a pirce very worth reading till the end SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL by John Perry Barlow

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL

I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney

was obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events

raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

With this in mind, I¹ve given some thought lately to how all this

might look to the Vice President (who is, I remain convinced, as much

the real architect of American policy as he was while Gerald Ford¹s

Chief of Staff or George the First¹s Secretary of Defense).

As I¹ve mentioned, I once knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get

elected to his first public office as Wyoming¹s lone congressman. I

conspired with him on the right side of environmental issues. Working

closely together, we were instrumental in closing down a copper

smelter in Douglas, Arizona the grandfathered effluents of which were

causing acid rain in Wyoming¹s Wind River mountains. We were densely

interactive allies in creating the Wyoming Wilderness Act. He used to

go fishing on my ranch. We were friends.

With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the

smartest man I¹ve ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he

will take you on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in

your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the

ideologue he appears at this distance. I believe he is personally

indifferent to greed. In the final analysis, this may simply be about

oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it that way. I am relatively certain

that he is acting in the service of principles to which he has

devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that is unimpeded by sentiment

or other emotional overhead.

Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the

moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there

is only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition,

myself included, has not asked out loud. It¹s not an easy question to

answer, but neither is it a question to ignore.

Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have

prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest

habit.

The more common of these has been symmetrical balance of power. This

is what kept another world war from breaking out between 1945 and

1990. The Cold War was the ultimate Mexican stand-off, and though

many died around its hot edges -  in Viet Nam, Korea, and countless

·     more obscure venues - it was a comparatively peaceful period.

·     Certainly, the global body count was much lower in the second half of

·      the Twentieth Century than it was in the first half. Unthinkable

      calamity threatened throughout, but it did not occur.

The other means by which long terms of peace - or, more accurately,

non-war - have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a

single ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the

Pax Romana, a ³world² peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180

AD. I grant that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They

crucified dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets,

and generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus

Himself. But war, of the sort that racked  the Greeks, Persians,

Babylonians, and indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar,

did not occur. The Romans had decided it was bad for business. They

were in a military position to make that opinion stick.

(There was a minority view of the Pax Romanum, well stated at its

height by Tacitus: ³To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things

 they misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it

peace.² It would be well to keep that admonition in mind now.)



There are other, more benign, examples of lengthily imposed peace.

One could argue that the near absence of major international wars in

the Western Hemisphere results from the overwhelming presence of the

United States which, while hardly a dream neighbor, has at least

stopped most of the New World wars that it didn¹t start. The Ottoman

Empire had a pretty good run, about 700 years, after drawing its

borders in blood. The Pharoahs kept the peace, at least along the

Nile, for over 2800 years until Alexander the Great showed up.

If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the

latter doesn¹t necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be

made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in

the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist

peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other.

It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability

can be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one

that terrified us into peace during the Cold War. Europe, old and

new, is furious with the United States at the moment (if my

unscientific polls while there in January are at all accurate), but

they are a very long way from confronting us with any military threat

we¹d find credible.

I¹m pretty sure that, soon enough, hatred of our Great Satanic selves

will provide the Islamic World with a unity they have lacked since

the Prophet¹s son-in-law twisted off and started Shi¹ism. But beyond

their demonstrated capacity to turn us into a nation of chickenshits

and control freaks, I can¹t imagine them erecting a pacifying balance

force against our appalling might.

I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations

through in vastly greater detail than I¹m providing here and has

reached these following conclusions: first, that it is in the best

interests of humanity that the United States impose a fearful peace

upon the world and, second, that the best way to begin that epoch

would be to establish dominion over the Middle East through the

American Protectorate of Iraq. In other words, it¹s not about oil,

it¹s about power and peace.

Well, alright. It is about oil, I guess, but only in the sense that

the primary goal of the American Peace is to guarantee the Global

Corporations reliable access to all natural resources. wherever

they may lie. The multinationals are Cheney¹s real constituents,

regardless of their stock in trade or their putative country of

origin. He knows, as the Romans did, that war is bad for business.

