The Depraved Majesty of Totalitarian Democracy

Is it Krushchev? Is it Lancelot Link's nemesis, Baron von Butcher? No, it's a little of both: It's the Grand and Glorious Decider in full General Urko mode.


After four Blackwater mercenaries were killed and their lifeless, butchered bodies publicly displayed by gleeful insurgents in March 2004, George W. Bush was handed one of those "leadership moments" so earnestly lusted after by incorrigible narcissists of his variety.


Summoning every resource of eloquence and inspiration at his disposal, Bush -- according to the newly published memoir by Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, former commander of U.S. forces in Iraq -- disgorged what he probably thought was a masterpiece of Churchillian oratory in a videoconference with his national security team and commanding generals in Iraq:

"Kick ass! If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell! This Vietnam stuff, this is not even close. It is a mind-set. We can't send that message. It's an excuse to prepare us for withdrawal. There is a series of moments and this is one of them. Our will is being tested, but we are resolute. We have a better way. Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out! We are not blinking!"

This harangue was roughly equal parts towel-snapping frat-boy faux bravado, corporate seminar positive thinking dogma, partially digested talk radio sound-bites, and reheated Brezhnev-era Soviet revolutionary cant served up in one borderline-aphasic seizure.


Picking carefully through this slurry with a pair of tweezers we can extract one expression that nearly qualifies as a complete thought: The Marxoid imprecation against those who would "stop the march of Democracy" in Iraq and, presumably, elsewhere.


In fact, it was the audacity displayed by the residents of Fallujah in setting up their own self-governing institutions after the U.S. invasion that attracted the murderous attentions of Bush and his adult handlers.


Jeremy Scahill, in his exceptionally valuable study of Blackwater, Inc., points out that after the invasion "Fallujans had organized themselves and, before U.S. forces entered the city, created a local system of governance -- appointing a Civil Management Council with a manager and mayor -- in direct affront to the authority of the occupation."


Human Rights Watch reports that in Fallujah, the management of the city's public and private assets was apportioned among the various tribes, and arrangement one could call a form of checks and balances. The local hospital contracted with local militiamen to provide security. And local Imams "urged the public to respect law and order."


"Are you finished democratizing my city? Can I come out?"


What is described here is a rudimentary and very fragile form of republican self-government, albeit of a form based on cultural assumptions substantially different from those that informed our own Founders. So of course it had to be destroyed in the interests of the Bushevik Global Democratic Revolution.


Fallujah suffered greatly in the first Gulf War: A February 13 aerial bombing attack on a bridge spanning the Euphrates. The first airstrike failed to bring down the bridge. During the second, a half-dozen of the laser-guided "precision" missiles malfunctioned, missing the target and hitting a nearby residential neighborhood, an apartment building, and a crowded market. Scores were killed, hundreds more were wounded.


By the time the Bush family stretched forth its hand a second time to confer the blessings of armed benevolence upon the ungrateful Iraqis, Fallujah had become known as a stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-American hostility. This shouldn't surprise anyone with a particle of understanding of human nature. Which means it was utterly mystifying to those whose minds are incurably hostage to the tenets of totalitarian democracy.


You see, "Democracy" is the sanctified name used to describe whatever Washington sees fit to inflict on any community -- foreign or domestic -- it targets. And the objective of planting and nurturing democracy consecrates any means to bring about that end.


Shortly after U.S. troops invaded Iraq, a contingent of Marines occupied Fallujah, seizing the Al Qaed ("The Leader") School on Hay Nazzal Street as its headquarters. Since the reaction to this action was entirely predictable, the seizure has to be considered a deliberate provocation.


Opposition quickly coalesced, and a mob gathered around the school -- as well as Ba'ath Party HQ, also occupied by US troops -- to chant defiant slogans. The protest promoted Lt. Col, Eric Nantz, the U.S. commander in Fallujah, to warn the crowd via loudspeaker that the demonstration "could be considered a hostile act and would be engaged with deadly force.


At some point, a U.S. soldier was hit by a rock thrown by a demonstrator, and what had been a protest turned into a massacre. A hail of gunfire erupted, and hundreds of Iraqi civilians were slaughtered. Some eyewitnesses testify that U.S. troops ordered ambulance drivers away from the scene as civilians died in agony.


This all happened roughly a year before the death of four Blackwater operators who were sent, ill-prepared and with inadequate support, on a very badly planned mission in Fallujah.


It is tragically typical of the American mass mind -- at least, that small portion of it that still pays attention to the ongoing national crime in Iraq -- that the death of four mercenaries in the service of Washington's empire has become known as the "Fallujah Massacre," and -- of course -- there is no corresponding name for the murder of hundreds of Iraqis by American forces in 1991 and April 2003. Likewise, no name has been given to the breathtakingly savage campaign of detention, regimentation, state terrorism, and mass murder that the Bush Regime conducted in an attempt to impose democracy on Fallujah.


