Stan Goff
May 17, 2006

“A year ago none of us could see victory. Now we can see it clearly, like light at the end of the tunnel.”

-General Henri Navarre, 1953

About Dien Bien Phu, the decisive battle in which General Vo Nguyen Giap commanded the defeat of the French colonial armed forces in Vietnam, Giap would later write:

Navarre [the French commander at Dien Bien Phu] asserted that with such powerful forces and strong defense systems, Dien Bien Phu was the strongest fortified entrenched camp ever seen in Indochina. It was “an impregnable fortress.” From thisd subjective viewpoint he considered that an attack by us would be very improbable, that if our troops ventured to launch an offensive he would have the opportunity to inflict an inevitable defeat on us. He went so far as to arrogantly challenge us to an attack!

Navarre’s challenge was the 1953 French equivalent of “Bring ‘em on!”

There was a gruesome irony in the name of the plateau upon which the base was built: The Arena of the Gods. The French did indeed think themselves almost Gods in this land. Three years ago, empowered by the attacks of 9-11, the Bush White House and all its advisors displayed the arrogance of Caligulan deities.

With each day that passed prior to the battle, Navarre and his commanders grew more confident in their own conclusions, never surmising that under cover of darkness and tropical canopy, using tens of thousands of civilian-auxiliary porters and soldiers to bring in thousands of tons of tools, weapons, rice, and ammunition, digging hundreds of camouflaged caves into the mountain slopes facing the French base, and dragging artillery pieces up mountainsides with ropes and muscle.

Navarre was blessed with the cream of French fighting forces - battle-scarred veterans of many engagements, including his officers - fleshed out with foreign allied troops to 14.000 strong, and supplied with massive American logistical assistance. Then the battle was engaged.

Over the next 55 days, there was a long period of French confidence, even with the surprising force of the assault and the dreadful casualties. But during that time, Giap had determined on a new tactic. Rather than a final frontal attack over ground, the Vietminh soldiers slung their Kalashnikovs and seized their shovels. They began entrenching their way in through the concentric French defense perimeters, patiently and arduously digging like moles, centimeter my centimeter, from the outside in, deep enough to use the trenches as both supply lines and protection from the incessant French artillery, mortars, and aerial strafing.

No doubt on the 50th day, there was still hope within the bloody French camp that the Vietminh would run out of ammunition, that some key leader would be killed in the cannon duels, that some miracle would erase the evidence growing before them that they would go down in defeat. And no doubt, there were a few Vietminh among these tough and relentless anti-colonial troops who felt a pang of doubt by Day 54 about how long this fight had gone on… the sneaking suspicion that the French might actually be invincible.

But the tipping point had been nearly reached by the time the battle was prepared, and Giap’s decision to go for the slow, systematic approach of the trenches - along with that revolutionary faith that had already determined never to quit - was the decision that made the French defeat inevitable.

The Bush administration is surely looking around and seeing the encroachment of the trenches now. Navarre, it must be said, at least had the advantage of knowing who was and was not the enemy. Some of the trenches inching in toward the Bush administration’s central perimeter are being constructed by former allies.

Navarre was a real general, with a real military career, and real combat experience. Bush is a guy who likes to dress up like a fighter pilot, and make manly faces at interviewers when he says things like, “I am a war president.”

Bush and Navarre shared the fatal flaw of racist arrogance, which led them both to face the patient fury of the tough brown people they held in Eurocentric contempt.

But Bush - who said the best event of his presidency was catching a “seven-and-a-half pound perch in my lake” [in Crawford, Texas… this would have exceeded the record perch recorded caught, in New Jersey, which is four pounds] - who wants to be a fighter pilot but has an aversion to both discipline and combat, who wants to be a cowboy but reportedly has a phobia about horses, who cannot differentiate between reality and play-acting, was easy prey for the most grandiose faction in the Republican Party leadership: the cosmic think-tankers of the imaginary New Rome. They promised him - especially after September 11th, when they were all seized by paroxysms of martial fantasy - that he could be a war president, a generalissimo, the Commander-in-Chief of the victorious armed forces that would launch The New… American… Century.

And they were well on their way, at least in the political construction of their new Arena of the Gods.

The invasion of Afghanistan - having already been planned anyway - was not only swift, it was still riding the giant wave of collective shock and anger emanating from the crushing collapse of the World Trade Center. It was a juggernaut, and the speed with which the Taliban government came apart in the face of the invasion gave the public and the New American Centurions just the cathartic combination of vengeance and display of power that they needed. The public was satisfied that the attacks of September had not gone unanswered; and the Centurion administration was reinforced in its own sense of invincibility.

And so they built their new political fortress with money, American orientalism, and imperial hubris, and they never suspected that the enemies in the thickly foliated surrounding hills would dare move against them.

There was always a real crisis that is still mutually recognized by neocon and “realist,” by Republican and Democrat. The imperial center’s foundation is eroding, and it now rests atop an increasingly contradictory and disarticulated set of supports. The Centurions - correctly - identified the looming world energy crisis as determinative of any future.

Cheney’s first act as shadow-president was to pull together an energy Star Chamber; and the Centurions always saw militarization of both foreign and domestic policy as the methodological solution. It was their eagerness to exploit the September of American Shock as an agenda accelerant - the opportunity it provided to construct the New Enemy, the new Global War on Terror (GWOT) as the basis of that militarization, that led them to their own Arena of the Gods.

It was, is, and will continue to be, however, an Energy War. Energy is the material substrate of power; this is as inescapable - literally - as entropy. The plan was to erect a new network of bases in Southwest Asia in the wake of their expulsion from ever more fragile Saudi Arabia, and to use the GWOT as a pretext to develop a new body of law to attack domestic political enemies.

The first obstacle came before they’d even recognized it. The extreme marginalization of the political left in the United States led the neocons to dismiss the left. That dismissal was reiterated within two week of September 11th. I myself participated in a teach-in at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that was quickly organized by leftist faculty members Catherine Lutz, Rashmi Varma, and elin o’Hara slavick, opposing any attack on Afghanistan.

The teach-in happened on September 17th, and with elin emceeing, the teach-in panel consisted of Ariel Dorfman, Catherine Lutz, Rashmi Varma, Rania Masri, William Blum, Charles Kurzman, and me. With less than six days to prepare, around 800 people came, and they heard exactly what they could not have heard on any television station or read in any newspaper… in fact, what many people, intimidated by the aggressively chauvinist atmosphere post-9-11, would hardly speak among themselves - that this administration was using this attack to pursue an agenda, and that history did not begin on September 11th.

These courageous progressive women at UNC made up their minds that if only ten percent of the US population was opposing the war agenda, then someone had to ensure that this ten percent retained a public voice. Within days, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a right-wing outfit originally founded in 1995 as the National Alumni Forum by Lynne Cheney (America’s “second lady”) and Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman to push the university systems to the right by attacking “political correctness,” issued what was tantamount to an enemies list, and all of us were placed on it… along with similar activists conducting similar events across the United States.

“We learn from history that when a nation’s intellectuals are unwilling to defend its civilization, they give comfort to its adversaries,” ACTA said.

The subtext was blazingly clear. We were engaged in treason. The neocons were counting on the war frenzy to get the American public so firmly behind their agenda that the rest of us would be intimidated into silence. This was a warning; and it was a warning that the left ignored. I have never been prouder than I was then to be counted among the left; to have been the first speed bump that the Centurions encountered on the way to their Arena of the Gods.

The liberals who exult in the polls showing the administration’s popularity at an all time low now - in some vain hope that an election will give us closure - wrote cautiously then, alternating between despair at the good fortune of Republicans and support for Afghan women being “liberated” from the Taliban by American bombs. The left - that motley, sometimes warring collection of socialists, feminists, anarchists, and anti-imperialists from all over the country that had been continually marginalized - had nothing to lose by telling the truth. And those of us who refused to grant the Centurions our fear emboldened others to lose theirs.

