Had the invasion of Iraq merely been a mistake, Bush would have responded to the loss of Congress in the midterms, and the ISG report, by working with the new majority in Congress on a sensible, sane, moderate plan to go where the nation wants us to go on Iraq -- out of that country as soon as possible. But Iraq was no mistake. It was a tool, a way to terrorize the electorate into supporting the Republican political machine, a tool that has lost its ability to terrorize. So they must move on to a fresh war with a country, Iran, that does have better means to retaliate against the electorate itself, and so keep it cowed in terror of switching Commanders in Chief in mid-stream.
But eventually this new adventure will lose its ability to instill fear, perhaps more rapidly, now that people are growing wise to the game. So they must have in reserve a supply of ever more dangerous adventures designed to keep us perpetually off balance, until they finally have so institutionalized fear that they no longer have to worry about any domestic opposition. I will, from time to time, offer a brief outline of a particular gambit, similar to what they have done in the past, that they might soon deploy in this ongoing effort to, as Baghdad Bob (h/t)would say, Open the Gates of Hell.
Tonight's episode is inspired by a Paul Craig Roberts article in Counterpunch (Dump the Dollar! How the world can stop Bush.). Yes, I know, Counterpunch is some hard Left site full of loonies and conspiracy theorists. Well, a country that seems on the brink of war with Iran, just to help Bush's approval ratings, should get used to looking to conpiracy theorists for its insightful analysis of current events. Even Baghdad Bob is looking positively oracular these days, when you consider the competition.
Roberts looks around the world, especially at Putin's recent speech, and, sensibly enough, concludes that the rest of the world is getting a bit worried that the US, what with being about to bomb yet another foreign country for no better reason than to help Bush's favorables, might need some reining in. He warns that, while they lack the military might to challenge our war machine on the battlefield, that machine's financing with foreign-held debt leaves us vulnerable to financial pressure, specifically dollar dumping.
A reasonable argument, and a concern not unshared by others (Republic or Empire), though I guess Chalmers Johnson doesn't rank much higher on the credibility scale with sensible people than Roberts. But my concern is that Roberts and Johnson are being too optimistic in thinking that this administration would be deterred by the prospect of a mere repeat of the Great Depression. That would be a feature, not a bug, to them.
I buy the conventional reason offered for why the world won’t dump the dollar, that they have too much invested in its worth, only up to a point. That psychology will prevail only until we start doing truly outrageous things, things so outrageous as to make the world even more afraid of not destroying our economy than of destroying our economy. But, the prospect of the US bombing Iran, especially nuking Iran, may be getting us close to that point, so we have reached the threshhold at which we must consider the even stronger reasons that foreign nations will be reluctant to engage in ecocomic warfare against the US. We may, in fact, be too optimistic in imagining that we would have to wait on the world to declare economic war on us, as Bushco may find the consequences so politically useful as to actively seek a debt/dollar crisis.
I am not sure that Bushco would not welcome a dollar dump by Europe, Russia, and China. I think we have to consider that an administration crazy enough, or rather willing to engage in brinksmanship enough, to contemplate nuking Iran, is plenty crazy enough to look calmly at the prospect of using a dollar crisis brought on by foreign central banks as an excuse to repudiate our debt to foreign countries. Of course it won’t be called repudiation, or default. What the administration would do in response to serious economic warfare from the industrialized world would be to charge these countries for the "protection" against terrorism that we provide with our vaunted GWOT, and whose expense will be cited as the reason that we run deficits. The back charges will undoubtedly be large enough to at least wipe out our debt, and better yet, future assessments would more than balance our budgets indefinitely into the future. Of course it won’t be called "protection", or tribute, but that’s the idea.
