The Rag Blog

What the Pittsburgh audience heard from Mr. [Ron] Suskind and Mr. [Paul] O’Neill about the high degree of politicization of decision-making in the administration was shocking to some extent. The two speakers are extremely well-informed about what happens at the top in Washington and have excellent contacts there. People who don’t live and work in that environment could not know what factors rule when people like President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld determine whether the United States will go to war or not, putting on the line the lives of thousands of U.S. soldiers.

UNITED NATIONS –Several governments around the world have tried to rebut criticism of how they handle detainees by claiming they are only following the U.S. example in the war on terror, the U.N. anti-torture chief said Monday.

Manfred Nowak, the U.N. special investigator on torture, said that when he criticizes governments for their questionable treatment of detainees, they respond by telling him that if the United States does something, it must be all right. He would not name any countries except for Jordan.

“The United States has been the pioneer, if you wish, of human rights and is a country that has a high reputation in the world,” Nowak told a news conference. “Today, many other governments are kind of saying, ‘But why are you criticizing us, we are not doing something different than what the United States is doing?'”

I wonder what is going to happen to Israel. Its existence depends entirely on its only ally, the United States. American support depends on the Israeli Lobby. Independent of the Lobby, a lot of Americans support Israel for many reasons, yes: Varieties of Christians for reasons of religion, people who see the Moslem world as a national enemy, those who think that Israel should be left alone to live in peace, and those who don’t precisely support Israel but don’t want to see what would happen if it were overrun. Together, these are not a contemptible constituency.

But most of this is soft support. As long as the price of backing Israel is a few billions a year, the supply of weaponry, and vetoes in the United Nations, few will object. But the world is changing. America appears to be on the verge of becoming a greatly reduced power. Where will that leave Israel?

Even now, neither the Israeli nor the US military is convincingly dominant. The American forces are enormous but designed for wars they are not going to fight. Carrier task forces, armored divisions, and nuclear submarines would excel against the Imperial Japanese Navy or the Red Army in the Fulda Gap. They lose to ragtag guerrillas. The ragtag guerrillas have noticed this. America hasn’t won a war since 1945.

The Israeli military is similar, relying on aircraft and tanks. Israel cannot successfully invade Lebanon against the wishes of irregulars, nor the United States defeat a small force of insurgents. As long as Israel is supported by the US, no Arab power will have any hope of invading it, but Israel’s capacity to intimidate neighboring powers has diminished. Times have changed.

The US has claimed “dibs” on the Universe with its new space policy. The document, signed by President Bush, was released on a Friday, just before a long weekend in the States. This, in itself has caused a bit of a stir, but not more so than the tone and content of the document.

In it, the US government allocates itself rights to access and use space without anyone else getting in its way. It also sets security at the heart of the space agenda, frequently citing its right to use space as part of its national defence.

Significantly, however, it does not commit to restrict, or even to join talks about restricting the development of space-based weapons. This is despite a UN vote last year in which 160 nations voted in favour of such talks.

The first bullet point outlining the principles of the programme sets the tone for the rest of the document:

“The United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space by all nations for peaceful purposes, and for the benefit of all humanity. Consistent with this principle, ‘peaceful purposes’ allow US defence and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national interests.“

To Bush, it makes no difference whether the number is 600,000 or 6 hundred million; the cost in human terms is irrelevant. In America, the life of one microscopic stem-cell is of more value that the entire population of Iraq. That’s what happens when racism merges with apathy; the dead simply don’t count.

Compare Bush’s indifference to the Iraqi death-toll to his “pro-life” rhetoric at home. Consider how he cancelled his Crawford vacation to speed back to Washington to sign legislation to save the life of Terri Schiavo even though Schiavo was showing no mental-activity and 19 courts had already ruled in her husband’s favor to allow her to die peacefully. Later, an autopsy confirmed that her brain had calcified and shrunk to half its normal size.

Still, Schiavo’s political value was of greater importance to Bush than the 650,000 men, women and children he has slaughtered in Iraq.

For Bush, who has failed at every task ever put before him, from work, to the military to school, this was going to be his vindication. He so desperately wanted to be a hero and Iraq was going to solve all of his issues. He would defeat an enemy, prove himself worthy and gain the respect from his family he so desperately wanted.

Which is why he chose men his father kept at arms length. Bush never wanted advice, he wanted confirmation of his beliefs. His narrow world view, shaped by the dust dry plains of Midland as much as any movie, this idea that a man didn’t need or want questions, he just did.

When the admirable Tiberius upon becoming emperor, received a message from the Senate in which the conscript fathers assured him that whatever legislation he wanted would be automatically passed by them, he sent back word that this was outrageous. “Suppose the emperor is ill or mad or incompetent?” He returned their message. They sent it again. His response: “How eager you are to be slaves.”
— Edward Gibbon, History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Amid the onrush of Caligulan sex scandals, suspension of the Constitution, depressing bulletins from the Babylonian front, and all manner of bogus “events,” a recent news item has passed with remarkably little public stir, despite being featured above the fold on the front page of The Washington Post, a bulletin board as eagerly read by the capital city’s strivers as Pravda in its day by the fellow-traveler, or Osservatore Romano by the untramontanist Catholic.

The article [1] informs us that the President has signed off on a “National Space Policy.” The cornerstone of this new policy is the administration’s intention to “oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access to or use of space. Proposed arms control agreements or restrictions must not impair the rights of the United States to conduct research, development, testing and operations or other activities in space for U.S. national interest.”

The document adds elsewhere that the new policy must “enable unhindered U.S. operations in and through space to defend our interest there.” Note the unctuous use of the modifier “our”–as if the interests of parasitic contractors, government placemen, and neoconservative scribblers constituted the res publica.

If the English language means anything, the plain intent of the policy is to assert that the United States (or rather its governing clique) can do anything it likes, and treaties be damned, including the Outer Space Treaty currently in force. This conclusion would be consistent with the administration’s treatment of other judicial impedimenta, such as the Geneva Convention or the late Constitution. Similar to the Senate’s craven grant of plenary power to the Roman Emperor, a supine legislative branch has encouraged the administration to believe its own whim is law–to make war, to torture, to “unsign” treaties.

Yet the Post journalist, in the idiot-savant manner made famous by Bob Woodward, stenographically quotes a “senior government official who was not authorized to speak on the record” as saying “This policy is not about developing or deploying weapons in space. Period.”

Ah, just as the Military Commissions Act was not about torture! How like the administration to assign one of its “senior” functionaries to pretend to speak without authorization in order to add verisimilitude to an assertion that it plainly wanted to disseminate–an assertion at odds with the plain text of its policy. And the Post’s reporter fell for it like a yokel at the Barnum circus. Thus the rest of the article becomes a fraudulent “debate” between the administration’s allegations and those of its critics; thereby lending weight to the presumption that there are legitimately “two sides” to any issue involving the administration.

While the Establishment press (other than the Post) gave little attention to the space policy story, the blogosphere (to the extent it paid any attention) behaved in a predictable fashion: the usual hand-wringing about the militarization of space, the unilateralism of the Bush administration, and forecasts of dark tidings generally. There is some truth to these assertions, but they are subsidiary to a more significant point.

The space policy document is not so much a blueprint as a symptom. But of what?–of fiendish Machiavells, plotting to storm the very heavens? Perhaps that is the intent of these laptop Flash Gordons, but between the desire and the fulfillment falls the shadow: the shadow of utter incompetence.