Twilight of American Empire

by Len Hart, the Existentialist Cowboy

The fall of the American empire resembles that of Rome in several areas but primarily --military and economic. The economies of the US and Rome ultimately depended on conquest. To this end, the US was sold to the Military/Industrial complex for whom 'conquest' is both an addictive drug and a life's blood. By the time the Roman Empire was sold at auction to one Didius Julianus, Rome's currency had already collapsed, as the dollar is likewise endangered. The smart money had already dumped sestercius for Greek Drachmas and the sale of the empire was concluded in Greek currency --not Roman.

Today, the currency of choice is neither the US dollar nor the Euro. It's oil and because Iran would prefer to sell oil for Euros, nations wishing to buy oil must exchange their dollars for Euros. Iran is threatened because it possesses a precious resource no longer produced economically in the US --oil! Rome was likewise impoverished. The sestercius was essentially worthless. It doesn't require an economics degree to conclude that Rome invaded Dacia for its gold and that the US will attack Iran for its oil.

Lacking oil, lacking a currency of choice, the American empire is finished! Just like Rome!
The US made of the Military/Industrial complex a cornerstone of its economy as Rome had done. War apparently never paid its own way; Rome compelled its people to 'render unto Caeser' beyond the ability of most to do so. Poverty increased with higher prices. Many farmers fled Rome's tax collector; others lost their farms whilst away on wars of conquest. Dispossessed farmers had no choice but to help swell the population of poor in Rome's teaming ghettos --one of which birthed the Great Fire in Nero's reign.

In his Decline and Fall of the American Empire, Gore Vidal called the Pentagon an "economic black hole". Indeed, a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research makes the convincing case that military spending depresses the economy.

• After an initial demand stimulus, the effect of increased military spending turns negative around the sixth year. After 10 years of higher defense spending, there would be 464,000 fewer jobs than in the baseline scenario with lower defense spending.
  
• Inflation and interest rates are considerably higher. After 5 years, the interest rate on 10-Year Treasury notes is projected to be 0.7 percentage points higher than in the baseline scenario. After 10 years, the gap would rise to 0.9 percentage points.
  
• Higher interest rates lead to reduced demand in the interest-sensitive sectors of the economy. After 5 years, annual car and truck sales are projected to go down by 192,200 in the high military spending scenario. After 10 years, the drop is projected to be 323,300 and after 20 years annual sales are projected to be down 731,400.


• Construction and manufacturing are the sectors that are projected to experience the largest shares of the job loss.-- Center for Economic and Policy Research: The Economic Impact of the Iraq War and Higher Military Spending

Military spending is not the only blood sucker loosed on the American economy. At a time when China stocks the shelves at Wal-Mart, Japan supplies the cars and electronic 'play pretties', and oil is pumped almost everywhere but in the US, the business of government is the nation's only business and business thus owns and runs the government. There is a word for this: fascism. 'Criminal Justice' is not just an oxymoron, it is among the biggest businesses in Texas, for example. The same would have been true of Rome in its decline.

• As many as 64 million Americans have arrest records, many of which never resulted in conviction. That means that about 27% of the nation's adult population have a criminal record. (Source: LAC.org).
  
• In 2004, nearly 7 million Americans (3% of adult population) were under some form of correctional supervision: 2.2 million incarcerated in state and federal prisons and local jails; 4.1 million on probation; and 700,000 on parole. (Source: US Department of Justice) 4/23/08 UPDATE: Inmate Count in US Dwarfs Other Nations'

America likes to boast: "We're Number One!" I always ask: "in what?"