I haven’t the least doubt that the rapidity and steadfastness of the left’s response to 9-11 was directly responsible for the eventual speed and strength with which a vigorous mass movement was formed against the war in Iraq. The public was shown that we could get away with it, and then - day-by-day - people began to ask the tough questions that would break ground on the encroaching entrenchments that define the siege of the Bush administration today.

Internationally, of course, they made the mother of all miscalculations: They believed that the fait accompli of the Iraq occupation would dictate the terms to the rest of the world for all future relations. The defining moment for the New American Century was to be Bush’s triumphal announcement from the Deck of the USS Lincoln - in a fighter pilot costume, complete with the presidential nads protruding against tightly cinched leg-straps - that the war was won…and over. Iran would be next, surrounded now from Afghanistan and Iraq. Syria would bend the knee. Saudi Arabia would be safely encircled by US military platforms. China would be hemmed in; and the US would be parked on the back porch of Russia. The imperial hand would be firmly on the oil tap.

But the Iraqis hadn’t read the White House script. They fought. The huge American bases were inundated in a storm surge of hostility. The occupiers were driven behind the wire in the Green Zone, where they were forced by the two-front rebellion of 2004 into forging a tactical and political alliance with pro-Iranians.

George W. Bush won the Iran-Iraq War… for Iran.

Rather than effect a compliant regime change, American saber rattling provoked a militant nationalism among the Iranians that led to the election of religious conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as Iran’s new president.

Russia and China, neither being rookies in the game of international Realpolitik, effected their own compact, centered on the defense of Iran. These two giants, each dealing with the intricacies of non-linear diplomacy in ways that confused the uninitiated, were destined to make this compact on March 20, 2003, when the Bush administration demonstrated its resolve to pursue a new doctrine - preemptive war. The only question was how.

The answer to that question evolved with the situation, the most elemental aspect of which was the fact that the guerrilla resistance in Iraq began wiping its ass with Rumsfeld’s new military doctrine. The US was pinned down - militarily, politically, diplomatically, and economically. The Bush administration had successfully conducted a coup de main… against itself.

Once it had become apparent by mid-2004 that the US would be forced to grant substantial concessions to the pro-Iranian Iraqis under the influence of Ali al-Sistani, the Bear and the Dragon turned to one another in their mutual understanding of the implication: the US had leapt into quicksand. The time had arrived to form a bloc to challenge the Centurions.

Jephraim P. Gundzik, writing in Asia Times in June 2005, described the emergence of the Russia-China-Iran compact:

The military implementation of the George W Bush administration’s unilateralist foreign policy is creating monumental changes in the world’s geostrategic alliances. The most significant of these changes is the formation of a new triangle comprised of China, Iran and Russia.

Growing ties between Moscow and Beijing in the past 18 months is an important geopolitical event that has gone practically unnoticed. China’s premier, Wen Jiabao, visited Russia in September 2004. In October 2004, President Vladimir Putin visited China. During the October meeting, both China and Russia declared that Sino-Russian relations had reached “unparalleled heights”. In addition to settling long-standing border issues, Moscow and Beijing agreed to hold joint military exercises in 2005. This marks the first large-scale military exercises between Russia and China since 1958.

Moscow and Beijing signed massive arms and energy deals. The re-nationalization of energy giant Yukos by Putin’s government - which provoked an avalanche of misinformed speculation in the press - was directly related to Russia’s geo-strategic imperative to consolidate this emerging Sino-Russian bloc.

Meanwhile, China’s state-owned Zhuhai Zhenrong penned a contract with Iran for 25-years worth of liquefied natural gas, as Sinopec (the Chinese state-owned oil company) hooked up a $100 billion oil import deal, which included substantial Chinese investment in Iranian oil production infrastructure. Even though this technically violated a US sanction against trading with Iran, the US had to tread lightly and swallow its bile.

F. William Engdahl’s subtly entitled article “The US’s geopolitical nightmare,” written for Asia Times on May 9, 2006, noted:

The problem is that the US economy has become dependent on Chinese trade imports and on Chinese holdings of US Treasury securities. China today is the largest holder of dollar reserves in the form of US Treasury paper worth an estimated US$825 billion. Were Beijing to decide to exit the US bond market, even in part, it would cause a dollar free-fall and collapse of the $7 trillion US real-estate market, a wave of US bank failures, and huge unemployment. It’s a real option, even if unlikely at the moment.

Russia and China were already both surviving US objections to violations of US sanctions against selling arms technology to Iran. The other thing Russia was selling Tehran was nuclear fuel.

The recent rattling of the US saber, ostensibly threatening a US attack on Iran was clearly aimed at gaining Russia’s and China’s - both members of the UN Security Council - acceptance of anti-Iran sanctions as a lesser-evil option to military action. It did not work; and now the US is “blinking” again, yet another demonstration of US isolation and debility.

Gundzik writes:

The endorsement of Tehran’s nuclear energy program by Moscow and Beijing reveals the primary impetus behind the China-Iran-Russia axis — to counter US unilateralism and global hegemonic intentions. For Beijing and Moscow, this means minimizing US influence in Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East. For the regime in Tehran, keeping the US at bay is a matter of survival.

The joint statement issued at the conclusion of Putin’s state visit to China in October 2004 was a clear indication of Beijing’s and Moscow’s abhorrence of the Bush administration’s unilateral foreign policy. The statement noted that China and Russia “hold that it is urgently needed to [resolve] international disputes under the chairing of the UN and resolve crisis [sic] on the basis of universally recognized principles of international law. Any coercive action should only be taken with the approval of the UN Security Council and enforced under its supervision…”

Two weeks after this statement was released, and just prior to the US presidential election, Beijing’s position against US unilateralism was again made explicit by China’s former foreign minister Qian Qichen - arguably China’s most distinguished diplomat.

In an opinion piece published in the China Daily, Qian ripped Washington’s unilateralism: “The United States has tightened its control of the Middle East, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia.” He noted that this control “testifies that Washington’s anti-terror campaign has already gone beyond the scope of self defense”. Qian went further, stating that: “The US case in Iraq has caused the Muslim world and Arab countries to believe that the superpower already regards them as targets [for] its ambitious democratic reform program.”

Since the formation of this Sino-Russian condominium, Iran has not only placed the US in check within Iraq through the pro-Iranian United Iraqi Alliance domination of elections, it has found a new friend in the region Turkey - who can help it drive a wedge between the only two armed factions in Iraq that are not openly fighting the Americans: the Sistanist Shias and the Kurds.

The United States cannot attack Iran, nor can Israel mount a proxy attack on Tehran, without risking a generalized and well-armed Shia rebellion in the South of Iraq against American forces. In the North of Iraq - Iraqi Kurdistan - Turkish forces cross the border to raid Kurdish positions while Iran lobs artillery fire into Kurdish mountain bases. Even as Turkey retains it commitment never to allow an independent Kurdistan on its Southern border, it government has grown increasingly Islamist and thereby receptive to overtures from Iran.

The main constraint remaining on the Turkish government right now is its powerful desire to become part of the European Union - a desire that is steadily losing traction with the Turkish masses whose backs are being broken with the very neoliberal “structural adjustment” policies supported by the EU.

The US attempt to use the Kurds as a counterbalance against the Shias - even resorting to election fraud to diminish the UIA vote count - has backfired spectacularly, not only setting the stage for a Shia-Kurd armed conflict within the newly constituted Iraqi armed forces, but creating the conditions for a tactical rapprochement between the Kurds and Sunni Arab guerrillas.

Instead of knocking off Iraq then moving promptly to the next target - Iran - the Bush administration has now played the foil for Iran, and put within Iran’s reach what it has sought for decades: the position of key political actor in the region and the world.

