The pundits are claiming that Bush will have to get the planned war in Iraq going by the first of next year if he wants to have any popular support for it at all. I doubt that. I think Bush has to and is planning to have the war in Iraq start as soon as possible in order to be running full bore by the November elections.
Americans vote their wallets. While the roots of the present economic decline reach back decades, the average American, naïve about economics, is already looking back with longing at the perceived boom times of the Clinton administration and the Democratically controlled Congress. The Bush administration is sharp enough to know that the continuing economic slump, impossible to reverse in the short time remaining before mid-term elections, is eroding support for GOP candidates at all levels.
However, the Bush administration is also sharp enough to know that Americans have historically tended to vote incumbent during time of war. As the slumping economy drags down GOP support with it, propping it back up with a war may appear to be Bush’s best option for the mid-term elections and going into the 2004 campaign.
Therefore, it is my conclusion that Bush will want start the war with Iraq within a few weeks, so that the war will have time to ramp up and overshadow the economy going into the November elections. However, in order for Bush to regain the popularity numbers he enjoyed following 9-11, war alone will not be enough. There will have to be another “terror” attack to manufacture support for America’s “cause” in Iraq. Even Bush’s advisors agree that starting a war in Iraq will be a political disaster unless there is a provocation. Ergo, if Bush needs the war and the war needs a provocation, count on one to be provided.
What form will this provocation take? After the UN revealed that there had been no gassing of the Kurds, Americans are not likely to get too excited about renewed claims regarding what Saddam is or is not doing to his neighbors. Claims that Saddam has acquired some new super weapon will also elicit a lukewarm response at best, given the fact that the UN weapons inspectors have never found the weapons the USA insists are there, and indeed the former head of the UN inspectors, Scott Ritter, has concluded such weapons are not there.
No, no convenient provocation based on the usual anonymous official sources making claims of events and weapons that cannot be seen will motivate Americans to support an invasion. Something immediate and obvious is needed to scare Americans into unquestioning (emphasis on “unquestioning”) support for the invasion of Iraq’s oil fields.
In what may have been the greatest single miscalculation of the whole year-long plan for the war in Afghanistan, the public shock and outrage over 9-11 faded before it could be fully exploited to kick off a major multi-front war. Doubts surfaced in the public mind almost as soon as the dust settled. The fake Osama confession tape did not inspire public trust, nor did the classification of the evidence that pointed to a non-Arab nation as the real culprit. Despite heavy effort by various government propaganda corps and the ever obeisant mainstream media, a large percentage of the American population have come to doubt that we are being told the truth of who really brought down the World Trade Towers and why.
Anyone planning a provocation to promote the invasion of Iraq has to know about this public doubt, has to know that such doubt will surface all the quicker following another similar incident. Therefore, the next manufactured provocation will have to be huge, dwarfing the attacks on the World Trade Towers, something to shock and terrify the public so that they cannot think, something so frightening that the public will be terrified to take a chance it might not be true.
Throughout history, governments have been willing to trade large numbers of their own population for gains. That is what a war is, after all, a game for global advantage with a nation’s population as the playing chips. A government willing to risk millions of its soldiers to win a conquest of the world’s oil must be assumed to be equally willing to risk millions of lives to get that war of conquest going in the first place.
Too many staged provocations run the risk of numbing the population to the terror, of succumbing to diminishing returns. This next staged provocation will have to solve all of the government’s problems at one blow. It will have to justify control of all communications, disarming of the populace, total control of all communications even between individual citizens. This will be followed by the assurance that the “enemy” is within the nation itself, in turn followed by a suspension of all due process for citizens while the ”enemy” are rounded up in door-to-door searches which also confiscate guns, short wave radios, and most likely modems as well.
I know this sounds like the wildest and most outrageous of story lines form the cheapest B movie ever made, but then would any of you a year ago have believed a prediction that the World Trade Towers would be knocked down, faked video tapes used to point the finger of blame, while the US Government classified evidence that pointed in a different direction.
The plans that are underway have gone too far to be turned back. The planners and perpetrators and promoters of this plan to conquer the oil cannot stop. They MUST move forward, and there is only one way they CAN move forward.
And they must move soon.
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