When The Wind Blows
Digby names the biggest elephant in the room:
[…]
Busting taboos is a specialty of the Bush administration. The taboo against torture is now pretty much fully inoperative. The taboo against genocide is being currently tested. Nukes are the most efficient way to get there so that taboo is being discarded too.
Of course, the neocons and other hawks have always been big believers in nuclear weapons and thought the taboo against a first strike was “tying our hands.” Part of their original raison d’etre was their antipathy toward detente back in the 70’s which led them form Team B and Committee on the Present Danger to hype the Soviet threat. They were hysterical then and they are hysterical now. But we are in a different world. The WWII veterans and foreign policy establishment types who knew to keep these crazies at bay are long gone. The crazies are in charge.
If we let Gingrich and Lieberman get away with this insane, reckless rhetoric comparing some would-be bombers with Hitler and Stalin and characterizing the GWOT as an existential threat requiring extreme violence, within a very short time period the slow motion car wreck will have begun and we will wake up one morning to find Cheney and his pals have exercized their “only option to win.”
To be concerned about the threat of a nuclear war that’s posed to the world by these nutters in Washington and their enablers in Westminster (I mean you, Geoff Hoon, who posited a US/UK nuclear first strike as far back as 2002 and I know that’s true, because he tried to frantically backpedal when taxed with it at a union meeting and I was the one who tracked down his quote in Hansard) is not mere paranoid tinfoil-hattery. George Monbiot also noticed what Hoon said:
In March 2002, for the first time in British history, the government suggested that we might use them before they are used against us.7 Since then, Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, has repeated the threat several times, on each occasion further reducing the threshold. Put items two and three together and the United Kingdom begins to look like a pretty dangerous state.
A few changes of personnel in Congress come Novemeber won’t make a ha’porth of difference to an administration bent on letting off the Big One. The whole point of Bush’s anti-consitutional strategy has been to remove any obstacles to a naked grab for unlimited power to make war wherever and whenever he pleases.
Congress is toothless, the allegedly independent Supreme Court and Justice Department are stacked with party loyalists, and the mass media has long been bought, sold and paid for.
Progressive bloggers can only campaign against this on the sufferance of the ISP’s and the network and cable owners. Take away our internet access and bingo, no opposition. No keyboard, no problem to paraphrase a favourite righjt-wing quote. Yahoo et al are perfecting their control mechanisms in China right now. We can be silenced so easily. I hope that the infrastructure technocrats’ll suddenly smell which way the wind blows and stage a libertarian revolt should that happen, but I won’t bet on it. Too many read Ayn Rand and have never felt the need to read anything else not published by O’Reilly.
There are now draconian laws preventing the public expression of free speech on both sides of the Atlantic, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many people we get out on the streets against any given policy it makes no bloody difference. We can rail all we want to, but a nuclear strike is going to happen, with the full support of the British government. Chemical and radiological weapons have already been used in various Middle East countries by the US/UK coalition so they’ve shown they have no compunction whatsoever in using WMD”s against civilian populations.
Do they really think a first strike would be the end of it? These warmongers will kill us all. This is indeed an existential war, but not in the sense the wingnuts mean.
Read More: Middle East, War On Terror, Nuclear Weapons, Bush, US/UK Foreign Policy Blair
