By Chris Floyd - The Moscow Times
March 3, 2002.

  The Global Eye would like to apologize for having inadvertently helped perpetrate a fraud upon the reading public. In so doing, we facilitated -- again, unwittingly -- the efforts of a criminal enterprise bent on plunder, conquest and the promulgation of a mad, inhuman ideology. These are heavy crimes and we, no doubt, will answer heavily for our complicity in them.

During the past several months, this column has featured a number of items on the "debate" over the Bush administration's plans for military action against Iraq. Therein lies the fraud: The "debate" is a sham, a cynical con game, and we were suckered in, like the gawking country bumpkins we undeniably are. However, we can take some small comfort in that were not alone in this classic yanking of chains; the world's media have been increasingly absorbed by the "debate," which has relegated almost every other topic to the shadows.

The "debate" reached a crescendo last week, with a series of high-profile editorials by some of the most well-connected courtiers of the Bush family. Old Bush I hands like Brent Scowcroft, James Baker (last seen fixing election 2000 for Junior), and General Stormin' Norman "Bury Them Alive Before They Can Surrender" Schwarzkopf weighed in from august podiums at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, speaking with one voice to warn the current President Bush against rushing into war with the Malevolent Moustache of Baghdad.

These articles in turn produced a blizzard of anxious fluttering amongst the commentariat, who hung over the back fences gossiping about the "great battle" going on within the administration. The epistles of Brent, James and Norman were seen as coded messages from Bush the Father to Bush the Son, urging restraint. Bellicose speeches by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were seen as return fire in this "internal struggle" for the heart and mind of the president. Airwaves and inky columns were filled to bursting with speculations about the "titanic debate" that will determine the course of world history.

But the entire "debate" -- especially the "Oedipal drama between father and son" -- is, of course, nothing more than the odoriferous end product of a horse's digestive tract. It's a ruse, an elaborate bafflement, carefully scripted -- why do you think all the cautious courtiers speak "with one voice"? Doubtless they had the same ghostwriter -- probably the same hack who provided Cheney and Rumsfeld with their warmongering words. The goal -- entirely successful so far -- is to divert public attention from the common criminality of the corrupt corporate hucksters in the White House.

The book-cooking, insider-trading, handjobbing hijinks at Harken and Halliburton were just beginning to nose their way into the mainstream press (after lying around in plain sight for years) when the great Iraq "debate" was suddenly ratcheted up to new levels. Who could be bothered with boardroom larceny when the awesome question of war or peace hung in the balance? And why dredge through arcane financial records to expose humdrum malfeasance when you could have a nice chinwag about family soap operas of the high and mighty?

The truth is that if Pa Bush wanted to warn L'il Spud about rushing into war with Iraq, he would have done so privately. After all, the two men speak on the phone several times a week. They meet in person frequently -- most recently during a long weekend together luxuriating in the family compound at Kennebunkport. George Senior has no need for surrogates to tell his son what he thinks.

And if even the editorial "warnings" were taken at face value, there is much less here than meets the eye. As analyst Norman Solomon has pointed out, none of the courtiers -- or other cautioning kibitzers, like Henry Kissinger -- have denied the desirability of military aggression against Iraq. They merely quibble over political fine points: Try to line up some allies to help cover the costs; get a blank check from the rubber stamps in Congress first; and, above all, be sure to mount a massive PR campaign before going in. The only important question -- how the United States of America can possibly justify launching an unprovoked war of Hitlerian aggression against another nation -- is completely ignored.

All of this supposed hand-wringing in high places is designed to obscure the fact that the decision for war has already been made. (Indeed, it was probably made the day the Bush retainers on the Supreme Court gave the election to Spud-Spud.) The troops and materiel are already on the way to their staging areas. Indeed, the Financial Times reports that the Bush regime has even put out contract bids for humanitarian services to help mop up the bloody aftermath.

But the "debate" is crucial for the fall elections. So look to see more "interventions" by Bush courtiers, more staged wrestling matches in the Cabinet -- surely we're due for an ambiguous statement of seeming reluctance from Colin Powell any day now; you should get at least a week of Harken-free headlines out of that -- and, of course, more complicity, witting and unwitting, bumpkinish or otherwise, from political commentators.

None of it will matter. The war will come. The oligarchs of Kennebunkport, Wall Street and Texas will at last control the vast oil fields of Babylon. As usual, the hapless American people will pay for it all, with their blood, their money and the continuing degradation of their liberty, their land and their communities -- victims of the Bush family's firmly-held credo: "Tough luck, suckers."

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