23 April 2003

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN… I live next door to a rather pretty little market town called Hitchin.  The other day I was wandering through the sunshine across the cobbled square on the way to the deli & a gingery, bearded guy in sandals handed me a leaflet.  He was wearing buttons from various peace campaigns, including, prominently, a No War in Iraq badge, so I assumed that this was yet another invitation to fill the London streets before fetching up in Hyde Park to be told how virtuous we all were for supporting the cause.  I got home & unpeeled it from the yoghourt.  In seconds the casual running of the eye over undramatic 10-point Roman turned into an increasingly incredulous word-by-word scrutiny.  And I still can't quite understand by what mixture of indifference, news-fatigue & straightforward cynicism I had to learn what should have been headline news from a piece of A5 paper handed to me in Hitchin marketplace. It reads thus… THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY The Project for the New American Century (PNAC) is the far-right Think-Tank that has been planning the invasion of Iraq for years.  It was set up and is supported by some of the most powerful men in the US, if not the world.  Their publicly available documents provide a real insight into the reasons for America's bombing of Iraq. PNAC's stated aims are "to shape a new century favourable to American principles and interests"; to achieve "a foreign policy that boldly and purposefully promotes American interests abroad"; "to increase defence spending significantly", and to "pursue an international order friendly to our security, our principles and our prosperity".  In 1997 PNAC forcefully mapped out "America's global leadership".  On 28 Jan 1998 (5 years ago) the PNAC project team wrote to President Clinton demanding a radical change in dealings with the UN and the end of Saddam. While it was not clear whether Saddam was developing WMD, he was, they said, a threat to the US, Israel, the Arab States and "a meaningful part of the world's oil reserves".  They put their case as follows "In the short term this means being ready to lead military action without regard for diplomacy. In the long term it means disarming Saddam and his regime.  We believe that the US has the right under existing Security Council resolutions to take the necessary steps, including war, to secure our vital interests in the Gulf. In no circumstances should America's politics be crippled by the misguided insistence of the Security Council on unanimity". (www.newamericancentury.org.iraqclintonletter.htm) This letter was a blueprint for a long desired war.  The PNAC signatories are today all part of the Bush Administration.  They are Dick Cheney - Vice President, Lewis Bibby - Cheney's Chief of Staff, Donald Rumsfeld, Defence Minister, Paul Wolfowitz - Rumsfeld's deputy, Peter Rodman - in charge of 'Matters of Global Security', John Bolton - State Secretary for Arms Control, Richard Armintage - Deputy Foreign Minister, Richard Perle - former Deputy Defence Minister under Reagan, now head of the Defence Policy Board, William Kristol - head of the PNAC and adviser to Bush, known as the brains of the President, Zalmay Khalilzad - special ambassador and kingmaker in Afghanistan, now Bush's special ambassador to the Iraqi opposition.  Jeb Bush is also a founder member of PNAC. Before that - over ten years ago - PNAC had developed a defence proposal that created a global scandal. Its goal was the enduring preservation of the superpower status of the US - over Europe, Russia and China.  Various means were proposed to deter potential rivals from questioning America's leadership or playing a larger regional or global role.  The paper caused major concerns in the capitals of Europe and Asia. But the critical thing, according to the Wolfowitz-Libby paper, was complete American dominance of the Gulf region.  Any nation there that threatened the US by acquiring WMD should face pre-emptive attack, they said.  Traditional alliances should be replaced by ad-hoc coalitions. This 1992 master plan then formed the basis of a PNAC paper that was concluded in September 2000, just months before the start of the Bush Administration. That September 2000 paper (Rebuilding America's Defences) was developed by Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Libby, and is devoted to matters of "maintaining US pre-eminence, thwarting rival powers and shaping the global security system according to US interests".  It talks of  "creating tomorrow's dominant force", "preserving American military pre-eminence in the coming decades" and even "ensuring America's control of space".  The paper describes US forces stationed overseas in the raw language of the Wild West, calling them "the Cavalry on the New American Frontier".  Even peace efforts, the paper continues, should have the stamp of the USA rather than the UN. Amongst other things, this paper said, the USA must re-arm and build a missile shield in order to put itself in a position to fight numerous wars simultaneously and chart its own course.  Whatever happened, the Gulf would have to be under US control: "The US has sought for years to play an ongoing role in the security architecture of the Gulf.  The unresolved conflict with Iraq provides a clear basis for our presence, but quite independent of the issue of the Iraqi regime, a substantial US presence in the Gulf is needed".  (www.newamericancentury.org/RebuildingAmericasDefences). This leaflet is not the result of a conspiracy theory.  PNAC are quite open and honest in their advocacy of a future based on the idea that might is right and a future of spiralling defence expenditure and constant conflict.  It should be clearly understood that these are not people working for peace and global justice.  What they haven't counted on is the opposition around the world, not least in the United States, where people are increasingly finding that they are excluded from "US interests". www.hitchinagainstwar.freeserve.co.uk Maybe I'm not jaded enough yet.  Maybe I should sneer more & care less.  Maybe I should just mutter, "Fuck it, whoever you vote for the government always gets back in", & reach for the beer & pretzels.  Can't do it, though.  A world in which the hubris & arrogance of the powerbrokers is such that they lay out the terms of what amounts to a bid for world dominance on a website is a world that has to be changed.  What do you think? 11:49:02 PM    comment [] RADIO ACTIVE Well, I guess I've been around Salon long enough to let slip the odd true confession. You guys out there seem like a broad-minded & sanguine crew, able to deal with a few quirks & tics.  And if the two of you don't like what you learn then you'll just have to transfer your allegiances back to those blogs with the soft porn, hard news or Dear Diary pages.  So here goes. I am a radio ham.  Yes, that's right - one of those socially-challenged individuals in the pebble-lens specs, woolly hats & terminal dandruff who spend valuable time hunched over a desk mic bawling gibberish across the ether to similarly inclined saddoes in Japan, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, the Cayman Islands.  Above my house there revolves an industrial strength aerial capable of sending & receiving hundreds of watts-worth of largely puerile conversation whilst wiping out the neighbours' TVs over an area of several acres.  As tools of the trade I have an old pre-digital age transceiver built when the abacus was high tech, a Times world atlas so large scale it's got your house on it, & my very own callsign - G0 EUV. I don't do radio much nowadays.  The old dark passions that would have me winding the aerial up its 40' mast in a force 9 gale so that I could catch the Australians between 5.00 & 7.00 AM have stilled.  No more chasing the fluctuating ionospheric conditions to bag a 5-second contact with that lone operator on some lump of rock in the Indian Ocean.  No more regular 'skeds' with the guy in San Antonio who sounds just like Jack Nicholson or the Russian doctor in a desolate oil pipeline outpost in Northern Siberia who wanted to learn English.  Laziness, I suppose, the lure of the touch-sensitive keyboard, boredom with the standard in-out link-up - signal strength, weather, cheerio. But sometimes I do miss the peculiar solitary excitement of the thin, oscillating, alien voice that picks up your CQ (contact sought) call.  It's a UN observer watching a Palestinian/Israeli firefight from the Golan Heights, a panicky weekend sailor whose yacht is shipping water fast off Mauritius, an Australian fence-mender 50 k. from the nearest shop & bar.  Those few minutes of shared personal culture across thousands of miles of earth & sky are worth all the hours of static crackle & atmospheric hiss.  Maybe tomorrow morning I'll fire up the rig, wind up the antenna & check out those early Aussies… WAVELENGTHS   #1. Bonsai 1005 1 GHz Pentium III Processor   I paddle the keys and pixels break surface like bubbles.  The blue window shivers into a spray of letters, uniform, a lingua franca.  The world and his wife are talking hard, a promiscuity of speech that melts into the pool, unvoiced.  This is language out of light, words squeezed and shredded out of shape and form, electronic runes and glyphs squirted into bits and bytes down filaments. These digits, these encryptions, they’re mouthless, lost in space.  No tongues or lips articulate the cries and whispers of the slave electrons working the binary roads.  Behind the brilliant lexicon, just the insect voices and the hum of spinning disks.   #2. Icom 756 Pro Mk II HF transceiver   Still dark outside. 0500 zulu and a cold wind rocks the antenna tower.  I’m beaming west on 20 meters, listening through the chuckle of morse, the whooping heterodyne.  I’m looking for Australia on the long path, vaulting scraps of landscape and the great bare, muscled back of ocean; skidding in across the eastern shores, magnet-voiced and listening hard.  A VK3, a loner by two hundred miles of fence-line; a little wooden house, a splinter in the prairie skin. Just him, his wife and daughters, fixing the broken wire that separates the cowboys and the kangaroos from dreamtime.  Now the aerial image shimmers, breaks.  I lose his voice as the skywave shifts; lose his tale of full moons, crowding stars and voices in the wind.  I drift with the tidal ebb and flow of distant storms, spikes of wireless sound and silence. But I’ve spoken; he has spoken. Breath has shaped and joined our words. We have thrown a line across the earth and tugged it once or twice.   12:34:17 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 Dick Jones. Last update: 02/05/2003; 19:18:21.