, neoliberal advisors?

My hypothesis is that the steppe yankees decided that four more years of bleeding to death in Iraq (and Iran) would be the end of U.S. international power; and that they worried that HRC was happy to let that happen as long as the sand yankees got her elected President. So, the steppe yankees looked around for someone smart, someone charismatic (there's that color revolution word again), some relative unknown who, like Jimmy Carter, was willing to go along with the steppe yankee program in return for a shot at the bigtime. It was a long shot; but Obama is very good. He pulled it off. But, before the dust had settled, something brand new was sprung: Georgia.

That's my hypothesis to the present moment, and it is certainly open to debate. But, let me expand a little on the implications of my hypothesis, assuming it is correct.

3. Georgia - screw up or plan?

The steppe yankees are smart and tough. They despise the neocons for their incompetence. They think the sand yankees are just money-grubbing civilians with no world-historical ballast. Because they both have a world-historical vision, the neoliberal steppe yankees and the neocons keep bumping into each other in out-of-the-way corners of the third world. Case in point, Georgia. Georgia is in the spheres of influence of both factions.

The neocons (and I'm putting McCain in that camp now) wanted to use it to "wag the dog" to get McCain elected, and to shift focus from the increasingly obviously fraudulent GWOT to the familiar old Russian bear. Also, the Israelis have made huge commercial investments in Georgia and its neoliberal economy, and they have provided weapons and advisors.

But, Georgia is steppe yankee territory, too. If my hypothesis is true, the CIA (yankee) has influence in Georgia. But, the neocons had enough influence to make Shakashvili screw himself. In the aftermath of that cockup, both of these camps happen to be mostly shooting in the same direction - at the Russians. They're probably also throwing elbows at each other (the news stories about Bush writing checks without looking at his bank account; the fact that McCain's ties are talked about in the corporate media).

I don't have enough info to decide if things went according to any faction's plan (including the Russians). So I'll just end this little example (of how the news media has no intention of telling us anything resembling the true story) and pop back up to the strategy level.

4. The tripod

The worst thing about the scenario I have outlined is that it is highly stable, politically. It reminds me of the infamous tripod in the Soviet Union: the Politburo, the military, and the KGB. Three power centers. If any one of them tried to aggrandize itself, the other two allied to press it back in line. Two-way alliances formed and broke countless times over countless issues, but the system itself was extremely stable.

I worry that American politics has now reached such a state, with three power centers, none of them responsive to citizen wishes. All of them in fundamental policy agreement: neoliberal economic policies and war for oil. At the moment, it looks like the two yankee factions are teaming up (reluctantly on HRC's part) to get rid of the neocons.

But, the Georgia situation has shifted the equilibrium more towards war hysteria, to the neocons' benefit. The media has let the fact that McCain's advisor is a Georgian lobbyist get "lost". They have not demolished the "We are all Georgians." humbug. It seems that the neocons still control the media. However, the paleocons are increasingly restive. P.C. Roberts and P. Buchanan have been trashing the neocons for years, and its starting to get some traction with conservatives after all the neocon failures. Also, the Ron Paul movement may get no airtime, but its still out there. This game could go any direction.

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To me, as a mere citizen-mushroom, this whole thing is a sword fight in the dark. If I have any dog in this pound, its the steppe yankees. They would be the most rational and lenient jailers; and they might be able to avoid holy war with Islam. Also, being secularists, they wouldn't make me convert to fundamentalist Christianity. Talk about voting for the lesser evil.

Comments?

arendt

DISCLAIMER: I do not want to get dragged into the anti-semitism tarpit. I stay as far away as I can from the Israel/Palestine forum. I don't know who's who in Israeli politics, beyond the fact that Ariel Sharon is/was a war criminal who deliberately wrecked the peace process.

Insofar as it is possible, I take pains to separate opposition to hard-rightwing Israeli politicians from anti-Semitism. (Apparently, things are so convoluted that even the earlier attempt to make this differentiation with the label "zionist" is now considered anti-Semitic by many. I give up.)

I can't avoid mentioning Israel in this essay, as its central to the sand/steppe split; but I really don't want to argue about the voluminous historical and internet record of who said what about whom. It is a tarpit.

[whistle]

1. The economy of war and total war require that a nation be totally insane...

<snip>
War economy is the term used to describe the contingencies undertaken by the modern state to mobilize its economy for war production. Philippe Le Billon describes a war economy as a "system of producing, mobilizing and allocating resources to sustain the violence". The war economy can form an economic system termed the "military-industrial complex". Many states increase the degree of planning in their economies during wars; in many cases this extends to rationing, and in some cases to conscription for civil purposes, such as the Women's Land Army and Bevin Boys in the United Kingdom in World War II.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said that if the Axis Powers win, then "we would have to convert ourselves permanently into a militaristic power on the basis of war economy."<1>

In what is known as total war, these economies are often seen as targets by many militaries. The Union blockade during the American Civil War is regarded as one of the first examples of this.

Concerning the side of aggregate demand, this concept has been linked to the concept of "military Keynesianism", in which the government's military budget stabilizes business cycles and fluctuations and/or is used to fight recessions.

On the supply side, it has been observed that wars sometimes have the effect of accelerating progress of technology to such an extent that an economy is greatly strengthened after the war, especially if it has avoided the war-related destruction. This was the case, for example, with the United States in World War I and World War II. Some economists (such as Seymour Melman) argue, however, that the wasteful nature of much of military spending eventually can hurt technological progress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_economy

[arendt]

2. kick n/t

[arendt]

3. crickets n/t

[arendt]

4. crickets would be a crowd. n/t

[arendt]

5. Going once, going twice,... n/t