Who would stop them from doing this, from setting up a naked empire in which we exact tribute from the developed world in order to finance our dominion over the undeveloped world? Foreign powers? Even if they all banded together, our control of the seas at the outset would suffice to keep in thrall all of them with enough GDP to conceivably build up enough naval power to challenge us. But they would need decades uninterrupted to catch up, which we would not allow them. Would they simply refuse to pay their assessments? Perhaps, if they don’t care about ever receiving oil shipments again, at least until the US Navy is swept from the seas and can't hold world oil deliveries hostage anymore. What about Russia, which is perhaps energy independent? Well, shock and awe was not effective against Iraq. It does little good to cut off the head of an organism too primitive to depend on a central nervous system, and sending countries that are not too far from the Stone Age back to the Stone Age is not very effective. But would not the threat of bombing not work much better against a country like Russia? Again, the aim would not be to occupy Russia, which bombing would admittedly not help with, but simply to destroy productive capacity and "amenities" like electric power, which it should be quite good at.
Would there be effective domestic opposition to this empire? Where would it come from? Americans who would rather pay taxes than have the Chinese and French support our government services? Maybe enough people in this country would be honest enough to not go for that proposition if offered to them cold, and out of the blue. But if we come to that solution out of a dire economic crisis started by the central banks of France and China...? Other banana republics that have repudiated foreign-held debt have never found that plan to be anything but a widely popular, populist, move, and people in these other banana republics had much more to fear from the anger of the cheated foreign countries than we do. If anything, Bushco would have enough popularity to spare in the time of real danger to the US stemming from a dollar crisis, that they might use the debt crisis as an excuse to end all of the entitlement programs, at least in their present forms. The end state would be characterized by a budget in which defense would be paid for by foreigners, and the entitlement programs will have been replaced by privatized versions, leaving very modest govt expenditures that would require appropriations from Congress, or taxes on anybody with US citizenship. We might be able to abolish the personal income tax entirely. The President would have a huge revenue stream, the foreign tribute, completely beyond the control of Congress. The military would be privatized, just so that no stiff-necked loyalty to the Constitution, inextricably wound up by history with loyalty to "long grey lines", would interfere with their performance of their new duties as world policemen. The Unitary Executive types could have their imperial govt without even openly abolishing the Constitution.
The greatest hurdle to taking this possibility seriously, even after everything this administration has done, is the inability to even entertain the possibility that such things could happen here. Call it Godwin's Curse, this belief, created by the caricature we have made of Hitler and Hitler's Germany, that nothing similar could possibly happen here. If you don't think it at all credible that Bushco started an otherwise totally senseless war with Iraq for no better reason than to help out in the 2002 and 2004 elections, and that they are maneuvering us into war with Iran to help out in 2008, then by all means please pick up your copy of Godwin's Law on your way out of this discussion. But if either of these two propositions is at all plausible, what is there worse, or more extreme, than these past crimes, in the crimes I propose that they might have in store for us in the future? If you believe the former crimes to be credible, then you believe that these people have killed over 3,000 US soldiers and Marines, and over 600,000 Iraqis, all to help create the fear needed to win some elections. No, Bush is not an inhuman monster, but neither was Hitler. Both of them, I am sure, are (or were, in Hitler's case) quite sincere in their belief that they were taking hard but necessary measures against the enemies of the Homeland, and laid the entire blame for the regrettably necessary destruction on these enemies. Both actually seem to relish overturning conventional political strictures, believing them to be rotten and corrupt, a pile of excuses used by weaklings to hold back real leaders from doing what needs to be done. Both had a very sincere vision for a happy end-state for their peoples, horrible only (only!) in the practical consequences for everyone else in the unfolding of this dream turned nightmare in the real world, and then finally for their own peoples, as the world eventually found its way to effective resistance. If we wait until our republic is gone, and 6,000,000 are dead, before we are allowed by Godwin's Law to admit the possibility that yes, such things could happen here, then it will be too late. They didn't call it Godwin's Law, of course, but I'm sure sensible people in the Weimar Republic had the same principle under some other name, and this principle was all that was needed to make the Third Reich possible.