The only place in the region where the Bush administration enjoys a shred of support from any significant segment of actual national populations is among the right wing in Israel - a strategic alliance that has cost the US dearly over the years and promises to cost it more. This violent, racist settler state is a magnet for ill-will not just among Arabs and Muslims, but throughout most of the world, and it has nothing to do with Judaism… and everything to do with racial Apartheid and predatory expansionism. Neither the Bush administration nor the Democrats can maneuver on this question, partly because of a very well-funded and aggressive Israeli lobbying-and-contribution apparatus within the US, and partly because they are now hoisted on their own petard from years of spouting Zionist propaganda and painting Palestinians as terrorists. The Bush administration in particular is shackled to Zionism because the most consistent support for the right-wing of that party comes from Christian dispensationalists - an end-of-time cult that holds sway over around 50 million Americans (if you count their captive children) - who believe that they can’t achieve their ultimate goal, being sucked up into heaven to abandon the rest of us heathens to plagues, wars, and other unpleasantness, until the Jews (in this case, they believe Israeli Jews) rebuild the Temple Mount.

Some people can be persuaded by reason and new information. That seldom applies to any of these folks, and the Republicans have maneuvered themselves into a very long-term alliance with them… therefore they can under no circumstances acknowledge what an anchor around the neck of US diplomacy Israel really is.

There is no place that should trouble them more than Saudi Arabia, since as we said, continued access to cheap, plentiful supplies of “black gold” is the physical basis of keeping the whole system together.

The Saudi Arabian population - which has actually grown from less than 10 million in 1980 to 24 million today (40% under the age of 15), with a per capita annual income of $25,000 in 1980 that dropped to $7,000 by 2000 - trained assiduously in the state religion - Wahhabi Islam - as a prophylaxis against the danger of yesteryear - pan-Arab nationalism - has grown materially less secure, politically more restive, and has turned the lens of its strict moral teachings on its own leadership… allies of the United States, and by extension, of Israel, occupier and oppressor of fellow Arabs and Muslims.

Given that Saudi Arabia is THE world swing producer of oil, this could be an issue for the US whose demand for the stuff insatiably rises, even with prices topping $75 a barrel. Oh… and the worse news is… Saudi Arabia has probably peaked. Platts, a well-respected energy news service, noted in April this year that Saudi Arabia - at its current capacity - expects an 8% per year decline in production. Even with heroic efforts to apply new infrastructure and technology, Saudi Arabia believes it “can lower… the composite decline rate of producing fields to around 2 percent.”

Read that again. The world’s main swing producer can no longer boost its quotas. It can only manage decline.

The May 14 edition of Bloomberg’s carried an article (”OPEC `Doing Enough’ to Meet Demand as States Miss Output Quotas”) that noted:

Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria and Indonesia, which together account for almost 40 percent of OPEC’s target output ceiling, fell short of meeting their daily quotas by 1.55 million barrels last month, according to Bloomberg data. Venezuela, OPEC’s third largest oil producer, and Indonesia have seen their output capacities decline 20 percent this decade.

“The long emergency” is in progress, and the actions of the Bush administration have served to alienate the majority of the populations sitting atop the world’s remaining oil resources, and potentially destabilize the Sultans of Swing.

The purpose of the war, in this respect, was not to destabilize Saudi Arabia, but to break OPEC and the potential power of the Saudis. The loss of production from the incessant attacks on Iraqi oil infrastructure, and from the inability of OPEC to boost production, has actually increased the fortunes of many OPEC producers.

The segway here is irresistible. Venezuela is emblematic of how the American Empire has hemmed itself into the Mesopotamian Arena of the Gods. Long considered the province of that Empire, Latin America is now being coaxed out of the neoliberal fold by the Creole paratrooper who now leads OPEC’s third largest exporter - Venezuela.

Hugo Chavez has managed - especially with record oil revenues - to break the embargo against Cuba, embolden the indigenous movement in Bolivia that has now taken formal political power with Evo Morales at its helm, strengthened the move toward Mercosur - an anti-Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) bloc, and facilitated a plan byu both Argentina and Brazil to pay down their external debts to the International Monetary Fund - Imperial America’s loan sharking agency.

The symbolic placeholder for Latin American popular resistance, Zapatismo, has now been replaced by a movement with real political agency - Bolivarianismo. Zapatismo stirred this giant; but the Bolivarian movement is putting it on its feet. And the US is mired, in every way, in Iraq.

The most interesting thing about Venezuela is that American weakness was exposed there before the March 2003 invasion of Iraq. The obsession with attacking Iraq had so preoccupied the administration that it had farmed out the question of dealing with this popular but troublesome “black Indian” who had been elected president of oil-rich Venezuela. That task was assigned to two veterans of the Iran-Contra-Cocaine fiasco, convicted felon Elliott Abrams and arch-gusano Otto Reich. (The third member of this scofflaw troika during Reagan was none other than John Negroponte, now chief of US intelligence.)

Reich had actually been the US Ambassador to Venezuela in 1986.

The face of the April 2002 anti-Chavez coup d’etat in Venezuela was Pedro Carmona of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce (Fedecamaras), and he had coordinated with Reich on more than one occasion at the White House in preparation. His pot-banger “opposition” was coached and financed by the US Embassy front, the National Endowment for Democracy.

This coup was a foreshadowing of Bush administration arrogance combined with miscalculation. The meddlesome colonel was in custody on April 12th, and the Fedecamaras ricos were engaged locker-room backslapping and proposing toasts to each other in the Palacio Nacional. Bur by April 13th, world of the coup had mobilized the Venezuelan masses, closing in now around the palace like a malevolent flood, and by April 14th, the Venezuelan army - loyal to its nation and its Constitution - entered the main chambers of the Palace and abruptly ended the party. The Bolivarian government had been restored, and Chaves flew back into office on an army helicopter.

Unlike George W. Bush and his stunt aboard the USS Lincoln, Chavez had been a career military officer, and one who ad secured the loyalty of his troops through his practice.

This was a staggering setback for the Bush administration; and the expansion of Bolivarian influence in the region has not abated since. When Bolivarianism and the recent immigrant uprising in the Untied States, led by the Hispano-Latinas - displaced from their home countries by US neoliberal depredations - link arms, the inner perimeter of the empire will have been breached.

The cooler cynical heads of the imperial establishment - those not as compulsively driven by fictional imaginings of martial masculinity - already understand the implications. They are, frankly, alarmed. They have always understood that US power rests on far more than military power and prowess… that, in fact, US military power is far more limited than most imagine, and US military “prowess” is largely mythical. US power was intricately rooted in the complexity of international relations. Dollar hegemony and military backup operate on the terrain of guile, misapprehension, ideology, cooptation… deal-making. Control exercised from the drawing room is always more stable and stabilize-able than control exercised from the battlefield… now an urban battlefield defined more by chaos-theory bifurcations than range, precision, and firepower.

Dick Cheney is the seat of power in this administration. When Al Gore was Vice President, he had one national security advisor. Cheney has assembled a team of 15 advisors who were - in effect - the actual architects of the war in Iraq. The majority were recruited directly out of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a neo-con propaganda-mill disguised as a think tank.

WINEP’s influence via this Cheney “board of advisors” was detailed in an article by Juan Cole, “All the Vice President’s Men,” October 2005, in Salon.

The principle policy document produced by WINEP building the case for the Iraq invasion was “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” That it was even called “the realm” in the title speaks volumes, but the detailed document itself - nor mandatory indoctrination for US military officers interested in “learning” about the Middle East - as Cole caustically noted, “must be the most absurd, ill-informed and frankly lunatic pieces of prose ever produced by any policy advisor anywhere. It is full of false premises and ignorant assumptions.”

