A good speech by a contemporary state leader to a group of voters must be rousing and lacking in any particular meaning. Especially in this era of political “post-modernism” which has defeated sense and meaning. Therefore, if George Bush’s speechwriters had included the words of Stalin, starting with “Brothers and sisters” and ending with “The enemy will be crushed! Victory will be ours!”, in Bush’s speech to graduating students at the elite military academy at West Point, then it would quite accurately have captured the spirit of the times and would have represented poetic justice. Especially in the context of yesterday’s American state holiday, Remembrance Day.
Actually, in the aforementioned speech, the President of the world’s strongest country, which is constantly waging wars against a fairly indistinguishable enemy and with indistinct aims, said almost exactly that, only using other (American) words. Here is a reproduction of the cowboy-messianic message. “Just as during the Cold War, we are fighting against the followers of a lethal ideology that despises freedom, suppresses any dissent, has territorial pretensions and is pursuing totalitarian goals. There can only be one effective reply to such an enemy: we will never retreat, we will never make concessions and we will never agree to anything less than total and unconditional victory. The best way for America to honor the memory of our fallen heroes is to continue the fight, defend our freedoms and complete the mission in the name of which they laid down their lives. […] Our terrorist enemies are noticeably different from a traditional enemy – they have no capital city, no territory, no borders which they need to defend. They cannot be contained like our opponents in the Cold War, but on the other hand they can be destroyed. (Regarding the Cold War: this opponent (there were 250 million of us then) survived only because America was afraid of starting a “hot” war against it. Nuclear strikes, which were meant to serve as our liberation, were prevented only by Soviet totalitarianism and its outstanding scientists, for example the father of our hydrogen bomb, the academic Sakharov.)
The US President once again reminded us that America is waging “a sacred war”. The enemy is so terrifying that it can hardly be seen. There is only one way of recognizing it: whoever they kill is an enemy.
On the whole fighting against terror is the same as with the plague: it is easy to cure a temperature, but curing the illness itself is a wholly different matter. Terror is the means to which various figures, organizations and states resort in order to attain their goals. In more concrete terms – for the international Islamic community to achieve world domination. This is also called ‘jihad’. One of the main financial backers and the brains behind the operation is the only official Wahhab state – Saudi Arabia. But war is not being waged against the Saudis! Although plans for this were developed by the most logical and fundamentalist Republicans. The Americans are removing the natural rivals to the House of Saud – firstly Saddam’s secular dictatorship, and now they have set their sights on the regime led by the Iranian Shiites. The reason for this is the inextricable financial link between the ruling Republican elite (and the Bush family personally) and Arab oil sheikhs. It must be added that the Arabs have something like “a weapon of retribution” lurking behind the scenes: a double-edged possibility both to flood the currency markets with free masses of dollars, and to start selling oil in currencies other than dollars. Either one of these would ruin the main means for sustaining the world-wide hegemonyof the USA– thedollar – and would lead the US economy into a catastrophic crisis.
It is therefore more rational for them to run after Osama in the caves of Afghanistan, at the same time increasing drug trafficking into our country by ten times over. Generally, as soon as national and geopolitical values are replaced by those of a selfish oligarchy, politics immediately becomes unintelligible and unfamiliar: terrorists lose their nationality, Muslims their religion etc. And we will be forced to pick apart speeches made by heads of state to discern slips of the tongue and breaks in the collective political unconscious. The famous German military theorist of the 19th Century Carl von Clausewitz developed the maxim “War is the continuation of politics by other means,” therefore if we think about what kind of war the Americans have started, we might be able to surmise their underlying politics. If this is the case, then the following passages from Bush’s same speech cannot fail to attract our attention. “Two years ago I announced the largest transformation in the stationing of our armed forces around the globe since the start of the Cold War. In the coming decade we will withdraw American troops from ‘Cold War’ garrisons in Europe and Asia, and we will relocate them in such a way that they can be quickly deployed to hotspots in any corner of the world. […] We will use our improved military potential which will increase US military power around the world.” Bush also added that the plan implemented by his administration will allow up to 70 thousand soldiers to return home.
In preparing for the latest Cold War, the Americans are for some reason giving up part of what they won from the previous one – the system of forward deployment bases aimed at the Soviet Union. But where will the forces from European garrisons actually go? What if they are redeployed to a new front line on the border with Russia and Belarus? For example, the brand new shield to counter missiles from Iran has been set up not just anywhere, but in the Czech Republic and Poland.
The withdrawal of troops from Cold War garrisons in Asia is very interesting. First and foremost, from which garrisons exactly – Japan, South Korea, South-East Asia? That is unlikely. Probably from bases in post-Soviet Central Asia. It has clearly never quite worked out for the Americans there. The Uzbeks forced them out of Hanabad; the Kyrgyz tactlessly asked them for 100 times more for their Gansi base, because they need money. For at least a year the Americans have been weighing up the possibility of withdrawing from this region, leaving behind them key economic and human rights influences. As a result the geopolitical vacuum in Central Asia will be promptly filled by either Russia or China. The very absence of any mention of China in Bush’s speech is telling in itself. America is preparing for a serious conflict with China, and with this in mind their demonstrative abandoning of Central Asia would mean that the Chinese have been offered a hint of a Molotov-Ribbentrop pact: a suggestion for the direction that their expansion should take, diverting them from Taiwan and South-East Asia as a whole. Expansions which will occupy China’s attention until the USA is ready for them: they will rearm, negating China’s (and at the same time Russia’s) capabilities; they will establish control over outer space and will put Reagan’s “Star Wars” plan into action. In these ideas there is a significant amount that is American, too American – from their instinctive political isolationism to their deeply instilled concept of the war for the greater good – for it all to come true.
Source: Utro
Translated by James Platt
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