America by the numbers

• The United States is 49th in the world in literacy (the New York Times, Dec. 12, 2004).
• The United States ranked 28th out of 40 countries in mathematical literacy (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004).
• Twenty percent of Americans think the sun orbits the earth. Seventeen percent believe the earth revolves around the sun once a day (The Week, Jan. 7, 2005).
• "The International Adult Literacy Survey...tound that Americans with less than nine years of education 'score worse than virtually all of the other countries'" (Jeremy Rifkin's superbly documented book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, p.78).
• Our workers are so ignorant and lack so many basic skills that American businesses spend $30 billion a year on remedial training (NYT, Dec. 12, 2004). No wonder they relocate elsewhere!
• "The European Union leads the U.S. in...the number of science and engineering graduates; public research and development (R&D) expenditures; and new capital raised" (The European Dream, p.70).
• "Europe surpassed the United States in the mid-1990s as the largest producer of scientific literature" (The European Dream, p.70).
• Nevertheless, Congress cut funds to the National Science Foundation. The agency will issue 1,000 fewer research grants this year (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004).
• Foreign applications to U.S. grad schools declined 28 percent last year. Foreign student enrollment on all levels fell for the first time in three decades, but increased greatly in Europe and China. Last year Chinese grad-school graduates in the U.S. dropped 56 percent, Indians 51 percent, South Koreans 28 percent (NYT, Dec. 21, 2004). We're not the place to be anymore.
• The World Health Organization "ranked the countries of the world in terms of overall health performance, and the U.S. [was]...37th." In the fairness of health care, we're 54th. "The irony is that the United States spends more per capita for health care than any other nation in the world" (The European Dream, pp.79-80). Pay more, get lots, lots less.
• "The U.S. and South Africa are the only two developed countries in the world that do not provide health care for all their citizens" (The European Dream, p.80). Excuse me, but since when is South Africa a "developed" country? Anyway, that's the company we're keeping.
- by Michael Ventura

There is a palpable sense of despair throughout the "land of the free" as it becomes clear that Bush still insists upon imposing a dictatorship. In the end, Rome became irrelevant as America is rapidly becoming today. The legions, for example, were efficient killing machines and the work of its engineers can still be found from England to the Middle East. It hardly mattered anymore. Few continued to believe in the Roman ideal.

Today, the US espouses peace, prosperity and Democracy as it breaks the peace, confiscates oil, and imposes a fascist and imperial rule. Yet no one outside the US believes in the 'American' ideal and, inside the US, those 'ideals' were disdainfully repudiated by a would-be emperor who said of the only document that made of them law: "The Constitution is just a goddamned piece of paper!" The entire world sees Bush for the fraud he is! Why is he still supported in the nation that he has betrayed?

In wars, there is always a difference between the motives of the soldiers and the motives of the political leaders who send them into battle. My motive, like that of so many, was innocent of imperial ambition. It was to help defeat fascism and create a more decent world, free of aggression, militarism, and racism.
The motive of the US establishment, understood by the aerial gunner I knew, was of a different nature. It was described early in 1941 by Henry Luce, multi-millionaire owner of Time, Life, and Fortune magazines, as the coming of "The American Century." The time had arrived, he said, for the United States "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit, and by such means as we see fit."

--Howard Zinn, Empire or Humanity? What the Classroom Didn't Teach Me About the American Empire

This response, Zinn argues, is counter-productive. As this blog has pointed out: terrorism is always worse during GOP regimes. Zinn characterizes American foreign policy in a phrase: "an old way of thinking!". Zinn is right to term it a 'destructive script' repeated at Wounded Knee, the invasion of Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Central American nations such as El Salvador and Nicaragua. According to the US State Department, the US intervened militarily 103 times in foreign countries between 1798 and 1895. Zinn also connects "internal" imperialism with the "external" variety in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at home, the position of the globe's "sole superpower" is visibly fraying. The country that was once proclaimed an "empire lite" has proven increasingly light-headed. The country once hailed as a power greater than that of imperial Rome or imperial Britain, a dominating force beyond anything ever seen on the planet, now can't seem to make a move in its own interest that isn't a disaster. The Iraq government's recent offensive in Basra is but the latest example with -- we can be sure -- more to come. ... It's called A People's History of American Empire. It's a gem and it's being published today.
--Tomgram: Howard Zinn, The End of Empire?

The Emperor Valens, as I have mentioned too often on this blog, could not even raise an army. Nor can the US which recruits among those who cannot find work in the waste-land economy Ronald Reagan left behind. The real 'dirty work' is outsourced to mercenaries --just like Rome! Rome's defeat at Adrianople was, in fact, a battle fought between 'free barbarians' and 'mercenary' barbarians paid by Rome.