At the head of this Vice Presidential battle staff of laptop bombardiers sat one I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Scooter was a chief stove-piper. He gathered “evidence,” often gleaned from a network of liars under the supervision of Rendon Group exile Ahmed Chalabi (convicted of bank fraud and embezzlement in Jordan), that supported the pre-ordained decision to invade Iraq, establish a puppet government, and construct an array of US military bases there. That “intelligence” was then “stovepiped” to Cheney, and thereby, to Cheney’s pup in the Oval Office.

Seymour Hersh’s October 2003 New Yorker piece, “The Stovepipe,” gives an astonishing and remarkably detailed account of this process.

A small group of Central Intelligence Agency analysts, grown restive under Libby and Cheney’s bullying them for questionable conclusions to support the war in 2002, actually began rebelling in the Agency’s subtle way: they started feeding Cheney’s office bullshit. Hersh:

“The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney,” the former officer said. “They said, ‘O.K, we’re going to put the bite on these guys.’ ” My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year, at one of the many holiday gatherings in the Washington area of past and present C.I.A. officials. “Everyone was bragging about it-’Here’s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.’ ” These retirees, he said, had superb contacts among current officers in the agency and were informed in detail of the sismi [Italian] intelligence.

“They thought that, with this crowd, it was the only way to go-to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence,” my source said. “They thought it’d be bought at lower levels-a big bluff.” The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. “It got out of control.”

Like all large institutions, C.I.A. headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, is full of water-cooler gossip, and a retired clandestine officer told me this summer that the story about a former operations officer faking the documents is making the rounds. “What’s telling,” he added, “is that the story, whether it’s true or not, is believed”-an extraordinary commentary on the level of mistrust, bitterness, and demoralization within the C.I.A. under the Bush Administration.

Howsoever the actual story of Niger uranium began, Cheney wolfed it down like a bass going for a plastic worm. History may well show that this little dirty trick - a bit of payback to a disrespectful boss - may have planted the seed that would lead to the impeachment of the Bush administration.

Cheney ordered the CIA to follow up. So they hired a former diplomat with both Iraq and Africa experience, Joseph Wilson IV, to go to Niger and confirm whether Niger had sold yellowcake uranium to President Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government.

Wilson later explained:

In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney’s office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake - a form of lightly processed ore - by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990’s. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president’s office.

After consulting with the State Department’s African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government.

But he went on to describe how his report, debunking the claims, was intentionally buried to publicize a phony Iraqi nuclear threat in order to gain the American public’s acquiescence to invasion.

Before I left Niger, I briefed the ambassador on my findings, which were consistent with her own [that the yellowcake story was bullshit]. I also shared my conclusions with members of her staff. In early March, I arrived in Washington and promptly provided a detailed briefing to the C.I.A. I later shared my conclusions with the State Department African Affairs Bureau. There was nothing secret or earth-shattering in my report, just as there was nothing secret about my trip.

Though I did not file a written report, there should be at least four documents in United States government archives confirming my mission. The documents should include the ambassador’s report of my debriefing in Niamey, a separate report written by the embassy staff, a C.I.A. report summing up my trip, and a specific answer from the agency to the office of the vice president (this may have been delivered orally). While I have not seen any of these reports, I have spent enough time in government to know that this is standard operating procedure.

I thought the Niger matter was settled and went back to my life. (I did take part in the Iraq debate, arguing that a strict containment regime backed by the threat of force was preferable to an invasion.) In September 2002, however, Niger re-emerged. The British government published a “white paper” asserting that Saddam Hussein and his unconventional arms posed an immediate danger. As evidence, the report cited Iraq’s attempts to purchase uranium from an African country.

Then, in January, President Bush, citing the British dossier, repeated the charges about Iraqi efforts to buy uranium from Africa.

The next day, I reminded a friend at the State Department of my trip and suggested that if the president had been referring to Niger, then his conclusion was not borne out by the facts as I understood them. He replied that perhaps the president was speaking about one of the other three African countries that produce uranium: Gabon, South Africa or Namibia. At the time, I accepted the explanation. I didn’t know that in December, a month before the president’s address, the State Department had published a fact sheet that mentioned the Niger case.

Those are the facts surrounding my efforts. The vice president’s office asked a serious question. I was asked to help formulate the answer. I did so, and I have every confidence that the answer I provided was circulated to the appropriate officials within our government.

The question now is how that answer was or was not used by our political leadership. If my information was deemed inaccurate, I understand (though I would be very interested to know why). If, however, the information was ignored because it did not fit certain preconceptions about Iraq, then a legitimate argument can be made that we went to war under false pretenses. (July 6, 2003, New York Times)

Just as it had with Chalabi’s parade of disinformant-exile stories, Libby’s staff stovepiped the Iraq-Niger nuke fable straight into a presidential speech. Wilson’s public rebuttal (excerpted above) became an instant legitimation crisis for the administration, now facing the reality of a stubborn guerrilla war only two months after the Crawford Generalissimo had capered across the deck of the Lincoln declaring “Mission Accomplished.”

Libby’s staff was directed to un-fuck this situation, and pronto. The way to do that? Shed doubt on Wilson’s credibility. Show that he himself was a partisan in the debate on whether to invade Iraq.

As Howard Fineman explained in Newsweek (October 7, 2003):

Behind the scenes or openly, at war or at peace, the United States has been debating what to do in, with and about Iraq for more than 20 years. We always have been of two minds. One faction, led by the CIA and State Department, favored using secular forces in Iraq-Saddam Hussein and his Baathists-as a counterweight to even more radical elements, from the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt to the Shiite ayatollahs in Iran to the Palestinian terrorists in the Levant. The other faction, including Dick Cheney and the “neo-cons,” has long held a different view: that, with their huge oil reserves and lust for power (and dreams of recreating Baghdad’s ancient role in the Arab world), the Baathists had to be permanently weakened and isolated, if not destroyed. This group cheered when, more than 20 years ago in a secret airstrike, the Israelis destroyed a nuclear reactor Saddam had been trying to build, a reactor that could have given him the ultimate WMD.

Associating Wilson, through his wife, Valerie Plame, with the Agency was not revenge. That is a bone-headed analysis on its face. It was spin in what was known by insiders to be a polarization and power struggle between the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction and the State-CIA faction, about how to handle the question of Iraq. The CIA was not exactly having a banner year in 2003, and being associated with them was not credibility-enhancing.

This was simply a reaction. A blundering one, as it turns out, because by and by it led to questions about the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which I’d wager Libby never even thought much about. The problem was, they violated it. Bush’s enemies, their numbers growing by the day, seized on this - as they did anything that might chip the presidential armor - and ran with it. The fact that it violated a law designed to protect the power of the Security State made it palatable to the press. One thing led to another, then a quiet Illinois prosecutor was appointed to give the impression that there was nothing to hide.

Enter Patrick Fitzgerald, appointed Special Prosecutor December 30, 2003. He was about to become the Archibald Cox of this administration, except for the fact that it was politically impossible to fire him without inviting this very comparison. Fitzgerald would begin a patient and scrupulous investigation that would lead to Libby’s indictment, that may lead within the week to the indictment of top presidential advisor Karl Rove, and eventually to that of Vice President Dick Cheney.

As in most cases of political malfeasance, the attempt to cover up a minor infraction generally leads to more felonious ones. The emergency mobilization of the entire White House staff to deal with this burgeoning crisis has led to every more incoherent operations. In the wake of the Libby tremor, while Rove was trapped in chronic consultations with lawyers, the public got a bizarre peak at an administration in turmoil.

On October 13, 2005, George W. Bush conducted a staged teleconference with troops in Iraq.

I’d seen some weird shit in my day, and that definitely qualified as weird.

I suppose Roget’s Thesaurus could have provided me with a more eloquent or evocative term, but weird was all I could think of that fits to describe the so-called video-conference that the Bush held with ten of the most haplessly humiliated officers and NCOs in the military (and one Iraqi collaborator).

