Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 4, 2008 8:07:35 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: As America Implodes, like Germany after WWI, OUR "Nazis"
Circling like Vultures
A War of Self-Destruction
Posted on Aug 4, 2008
By Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080804_a_war_of_self_destruction/
An attack on Iran, which Israeli and Bush administration officials
appear set to carry out if Iranian uranium enrichment is not halted,
would ignite a regional war in the Middle East and lead to economic
collapse and political upheaval in the United States.
“In short and simple terms, we would be plunged into a depression that
would make the Great Depression of the 1930s in which I spent my
childhood look like boom times,” said William R. Polk, former
professor of history at the University of Chicago and a member of the
Policy Planning Council under President Kennedy. “Industries would
fail, banks would collapse, government revenues would dry up,
universities would have to close, health care, even as limited as it
now is for roughly 75 million Americans, would virtually cease. In
short, something like [what] the South suffered at the end of the
Civil War would plague the country.”
The passage of vast amounts of oil and liquefied gas through the
Persian Gulf would be disrupted. Iranian attacks, carried out with
rocket- and bomb-equipped speedboats and submarines, would be deadly
and effective. A classified Pentagon war game in 2002 simulated these
swarming attacks by Iranian speedboats packed with explosives in the
gulf; the Navy lost 16 major warships, according to a report in The
New York Times. Iranian oil, which makes up 8 percent of the world’s
energy supply, would instantly be taken off the market. And oil would
jump to over $500 a barrel and perhaps, as the conflict dragged on, to
over $750 a barrel. Our petroleum-based economy would come to a halt.
Israel would be hit by Iranian Shahab-3 ballistic missiles. Hezbollah,
with its new store of Iranian-supplied rockets that allegedly can
reach any part of Israel, including Israel’s nuclear plant at Dimona,
would enter the conflict. Israel would lash back. Terrorist attacks on
U.S. targets would become frequent. U.S. casualties in Iraq would
mount as the Iranians rained missiles down on U.S. bases and
installations, including our imperial city, the Green Zone. Chaos and
mayhem would grip the Middle East. The world financial markets would
go haywire.
“Even at today’s price, as you know, 14 airlines have gone out of
business while others are hovering on the brink of bankruptcy and most
have curtailed service and laid off personnel,” said Polk, one of the
country’s leading scholars of the Arab world. “At double or triple
today’s price, none could fly unless nationalized. A whole range of
other industries would be quickly drawn into the quicksand.
Ironically, war would push America into a form of socialist economy.”
The U.S. economy is already tottering. We recently witnessed the
second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, and there are fears that
as many as 150 banks could fail over the next 12 to 18 months. There
will be 6.5 million foreclosures over the next five years, according
to Wall Street analysts. The government is furiously pumping billions
of taxpayer dollars into private corporations to keep them afloat. The
Congress bailed out the shareholders of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
These bizarre “government-sponsored enterprises” own or guarantee half
the mortgages in the country—some $5.1 trillion. The Federal Reserve
evoked rarely used emergency powers to put billions of taxpayer
dollars at risk to stop the meltdown of a non-bank, Bear Stearns,
which it never regulated. More than $300 billion has been written down
so far. Losses, by the time we are done, could exceed $1 trillion.
The already staggering debt generated by the war in Iraq would
mushroom with an attack on Iran. Fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Iran, we would soon be struggling to pay off a debt of at least
two or three times the present amount. This is a weight the U.S.
economy cannot bear, especially as the dollar tumbles against the euro
and other major currencies. The government has borrowed abroad roughly
a quarter of our annual national income in order to pay for the Iraq
debacle. We have been told for the first time by a sovereign fund
(South Korean, one of the world’s largest) that it will no longer buy
U.S. Treasury bonds. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the
final cost of the war in Iraq, once all the hidden costs are added up,
could be as high as $7 trillion.
“Financial capitalism is crashing,” wrote independent presidential
candidate Ralph Nader. “So the lights are on late in Washington’s
Federal Reserve, SEC and Treasury Department trying to figure out how
socialism (your tax dollars and credits) can once again bail out these
big-time gamblers with our money. ... Reckless, self-enriching
capitalists get on your knees and thank the rescuing Washington
socialists, for without them, you would surely be in chains.”
A war with Iran would also have grave political consequences. The
specter of millions of Americans driven out of their homes, no longer
able to afford basic necessities, out of work and enraged, would, as
it has throughout history, embolden messianic right-wing and proto-
fascist movements. Given the potential for social unrest, basic
freedoms would be curtailed and in some cases abolished in the name of
order and national security. The radical fringes of the Christian
right could rise up with a vengeance. They would happily ally
themselves with an assortment of oddballs, lunatics and corporate
behemoths from Blackwater mercenaries to frightened capitalists at
Halliburton. It was economic collapse, along with a climate of fear
and instability, that was used to build the fascist and communist
movements that plagued Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union during the
last century. These same forces led to the collapse of the former
Yugoslavia. We are not immune to these distortions.
But maybe those who advocate a war with Iran know all this. Maybe this
is what they want. Maybe they understand that a war with Iran would
finally kill off our weakened and anemic democracy. Maybe they see
this as the dawn of a new era, an era when the last impediments to a
global totalitarian capitalism can finally be removed and we can all
be ground under the corporate jack boot, from Shanghai to New Delhi to
Ohio. There are huge corporations that make obscene profits from human
misery. They run our health care industry. They run our oil and gas
companies. They run our bloated weapons industry. They run Wall Street
and the major investment firms. They run our manufacturing firms. They
also, ominously, run our government.
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