It is ironic that many writers cite the rise of Christianity as a major reason for the fall of Rome. Certainly --many found it impossible to render unto Caesar and unto God and it is equally clear that cultism was rampant throughout the latter empire. The 'Christians' were just one of many strange cults and still are. All of them were symptomatic of needs not met by empire. And nothing has changed. A subtle argument --and one that I have toyed with --is that Rome did not fall; it was, rather, supplanted from within and survives still in the form of the Roman Catholic Church. If the many who see this as a conflict between 'Christianity' and 'Islam' are correct, then, clearly, Bush has taken the bait. The radical fundamentalists who celebrated Bush as a new Richard Coeur de Lion may be in for the shock of several centuries. No one can predict what might arise from the ashes of the short-lived 'American empire'.

Gore Vidal dates the end of the American empire to a time during the Reagan administration when the US became a net debtor nation. It has been since! If that is true, then, clearly, the American empire must have begun in two acts of needless savagery which equal or surpass even the genocide of the Native American, and that is, the dropping of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lives of some 200,000 civilians were taken in a flash because imperial Washington wanted to make a point!


But what point? The surrender terms offered before the nukes were dropped are verbatim those signed later on the Battleship Arizona. For what noble principle were the lives of some 200,000 civilians sacrificed?

Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-born scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued against its use. "Japan was essentially defeated," he said, and "it would be wrong to attack its cities with atomic bombs as if atomic bombs were simply another military weapon." In a 1960 magazine article, Szilard wrote: "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."

--Mark Weber, Was Hiroshima Necessary?

It's never too late to do the right thing!

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You Can't Handle the Truth

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

Two truths denied by nation and media:

1. Bush and Cheney are war criminals;
2. 911 was an inside job.

In the meantime, unless something is done, Bush will have led this nation into another bloody, criminal war crime: an attack --possibly nuclear --upon Iran. It is the nature of evil that Bushco has compromised many otherwise good Americans now powerless to act because they have fallen into the spider's web.

As the US economy slips inexorably into a black hole from which they may be no escape, Bush plots another ruinous war. Some 232,000 jobs have been lost in the past three months and still the American people, the media, the Congress kowtows to the worst administration in American history. Nero is said to have fiddled while Rome burned. Deck chairs were re-arranged on the Titanic. Cowards whistle past grave yards. Americans cower in the suburbs.

The US Congress --both parties --have failed their Constitutional responsibilities and in doing so betrayed the nation. That includes every court and every judge who winked and nodded and re-wrote the laws disingenuously to accommodate the revolutionary criminals who have seized what seems now to be absolute power, absolute dictatorship, a 'Big Brother' of Orwellian imagination. Worst of all, it includes the American people, many of whom still support the junta. It also includes anyone still stupid enough to drive an SUV, still stupid enough to enrich the war mongering oil barons with gasoline purchases.

With the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War and the grim milestone of 4,000 US dead, the nation has been awash with news retrospectives on the war and speeches by politicians, mostly offering sanitized versions of what's transpired.

...

During the post-World War II trials at Nuremberg, the United States led the world in decrying aggressive war as “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Yet, Frontline and other mainstream US news outlets shy away from this central fact of the Iraq War: by invading Iraq without the approval of the UN Security Council and under false pretenses, the Bush administration released upon the Iraqi people “the accumulated evil of the whole” – and committed the “supreme” war crime.

--Robert Parry, When a great power goes mad

Because the American people, the Congress, the Democratic party, and most ominously, the media, have been all but deathly silent on the radical, criminal and illegitimate nature of this regime, Bush/Cheney will most surely take the nation into a ruinous war against Iran. And, again, it will be begun upon a campaign of fear and lies.

Parry especially singles out the US media, which he says cannot handle the implications of the Bush/Cheney conspiracy, namely, Bush and Cheney are war criminals --a fact that this blog confronted from its inception. Now, it is increasingly clear, that it was not only the war of Iraq that was begun upon the most evil of lies. It is the fact that 911 was an inside job is an even more disturbing truth the media cannot handle.