The death of four Blackwater operatives -- whose survivors were stiff-armed by both that politically connected corporation and the government it serves so dutifully -- gave the Regime "the ideal pretext to launch a massive assault on a population that was fast becoming a potent symbol suggesting that the United States and its Iraqi proxies were not really in control of the country," recounts Scahill. And remember: The triumph of "democracy" meant nothing more or less than uncontested U.S. control over Iraq.


In April 2004, Fallujah was encircled by U.S. troops and fenced in with concertina wire, and then Operation Vigilant Resolve began. According to on-site reports from both "embedded" and independent sources, occupation forces within the city seized control of the main hospital to prevent its use in treating the wounded. Air assaults destroyed the power plant and the main mosque.


Platoons were dispersed throughout the city armed with loudspeakers and a vocabulary of exquisitely profane insults compiled by psy-ops specialists as a way of luring resistance fighters out from hiding. This "insult-and-shoot" tactic was eagerly taken up by platoons throughout the city: U.S. troops, to the accompaniment of "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Hell's Bells," pumped out a steady stream of profanity and then mercilessly gunned down those Fallujans who rose in defense of their community's honor.


Warplanes dropped their lethal payloads of 2,000-pound bombs on the city; AC-130 Spectre gunships capable of demolishing city blocks in minutes were a common sight in the skies above Fallujah. A doctor from Baghdad who witnessed the death toll later commented: "There is no law on earth that can justify what the Americans did to innocent people."


Yet Fallujah refused to be "pacified," let alone "democratized."


"As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge," then-Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers testified before Congress on Hitler's birthday (April 20). Imitating the propaganda style of Hitler's regime, Myers described the inhabitants of the city as non-human vermin fit only for extermination: "We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat's nest, that is still festering today...."


The second assault on Fallujah began shortly after Bush's triumph in the November 2004 election. This time, the same Empire that supplied Saddam with chemical weapons, and then execrated him as a singular monster for using them "against his own people," cut out the Middle-Man entirely, using white phosphorous munitions against the "rat's nest" in Fallujah.


This was what the bloody-handed Bushling had in what passes for his mind when he urged the annihilation of those who stood athwart the "march of democracy" in Iraq.


Faoud Ajami, an apologist for the neo-con wing of the Imperial ruling elite, is every bit as Arab as Vidkun Quisling was Norwegian. A few days ago Ajami -- who is called on occasionally by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity to put a mock-academic gloss on the Regime's depraved ambitions -- decanted another dram of a familiar Establishment whine that is not improving with age: The plaint that it's simply unfair to judge the Iraq war, and the Warmakers, by the results of their policies and the facts as we now know them.


Ajami was provoked by Scott McClellan's memoirs, in which the erstwhile White House spokesliar tries to come clean about at least some of the deceptions that led to the invasion.


According to neo-con apologist Faoud Ajami, this little boy from Fallujah had to be mutilated because Saddam "taunted" the US Government. If that makes sense to you, you're qualified to teach at Johns Hopkins University.


Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami pouts that McClellan's apostasy from the Warmakers' cult comes "in the sixth year of the war, at a time when many have forgotten what was thought and said before its onset. The nation was gripped by legitimate concern over gathering dangers in the aftermath of 9/11. Kabul and the war against the Taliban had not sufficed, for those were Arabs who struck America on 9/11. A war of deterrence had to be waged against Arab radicalism, and Saddam Hussein had drawn the short straw. He had not ducked, he had not scurried for cover. He openly mocked America's grief, taunted its power."


So ... an aggressive war simply had to be waged because Saddam had "taunted" the Empire, by refusing to duck or scurry for cover?


That is a war aim worthy of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including more than 4,000 Americans?


This is the same quasi-thought, albeit expressed in slightly more elevated diction, that was given voice a year ago by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times: In a televised interview, Friedman said that a good and sufficient reason to invade Iraq was because "we" could, as a way of telling the Arab world, "Well, suck on this."


While Ajami avoids Friedman's use of urban patois -- which is singularly unconvincing, coming from a chinless, chest-less nebbish who probably can't do a single pushup, much less throw a decent punch -- he likewise insists that "democracy" cannot be victorious until all people everywhere, great and small, bow before the Empire's scepter.


Ann Coulter, who could probably take either Friedman or Ajami in a fist-fight, once reduced the discussion to a metaphor derived from prison rape: By ordering the invasion of Iraq, Coulter told an audience in mid-2003, Bush had "made the Middle East his bitch."


Well... not exactly. The problem, of course, is that neither Iraq nor the Middle East has been domesticated by the Empire, and never will. But the ongoing imperial wars will prove a splendid way to destroy whatever remains of American prosperity and national independence, as well as to flush out and eradicate anybody who remembers and seeks to restore the old republic.


