Backbone > Panet Waves

One Percent
By Eric Francis . Illustration by Emil Alzamora

We stand at a critical world turning point. It humbles the greatest science fiction. The delicate balance of the ecological situation, the world nuclear situation, the global water crisis, the impending oil endgames, which will force the frail economy into an extended reinvention phase, are influenced by decisions made on what we think of as the top levels of government. More than that, the stability of these interconnected systems is closely related to public perceptions (which means the level of collective fear, cooperation, consciousness) and to public participation in change. There are really two possibilities for how we relate to all this in the big picture: that we’re powerless or that we’re not.

The war in Iraq has gone into full-tilt overdrive, and is revealing itself as a catastrophe. Like Vietnam, Iraq is an important news item each night, but the war is still in the background of consciousness, not the first thing we think about every day.

We have not, as a community, connected with the many issues of this war: how many children we are killing, or how we have once again destroyed the infrastructure of a poor country and are largely leaving the people to struggle. (Despite peachy-keen news reports of our great success, and $87.5 billion new dollars allocated, one does not simply rebuild a country, as anyone who has rebuilt their house after a disaster knows). We are not dealing with the depleted uranium that’s soaked the desert, amounting to nuclear war; we have not begun to see the pain and devastation caused to US service people when they return home disabled and sick as a result of exposure. The corpses are returning secretly, with no cameras allowed and no state honors, in “transport tubes”—what used to be called body bags.

We are not listening to the families of military personnel who want their loved ones returned home. We have not begun to address the possibility of the draft. Recently, the Selective Service people sent out announcements that they were seeking draft board members for local communities (I know because I applied to be on my local draft board).

We have not, and neither has our media, taken seriously the reality that this war was based on lies told to the public and the world community.

We have not begun to address the massive profits being hauled in by companies like Halliburton, whose executives populate the Bush administration. We have not made the connection between the oil executives who run the White House and the fact that Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves in the world. Perhaps this is because so many people drive two-ton SUVs that get less than 15 miles per gallon.

Why don’t we go back to the egg, the election scandal of 2000? However you look at it, George W. Bush was not elected president in any conventional sense of the word, plus there was a big scandal in Florida involving deregistering tens of thousands of Democrats before the election, and he won at the Supreme Court by just one justice’s vote. Now we are harvesting the fruits of that illegitimacy. Everyone just went along for the ride, did we not?

I know a lot of people are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about getting Georgie and his friends out of office, and many see it as a done deal—but it’s not going to be as easy as anyone thinks. He’s not supposed to be there in the first place. By he, I mean he and his team of PNAC operatives.

For those not familiar with PNAC, the Project for the New American Century, it’s the conservative think tank that’s currently in control of the US government and much of world destiny. Last month their Web page published their argument for prolonging US military involvement in Iraq for about a century.
That’s correct—about a century. Now, lest you think that these folks are just some crackpots with a Web page, remember, they got the President into office, and many of their officials hold high public office or other important public policy positions, as well has having substantial corporate interests. The 25 signatories to PNAC’s “Statement of Principles” (number one being “to increase defense spending significantly”) include Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Jeb Bush. They got us into a situation in Iraq from which we cannot remove ourselves; the line from now on is that “we have to keep fighting” so we can “win this war” and “not be defeated” and “send the wrong message to terrorists.”

PNAC’s article, “US Counterinsurgency in Iraq: Lessons from the Philippine War” by Tom Donnelly, PNAC senior fellow and former head of the policy group for the House Committee on Armed Services, states:

“More than a century after ‘winning’ the Philippine War, American soldiers are working with their Filipino counterparts to coordinate a counterinsurgency campaign against Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist terrorist group based in the southern Philippines with ties to Al Qaeda.

“It is neither cynical nor defeatist to acknowledge that the US military commitment to help Iraqis secure their country against the enemies of democracy may prove to be similarly enduring.”

This profitable strategy for the defense industry is very bad news for the hundreds of thousands who might die. At least 31 American troops were killed in action the first week of November. Multiply that by 100 years. However, PNAC has a way of dealing with this.

They acknowledge that, “In such campaigns, the ‘real’ strategic center of gravity is US public opinion.” But, fortunately, the American public are “more worried about losing a war than losing soldiers in order to win a war.”

In other words, no need to worry about people dying because we, the public, are not motivated by that. Thus a hundred years of war becomes a viable option. But surely planning a war without end suggests that we’re not expecting to get to the point of winning it. So the fact is that we’re losing the soldiers and losing the war, which even by PNAC’s reckoning should motivate nobody.

This war began under a Mars-Chiron conjunction, which has been an omen in American history in the past. If we dig up the history of the peak years of the Vietnam war as told by Mars-Chiron conjunctions, one of which was on February 13, 1968. By 1968 the Vietnam War had become the longest running war in the history of this country. Many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodians and upwards of 30,000 Americans had died. Then the Tet Offensive began, which was a military loss for the Viet Cong but brought a major shift in US public opinion against the war.

Lynden B. Johnson, a Democrat, was president, and it was pretty much his war. He had inherited it from Eisenhower and Kennedy, but Kennedy was in the process of withdrawing troops at the time of his death, maintaining the status quo for the sake of appearances while holding out for re-election. Under Johnson, the war escalated greatly. On February 29, 1968, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the great hawks of his day—comparable in zeal to Donald Rumsfeld, but viewed with much greater respect—resigned after concluding that the US could not win. The last years of the war were a very rude awakening, and many more people died to save the face of American politicians.

Waking up can be unpleasant, particularly when one wakes up to intentionally inflicted chaos and anarchy, or to a lurking sense of guilt that maybe you’re doing something to keep it going. I do wish my brothers and sisters, my cousins and parents, all those people holed up in their cute little homes on Vashon Island and Woodstock and playing Vivaldi in their SUVs, would wake up to the necessity of participating in collective world processes. Why do I think they’re not? Um, math. My estimate is that if one percent of the people who know what’s happening in the world really cared, the world would not be in the state it’s in. Actually, it would probably take far fewer than that. We shall see.

Aquasphere is the 2004 annual Planet Waves CD, with complete annual horoscope by Eric Francis. Combined CD and Web access are just $24.95. To order go to PlanetWaves.net/aquasphere.