Their fatigued faces almost sagging with temporary muscular failure from twenty-minute rigor mortis smiles (that surely seemed like 20 years), these unfortunates were required by the chain of command to leave their regular jobs on behalf of the slaughter and occupation and become public relations meat-muppets for maybe the most inept perception management stunt ever performed by the Oval Office.

I touted the teleconference as a perfect counter-recruitment ad. Invite teenagers and ROTC students to watch this “teleconference.” Join the military and be put on display as ventriloquist dummies. Join the military and be humiliated before the whole world in a thespian performance on par with a third-grade Halloween skit.

Show this buffoonery to prospective troops, and the recruiters will have to hang around courtrooms - like in the old days - to offer convicted felons armed service as an option to prison.

During this sorry stunt, Dubya danced around behind his podium like a six-year-old with pinworms, fidgeted with his notes until he lost them, and had his earpiece fall out about five times. He would lose the thread then talk over the lines of the other performers - whose performances weren’t wooden; they were petrified. Under his smile, you could see the muscles in his face twitching with the mounting rage of a Caligulan blueblood as the whole thing went from bad to bizarre in its ineptitude. Someone had to face the wrath of the pipsqueak afterwards, if reports from Capitol Hill Blue had any validity; they claimed the Prez had been pretty unhinged lately - prone to crimson-faced, carpet-chewing tantrums.

Even the network news outlets found the whole thing so horrid in its execution that they were obliged - if they were to salvage even a shred of self respect - to ridicule the whole episode. When Scott McClellan attempted to field questions later that day and the reporters pounced on the whole excruciating exhibition, the best the Press Secretary could muster was, “I think what the American people heard was some very important information from our men and women in uniform.”

The Press Secretary denied that the event was scripted, a denial that would have made an ass out of him even had the networks not obtained and broadcast footage of Allison Barber, a Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary, coaching the muppet-troops on their lines prior to the performance.

McClellan looked bad. He’d been looking very bad lately, foreshadowing his eventual resignation. With Rove and Libby (and Judith Miller, too) spending their days in legal offices trying to get their story straight, and with Cheney attending to his dark malfunctioning heart, the center was not holding.

Poor baby-faced Scott - privileged son of Barr McClellan, a conspiracy theorist who claims LBJ killed JFK, and Carole Keeton Strayhorn, the former comptroller of Texas - looks these days like he was retaining water. Scotty was sallow and puffy, and behind his smile there was no joie de vivre. During the press conference, he’d snapped. First he grew surly, then combative, and finally walked out of the room with the grimmest smile imaginable, the waves of press-laughter lapping at his back.

Criminals might not be turned out by the body politic; but laughingstocks will. The Bush administration had now lost any vestige of dignity, all the way out to the White House Press Secretary. This was a very bad omen for George W. Bush and his control-cell.

The Harriet Miers nomination had surfaced just in time to give members of Bush’s own right-wing the excuse it needed to abandon ship. After this sensationally stupid exhibition of mediocrity, the lifeboats were being untied.

The Bush administration had now become ridiculous. When history finally records the outcomes of so-called Plame-gate, this worthiness for ridicule may be demonstrated to have been more significant than the actual indictments.

The legacy of the Bush White House may be entitled “The War of the Leaks,” and Bush will have become a “war president” after all. By 2005, the leak-counterleak cycle was about to be replaced by more open rebellion from the spokespersons of the ruling class who were growing increasingly alarmed by the runaway train that the Bush-Cheney executive had become. But not before one more spectacular leak. The Downing Street Memo.

Not only did the leaked memorandum show that Tony Blair was as shameless a liar as George W. Bush, it confirmed that the Bush administration had decided on the course of war, and that they were seeking “supportive intelligence” to justify it.

Then, on August 29, 2005, a Category 3 hurricane named Katrina, producing storm surges as high as 32 feet, made its second landfall at Buras-Triumph, Louisiana with a diameter of more than 420 miles. It was to become the most expensive “natural” disaster in US history, killing more than 2,000 people, displacing hundreds of thousands, disrupting millions, and setting the stage for a scandalous display of incompetence and racist insensitivity.

The reaction of the US government to Katrina was as ugly a picture as you might want of this administration. It said, in no uncertain terms, “You’re on your own… if you’re poor, too fucking bad.”

There was also no more stark a picture of the African American national question, to my mind, than seeing Black families in New Orleans roaming through the poisonous floodwaters in search of survival. African America was already only one disaster away from third-world status, and we could see clearly how Black people were the vast, vast majority of those who were left behind, without transportation, by the “free-market evacuation.”

The poor whites among these refugees had been effectively excluded from full “whiteness” by their class, but the fact that they were “white” did not change the essential reality of race as a question of imperial (read: national) oppression.

Looking at the whole question in light of Katrina’s aftermath, it became much more difficult to shazam away the national reality we were witnessing on the devastated Gulf Coast. Historically, empirically, dialectically, subjectively… doesn’t make a bit of difference which lens you used, the scenes from places like New Orleans, then 80% under a toxic soup that the EPA had said couldn’t be cleaned up with the equivalent of the US Gross National Product, were scenes from the African diaspora that brought shame on America and the taint of plain criminal negligence to the Bush administration.

There was a televised report one day of a Black family foraging in a pile of garbage for food. A pre-pubescent boy, wearing only a pair of shorts, carefully picked a barefooted path onto the steaming pile of refuse to salvage edible calories. I thought I was in Haiti again.

The parts America that power doesn’t want us to see were already in the Third World before Katrina. On the Gulf Coast of the Mississippi Delta that was the case for many already. Now they were a step down from a poor nation; they were refugees.

Jordan Flaherty, reporting from the zone on September 2nd, wrote:

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway, thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be told where the bus was taking them - Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas, or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas (for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge. You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17 miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told me ‘as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to be here at night.”

On the news, white families foraging through flooded convenience stores for food and water are said to be “recovering” food. Black families doing exactly the same thing are called “looters.” The organs of commodified information are clamoring for control of this deracinated mass of black bodies - get law and order back, even though the city is gone, is a more urgent cry than finding those who are still trapped in their sweltering attics, slowly dying of dehydration and vascular collapse… children the most vulnerable.

Bush spoke today (September 2) in response to the mounting wrath at how the Federal government has responded, and all he could think of to say was, “We are going to restore order in the city of New Orleans.” He knew his White nationalist base well, and that’s all he had to go to now. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, at his wits end with diplomatic restraint had to be bleeped on the radio when he said, “They don’t have any fucking idea what’s going!”

Then the word was out on the media. The FEMA Director was a buddy-appointment, a man who had never done anything even remotely related to disaster management… or management at all. Director Michael Brown had organized horse shows; and for weeks the irresistibly horrible images of the devastation were broadcast to the world. The looting theme was eroded away by the relentlessly mounting images of pain, loss, and despair.

In an attempt to show concern, Bush had his plane fly over while he was photographed looking out the window. This became, instead of a publicity photo, an iconic image of detachment and distance, followed by another Bush gaffe - his hope for recovery for when he could sit with Klan-friendly Trent Lott on his porch in Mississippi - an antebellum image that conjured mint juleps and black bodies sweating in distant cotton fields.

In the wake of September 11th, George W. Bush’s approval rating was 83%. By July 2004, it had fallen to 47%. Katrina happened. By December 2005, he was approved at 41%. In May 2006, his numbers fell to treetop level: 31%.

Once the outer perimeters begin to fall, the power of the defense begins to disappear with a dreadful momentum.

On November 17, 2005, Congressman John Murtha (D-PA), a Vietnam Vet and career Marine Reservist - known as a devotee of American imperial power and military masculinity - stunned Congress, the public, and the White House by calling for an immediate military withdrawal from Iraq.

“Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency,” said Murtha at a tearful news conference. [The Iraqi resistance forces] “are united against U.S. forces, and we have become a catalyst for violence…It’s time to bring them home.”

