Posted on 2-9-2003

What A Tangled Web They Weave
By Alan Marston

To construct and then sustain anything built on lies demands a high level of intelligence and corresponding deep psycho-pathology, in short  you have to be a mad genius. The cabal of current `top men' around the US president, and the man himself, are very probably mad enough, but they're not smart enough to avoid being trapped in their own web of deceit. Iraq is proving to be one web too far.

Sticky trap #1: Promising to improve Iraq after invasion and occupation. This is a very sticky one because the invasion, occupation then re-construction of a country, unlike the reconstruction of political images, cannot be done on the cheap in a fully controlled virtual world of electronic media, mainly TV, nor can it be paid for with advertising. The dollar cost of a modern invasion and occupation is huge because the `contracted out' armed services of the global market economy demands costs + gouging + superprofits - and that's only the armed forces. The so-called reconstruction will be worse as companies like Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Cheney, gets its promised contracts... and they turn out to be worth more than $1.7 billion. In a shameless case of corruption Halliburton is so far the sole recipient of contracts under (hold your nose) Operation Iraqi Freedom and it stands to make hundreds of millions more dollars under other no-bid contracts awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The size and scope of US government contracts `awarded' to Halliburton alone, in connection with the war in Iraq are significantly greater than was previously disclosed and demonstrate the U.S. military's increasing reliance on for-profit corporations to run it.  As much as one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost per month of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to privately owned contractors. Brown and Root, another insider, `won' a competitive bidding process in 2001 to provide a wide range of "contingency" services to the military in the event of the deployment of U.S. troops overseas. The contract, known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, was designed to free uniformed personnel for combat duties and did not preclude deals with other contractors.

Sticky trap #2: The classic trap for the madman who isn't too bright, believing one's own lies. The neo-con artists in the White House played the terror card but unlike other war-mongers they played the whole deck, and some. Unlike most war-mongers the Bushettes also conducted the we'll be welcomed as liberators orchestra. Both these nifty ploys are very effective for getting war rolling, but steering the war home is going to prove a bit tougher, if not impossible, because facts are stubborn things and hang around a lot longer than political climates. The facts are turning out to be that Iraq had very little to do with the terror networks, it is Saudi Arabia (a so-called US ally) that supplies the money and men for that. Also, most people in Iraq want liberation from poverty and disease and if the US is only interested in liberating them from their oil, as it has so far demonstrated, then the US will be seen by most Iraqis not as liberators but as thieves.

Sticky trap #3: Relying on a never-ending supply of sociopaths to act as US stooges in the governments of countries designated as US `zones of interest'. This one shows the level of stupidity that accompanies blind greed. After all Saddam Hussein was the US's ruthless dictator, which is called good, until about 1990 when he became his own ruthless dictator, which is then called evil. It has taken 13 years and an enormous social and economic cost to get rid of this one stooge who decided he could play the dictator game better without his former handlers. And now its simply a matter of finding a `good' man again? Get real. History, first of all the Roman Empire, tells us that the Empire that lasts may be lead by people with a lot of faults, but utter stupidity is not one of them.

Sticky trap #4: The double-edge of technology. Supplying `our bastards' with rockets, bombs and guns to fight `their bastards' is heading for trouble, for the simple reason that bastards aren't reliable, they can suddenly without warning turn their weapons 180 degrees, back at those who supplied them. Intelligent people know that, they don't have to read Machiavelli. However it's all too apparent that the neo-con reading list doesn't feature The Prince.

Sticky trap #5: Not accepting that life is full of sticky traps, none more sticky than killing people on the basis it's for their own good.

Bush and the neo-cons will without doubt be caught by their own traps, but watching the damage done every day until they are immobilised by their own lies and misdeeds is excruciating, however the only person with enough power to make a trap big enough to catch the US President, is the US President. And that is his one redeeming feature.