"I don't care if it created more enemies," the Bushling spat at NBC News correspondent Richard Engel in a 2007 interview. "I had to act." To the same reporter, Bush blithely admitted that the war in Iraq "is going to take forty years." And his administration is taking steps right now to ensure that we will remain mired in Iraq and the region for at least two more generations.


Bush and his claque are seeking a special agreement with the Iraqi government to retain fifty permanent military bases in that country, and to provide permanent immunity for U.S. personnel stationed there. In familiar fashion, George the Dumber insists that congressional approval of this proposal -- which is a treaty by any honest use of language -- does not require Senate approval or congressional action of any kind.


Heroic armed missionaries of Democracy confront violent Iraqi ingrates -- at least, that's how the Regime and its apologists expect us to view this photograph.



Iraqi government officials protest that such an arrangement would entirely nullify Iraqi sovereignty. Ah, but Iraqi sovereignty, like all other principles, people, institutions, laws, or considerations, must yield to the imperatives of Washington's rule, aka Democracy. To that end, the Regime that rules us "is holding hostage some $50 billion of Iraq's money in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to pressure the Iraqi government" into signing that agreement by July 31, reports the estimable Patrick Cockburn of Britain's Independent newspaper.


To many observers this appears to be simple, vulgar extortion.


This conclusion is entirely unfair, of course. It's democratic extortion -- surely, the noblest kind.


On sale now!












Are you on their little List? Probably -- if you've done anything worthwhile for freedom.

Dhimmi Shelter (UPDATED)

You think I want to send my teen-age son to die for Kuwait? We have our white slaves from America to do that. --

Unnamed “Senior Gulf Official,” quoted in the pro-war Wall Street Journal prior to the first Gulf War

In clarifying his candid remark that U.S. troops might remain in Iraq for a century or more, Sen. John McCain told the audience of Face the Nation that his projection assumes Americans will remain there "in a support role but they're not [going to be] taking casualties." McCain apparently believes that the Iraqis would assume the responsibility of doing whatever fighting needs to be done, while Americans would be largely unmolested within the permanent bases being built in Iraq at tremendous expense.


McCain didn't explain why Iraqis would be eager to embrace this division of labor, in which their young (and not-so-young) men would be enlisted to protect a foreign occupation force well into the foreseeable future.


The good news -- if we can call it that -- for the Iraqis is that this scenario is facially implausible: Our troops won't be staying in Iraq for a century, since our government will have bankrupted our nation long before then. And we might find ourselves quite literally enslaved by the foreign lenders -- including those charming folks who run Saudi Arabia -- who are financing Washington's imperial foreign policy.


The Word says that the borrower is the servant to the lender (Proverbs 22:7). Perhaps that warning would resonate more with certain people if we were to paraphrase it this way: Government debt leads to dhimmitude.

The mental cupboard of the typical warbot is rather barren, so when rhetorical desperation sets in he will often invoke the danger of dhimmitude – a condition generally described as abject enslavement of non-Muslims by the triumphant followers of Mohammed.

A warning of that sort is an invitation to believe that we must wholeheartedly commit ourselves to decades of unremitting war against the Islamic world – with the implicit goal of either liquidating hundreds of millions of refractory Muslims, or terrorizing them into some kind of religious conversion. Failing that, our nation will fall beneath the Crescent; Mohammed's throat-slitting myrmidons will swarm American streets, imposing a Talibanesque social order with all of its attendant horrors.

We are also occasionally instructed to be wary of the symptoms of “self-imposed dhimmitude,” which apparently include any opinion or policy suggestion evincing a lack of enthusiasm for the “Long War” against the entire Muslim world. (For the supposed sin of acknowledging that Muslim antagonism toward the United States was, to some extent, provoked by Washington's imperialist foreign policy, Rep. Ron Paul has been accused of promoting "dhimmitude.")

The fate of those conquered by Muslims has usually been quite grim, at best. But most of those peddling alarmist rhetoric about dhimmitude are working in the service of an ideology – for our present purposes, I'll call it Democratic Imperialism -- at least as destructive as radical Islam. And their preferred course of action is actually making our descent into a form of dhimmitude more likely.

The term “Dhimma” refers to a kind of social contract between victorious Muslims and their conquered subjects. In his book Defeating Jihad: How The War on Terror May Yet Be Won, In Spite of Ourselves, Dr. Serge Trifkovic offers a concise and measured analysis of the historic practice of dhimmitude. After reviewing the text and significance of sura 9, the Koran's “chapter of war proclamations,” Dr. Trifkovic briefly describes the protection racket imposed on conquered non-Muslims:

“The conquered peoples were `protected persons' only if they submitted to Islamic domination by a `Contract' (Dhimma), paid poll tax – jizya – and land tax – haraj – to their masters. Any failure to do so was the breach of contract, enabling the Muslims to kill or enslave them and confiscate their property. The cross could not be displayed in public, the people of the book [that is, Christians and Jews] had to wear special clothing, and they were not allowed to carry weapons. They had to take in Muslim travelers, especially soldiers on a campaign.”