Murtha visits casualties every week at Walter Reed Army Medical Center; and he has close friendships with a number of Pentagon Generals. The combination of his very real personal empathy for soldiers, and his channeling of the reasonable fears of Generals that the overstretch in Iraq was degrading the armed forces as a whole, led him to be the messenger for what the Generals were not empowered to say themselves. He was carrying a message from the brass that Iraq was another Vietnam; and that continuing the occupation could have the same disastrous effect on the military as an institution.

Murtha declared the whole Iraq adventure “a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”

The White House was already preoccupied - now with a host of new crises: Guantanamo had been declared a gulag by Amnesty International in May; Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff was facing indictments for fraud, conspiracy, and tax evasion, with implications so far-reaching that dozens of Congresspersons found themselves consulting their own attorneys (especially Republican Speaker of the House Tom Delay who would eventually be indicted and resign);

And so they reacted to Murtha instantly and stupidly. They compared Murtha to liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, and Scotty McClellan added one more gaffe to his thickening resume: “The eve of an historic democratic election in Iraq is not the time to surrender to the terrorists.” This to a Congressman who was twice wounded during the imperial occupation of Vietnam… from Scott McClellan, whose whole career was defined by privilege and nepotism. This did not play well - to coin a phrase - in Peoria.

Murtha was only prefiguring what was about to come. Generals, real military Generals, teamed up in April - facing the dual prospect of a Vietnam-like degradation of the armed forces and their own legacies being tied in history to a Commander-in-Chief who will be remembered not only as a poor president (by the flat standards of political scientists), but as a spectacularly bad one - and publicly called for the resignation of Bush’s arcade Field Marshall, Donald Rumsfeld.

Generals Zinni, Newbold, Swannack, Riggs, Batiste, and Eaton began thinking of their own places in history; that when the inevitable coup de grace comes, the flash flood of investigations may come rushing uncomfortably close to home: Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Fallujah.

And so they lined up and denounced not the king, but his counselor, the one who had given them orders.

It was hard to imagine in April what could be worse - from the point of view of perception management - for the administration than a rebellion of generals. If one were to fictionalize a bigger public relations disaster, it would have to be something involving very creepy people with names like Duke Cunningham, Dusty Foggo, and “Nine-Fingers” … something with flabby, dissipated, middle-aged, rich men garbed in expensive suits and jewelry, cutting deals at seamy parties where they share booze and prostituted women… Oh yeah. That is what happened, and is still happening. It is what led to the resignation of Porter Goss, former Director of Central Intelligence. And it will simply thrill the “family values” crowd out of its socks.

Goss was assigned head of the CIA after George Tenet was made the willing scapegoat for the discovery of a series of administration lies leading up to the war. Cheney was livid that the CIA didn’t give him their full cooperation in developing an invasion pretext, and Donald Rumsfeld was still engaged in the long-running battle for domination of covert operations between the Department of Defense and the Agency. When Bush needed a good-bureaucrat fall guy to “protect the king,” Tenet was it. So the Agency was being placed on a transformative disciplinary status. Goss was given the task of making the Agency into a glorified public relations organ of the executive branch.

Goss is as much a frat-boy as the rest of his party, and he immediately relied on cronyism to make his key appointments. The real make-it-happen guy at the Agency is the Executive Director (ED). It’s the number three slot at the agency, and it comes with a whip. He initially awarded the position to his own Congressional aide, Mike Kostiw. But war had been declared against this Agency by the administration, and the battle of leaks was renewed in a counter-offensive. The Washington Post soon released a story showing that Kostiw had been convicted in 1981 of shoplifting a package of bacon (no puns suggested).

Goss’ deputy, Patrick Murray, sharing his new boss’ pique, marched into the office of CIA Deputy Director of Operations for Counter-Intelligence, Mary Margaret Graham, and issued a red-faced warning: another leak on any Goss appointment would cost her head. (Murray was such an overbearing bully that Senior CIA operations officials Steve Kappes and Mike Sulick both resigned rather than work with him.)

This warning was concurrent with the appointment of a new ED - Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, a retired CIA contract manager from San Diego. Goss and Murray had good reason to try keeping the lid on Foggo - even if it was colossally stupid. Foggo, a veteran of the government contract trenches, is a crook. Foggo’s associates are crooks. They are also Republican Party heavyweights.

Foggo and a host of others, including the now-incarcerated ex-Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham (a Republican… from San Diego, too), were deeply involved with another character, Brent Wilkes. Wilkes is a fellow-San Diegan. This was a San Diego clique.

Wilkes and Cunningham began collaborating in 1995 on a flim-flam defense contract scheme - the one that eventually landed Congressman Cunningham in a federal penitentiary. Wilkes is under investigation now, along with Foggo, for contracting schemes with the CIA. The buzz in Washington DC is that there are quite a few Congresspersons who are watching this drama unfold with a very high index of anxiety.

But the juicy parts are still to come. Cunningham, whose first wife swore out a restraining order against him back in the day, claimed that his divorce broke him down and prepared him for rebirth in the evangelical Christian tradition. Apparently, he was reborn with a taste for expensive liquor and exploited women. One of the CIA employees who was a regular at the parties has been identified only as “Nine-Fingers.” Can this get better? Yes, it can.

Wilkes was greasing his contract scams with bribe-parties, big rowdy ones with plenty of alcohol and a menu of prostituted women for his potential clients… at the DC hotel formerly named… Watergate. I know. I know. This is a surfeit of irony.

Wilkes was also George W. Bush’s finance co-chair for the state of California and an active supporter of the Schwarzenegger gubernatorial campaign.

One of the attendees at these “special” parties was Dusty Foggo, and another was probably Porter Goss. Like I said, this is deep… and it’s still breaking. It certainly helps demystify the question of Goss’ rather abrupt resignation.

But it gets better, because this has created a stack-on effect. When Goss stepped down, whom did Bush nominate to replace him?

General Michael Hayden.

Much has been made of General Hayden’s nomination to head up the CIA without so much as retiring from active duty. Many see the mark of the Rumsfeld beast on this appointment, and I can’t say I blame them. Porter Goss’ job was to transform the Agency into a more compliant Public Relations company for the executive branch; and the sudden resignation of Goss as the Foggo sex scandal comes creeping centerwise provided the Department of Defense its best-yet opportunity to finally seize its long-time intelligence and covert operations rival for itself.

Even more has been made of Hayden having been the architect of the administration’s domestic spying program, when he was head of the National Security Agency (NSA). The latest scandal involved the NSA purchase of call records for millions of people inside the United States. The excuse being put forward by both Bush and Hayden is that they didn’t listen to the calls, so it wasn’t spying. The legal issue is that the NSA is prohibited in monitoring people inside the United States without express permission from a federal judge showing cause. The Federal Intelligence Security Act (FISA) that lays out this rule was written in the wake of the domestic spying scandal that led to the presidential resignation of Richard Nixon.

But in December 2005, Bush actually signed and executive order authorizing not merely the harvesting of phone records, but actual wiretaps. So their excuse now undermines their claim they did nothing wrong then.

The real problem for the Bush administration is whom they pissed off with this one. The Chicken Little sector of the antiwar movement (I still love them, even though they madden me with their breathless panic attacks.), of course, immediately leapt to the conclusion - again, based on their wild overestimation of the abilities of government employees, including spooks - that the omniscient Big Brother portrayed in Enemy of the State has arrived and the roundups for the camps are immanent.

The real story is that this administration is in a very deep crisis and this is a rearguard action. To do what? Let’s think this through, shall we? In the war of leaks and counter-leaks, the Bush administration has been repeatedly beaten like a rented mule. There are not enough of these government employees to stay on top of every telephone call in the country. They have to be directed, focused. The target has been the press, in order to determine who the whistleblowers are who are doing such terrible damage to Bush-Cheney legitimacy.

When Bush was busted in December 2005 for the illegal wiretapping, his response - in public - was:

Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk.