One failure is the lack of skepticism about the US government's explanation of 9/11. The other failure is the Democrats' refusal to begin impeachment proceedings against President Bush for lying to the Congress, the American people, and the world and launching an invasion of Iraq based on deception and fabricated evidence.

--Jim Kirwan, The Failure To Confront

Sadly, no one in the running has confronted the truths America can't handle.

For seven years we've watched fiscal sanity, global responsibility and anything even remotely recognizable as presidential accountability go the way of the horse and buggy, but only now -- after the release of one poll showing that four out of five Americans may finally stop getting out of bed -- do the media huddle and pronounce things not so good. Washington, we have a problem.

Or most of us think so, anyway. Just most. The New York Times, for instance, presumably in search of a silver lining around the apocalypse, finds in its own polling results that we have arrived at "nearly a national consensus that the country faces significant problems" -- nearly, since there is still that 19 percent in extraordinary denial that "things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track."

There are two definitions of "consensus" -- unanimity or general agreement -- but when you get into the 80 percent+ range it would seem a distinction with no weighty difference. After all, a full four of that 19 actually said things are better off. And they said so, one assumes, just before their five o'clock feeding.

-P.M. Carpenter, John McCain's Democratic Deliverance?

Sure! We're on a wrong track! And there's no way off! Among the field of wannabes, the only one that should have gotten 'it' felt an inexplicable need to utter platitudes about that undisputed master of the meaningless platitude: Ronald Reagan! I have since forgiven Obama, but I had to hold my nose to do it.

if you were a high government official and watched as -- all in a couple of weeks time -- it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation's top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama's bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn't you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?

--Glenn Greenwald

Unless there is a great awakening --and I don't see that happening in the land of faux and Fox --I don't see that happening. Fasten your seat belts and hang on. The flush down the toilet will be an interesting ride.

I repeat this for newcomers to this blog! A 'state of war' already exists between Bush/Cheney and the American people against whom Bush has waged treasonous war upon their persons, their rights embodied in the Constitution, Due Process of Law, the rule of law and international conventions to which the US is bound --whatever Bush may have uttered with his lying lips!

Down with this tyrant now!

Bobby Darin: A Simple Song of Freedom

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How an Iranian 'Oil Bourse' Threatens the American Empire

by Len Hart, The Existentialist Cowboy

It's been over seven years since the US had real or competent leadership and now a neo-ape man may precipitate our return to the cave! Iran's planned oil bourse threatens not only Bush's simplistic view of the world, it strikes at the the coffers of "big oil". Isolated by mysteriously cut internet cables, Iran --if it is not nuked --will this month begin trading oil in currencies other than the dollar. Bush's cave man response: Nuke Iran! Kill, kill!

On September 16 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire was as dead, theoretically, as its predecessor, the British. Our empire was seventy-one years old and had been in ill financial health since 1968. Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on economic primacy.

--Gore Vidal, Chapter Three of Imperial America (Nation Books, 2005)

Bush's response to Iran's "Oil Bourse", his response to the end of American empire, is pre-stonge age in nature. Indeed, the US empire will collapse when the dollar collapses. Because we have an ape-man and not a real President, the consequences will be tragic.

A commenter to this blog used the term "sunset fuel" to describe oil and our dependence upon it. The world grows more dangerous as oil becomes increasingly hard to find, more expensive to produce and refine. We should have expected the world to become a much more dangerous place under those conditions. In its decline, oil becomes disproportionately important, nations more desperate, Bush more belligerent.

Monitoring the news today --it is clear that the Middle East cables were deliberately sabotaged and the effect has been to cut Iran off the internet. Isolating a nation by cutting off its systems of communication is a first step preceding a military attack. Bush no longer cares about even the pretense of pre-text! His charge that Iran has weaponized grade fuels is universally and credibly debunked. The real threat is to the poohbahs of US empire --the Military/Industrial complex. Bush doesn't care. Nuke Iran! Kill, kill!

Like the US today, Rome had currency problems, one of the reasons for its fall. When Rome attacked Dacia, it was for the gold. Much of the history of Rome is the history of how "empire" became "enterprise", how the Praetorian Guard become the Military/Industrial complex.

