[Peace-discuss] New lies needed

[C. G. Estabrook]

The lights are burning late in Foggy Bottom - the section of swampy Washington 
DC that's home to the State Department - this weekend.

The US administration is in trouble. After convincing Americans that we were 
killing people in AfPak in order to "stop terrorism/deny al-Qaeda a safe 
haven/get OBL," Obama et al. have to come up with a new excuse for its Mideast 
crimes. They're aware of the difficulty.

"In his speech to the nation, the President twice cautioned that this [the 
assassination OBL] doesn’t mean the end of the fight, and the pundits have 
followed through, declaring that 'of course' the battle isn’t over. Aside from 
all the chest-thumping and victorious howling rising from the crowds, and the 
politicians who delude them, the sudden absence of this devil figure — this 
looming spectral threat perpetually lurking somewhere in the shadows – leaves a 
gaping hole in the rationale for our eternal 'war on terrorism.' A new devil 
will no doubt be found, but there aren’t many credible candidates, or at least 
none with the penumbra of menace surrounding the founder of al-Qaeda." [J. Raimondo]

Of course the real reason for the decades-long "Long War" (as the Pentagon says) 
against the Mideast is control of Mideast energy resources. Control - not 
access, which of course we have anyway: the oil has to be sold. In fact, the US 
imports very little oil from the Mideast, and most of that comes from one of our 
two principal clients, Saudi Arabia. (The bulk of our foreign energy resources 
come from the Atlantic basin - N. & S. America & W. Africa). But control gives 
us an undoubted advantage over our real economic rivals in Europe (Germany) & NE 
Asia (China & Japan), as American foreign policy "wise-men" from George Kennan 
and Adolf Berle and to Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski have pointed out.

The Obama administration is down with the program; it simply has to adjust the 
propaganda cover. It's happened before. A decade after the collapse of the 
Soviet Union, Colin Powell, then Chairman of the JCOS, blurted out that he was 
suffering from an "enemies gap." In a candid or foolish moment, he said, "Think 
hard about it: I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down 
to Castro and Kim II Sung." Fortunately - at least for ongoing US policy - a new 
generation of terrorists arrived in the nick of time, they had a fantastically 
lucky success, and the gap was filled...

Since the real reason for US subversion, invasion, and occupation of the Mideast 
hasn't changed, a new propaganda cover has to be found. Since Obama sold his 
presidency to the US economic elite on the argument that he could heal "the 
greatest casualty of that [Vietnam] war ... the bond of trust between the 
American people and their government" (Audacity of Hope, 287), he must now 
restore that "trust" as the imperial war continues. It seems worthwhile to try 
to stop him.