He meant that. George W. Bush and his administration have said more than once that they believe they are entitled to take extraordinary (extralegal) measures as part of the Global War on Terror (GWOT - I call it the Gee what?). This goes to the very Levi-Straussian core of their philosophical identity. The masses must be conformed to support the national “destiny” with a simple story - they are too stupid to be privy to the truth. These leaks are considered tantamount to treason by the Bush White House.

On May 15, I turned on MSNBC. Joe Scarborough, an emcee who rivals the worst of Fox in his mean-spirited mediocrity and petit bourgeois right-reaction, was lambasting the Bush administration on the latest revelations about the NSA scandal. One of the guests was my friend Robert Jensen, a died-in-the-wool anti-imperialist journalism professor at the University of Texas, and Scarborough was taking Robert’s side against a Republican Party spokesperson in the debate about the NSA.

(In the background, can we hear the lifeboats smacking down onto the ocean swells?)

Television news is a commercial venture. They track polls as obsessively as any politician. George W. Bush enjoys a 31% approval rating. Figure it out.

The Republicans have begun to understand - as has the entire bi-partisan ruling class - that Dubya and his entourage are a pig in a poke. On May 15, the conservative Moony sheet, The Washington Times, published an editorial by Bruce Fein, wherein he quoted (of all people) then-Congressman Porter Goss, the recently fired Director of Central Intelligence whom Hayden is designated to replace. The 2000 quote, from the floor of Congress as then-chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, stated:

The NSA General Counsel’s Office contended … that its legal opinions, decisional memoranda, and policy guidance, all of which govern the operations and mechanisms of that federal agency, are free from scrutiny by Congress. This would result in the envelopment of the executive branch in a cloak of secrecy that would insulate the executive branch from effective oversight. It would also undermine the intent of the 94th and 95th Congresses to establish stringent oversight of the intelligence community. This outcome would seriously hobble the legislative oversight contemplated by the Constitution.

Archival quotations are like Biblical quotations. They are mined in the service of agendas. People are beginning to break and run in the Bush administration’s Arena of the Gods.

Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.
-Proverbs 16:18

Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.
-Thomas Paine

On the day after May Day 2006, after the biggest demonstration by immigrants in US history, another shoe dropped. In the din of the immigration debate, it was hardly heard. But it will be.

Army documents acquired through FOIA by the American Civil Liberties Union were published by Raw Story that quoted Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, then US Commander of Ground Forces in Iraq telling his subordinates, with respect to interrogation of prisoners, “go to the outer limits.” Here is a snippet of the Raw Story article, just to give readers a flavor of what is to come as these documents - including more photos - emerge:

“These documents are further proof that the abuse of detainees was widespread and systemic, and not aberrational,” said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “We know that senior officials endorsed this abuse, but these officials have yet to be held accountable.”

Last week, the government authenticated that two videos released by the Palm Beach Post in March 2005 were videos that the government was withholding from the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request. The videos are part of a set that has come to be known as the “Ramadi Madness” videos and were made by members of the West Palm Beach-based Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 124th Infantry Regiment. The two scenes the government authenticated are called “See Haj Run” and “Blood Clot.” They depict scenes of urban battle and persons being captured and detained by U.S. forces.

Among the more than 9,000 pages of Defense Department documents made public by the ACLU today are several investigations detailing cruel and degrading treatment and killings. The investigations include:

* An investigation into the death of a detainee at Forward Operating Base Rifles near Al Asad, Iraq established probable cause to believe that several soldiers assaulted a detainee and committed negligent homicide, and conspired to cover up the death. The detainee died when a soldier lifted him up from the floor by placing a baton under his chin, fracturing his hyoid bone. It appears that the soldiers received written letters of reprimand and counseling.

* A heavily redacted e-mail dated May 25, 2004 shows that a presumed officer or civilian government official was told of three reports of abuse of detainees described as “probably true/valid.” One detainee was “in such poor physical shape from obvious beatings that [name redacted] asked the MP’s to note his condition before he proceeded with interrogation.” Another detainee was “in such bad shape … that he was laying down in his own feces.” These cases seem to have occurred in Abu Ghraib and Camp Cropper. The full document is online here.

* An investigation shows a doctor cleared a detainee for further interrogations, despite claims he had been beaten and shocked with a taser. The medic confirmed that the detainee’s injuries were consistent with his allegations, stating, “Everything he described he had on his body.” Yet, the medic cleared him for further interrogation, giving him Tylenol for the pain. There is no indication that the medic reported this abuse…

Sanchez, of course, denied the report on May 5th, reminding people - by way of rebuttal - that the ACLU is a bunch of… (ugh) “lawyers.”

Not exactly an auspicious thing to resurface just as the media is sniffing out the general wind change. And if the chain of command can find some small comfort in compassion fatigue among liberals and plain Islamophobia among others, they will find no place to hide from the one thing that makes Main Street and Wall Street shudder in unison: record oil prices.

On May 9th, William F. Engdahl published “The US’s geopolitical nightmare” in Asia Times. It began…

By drawing attention to Iraq and the obvious role oil plays in US policy today, the George W Bush-Dick Cheney administration has done just that: it has drawn the world’s energy-deficit powers’ attention firmly to the strategic battle over energy, and especially oil.

This is already having consequences for the global economy in terms of US$75-a-barrel crude-oil price levels. Now it is taking on the dimension of what one former US defense secretary rightly calls a “geopolitical nightmare” for the United States.

The reason the establishment has allowed the Cheney entourage to go as far as it has was that they themselves weren’t sure whether or not it would work. That’s why Democrats co-signed the war… not that they were fooled by “bad intelligence” too. There is a ruling class in the United States. It does seek its long-term interests. It does use the US state to pursue its interests. Those interests are inescapably international. It does recognize the existence of a crisis. It does recognize that energy is a critical substrate within the system it dominates. It is itself caught inside, not operating outside, that system. This is 21st Century Imperialism 101.

The attempt to seize control over Southwest Asia and emplace bases there was not insanity; it was not an Israeli plot; it was not revenge for a purported attempt to assassinate George Bush’s daddy; it was not because Iraq bought some Euros; and it was not to steal oil (though they tried that as an afterthought).

Oil is a means to an end - the valorization of capital. Money goes into the system as “investment” (this is often now speculation, which is a big part of the crisis); it is converted into some kind of commodity making process that involves machines, raw materials, human labor, and some guys with truncheons and guns to keep everyone in line; the stuff that is made gets sold at a cost greater than the investment.

But this is not a local blacksmith making horseshoes down the street and you growing trophy tomatoes on your land for the local market. In fact, an American can now chow down at Ryan’s salad bar and eat a plate of stuff that was grown in Oaxaca, off of plates made in Shanghai, wearing shoes made in Danang, pants made in Tegucigalpa, a shirt made in Lima, socks made in Jakarta, and underwear made in the Marianas (which will have a tag that says “Made in the USA,” because the Marianas are a US possession). This is simple math. If you pay a collection of Southeast Asian “guest” workers in the Marianas $5 a day instead of paying a US worker $7 an hour, to make the same stuff, the pot of money at the end of that valorization process is higher.

(By the way, the main lobbyist for Marianas sweatshops has also been transformed into one of the encroachments for the Bush regime; his name was Jack Abramoff, and he brought down Speaker of the House Tom Delay when he fell from grace.)

So the “virtuous circuit” of capital can now actually be imagined as a twine-ball of commodity shipment lines that runs all over the face of the planet. In reality, most of those lines terminate in the United States. Sure there are plenty that go to Western Europe and Japan, but the really heavy concentration is to the US.

Because of the position of the US dollar as the principle international currency, because it rests in Central Bank reserves all over the world holding “value” for the future (and to defend other currencies from speculative predation), and because poor countries have to pay their perpetual International Monetary Fund debts in dollars, everybody has to get them… dollars. So the largest fraction of commodity production is for ultimate sale in the United States. Selling is how the “virtuous circuit” is completed, and without that…well, things just break down for the class that owns all these productive facilities and has made all these investments.

