Apocalypse Now

Well, the events of the last week have left me speechless so that I haven’t felt much like writing, but Newt Gingrich gave two separate interviews today, one for The Seattle Times and one on Meet the Press , that have roused me from my quietude. In them he declared “I mean, we, we are in the early stages of what I would describe as the third world war, and frankly...”. I always get worried when Gingrich uses the word frankly, because throughout his career I’ve noticed it’s like a red flare shooting up and declaring, “Hello, this is a rhetorical mask for a calculated political argument.” He then when on to spin out a very seductive and calculated political argument of connecting the crap-dots of all the latest bowel movements by various US enemies throughout the world to make one big turd that backs up his WWIII analogy and, according to The Seattle Times reporter David Postman, urged Bush to convene “a joint session of Congress the first week of September and talk about global military conflicts in much starker terms than have been heard from the president.” A recent article I read somewhere pointed out how the Bush administration had used marketing techniques to sell the Iraq War and they pushed for it in the fall because “nothing sells in August” or something like that. Just one of those things that makes you go hmm.

If you know anything about the Newtster it’s that he likes to play the historian card. Postman notes,

An historian, Gingrich said he has been studying recently how Abraham Lincoln talked to Americans about the Civil War, and what turned out to be a much longer and deadlier war than Lincoln expected.

Of course all this sounds strikingly similar to Rumsfeld’s oft-repeated refrain of our current War on Terror as “The Long War”. For those of you who followed the Newtie’s career, as Speaker of the House he was once asked the inevitable question about what books influenced him most, and he included Peter Green’s Alexander to Actium . Peter Green, in an article in the October 9, 1995 issue of New Republic (subscription required), was not flattered and complained about how Newt used and abused the lessons of his book. You see, in 1995 Newt believed that the US was adrift in a cultural wilderness like the degraded Hellenistic period of the Macedonian successor kingdoms and needed to be more like the Romans and establish a Pax Americana. In short, he was a Neoconservative before it was fashionable. One significant fact that Newt and the other Neocrusaders like to leave out of the equation, however, is that Roman success at Actium marked the end of the Roman Republic -- the ensuing Empire was incompatible with what virtues there were of the Republic, including democratic elections of multiple parties.

At any rate, I believe Newt's salvo is merely the tip of a very shit-laced spear that’s going to be hurled at the Dems this fall because things are so constipated in Iraq and with North Korea. All this recent talk of diplomacy by Bush appears to me to be nothing more than a half-hearted CYA charade. He and the Neocrusaders are really cheerleading for the Israelis in Lebanon and are looking for any pretext to expand the disastrous War on Terror into WWIII with Iran, Syria and North Korea, and by God, come hell or high water they’re going to have it. Look for some trivial military event, whether real or manufactured (like Tonkin), to get the ball rolling. It’s all standard military operating procedure after that -- once it’s WWIII how can the Democrats oppose that?

Well, the Democrats better be ready to stand up and be a true opposition party and throw overboard any Joseph Lieberman’s on deck. There’s no way the Dems can win unless they make a united, frontal assault on this vision of the Neocrusaders. I don’t even think 5 bucks for gas, which we will quickly see if this war expands, will stop the Republicans if they can successfully sell the WWIII argument. The Democrats must make the argument that this doesn’t have to be WWIII, and the only way to possibly avert WWIII is to elect a Democratic House and Senate.

What is really disturbing to me is how fundamentally crazy these guys are. This war, if uncorked, would unleash a level of suffering the world has not yet witnessed. There’s no way to win it unless you flat out flatten (almost certainly with nuclear weapons) significant parts of the Middle East, North Korea and any other region that joins in (which scarily enough is consistent with Neocrusader ideology). Are we really prepared to do that alone? Are we really prepared for 10 bucks a gallon for gas, the draft and the attacks on us and the unabashed Empire status? Will that really bring peace and prosperity to the US? Do they really think we can't be hit too? It seems to me that if you want peace and prosperity, you do all that is within your power to maintain and make peace, which involves an aggressive policy of containment and defense. You hold the line or only take steps forward when under your own power, but you do not recklessly go out and look to shed blood at slight provocations, because the more blood that gets spilled on the ground the more berserk mankind goes and the harder it is to move forward again. Ares is not a god to be invoked lightly. He delights in the blood letting but is never predictable nor impartial, touching all sides alike. That is the lesson of Iraq.

One thing is for sure, if Newt’s advice is followed, the US isn’t going to be inheriting the earth anytime soon. Of course, none of this matters if you believe, like about a third of Americans, that Jesus will only return after a third of the world has been destroyed in the final apocalypse. You might even welcome such suffering as a sign that “all the Bible’s prophecies are finally coming true.” We shouldn’t have to inflict so much needless tribulations on others and ourselves only in the end to discover there will never be any blessed kingdom ushered in.