Balkan Christians under the rule of the Ottoman Turks also had to pay the “blood tax” by surrendering their sons to serve as yani ceri -- “new soldiers,” more commonly called “Janissaries.” Originally constituted as an occupation army devoted to tax collection, the Janissaries became a kind of Praetorian Guard with the power to depose the ruling Sultan. But the chief role of these troops – who were stolen at a young age and forcibly indoctrinated in Islam – was to ensure the subservience of the “infidel” community that had produced them.

While granting that dhimmitude, as practiced in the Middle Ages, was an abhorrent system of political and religious tyranny, I'm constrained to point out that in some ways it differs only in detail and degree from the system under which we presently live.

The "social contract" (no, not the Constitution of 1787 -- the Sixteenth Amendment and Federal Reserve Act) defining our current system permits far greater impositions on the governed than the poll and land taxes extracted from dhimmis, and confiscation of personal property on the whim of our rulers is standard federal practice today. In similar fashion, those who enforce the will of our ruling class enjoy broad discretion in the use of lethal force against civilians, who can't so much as touch or even speak brusquely to an enforcer without facing the prospect of immediate torture and summary imprisonment.

And the more deeply mired we become in Middle East conflicts, the likelier it is that we'll see a restoration of the “blood tax” in the form of conscription.

More to the point: There are significant ways in which Washington's foreign and fiscal policies have already made dhimmis out of Americans.

As the quote at the beginning of this essay illustrates, at least some Persian Gulf rulers understand that Washington is prepared to sustain their position at the cost of young American lives. And the increasingly precarious health of the American economy is largely dependent on the willingness of petroleum-enriched Arab rulers to continue propping up the dollar. This Dhimma (or contract) between Washington and the Arab world was forged three and a half decades ago, when Henry Kissinger worked out an arrangement in which the Saudis would accept only dollars for their oil, and Washington in exchange would provide Riyadh with ... well, pretty much anything it desired.

Some dare call this “dhimmitude,” however cunningly disguised. That corrupt pact is having tangible, tragic consequences as the dollar's decline accelerates. And should the Gulf States decide to dispose of the “dollar peg,” our faltering economy may collapse outright. It is that prospect that puts a swagger in the step of the likes of Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadenijad, and it should trouble the sleep of any reasonably intelligent and well-informed observer of current events.

Unless they've been abroad recently, or are involved in international commerce, most Americans have no idea how far the dollar has fallen during the past year.

As an American residing in Paris, fashion designer Erica Nevins has experienced the unpleasant consequences of the exchange rate between the dollar and the euro. She had apparently made peace with the fact that as an expatriate paid in dollars, her standard of living and social standing were rapidly declining among her Parisian friends. She was probably not ready to learn that her insistence on using dollars would put her near the bottom of the pecking order in a third world slum.

While visiting Marrakech a few weeks ago, Miss Nevins was moved by the plight of a street beggar and handed the little girl a dollar. The young Moroccan mendicant looked with disdain on the greenback, telling Nevins: “I don't want this. This is nothing.”

Nothing. What was it Ahmadenijad said? Oh, right: The dollar is just a “worthless piece of paper.”

The per capita GDP of Morocco is almost exactly one-tenth that of the United States. It stands to reason that the income of a child beggar in that country is so small it could only be detected through the use of an electron microscope. Yet such people understand a reality Americans will eventually have to confront: The dollar is “nothing.”

When Moroccan street beggars turn up their noses at the dollar, you know we're in for some rough times right away. The most privileged among us will be able to defer the day of reckoning for a while by selling off key assets to Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) controlled by Arab petro-despotisms.

SWFs are huge, State-controlled financial entities that are used by governments to buy key financial or infrastructure assets from other countries. The world's largest SWFs are controlled by energy-rich countries -- such as the petroleum-exporting kingdoms of the Persian Gulf, and Russia, which has huge reserves of natural gas. Those countries have also acquired immense reserves of currency, particularly dollars.

On November 27, an SWF controlled by the government of Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich member of the United Arab Emirates, spent $7.5 billion to buy a roughly five percent share in Citigroup, America's largest and most prestigious bank. Like most of the banking system, Citigroup is in potentially mortal peril from the collapse of the Federal Reserve's housing/mortgage/debt bubble. The willingness of Abu Dhabi to pump billions – the legal limit – into Citicorp prompted a brief but significant market rally, as the investor class prostrated itself with gratitude before its Arab benefactors.

A half-century ago, Abu Dhabi was a desert wilderness populated by itinerant tribes of Bedouin camel herders. Now it is seen as a potential savior of Wall Street.

