"Our power in the present tottering conditions of all forms of power will be more invisible than any other, because it will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it.
Out of the temporary evil we are now compelled to commit will emerge the good of an unshakeable rule. . . The result justifies the means.
Before us is a plan in which is laid down strategically the line from which we cannot deviate without running the risk of seeing the labour of many centuries brought to naught."
Jackie -- February 17th, 2003
http://www.blackcommentator.com/27/27_commentary.html
SHOCK AND AWE
The Mother Of All War Shows
Issue Number 27 - January 30, 2003
When it comes, the U.S. assault on Iraq will explode as global spectacle, an awesome pyrotechnic display of rolling thunder and lightening death intended to shock and cow [intimidate / paralyze] the entire planet. The effect, the planners fervently believe, will be comparable to that which occurred when cannon clashed with spears and arrows on the ever-expanding frontiers of European empire: incomprehensible devastation, soul-consuming terror, complete political disintegration, followed by abject submission.
In the grand imperial scenario, the satraps and sultans of the Earth, heads bowed at angles of unmistakable subservience, will gather up their robes and beseech the Americans for life on any terms.
Iraq's oil is important, but not the real prize of war. If a sustained flow of Iraqi oil were so vital to the U.S. and global economy, the production infrastructure would not be put at such risk of immediate immolation. Iraq's oil facilities can burn as easily as did Kuwait's, in the last days of the previous Gulf War. Capitalism went on to boom and bubble in the Nineties.
Dick Cheney's Halliburton corporation and the rest of the pirate pack are ready and eager to do a multi-billion dollar, postwar makeover of Iraq's oil facilities, at U.S. taxpayer expense. Invoices will be submitted to American Occupation authorities - part of the "cost" of war that the White House refuses to "speculate" about.
Oil is overrated as the root cause of the impending conflagration. Saddam Hussein has always been eager to pump much more of it, at no higher price than the next guy, while the U.S. has strangled Iraqi production by every means at its disposal for over a decade.
The prize is nothing less than world domination: all the riches above and below the earth and seas.
The real show is in the show, itself. The people who created George Bush's ridiculous War Face are not just playing crazy to gain transient advantage over Frenchmen and Russians. They are Hell-bent on proving to the natives (all of us) that they are capable of unimaginable destruction. We must see it to believe it - which is why this war is all but inevitable. In the aftermath of horror, the world will become malleable, ready for reshaping in the not-yet-defined New Order.
That's the plan. The pirates are confident they can improvise the post war details at their leisure, later. What we are witnessing is essentially the buildup to a global consciousness-searing U.S. military demonstration - the Mother of All War Shows. If we search for the military or economic objectives of the conflict on anything so crude as a map, we have missed the point.
An epochal announcement
The Bush men intend to show the world what Armageddon looks like. The time is nearly at hand, the clocks synchronized to the movements of armies and fantastic machines that hold even their masters in thrall. For the moment, Bush directs the world's attention to Colin Powell's February 5 appearance at the United Nations, in New York, where the game of diplomacy will lurch toward its foreordained end.
Then the event will occur, signaling the end of the Old Order. The world will pause in "Shock and Awe."
The War Party telegraphed its plans on January 24 - a practice they indulge in to further the momentum of war and thus prevent the timid from attempting last minute reversals in course. The Sidney (Australia) Morning Herald offered this concise account: www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/01/25/1042911596206.html
The US intends to shatter Iraq "physically, emotionally and psychologically" by raining down on its people as many as 800 cruise missiles in two days.
The Pentagon battle plan aims not only to crush Iraqi troops, but also wipe out power and water supplies in the capital, Baghdad.
It is based on a strategy known as "Shock and Awe", conceived at the National Defense University in Washington, in which between 300 and 400 cruise missiles would fall on Iraq each day for two consecutive days. It would be more than twice the number of missiles launched during the entire 40 days of the 1991 Gulf War.
"There will not be a safe place in Baghdad," a Pentagon official told America's CBS News after a briefing on the plan. "The sheer size of this has never been seen before, never been contemplated before."
According to the architect of "Shock and Awe", military strategist Harlan Ullman, the plan would rely on an extensive array of precision-guided weapons.
"We want them to quit, not to fight," Ullman said, "so that you have this simultaneous effect - rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima - not taking days or weeks but minutes."
A senior Bush official confirmed that Shock and Awe "is the concept on which the war plan is based," according to CBS News. <http://wjz.com/topstories/topstories_story_024224635.html>
Like Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Vice President Cheney and the entire pirate crew, strategist Harlan Ullman is in the business of war. He and his colleagues at www.defensegroupinc.com/war_rdpaper.cfm
The Defense Group Inc. have a contract to create the conditions for a New World Order that no nation or combination of nations can resist. Through its The Rapid Dominance Study Group, the company has constructed an order of battle that closely resembles the current U.S. forces surrounding Iraq, but is actually designed for Permanent War:
The Rapid Dominance Study Group has outlined a first cut Rapid Dominance force for fighting and winning a major regional conflict. That force design consists of roughly 250,000 personnel and would be employed in five waves. These waves can be brought to bear at any point in the peace, crisis and conflict continuum. The first wave of a Rapid Dominance capability could strike anywhere on the globe, within 30 to 40 minutes of being ordered, regardless of whether U.S. forces were already deployed in the crisis region. The subsequent waves would continue to deploy power relentlessly on the adversary to affect his will and perception through imposing a regime of "shock and awe." The final wave could include deploying a heavy corps or expeditionary force for physical occupation of territory.