The first known Roman "money" was a lump of bronze aptly named "aes grave", literally, "a heavy lump of bronze". An "aes grave" weighed about seven pounds. Traded by weight, it required slaves to carry it around.

A more portable medium --the true coin --would not appear until about 89 BC. It was quickly debased with increasingly thin silver plating as more coins were needed in circulation than could be backed up by the "real" wealth of empire. By one AD, a tiny new bronze aes or "as" was introduced. It had no real intrinsic value but it was easy to carry around. One could gain entry to bath houses or free public performances with it. Even then it was just a token to help "ushers" and/or doormen keep track of the number of folk.

By the mid 60s AD, Nero was alloying silver with cheaper metals, a process virtually impossible to detect. Nero thus set the precedent and standard not only for later emperors but politicians of almost every stripe. Briefly, Nero did what almost all politicians do. He swindled the people in order to put more coin into circulation.

By the time the Praetorian Guard auctioned off the empire to Didius Julianus, the transaction would be completed in Drachmas (Greek currency) not Roman the sestercius or the ass. The smart money had already dumped Roman coinage. In the late Empire, it was hoped that new coins --the silver "nummus" and the gold "aureus" -- would restore confidence during periods of devastating inflation.

Much is made of the "gold standard". In fact, it doesn't matter. If someone like Ron Paul restored the Gold Standard in the US, the economy would melt down for several reasons. First, economies must grow or die. Fixing the currency to a finite standard guarantees that it will be necessary to "debase" to accommodate a growing population, growing demand for money itself.

Secondly, given US weakness, encouraging Americans to dump bucks for metals, will only hasten the death cycle of the dollar. Perhaps Paul believes it is already too late --so just kill it off and be done with it --nevermind, the millions who would literally starve or wind up on the streets.

The "Gold Standard" is a myth that is easily demagogued. In fact, a nation's currency is backed up by its total productive capacity. If the nation is at work and productive, we could use monopoly money! And we have been for years. Who the hell cares for so long as we stay out of jail and pass "Go"? American prosperity had always "backed up" the strong dollar. Paulian thinking that we need only jack around with the currency to restore American prosperity is literally "backward". It doesn't work that way.

Productivity needs help. US economic expansion had always been fueled by an abundance of natural resources --land, timber, water, farm land, metals, et al. The nation's history was changed forever when oil was discovered first in Pennsylvania and, when that ran out, Spindletop in Texas. For over a century, US economic expansion was backed up by oil. The US was an oil producing nation. Oil was better than gold or silver in that it had much more intrinsic value than either metal.

Oil not only lubricated the engines, it fueled them. In the process of turning it into gasoline, it was discovered that its plastic properties could make an almost unlimited number of doodads, some of which had utilitarian value and some only value as playthings and baubles.

On a personal note, landing at Kansas City International Airport the other day, my vision of America altered by my in-flight reading of Mr. Berman's remarkable work, I saw the landscape through new eyes, a landscape I now understood to have been systematically vandalized by the corporatocracy: big box stores, chain hotels and restaurants, strip malls and gas stations, a landscape everywhere repeated across the United States, a landscape we intend to impose upon the world in order to fulfill our destiny as bringer of freedom as expressed through consumption.

--Reader Review of Dark Ages America

From internet reaction to my previous article on the US v Iran:

If Iran is attacked it will have nothing or next to nothing to do with the oil bourse. It will be because the PNACers have targeted Iran, because, like Iraq, it is not a puppet state, and, in the Neocon "mind" thus presents an "existential threat" to the greater Israel that they imagine.

It has everything to do with Neocons who are most certainly supporters of the Military/Industial Complex or, more accurately, the Military/Oil Exploitation complex. Neocons are all about empire and oil is at the heart of American empire. Israel is, in fact, just a convenient ally as were the various puppet, vassel states of Rome --many of which were in the Middle East.