The ever-mordant Dr. Gary North put this matter into proper perspective:

“A small percentage of a gigantic pool of oil-generated capital, which is managed by government bureaucrats in a city-state whose nation did not exist as recently as 1970, was used to buy 4.9% of the largest bank in the United States because this purchase was perceived as a better deal than buying T-bills denominated in a falling dollar.”

“The stock market will need many more interventions by Abu Dhabi and other Arab oil states, which now control the flow of funds America's capital markets,” continues Dr. North (my emphasis). “The great fire sale has begun. Senior American managers have begun to sell the nation's seed corn to the Arabs. They will continue to do so as the economic agents of American people. The sale of 4.9% of Citigroup is a visible turning point.”

Colin Barr of Fortune points out that earlier this year, Abu Dhabi bought a small but significant share in the enigmatic Carlye Group, an investment fund whose representatives are a veritable boutique of Power Elite types, including George Bush the Elder. This is one illustration of the way that foreign interests – particularly Arab petro-despots – are “becoming stakeholders in US businesses and, by extension, in American society, like it or not.”

James Post, a management professor at Boston University, points out that this is a logical and inevitable consequence of the recent orgy of borrowing from abroad. Most of it in recent years has gone to fund the Idiot King's war of choice in Iraq, and the construction of his Homeland Security State here at home. Now the foreign creditors who have lent Washington that money are coming for the collateral, and, as Post points out, “inevitably we'll see Middle East political influence rising” in Washington.

...well, no, it won't -- but it will profit handsomely from the self-inflicted collapse of American power, for at least a little while.

In fact, Washington has been bending to that political influence for some time, in terms of its military and strategic priorities. As Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker reported months ago, beginning about a year ago the Bush administration has become involved in an effort to create a regional Sunni power bloc in the Persian Gulf. This includes intimate collaboration with al-Qaeda-connected radicals in Iraq and elsewhere, as well as with Saudi princes who, in the words of Middle Eastern affairs expert Frederic Hof, “still see the world through the days of the Ottoman Empire, when Sunni Muslims ruled the roost and the Shiites were the lowest class” -- except, of course, for the infidels who paid in both money and blood to sustain the Ottoman ruling elite.

So now, behind the rhetoric of promoting democracy in the Middle East and protecting our nation from radical Islam, Washington is promoting the interests of the Sunni rulers who fund terrorists and keep the dollar afloat.

How is this anything other than financial dhimmitude?


Obiter dicta/Update

After a lengthy and frustrating delay, my new book, Liberty In Eclipse: The War on Terror and the Rise of the Homeland Security State, is available; my friend and colleague Tom Eddlem has offered a limited quantity for sale on-line at e-bay.

As soon as possible, ordering information will be posted in this space, and at The Right Source as well. It will also be available through most familiar retail book outlets.

Also, following a long hiatus, we are preparing a new edition of the Pro Libertate e-zine. Expect to see it sometime late this week, or early next week.


Dum spiro, pugno!

Captain Blackadder's Lament: Imperialism Isn't Fun When The Enemy Can Shoot Back

“I did like it [soldiering] in the old days, back when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns. Even spears made us think twice.... The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dried grass.... No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I had 15 years of military experience, perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and [mastering the intricacies of propositioning local women in their native tongue], and then, suddenly, a half million Germans hove into view....”

-- Captain Edmund Blackadder MC, mired in a dugout on the Belgian Front during WWI, describing his days with the 19th/45^th East African Rifles, while preparing to die pointlessly in a futile “Big Push” against the entrenched Germans.

For imperial powers, every war is supposed to be the geopolitical equivalent of a homecoming game: The opponents are carefully selected to guarantee that the “good guys” not only win, but run up the score and pad their individual statistics.

The biggest difference, of course, is that such “homecoming games” are always fought on the other country's home turf. But the point, as Captain Blackadder acknowledged just before going “over the top” to be pitilessly cut apart by German machine guns, is that imperial warfare is a lot of fun until the Empire's soldiers are thrown into combat against people who know how to fight back.

Barely a century passed between America's War of Independence and the emergence of an imperial ruling caste in Washington. Even before the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee (for which twenty soldiers were awarded Medals of Honor for gallantry of the type displayed by Captain Blackadder's African regiment) heralded the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny, powerful and ambitious figures were seeking to build an overseas American Empire.

One of the first lands to fall beneath this esurient gaze was the Kingdom of Hawaii, which was already under the rule of a corporatist sugar plantation clique. In 1887, that clique, with the full support of Washington, blessed the Islands with a constitution that thoughtfully removed from the native Hawaiians the burden of self-government.

Known as the “Bayonet Constitution” -- since, like all such acts of imperial liberation it was backed with the overt threat of punitive military action – the charter “gave all Americans and Europeans, even non-citizens, the right to vote” while denying it to the majority population of Asian laborers, explains Stephen Kinzer in his fascinating book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.

Cabal: The "Provisional Government" of Hawaii, shortly after seizing power in January 1893.