But what¹s more important is that he also knows that business is bad

for war. He knows, for example, there there has never been a war

between two countries that harbored McDonald¹s franchises.

I actually think it¹s possible that, however counter-intuitive and

risky his methods for getting it, what Dick Cheney really wants is

peace. Though much has been made of his connection to Halliburton and

the rest of the Ol Bidness, he is not acting in the service of

personal greed. He is a man of principle. He is acting in the service

of intentions that are to him as noble as mine are to me - and not

entirely different.

How can this be? Return with me now to the last time I was convinced

he was insanely endangering life on earth. This was back in the early

1983 when Dick Cheney was, at least by appearances, a mere

congressman. He was also Congressional point man for the deployment

of the MX missile system in our mutual home state of Wyoming. (The MX

was also called the ³Peacemaker,² a moniker I took at the time to be

the darkest of ironies.)

The MX was, and indeed still is, a Very Scary Thing.  A single MX

missile could hit each of 10 different targets, hundreds of miles

apart, with about 600 kilotons of explosive force. For purposes of

comparison, Hiroshima was flattened by a 17 kiloton nuclear blast.

·     > Thus, each of the MX¹s warheads could glaze over an area 35 times

larger than the original Ground Zero. Furthermore, 100 MX missiles

·     > were to lie beneath the Wyoming plains, Doomsday on the Range.

 

Any one of the 6000 MX warheads would probably incinerate just about

every living thing in Moscow. But Cheney¹s plan - cooked up with

Brent Scowcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and other familiar

suspects - was not about targeting cities, as had been the accepted

practice of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The MX was to be

aimed instead at the other side¹s missile emplacements.

The problem with this ³counter-force strategy, ³ as it was called,

was that it was essentially a first-strike policy. The MX was to be

placed in highly vulnerable Minuteman silos. In the event of a Soviet

first strike, all of the Peacemakers would have been easily wiped

out. Thus, they were either to be launched preemptively or they were

set to ³launch on warning.² The MX was to be either an offensive

weapon or the automated hair-trigger was to be pulled on all hundred

of them within a very few minutes after the first Soviet missile

broke our radar horizon .

In either case, the logic behind it appeared to call for fighting and

winning a nuclear war. Meanwhile, President Reagan was bellowing

about ³the Evil Empire² and issuing many statements that seemed to

consider Armageddon a plausible option.

I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill during the winter of Œ81-Œ82. I

lobbied over a hundred Congressmen and Senators against a policy that

seemed to me the craziest thing that human beings had ever proposed.

The only member of Congress who knew more about it than I did was

Dick Cheney.

Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one

of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an

hour listening to us argue about ³circular errors probable² and ³MIRV

decoys² and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were

leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day,

turned to me and said, ³I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous

person I¹ve ever seen up here.² At that point, I agreed with her.

What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used

to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when

their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho.

Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would

start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as

though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low

regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.

As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of

Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as

a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision

of implacable, irrational, lethality that the Soviet leaders would

decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation.

It worked. While I think that rock Œn¹ roll and the systemic failures

of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism

as did Dick¹s mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didn¹t

look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and

Reagan¹s terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging

psychological rather than nuclear warfare.

I¹m starting to wonder if were aren¹t watching something like the

same strategy again. In other words, it¹s possible Cheney and company

are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the

Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I¹m right

about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any

more than the MX missile did.

First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his

country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that,

they want to convince the Iraqi people that it¹s safer to attempt his

overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American

·     > ground troops.

 

Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet

that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad

·     > thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to

use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity

than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words,

they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate

weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed

with either.

By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted

by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and

the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism

will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access

to McDonald¹s and the Home Shopping Network, all ³news² will come

through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by

Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac.

If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would

prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I¹d been in charge back

in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still

be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.

Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they

actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method.

Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble

reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas.

We¹ll probably know which it¹s going to be sometime in the next

fortnight.

 

By then,  I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart of

darkness and closer to the heart itself.

 

-- 

*************************************************************

John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident

Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School

                   

Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow

 

Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of

state and corporate power.

 

-- Benito Mussolini

 

 

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