Certainly, when oil is no longer traded in dollars, it is not only the dollar that will collapse. It means that the US --on the bad end of a huge balance of trade deficit --will no longer be able to afford to import goods or services. For a nation that long ago (Reagan years primarily; See Vidal, cited) gave up its role as a manufacturing nation, this collapse will be monumental, catastrophic. The fact that oil had been traded in dollars was the only thing propping up the dollar. That there was a demand for dollars because there was a demand for oil meant that you could continue to buy imported goods with dollars. Now --imagine a world in which no other country need "purchase" dollars in order to import oil! What if oil producing nations agree to accept other currencies? What if they refuse to accept dollars? Go to Wal-Mart or even your local supermarket. Almost everything on the shelves is imported. Imagine a shop owner refusing to accept as payment for anything in the shop your worthless dollars !

As Gore Vidal pointed out, the US empire ended in the eighties, when the US became a net debtor nation. GOP regimes since have only made the situation worse. Just as empire became the business of Rome, empire had become the "business" of the US which no longer produces enough to employ its population let alone export to the rest of the world. Most US consumer goods are imported from China, sold in Warl-Mart, discarded in America. America's best days are over. We live in the twilight of empire.

Additional resources

• Carta Blanc: The Meaning of Ron Paul
• The Day the American Empire Ran Out of Gas
• Roman Coins
• How the White House Snookered the 9/11 Commission
• The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation

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Media Conglomerates, Mergers, Concentration of Ownership, Global Issues, Updated: January 02, 2009

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Talk of Imminent War Against Iran Amid an Attack of 'Coincidences'

The "coincidences":

• A series of internet disruptions due to cut telecom cables that has cut Iran off the Internet!
• Israel is not affected.
• An Iranian Oil Bourse, where oil, petrochemicals and gas will be traded in various non-dollar currencies, is set to open this month.
• Israelis have been told to prepare for war, presumably with Iran

Before leaving the Middle East, Bush is reported to have promised Benjamin Netanyahu that the US would join Israel in a nuclear strike on Iran. In Israel, there is talk of "...a rain of missiles" for which Israelis must prepare now.

Speaking on radio as part of a military propaganda offensive, retired general Udi Shani said: "The next war will see a massive use of ballistic weapons against the whole of Israeli territory."

Shani was tasked recently with drawing up a report on the way the military authorities operated during Israel's 2006 summer war against Hezbollah in Lebanon.

During that conflict thousands of rockets hit Israel, but were limited to the north of the country from where hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated.

The character of war has changed, said the general.

"Strikes to the rear must now be taken into account -- that is what will come and we must prepare in a totally different way for this eventuality," he said.

--Israelis told to prepare 'rocket rooms' for war

By the time the following dispatch hit what was left of the internet, it was clear: the world is under attack by organized coincidences.

Egypt denies the earlier reports on the Mideast Internet outage, saying there were no ships present around when the cables were cut off.

Egypt's Ministry of Communications announced in a statement Sunday that "a marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time.”

The Ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor on the two key cables was most likely responsible for Wednesday's cut in service that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of much of their internet.

The statement added that the location, 8.3 kilometers from the port of Alexandria, was in a restricted area so ships would not have been allowed there to begin with.

Internet blackouts are impacting large tracts of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa after four undersea cable connections were severed.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems.

--'No ship behind ME internet outage'

That there was 'no ship' would rule out the official 'dragging anchor' theory.

DOHA (AFP) — An undersea telecoms cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged, disrupting services, telecommunications provider Qtel said on Sunday, the latest such incident in less than a week.

The cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, Qtel's head of communications Adel al Mutawa told AFP.

Cables were also damaged last week in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and south Asia.

The cause of the damage is not yet known.

--DOHA (AFP) — Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables

It is amazing how much damage can be done by a rogue coincidence.

A repair ship was expected to begin work to fix the two cables in the Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday. They were damaged on Wednesday, rupturing connections not only in Egypt but also thousands of kilometres away.

--Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables

The sub-plot that ties all these "coincidences" together is the planned opening of the Iranian oil bourse where petrochemicals, oil and gas will be traded in non-dollar currencies. Iran Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari has said that the bourse will be open during the Ten-Day Dawn, ceremonies marking the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran. There's more at: Oil Bourse

Making these developments especially ominous are Bush's repeated threats and promises to Israel that he will join a nuclear attack on Iran. I wonder if this improbable attack of the cable killing coincidences, denying oil traders access to the net, is enough to delay the opening of Iran's planned oil bourse.