The author of the Bayonet Constitution was attorney Lorrin Thurston, an agent of the cabal that sought to steal the Islands on behalf of corporatist interests. Thurston imposed himself on the Hawaiian government as its interior minister and used that position to plot the overthrow of the puppet kingdom, which was consummated in January 1893.

At the time of the coup, the reigning Hawaiian monarch was Queen Lilioukalani, whose brother Kalakua was the puppet king who signed the 1887 Bayonet Constitution. Lilioukalani, a Christian believer who was educated in missionary schools, was made of sterner stuff than her brother: She described his capitulation – symbolized by the loss of Pearl Harbor to American control – as “a day of infamy in Hawaiian history.”

Fifty-four years later, Clio must have been left apoplectic with laughter when essentially the same phrase came from the lips of a U.S. President as he described an attack on the same Pearl Harbor by another imperial power. And the next thirty-three months offered many career military men – some of them, perhaps, old enough to have been alive when Lilioukalani described the first Hawaiian “day of infamy” -- abundant opportunities to voice their own versions of Captain Blackadder's lament.

Obviously it would have been much more fun to fight grass-skirted, poorly-armed natives, than to engage the very competent and uniformly brutal forces of another industrialized empire.

We are ritually instructed to remember Pearl Harbor in the least reflective way possible. Yes, the Japanese attack was a vicious act of aggression. This is true even though Washington was doing everything it could to provoke and even facilitate that attack as a back door into a war in Europe. I like to refer to Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of the attack who was not enamored of the idea of war with the US, as “FDR's most important collaborator in the attack on Pearl Harbor.”

The perfidy of our ruling elite does not exonerate Imperial Japan. That being said, this must be also: Japan's assault on Pearl Harbor, and much of what followed, usefully illustrates how Washington's interventionist foreign policy sows the seeds of future tragedies, often in ways most people simply can't anticipate. After all, if Thurston and his tiny knot of conspirators hadn't been backed up by the US Marines when they seized control of Hawaii in January 1893, it's likely there would have been no naval base at Pearl Harbor for the Japanese to attack in December 1941.

Imperial Japan's behavior in the occupied Philippines – particularly the Bataan Death March – looms very large in any retelling of the crimes of the Imperial Japanese (which were plentiful and entirely horrifying). But relatively few of the Americans who recall the unutterable atrocities visited on US servicemen by the Japanese take a moment to ask why there were American military personnel in the Philippines in the first place. And fewer still recall that roughly a half-century prior to the Pacific War, the cruelties inflicted on Filipino fighting men by American occupation forces were at least as vicious as those later inflicted by the Japanese on both Filipinos and Americans.

The "Greatest Generation"'s dark side: A young lady writes her sweetheart, stationed in the Pacific during World War II, to thank him for his thoughtful gift -- the skull of a Japanese soldier killed in combat against U.S. troops.

“We do not want the Filipinos,” declared the San Francisco Argonaut in 1898, after US troops disembarked on the archipelago during the Spanish-American War. “We want the Philippines. The islands are enormously rich, but unfortunately they are infested with Filipinos. There are many millions, there and, it is to be feared their extinction will be slow.”

After smashing the antiquated and over-matched forces of imperial Spain, Washington claimed the Philippines as its first official overseas possession in 1899. This meant fighting the newly created Republic of the Philippines, a conflict that became a three-year-long counter-insurgency war that created the template for subsequent enterprises in imperial generosity, including the ongoing effort to bring modern democracy to the benighted Iraqis.

Not everybody in Washington approved of annexing the Philippines. Massachusetts Senator George Frisbie Hoar, for instance, complained that the seizure would turn the United States, once a proudly independent republic, into “a vulgar, commonplace empire founded upon physical force, controlling subject races and vassal states, in which one class must forever rule and the other classes must forever obey.”

Not so, parried Senator Knute Nelson of Minnesota. “We come as ministering angels, not as despots,” Nelson piously pronounced, anticipating – by more than a century – contemporary paeans to Washington's armed missionaries of global democracy.

After Filipino partisans massacred a company of US infantrymen at Balangiga, American commanders anointed Colonel Jacob Smith, a decorated veteran of Wounded Knee, to confer the same benediction on that village he had administered to the Sioux.

“I want no prisoners,” Smith instructed his troops. “I wish you to kill and burn. The more you kill and the more you burn, the better you will please me.” He commanded his troops to raze the village and kill everyone over the age of ten, and to turn the area into “a howling wilderness.”

Elsewhere, ministering angels under the command of General Frederick Funston (who was later awarded a Medal of Honor) were detaining, torturing, and executing Filipinos indiscriminately. In their effort to locate guerrilla leader Emilio Aguinaldo, Funston's men made plentiful use of the same interrogation tactic used decades later by the Imperial Japanese: Waterboarding, or what was then called the “water cure.” During a post-war speaking tour, Funston boasted of not only torturing countless Filipinos, but also of summarily sentencing dozens to be executed without trial, and ordering numerous massacres of civilians. The war criminal also “suggested that anti-war protestors be dragged out of their homes and lynched,” observes historian William Loren Katz.

