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2 THE ROVING
EYE Levitate the
Pentagon By
Pepe Escobar
immortalized 1967 in
Armies of the Night, reflected on how
totalitarianism breeds apathy: there was no
confrontation at the gates of the Pentagon because
the Man had channeled the protesters - a mix of
new yippies and ex-hippies, dressed from native
American to all shades Eastern - toward an empty
parking lot. But the ceremony proceeded. Ed
Sanders of The Fugs
chanted a magical sort of
mantra - to the sound of bells, cymbals, drums and
brass.
In the name of the generative power
of Priapus, in the name of totality, we call
upon the demons of the Pentagon to rid
themselves of the cancerous rumors of the war
generals, all the secretaries and soldiers who
don't know what they're doing, all the intrigue,
bureaucracy and hatred, all the spewing coupled
with a prostate cancer in the deathbed. Every
Pentagon general lying alone at night with a
tortured psyche and an image of death in his
brain, every general lying alone, every general
lying alone. Out Demons, out, Out Demons, out.
The times they-are-a-changin' ...
not.
So where are the Bertrand
Russell-style tribunals now? Where are the civic
consciousness and the responsibility toward
history of bloated pop stars, financial-system
moguls and celebrities hawking their own line of
clothing? Now more than ever, a triumph of the
imagination is needed. The only way to stop the
insanity of the Iraq - and soon Iran - war is
through total, visceral mobilization of US public
opinion.
Only mega-successful levitation
would force the Pentagon to get rid of its
must-list of four "enduring bases" (whatever the
costs) in Iraq: al-Asad Air Base in Anbar
province; sprawling Balad Air Base, with attached
Camp Anaconda in the Sunni belt; Tallil Air Base
in the south; and Camp Qayyaragh near Irbil,
Kurdistan. And we're not even talking of the three
Baghdad bases - Camp Victory (adjacent to Baghdad,
formerly Saddam Hussein International Airport);
Camp Taji (25 kilometers north); and of course the
10-square-kilometer, hit-every-day-by-mortars
Green Zone, which is a base in itself containing
the Vatican-sized, 40-hectare, biggest embassy in
the world.
Both the White House and the
Pentagon have just confirmed on the record what
every distressed observer of the Iraq tragedy
already knew: this is naked Empire on steroids,
aiming at securing control over Iraq's oil wealth
and establishing permanent bases to control the
Pentagon-denominated "arc of instability" from the
Middle East to Central Asia.
Two weeks
ago, Pentagon supremo Robert Gates stressed the
"Korea model" and the US bent on securing a "long
and enduring presence" in Iraq. And then White
House spokesman Tony Snow reconfirmed that this is
what President George W Bush wants and needs to
fight "the larger war on terror".
Blowback
is a given: more and more Shi'ites will actively
support the Sunni Arab, Iraqi nationalist
guerrillas, and they may be supported in their
cause by Iranian Shi'ites as well. Pentagon
desperation - or cunning - is evident in the fact
there are no more holds barred now to divide Sunni
and Shi'ite to project an appearance of ruling.
The Bush administration and its neo-con
advisers' latest not-so-covert plan is to convince
US public opinion of a nebulous Iranian
government-Iraqi guerrilla connection - in plain
English, another pre-packaged lie (echoes of
Vietnam, echoes of Iraq). This carefully
manufactured lie establishes the precious casus
belli to bomb Iran. Call it Bombing Iran as an
Extension of Destroying Iraq.
Any
ludicrous disinformation trick in the book goes -
such as Dick Cheney and National Security Council
supremo Stephen Hadley accusing Iran of developing
a new Shahab-3 missile capable of reaching more
than 2,500km and striking Rome. In a sane world,
the proposition of US anti-missile shields in
Eastern Europe to "protect" the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization from Iranian missiles would be
dismissed as a (mediocre) exercise in black humor.
What is actually a fact is Russia's new
multi-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles,
capable of smashing any missile defense known to
man, plus new cruise missiles that President
Vladimir Putin will have to point toward Western
Europe if the Pentagon keeps on treating Russia as
a delinquent kid.
Power to the people
Forty years after the levitation of the
Pentagon, there's no "democracy" to speak of
anywhere. This is a plutocratic world. There's no
formidable push to change the world for the better
anywhere - but there are already rumblings of
repressed anger from all corners of the global
South, capable of exploding like a thousand
volcanoes.
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj
Zizek evaluates how hard it is today to think of a
credible alternative to the current system:
"Thanks to all these Hollywood movies and the
catastrophic scenarios depicted by ecologists, it
is easier today to imagine a total catastrophe
destroying all life on Earth than a radical change
in social life. In sum, an asteroid touches the
Earth, but capitalism survives."
In 1967,
the Pentagon did not engage in liftoff. It did not
turn pink. But the 1967 levitation ceremony at
least gave the world the indelible poetic metaphor
of a rose down the barrel of a M16 - and the
flowers dropping from the helmets of trembling
21-year-old soldiers. The Pentagon was humbled,
anyway. It was - at least metaphorically -
levitated. And the US - losing any intellectual
support from its elites - started losing the war
on Southeast Asians for good. It was a triumph of
the human imagination over heavy-metal greed.
Can US public opinion - or at least the
iPod generation - muster the will, the commitment
and the courage to do it all over again?
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