When we say that oil is a substrate (the layer beneath), we mean it is seen by the capitalist as a cost of production, but the reality is that it is also a form of matter that just happens to contain a lot of highly concentrated, extremely portable combustible energy that powers machines, cars, trains, trucks, automobiles, ships, and airplanes. It is not made (though it is refined). It is mined out of the earth; and its net quantity is finite. (And no, there is no direct calorie-for-calorie, equally concentrated, equally portable substitute… and never will be.)

If we go back now, and take an inventory of our own homes, and see where most of the stuff comes from, the points of origin are not equally distributed around the world. My own quick inventory of thirty items revealed 25 from China, two from Haiti (but I bought them there, when I visited), two from Mexico, and one from Honduras. So as I refine my imagination of the twine-lines on the earth’s surface, I now have a lot of lines extending from China to the US. A lot of US capitalists have very big investments and partnerships in China, and a lot of them make a lot of money retailing Chinese-made products (Wal-Mart, for example).

This creates a problem, when political (and military) power resides in the US state, but these “virtuous circuits” are now extending into many places where the US state does not exercise direct control. The other problem it creates is the obvious one related to oil - that this structure, which cannot be abandoned without a catastrophic impact on the global economy, especially on the ruling class of the US, in stretching its physical geography and continuously expanding commodity production (they call this “growth,” though physically it is extremely destructive… of substrates), is an increasing dependence on a commodity which is also a substrate (oil) that - as a substrate - has peaked and is now entering a permanent decline.

For anyone representing the interests, then, of this ruling stratum, the puzzle that has to be solved is twofold: hanging onto the international political-military power of the US state even though the valorization process extends substantially out of the US (and substantially into China, to be specific), and how to hoard the diminishing supplies of oil until another strategy can be found to resituate ruling class power (actually, it can’t, in my opinion, but that’s another story).

The strategy of Cheney’s Centurions was to kill two birds with one stone: Establish a large and permanent military presence in the biggest global oil patch by repositioning US military forces from their now anachronistic Cold War dispositions, and thereby put the imperial hand on the Earth’s oil spigot as leverage to use against China and others…but especially China.

A friend of mine says that “the difference between theory and practise is practise.” (She’s a Brit, so she spells funny.) This theory of Cheney’s Centurions looked pretty feasible. Rumsfeld plugged in some metrics from his own theories of “network-centric warfare” and even though both the Kissingerian realists and the Democrats groused and huffed for a bit, they themselves were convinced of what used to be an operations planning joke when I was working Special Ops: “It could work.”

But in practise, it didn’t work.

Now the class upon whose shoulders the Cheney Centurions ride is grown restive, and they are figuring out how to send them home with the least disruption, so someone can try and figure out how to un-fuck the mess they’ve made.

Elevating the position and status of Iran, allowing the breakaway of Latin America, building the basis for a resurgent American left along with a growing sector of secessionist-minded libertarians, stimulating around a billion Muslims into a sullen fury, destroying the myth of American military supremacy, degrading the armed forces, de-legitimating the US state itself, and raising the price of oil on top of an historic debt overhang… was not what they’d bargained for.

The straw that breaks the camel’s back, of course, is that $75 price tag on oil. This is more than fear of inflation (the perennial paranoia of neoliberals). It is the reconfiguration of global alliances that is taking place as this flow of dollars is re-routed.

Engdahl explains the significance of the little understood Shanghai Cooperation Organization:

The latest developments surrounding the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Iran further underscore the dramatic change in the geopolitical position of the United States.

The SCO was created in Shanghai on June 15, 2001, by Russia and China along with four former Soviet Central Asian republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Prior to September 11, 2001, and the US declaration of an “axis of evil” in January 2002, the SCO was merely background geopolitical chatter as far as Washington was concerned.

Today the SCO, which has to date been blacked out almost entirely in US mainstream media, is defining a new political counterweight to US hegemony and its “unipolar” world. At the next SCO meeting on June 15, Iran will be invited to become a full SCO member.

And last month in Tehran, Chinese Ambassador Lio G Tan announced that a pending oil and gas deal between China and Iran was ready to be signed.

The deal is said to be worth at least $100 billion, and includes development of the huge Yadavaran onshore oilfield. China’s Sinopec would agree to buy 250 million tons of liquefied natural gas over 25 years. No wonder China is not jumping to back Washington against Iran in the United Nations Security Council. The US had been trying to put massive pressure on Beijing to halt the deal, for obvious geopolitical reasons, to no avail. Another major defeat for Washington.

Iran is also moving on plans to deliver natural gas via a pipeline to Pakistan and India. Energy ministers from the three countries met in Doha recently and plan to meet again this month in Pakistan.

The pipeline progress is a direct rebuff to Washington’s efforts to steer investors clear of Iran. Ironically, US opposition is driving these countries into one another’s arms, Washington’s “geopolitical nightmare”.

Peter Kiernan, an energy consultant puts it bluntly.

[N]eo-conservative expectations that post-Saddam Iraq’s oil could be used as a weapon to lower oil prices, undermine Saudi Arabia and Iran, and bust the OPEC cartel wide open have not been realized. Iraq’s deteriorated security environment has played on oil-market fears that have contributed to higher oil prices. Iraq is producing less oil than it did before the invasion, leaving the market share of the region’s two big oil powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, unchallenged. And both those states are also enjoying near-record-level revenues. The grand dream of an Iraqi oil boom fueling transformation in the Middle East has gone bust.

Ouch.

“We are aware what is going on in the world,” said Vladimir Putin recently. “Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he’s clearly not going to listen to anyone… Methods of force rarely give the desired result, and often their consequences are even more terrible than the original threat.”

Lest anyone grow giddy over these developments… or complacent, I would remind readers that this does not present us with a resolution, but with an immanent re-formulation of the problem. First, I will note that those elites who are alarmed will inherit the same contradictions faced by the Centurions. Finally, I will note that a “middle class” in crisis is a dangerous beast, and we now find the country that I live in expressing an ominous outburst of xenophobia. Bush’s recent deployment of the National Guard to the US-Mexican border - while serving to take the public’s eye away from other matters for a moment - was also his capitulation to the demands of fascists.

Many people had never heard of Jim Gilchrist until he was given a platform on CNN’s Lou Dobbs Tonight. Dobbs, himself a relentless purveyor of racial paranoia against Hispano-Latinas, brought Gilchrist - the Minutemen’s founder - on his CNN program as an unopposed guest. The Minutemen are a motley collection of weekend vigilantes who started hanging around the Arizona-Mexico border with binoculars and rifles, and whose speech is littered with the memes of white supremacy.

What few realize is that “On April 20, 2006, Gilchrist and the Minutemen Project issued a public ultimatum to Bush to ‘declare a state of emergency and deploy the National Guard and military reserves (and begin building a border security fence) by the 25th of May.’ If the President refuses to do so, ‘on Memorial Day weekend, we’re going to break ground and we’re going to start helping landowners (along the US-Mexico border) to build a double layer security fence along their properties, because the federal government refuses to protect them’.” (Quote from Wikipedia)

Gilchrist ordered the President of the United States to deploy the National Guard, and Bush did it. With Dobbs, Gilchrist was legitimated. Dobbs legitimated him, and CNN legitimates Dobbs.

What this tells us is that the US is not immune to real fascism, which historically is a phenomenon of a “middle-class” thrown into deep economic crisis.

Bus and Cheney are failing, but the conditions they have created, and those created by longer-term secular trends, are nothing about which to be complacent. The dangers we face in our next period could be even worse than those of the Centurions.

It was after Giap defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu that the Vietnamese faced their most terrible war - one that would kill 3 million Southeast Asians and render vast swaths of land poisonous for generations.

There are miles to go.