Then, as now, there were many self-described Christian clerics who did not hesitate to baptize such atrocities as righteous deeds of valor in a war against an implacable terrorist enemy. One such was the Reverend Homer Stuntz, who ardently defended the use of controlled drowning in an essay entitled “The `Water Cure' from a Missionary Point of View.”

(Continues after the jump)

Oh, that damn "Liberal Media" -- always undermining our valiant war effort! The May 22, 1902 issue of Life magazine used this editorial to denounce the torture method now called "waterboarding," which was used extensively in counter-insurgency warfare in the Philippines. In the background can be found representatives, in caricature, of European colonial powers, one of whom says, with some self-satisfaction: "Those pious Yankees can't throw stones at us anymore."

While Stuntz and other supposed emissaries of the Crucified One extolled the use of torture, unbeliever Mark Twain – whose finest work was written in the anti-imperialist cause – published a rational denunciation of General Funston's demonic career, and the public's acceptance of it:

“Funston's example has bred many imitators, and many ghastly additions to our history: the torturing of Filipinos by the awful `water-cure,' for instance, to make them confess – what? Truth? Or lies? How can one know which it is they are telling? For under unendurable pain a man confesses anything that is required of him, true or false, and his evidence is worthless. Yet upon such evidence American officers have actually – but you know about those atrocities which the War Office has been hiding a year or two....”

Eventually, Washington was able to pacify the “liberated” Philippines, albeit by slaughtering tens of thousands of the liberated.

“In three and a half torturous years of war,” writes Kinzer, “4,374 American soldiers were killed, more than ten times the toll in Cuba [another island territory seized from Spain]. About sixteen thousand guerrillas and at least twenty thousand civilians were also killed. Filipinos remember those years as some of the bloodiest in their history. Americans quickly forgot that the war ever happened.”

A not-so-cunning plan: Desperate to avoid the "Big Push," Blackadder feigns insanity, only to realize the futility of that gambit. After all, with REMFs sending tens of thousands of young men to die pointlessly on the Western Front, "Who would notice another madman around here?"

I wonder how many of the American soldiers and dependents tortured or otherwise abused by the Imperial Japanese were aware of the turn-of-the-century American counter-insurgency war and its attendant horrors.

And I find myself wondering what unforeseen horrors will be wrought decades hence – in the Persian Gulf, in Africa, and elsewhere – growing out of Washington's contemporary imperial undertakings. As the ranks of our enemies swell, the compass of our commitments expands, and our economy disintegrates, one thing seems certain: Thanks to the arrogance and corrupt ambitions of our rulers, American soldiers – both currently deployed and yet to be born – will have abundant opportunities to sing their own versions of Captain Blackadder's lament.

A Melancholy Postscript....

Dum spiro, pugno!

Imperial Dread

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one against our own. I must fairly say I dread our own power and our own ambition. I dread our being too much dreaded.... Sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.

Edmund Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies, 1793

In the final decade of the 18^th Century, an alliance coalesced among conventional European powers to contain the insurgent revolutionary forces of Jacobin-ruled France. Edmund Burke, easily the most perceptive and persuasive critic of the French Revolution's abominations and atrocities, yielded to no man in his concerns about the ambitions of revolutionary rulers and their allies.

But Burke was consistent in his concerns about consolidated and unaccountable power, and he understood that nothing worthwhile would be gained by permitting the imperial British Government to acquire the power it accused the French of seeking.

Burke admonished countrymen unnerved by the prospect of France exporting its revolution abroad and building a continent-spanning Jacobin empire to regain their composure and try to see England as outsiders would:

“We are already in possession of almost all the commerce of the world.... If we should ... be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent on our good pleasure, we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing, and hitherto unheard-of, power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it.”

Since other nations were not as serenely convinced of Britain's bottomless benevolence and endless generosity, they would eventually form a “combination” to prevent it from exercising unchecked political and economic hegemony, Burke pointed out.

The contrived furor over the Iranian “threat” -- which has recently been dialed down to a low drone, rather than the persistent shrieking we heard a few months ago – prompts me to adapt Burke's insights to our own condition, living as we do in the world's largest and most powerful empire.

We are constantly told that Iran is a world-menacing power led by the most recent edition of Hitler (re) Incarnate. Yet unless I missed something, Iran's military doesn't occupy a meter of foreign ground, even though Tehran does have allies and surrogates in Lebanon and Iraq, and warm relations with Venezuela's clown-tyrant Hugo Chavez. The Iranian regime has also been plausibly implicated in an act of anti-Jewish terrorism in Argentina some years ago.

