Masopher's Mind

The other day I was teasing one of my Pakistani friends about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. What did he think Pakistan would do if 3 US warships pulled into Karachi harbour and Aabrams tanks started rolling towards Islamabad? Would they shoot at themselves? Wipe themselves off the map to save themselves?

He was a bit set back; the US is, after all, behind all things in the conspiratorially minded, but despite the ever present notional threat what would his country men do if thier suspicions were ever confirmed?

He then replied that Pakistan would spite the invading US forces by firing thier longest range missiles at Telaviv or Jerusalem. His solution was to bomb the Jews and kill the millions of Jewish and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. This is of course allowing a quick recalibrating of the missiles pointed at new Deli and Mumbai and a trouble free GPS guided flight to it’s maximum projected range over the four intervening states, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and Jordan.

The commander in this scenario has now added attemped holocaust to his crimes and done nothing about the forces bearing down on his position. I say attempted because Israel in it’s own paranoia of Persian attack is probably well defended from missile attacks and seeing a missile from the east will almost certainly obliterate Tehran in response. So the commander has also essentially triggered the murder of millions of Iranians and scattered nuclear debris over Jordan and Iraq. The Muslim world east of Pakistan would come to a quick pause. And half the possible reinforcements against the American invader would be now dead or visible in the dark.

My solution would be less messy. My commander would fire at India, guarenteeing a sure retaliation which would obliterate American forces as well as the denizens they would be “liberating”. My friend and I are obviously not strategists because were this our actual policy, we would be first strike-d by American ICBMs or space based weapons long before we got any birds in the air.

I guess the moral of this story is the only reason for any country to have even one nuclear weapon is to turn it’s own region into a wasteland. “Attack us and we’ll make our place more worthless than it already is”. It’s like the story of the guy that goes to prison and eats and bathes in his own shit to deter potential rapists. I don’t think it ever occurs to him that consuming and wearing fecal matter may be more degrading than enjoying the strong rythmic pounding of a man who obviously values his fealty more than the system that put him there.

Maintaining a nuclear deterent is costly, cumbersome and worthless in the long run. Despite having the ability to vaporize the topsoil off the whole planet and darken the world for centuries, America and the UK with it’s me-too (second hand) Trident have not deterred hostile attacks state sponsored or otherwise. Developing nations which follow this dead end path prove only that they are mired in 19th century imperialist thinking and 20th century hand me downs. The only beneficiaries of nuclear proliferation are the people who have no country and no army to lose and everything to gain by the use of weapons of terror.

A lot of nutjobs around the internet say things like, “oh the CIA attacked its own population on 9/11″ or “Mumbai was a MI6 Indian Intelligence plot to make Pakistan look bad” or better yet “to foment World war 3″, “India snuck into Pakistan to attack Sri Lanka”.. All I can say is wow. Conspiracy theorists like that give objective interpretation of events a bad name. By immediately diving into the ridiculous, by blaring “neo-con”, “illuminati” and “shapeshifting aliens” at the slightest change of the wind, an objective observer is almost forced to side with far more credulous sources…like Fox news.

Total arm chair analysts with no real knowledge except what Alex Jones the main screwball of Prison Planet tells them. Now don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of blurry stuff going on, agencies do orchestrate extreme violence and covert, clandestine operations against one another. For instance, Israel spies are regularly caught going into US no-go zones despite the unrestricted access that they usually get. The CIA spies on Israel operations. France snoops on the UK and believe me the UK has spies in all of the above and everywhere else. Russia, Cuba, Iran, Pakistan, Canada, Australia, Austria, Germany and the list could go on and on. On another list you have corporations whose income is more than many countries GDPs, former spies who are part of private companies still doing the dirty, secret societies, old monarchic families and oligarchs with a lot of money but no overt power and that list goes on as well.

Even as Obama makes overtures to Iran, the congress sponsors a bill helping Israel to sabotage the country.  The point is, there are so many actors in the game that it could have been any one of them that attacked the world trade centre. Former CIA backed Al-qaeda “the database” is the culprit as far as I am concerned just another clandestine actor in a hidden world of clandestine actors. It could have been anybody, CIA, MI6, Mossaud, KGB/FSB, the exiled French Monarchy, the Freemasons, Morgan Stanley….just about anybody and no one will ever know if it was anybody but the ones claiming responsibility and which were implicated.

It’s hard to understand a world where there isn’t a GI Joe on one side and a COBRA on the other, or Autobots vs. Deceptacons or Russia vs. USA. But life isn’t Skins vs Shirts or Chelsea vs Man U, life is a lot of people all fucking each other over at various times of the day while a lot of governments and interest groups fuck each other over at various times of the night.  No need to have GI Joe kill 3000 Americans to justify a war; there are more than enough people willing to do the job.

There is something profoundly reassuring to me when I heard that Obama was so pedantic about putting the word “faithfully” in its proper place. It cannot be said enough how September 11, 2001 was the day that America could have achieved full ascendancy over the entire earth. It could have been that day that America could have put the freedom, moral fortitude and perseverance of the American people into the limelight for good. Instead, a mistake was made. Instead of seeing the attack on the World Tradecenter as the last gasp of dying fundamentalism attacking the institution of globalization, America saw it as a show of a growing strength and a stab at the American people.

Bin Laden with all his hangups about Saudi Arabia, and modernized Muslims attacked America to create enmity and fear in Muslims. He attacked the USA because he could never have gotten away with attacking Medina or Riyadh. New York and Washington was his proxy and the proxy of the Saudi’s flying those planes. America became the projection of the perceived evil in Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Arab countries everywhere.

If America knew this then they may not have attacked Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. America would have stepped up modernization of the regional powers looking for common bonds and common interests. Radical Islam, Wahabism and the like could now be dead and President Bush may have been the hero of the 21^st Century.

Instead under the illogical precepts tactics and leadership developed in a Cold war era, America and its few allies embarked upon an 8 year campaign of labelling, blanket statements and ostracizing; playing right into the hands of Al-Qaeda, Afghan Warlords and Pakistani politicians. There is no bigger statement than killing and no bigger blanket statements than sending missiles and adrenaline filled young men into villages of women children and angry men trying to protect their pride and families.

America failed to take advantage of the political capital gained by 9/11. Iran one of the first countries to condemn the attacks has emerged as the next threat under the Bush administration. Russia has moved away from its apprenticeship in US style free markets into oligarchic capitalism, mistrust and sulking enmity. The United Kingdom which once acted as a common bond between Europe and the US has become subjected to US geopolitical views and the US is seen as an enemy of freedom, the very thing that was attacked on that September.

We will destroy terrorism not by turning America’s young men and women into terrorists; we will destroy terrorism not by paying and empowering factions to fight other factions; we will destroy terrorism by showing alternatives to armed struggle, by spreading democracy and showing that this method of rule is by far the most humane, fair and best system of government.

A grave mistake was made, one which snowballed into a state of constant economic and political uncertainty and now, one hopes this will be corrected. This mistake caused hundreds of thousands of needless lives to be lost and the shattering of any possible façade of American benevolence. This mistake can not be left uncorrected.

Barak showed up in front of George Bush’s appointed Chief Head Justice to correct a comparatively smaller mistake. He has embarked on correcting the mistake of Guantanamo and he may try to correct the mistake of America’s post 9/11 reaction to the world. Despite being realistic about Obama’s background and backers I foster that hope that his administration will put America in its proper place.