July 22, 2001
The CIA, under pressure from Republicans in Congress, recently fired the Rand Corporation for refusing to find the Peoples Republic of China to be ten feet tall and a present military danger to the U.S.. This according to that bastion of conservatism, U. S. News and World Report.
Thus can we begin to ascertain the outlines of another Cold War in the making.
Once again, the American people are the subject of a very old con game whose object is, as always, to part them from their money and freedom. The game is simple: create a new enemy, powerful and aggressive, whose intent is to destroy our nation and all it represents. Then propagandize the population to believe that this Lord of the Flies exists. Having converted public opinion, the power elite can then go about spending the taxpayers' money on a military buildup that puts that money into the coffers of the Pentagon, the defense industry and its stockholders, and that, in the process, endangers our security, our environment and our political freedoms.
How can the military-industrial complex get away with this con time after time? Simple. Americans don't know history, even recent history. Not only to they not know it, they don't care about it. Americans have throughout our history ignored the past as a matter of principle and have consequently been condemned to repeat the same idiotic mistakes over and over, always believing that their nation is an exception--that by rejecting the past it somehow is entitled to dictate the future. That attitude is not only erroneous; it could be suicidal.
"Those who cannot remember the past", as George Santayana once remarked, "are condemned to repeat it." Euripides put it even more strongly: "Whoso neglects learning in his youth,/Loses the past and is dead for the future."
We are indeed repeating the past. The future already pulls us into its inexorable vortex, ignorant and unaware of the calamity that is being prepared for us.
The new Lord of the Flies is China. Never mind that China is a poor, underdeveloped country, saddled with a backward and grossly inefficient industrial base, and with a political system of such fragility that it must deploy 10 divisions--as many persons as are on active duty in the U. S. Army--simply to keep order at home. That is not important.
Never mind that school classrooms are crumbling throughout the nation, that the ranks of the homeless are beginning to swell once again, or that the new generation of youth are destined, under the reign of the neo-liberals that have captured our government since 1980, to a lower standard of living that their parents, the first such event in the history of our nation. Those facts are not important.
What is important to the power elite of this nation is the power elite. Period. Nothing else matters.
Desert Storm, it is said, gave the defense industry a reprieve of about 1.5 years, and undoubtedly the War Against the Serbian People--the cowardly, high-altitude bombing campaign against the civilian Serbian population--created a reprieve of a sort. The few billions for Plan Columbia, however, pale in comparison with the vast funds that sustained the defense giants during the Cold War, for which they now long nostalgically.
Ever since the early days of the Reagan administration one of the high hopes of the industry has been an anti-missile defense system. In those days it was called the Strategic Defense Initiative--Star Wars, for short. The project from the beginning had all the characteristics of a first-class boondoggle. The object of such a project, defending the U.S. mainland against incoming missiles, is unattainable. Every defensive system the U.S. might deploy can be neutralized by a potential enemy at one hundredth the cost. Throughout the '80s, the justification for Star Wars and the systems proposed to realize it changed on an annual basis until finally the concept had virtually no defenders and lapsed into obscurity as one more unrealistic and unworkable military project.
The most recent test of Star Wars II, on July 14, which the military claimed to be a success, consisted of a killer missile with just one target missile and one decoy. Immediately after the killer missile destroyed the incoming missile, however, the radar locked up because it was incapable of processing the information generated by the debris from the destruction of the target. It is obvious that hundreds of relatively inexpensive decoys could easily overwhelm the computers that are supposed to process input from the radars. There is no evidence that the system can destroy an incoming missile except under the most carefully-planned (that means rigged) tests, a scenario that will never exist in the real world.
Further, the testing and deployment of such a missile shield would require the U.S. to unilaterally violate the ABM Treaty and probably the Test Ban Treaty, obligations that our nation solemnly undertook with the intent to make the World safe from a nuclear holocaust. They have been successful up to now in preventing a further nuclear buildup and the militarization of space.
The stakes are momentous. With the fall of the Soviet Union, our leadership had--and still has--the chance of the century of putting the nuclear weapons genie back into the bottle and freeing us from the fear of a nuclear war. It appears that it is squandering that opportunity for money.