Abhorrent as its ruling elite may be, Iran is not an aggressive power. Though some of its rulers may occasionally emit gusts of irrational nostalgia for the glories of Xerxes' empire, it requires an even greater investment in lunacy to believe that Iran poses a global threat.

Virtual imperialism: Understandably reluctant to visit "liberated" Baghdad, Emperor Bush holds a joint videoconference with Iraqi puppet Nouri al-Maliki to sign a "Cooperation and Friendship" accord.

Meanwhile, Washington – which maintains a globe-straddling empire of military garrisons -- is putting the finishing touches on an “agreement” with its puppet regime in Baghdad, a Soviet-style pact bearing the Soviet-esque title “Declaration of Principles for a Long-Term Relationship of Cooperation and Friendship Between the Republic of Iraq and the United States of America.”

(Does anybody else suspect that every totalitarian bureaucracy – whether in Moscow, Beijing, or Washington – includes a group of scribes who are paid by the syllable to devise grandiose titles for imperial pronouncements?)

Owing to the fact that the Empire's Mesopotamian province is not yet secure enough for the Emperor to pay a personal visit for an official ceremony, the agreement was jointly signed by the Swaggering Fool and his Iraqi satrap, Nouri al-Maliki, via “secure video conference.”

The key quid-pro-quo in the arrangement is this: US forces will remain in Iraq in some configuration to prop up the Shi'ite-dominated regime (even as they build little Sunni fiefdoms ruled by al-Qaeda-connected warlords). For their part, Washington's Iraqi puppets will permit politically connected corporate interests rape and plunder Iraq. That's part of the long-anticipated payoff envisioned during the heady first months of Bush the Dumber's rule, when Viceroy Cheney's secretive energy task force pored over maps of Iraqi oil fields with predatory intent.

That energy task force, in turn, was the outgrowth of a report published in December 2000 by a Joint Task Force on Petroleum organized by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute at Rice University. The final report of that task force (published with the “generous support” of Khalid al-Turki of Saudi Arabia, fretted that Iraq has “become a key `swing' producer [of petroleum], posing a difficult situation for the US government.... Saddam is a `destabilizing influence ... to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East.”

Therefore, concluded the CFR report, the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq, including military, energy, economic, and political/diplomatic assessments.

According to investigative reporter Greg Palast, who cites individuals with direct knowledge of the events, the report was handed directly to Cheney. He then convened an energy task force whose membership was largely identical to that of the CFR/Baker Institute task force. Then along came 9-11, and after making a feint in the direction of avenging the attack, the Bush Regime pivoted in the direction of Iraq.

And now, with 14 permanent US military installations sprouting up in Iraq, the “Declaration” signed by Bush and al-Maliki – essentially, an illegal military treaty completed without the constitutionally mandated Senate ratification -- offers yet another avenue to expand the war to Iran.

As Justin Raimondo points out, the “Declaration” contains a provision authorizing US military to conduct operations in support of “the Republic of Iraq in its efforts to combat all terrorist groups, at the forefront of which is al-Qaeda, Saddamists, and all other outlaw groups regardless of affiliation, and destroy their logistical networks and their sources of finance, and defeat and uproot them from Iraq.”

Raimondo observes:

“It's in this context that the Kyl-Lieberman resolution, enthusiastically supported by Hillary Clinton as well as the Bush administration, takes on special importance: having targeted the Iranian security force known as al-Quds, or the Revolutionary Guards, as an officially designated `terrorist' group, the American garrison is already authorized to take on Tehran. The road to war with Iran is paved, and we're ready to roll no matter who sits in the driver's seat.”

All that's missing is a suitable pretext, and if Iran doesn't provide one the Bush Regime has proven itself capable of conjuring one ex nihilo.

But, as Burke would expect, Washington's blatant grab for political control over energy sources in the Near East has inspired other powers to push back. Beijing's eagerness to stiff-arm US naval vessels seeking to dock in Hong Kong offers one illustration. Moscow's moves to upgrade its strategic nuclear forces presents another.

But the most acute threat to the American Imperium, as Hugo Chavez gleefully observed at the recent OPEC summit, is the ever-accelerating demise of the dollar. "Soon they won’t be talking any more about dollars because the dollar is on a free fall and the empire of the dollar is coming down,” gloated the Venezuelan ruler, a comment we should file under “Things That Are True Despite Being Said By Loathsome People.”

Burke wouldn't be surprised to learn that Washington's ambitions have engendered combinations devoted to bringing about its ruin. But he would likely be amazed at the audacity of our rulers in trying to build an Empire on money borrowed from those (such as Beijing's ruling caste) who stand to gain the most from its eventual demise.

And like our Founders – whose courage and wisdom he appreciated, and with whose grievances he sympathized – Burke would be astonished and disgusted by complacent Americans who cannot understand how empire-building always ends in misery and servitude.

Coming Soon To A Province Of Washington's Empire --

Dum spiro, pugno!