Given the precipitous fall of the dollar, only idiots will not consider the effect that an Iranian oil bourse will have on a war-mongering US.

Bush, of course, denies that his wars of aggression have anything to do with oil and, in a very, very narrow technical sense, perhaps not! They are, in fact, motivated by the fact that over the course of a century, the US economy was utterly dependent upon the availability of cheap energy, initially from West Texas, but later, the Sheikhs!

One wonders what goes on inside the heads of blithering idiots, primarily those who wage war upon their own people, those idiots who threaten the world from atop a precarious perch. So precarious the American position --one wonders if impeaching and removing this blithering idiot now is simply too little too late. Even now, however, good people are morally bound to oppose Bush even if it is with a dying breath beneath a mushroom cloud!

GOP, Oil Bourse, Bush, Nuclear War

Russia Arms the "Doomsday Bomb"?

Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that a US attack on Iran would be considered an attack on Russia. Earlier, a Chinese sub popped up undetected in the midst of the US 5th Fleet. As tensions mount, Wired Magazine tells us that a Russian "doomsday bomb" is still armed.

Fearing that a sneak attack by American submarine-launched missiles might take Moscow out in thirteen minutes, the Soviet leadership had authorized the construction of an automated communications network, reinforced to withstand a nuclear strike. At its heart was a computer system similar to the one in Dr Strangelove. Its codename was Perimetr. It went fully operational in January 1985. It is still in place. Its job is to monitor whether there have been nuclear detonations on Russian territory and to check whether communications channels with the Kremlin have been severed. If the answer to both questions is “yes” then the computer will conclude that the country is under attack and activate its nuclear arsenal. All that is then needed is final human approval from a command post buried deep underground. It would be a brave officer, adds Smith, who, having been cut off from his superiors in the Kremlin, could ignore the advice of such a supposedly foolproof system.

[...]

We all face the prospect that, if Russia were ever attacked, its strategic nuclear warheads could be launched by a computer system designed and built in the late 1970s.

Ron Rosenbaum, Slate, [quoted in Wired:Soviet Doomsday Device Still Armed and Ready]

A giant cobalt bomb capable of making the earth uninhabitable was made famous in the Stanley Kubrick film: Dr. Strangelove. [The clips below playback in sequence, a precis of the motion picture!]

We'll Meet Again??

Kubrick blurred fact and film fiction. Not only scenarios but devices dealt with by Kubrick had been classified.

We now have good reason to ask ourselves if we are safer now than during the height of the cold war. I don't think we are! Bush moved the countdownclock to nuclear annihilation much closer when he promised that the US would join an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran. As relations between Russia and the US seemed to warm for a brief while, America's right wing struggled throughout the Reagan era to find another phantom menace, another demon around which it might rally the populace. Sadly --our enemies are of our own making. The GOP would literally be nothing without them.

Sober PhDs are behind these thoughts. Citing the hazard of genetically engineered viruses, eminent astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has said, "I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years." Martin Rees, the knighted British astronomer, agrees; he gives us a 50-50 chance. Serious thinkers such as Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague, and Bill Joy, who wrote Wired's own 2000 article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," warn of techno-calamity.

--Gregg Easterbrook, We're All Gonna Die! Wired

The real enemy has always been the politicians. Their power derives from the manifestation of nightmares!

This update from Crooks and Liars:

The Wall Street Journal ran an article last week (subscription req’d) that Bush was using an investigation into a 1994 terrorist attack on a Jewish Community Center in Argentina as a way to continue to strain and maintain pressure on Iran.

The only problem? There’s no real evidence that Iran was involved in the bombing:

(I)t is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the case against Iran over the AMIA bombing has been driven from the beginning by US enmity toward Iran, not by a desire to find the real perpetrators.

Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence. Nobody could anticipate the president initiating a pre-emptive war against a sovereign nation on trumped up evidence, could they? Oh…wait…

GOP, Nukes, Government Incompetence, Terrorism