Ullman's strategy - now the Pentagon's blueprint
- is available to every English reader in his book "Shock and Awe: Achieving
Rapid Dominance". The whole volume is posted on the site of the Command and
Control Research Program (CCRP) of the U.S. Department of Defense. (Note:
We are listing several links because in researching this document we discovered
for some unexplained reason the Website appears unstable and the Table of
Contents page is not always available.
www.dodccrp.org/shockIndex.html
If the Table of Contents link does not work, try the Forward www.dodccrp.org/shockfore.html
or the Prologue. www.dodccrp.org/shockprol.html
CBS anchor Dan Rather tagged his "Shock and Awe" story: "We assure you this report contains no information that the Defense Department thinks could help the Iraqi military."
That's the whole point. The War Party wants the world to know that there is no escape from the raging superpower. Very soon, the U.S. military will stage a show more shocking and awful than can be imagined, for the benefit of a global audience. As Ullman envisions, it will be "rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima." The intent is to break the will of the [whole human] species. Iraq is merely a convenient stage, Saddam Hussein an extremely unfortunate prop.
A kind of rapture
The Bush cabal devoutly believe they are at a Hiroshima-like juncture in history - that they have at their disposal the means to start the world over in an apocalyptic spasm of swift and terrifying violence. The War Party believes itself to be embarked on an epochal, world-altering mission, and they are determined that this moment not be squandered. In the interval, Colin Powell can give his speech. When the set is ready, George Bush will flip the switch and the sky will flash and glow over Iraq, a warning to the world.
The Bush men believe humanity will first recoil, then cower - that the world has no choice but to surrender in "Shock and Awe." The opposite is true. By initiating Permanent War, Bush presents the world - including, ultimately, the American people - with no choice but to turn on their tormentor, and remove him and his pirate class.
Shock & Awe
Is Baghdad the Next Hiroshima?
By Ira Chernus
CommonDreams.org
1-28-3
Have your heard of Harlan Ullman? Everyone in the White House and the Pentagon has. They may very well follow his plan for war in Iraq. He wants to do to Baghdad what we did to Hiroshima.
Ullman is what they call a 'defense intellectual'. He was the Navy's 'head of extended planning' and taught at the National War College. One of his students was Secretary of State Colin Powell, who says he "raised my vision several levels".
What Powell and everyone in the Bush administration sees now is Ullman's vision for high-tech war. He calls it "rapid dominance", or "shock and awe". The idea is to scare the enemy to death. To win, you don't need to inflict physical pain and destruction. Just the fear of pain, and the massive confusion it creates, is enough.
Ullman wants the U.S. to (in his words) "deter and overpower an adversary through the adversary's perception and fear of his vulnerability and our own invincibility. This ability to impose massive shock and awe, in essence to be able to 'turn the lights on and off' of an adversary as we choose, will so overload the perception, knowledge and understanding of that adversary that there will be no choice except to cease and desist or risk complete and total destruction."
Ullman is ready to use every kind of weapon to create shock and awe. He once said it might be a good idea to use electromagnetic waves that attack peoples' neurological systems, "to control the will and perception of adversaries, by applying a regime of shock and awe. It is about effecting behavior."
When it comes to Iraq, Ullman likes the idea of cruise missiles -- lots of them, right away. CBS News reports that Ullman's ideas are the basis for the Pentagon's war plan. The U.S. will smash Baghdad with up to 800 cruise missiles in the first two days of the war. That's about one every four minutes, day and night, for 48 hours.
The missiles will hit far more than just military targets. They will destroy everything that makes life in Baghdad livable. "We want them to quit. We want them not to fight," Ullman told CBS reporter David Martin. So "you take the city down. You get rid of their power, water. In 2,3,4,5 days they are physically, emotionally and psychologically exhausted."
Ullman is sure it will work as well in 2003 as it did in 1945: "You have this simultaneous effect, rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima, not taking days or weeks but in minutes." "Super tools and weapons -- information-age equivalents of the atomic bomb -- have to be invented," he wrote in the Economic Times. "As the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki finally convinced the Japanese Emperor and High Command that even suicidal resistance was futile, these tools must be directed towards a similar outcome."
When he first invented "rapid dominance," Ullman talked about an "eight-level hierarchy of shock and awe," with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the top. Now, it seems, that's where he wants to start.
Is the Hiroshima model just a metaphor? Ullman recently wrote that one way to "shock and awe" Saddam is to remind him that the U.S. has "certain weapons" that can destroy deeply buried facilities. That's a not-even-thinly-veiled reference to the newest kind of nuclear weapons, the B-61 "bunker-busters."
L.A. Times columnist William Arkin www.commondreams.org/views03/0126-01.htm has confirmed that the U.S. is preparing to use "bunker-busters" against Iraq. That would "break down the firewall separating nuclear weapons from everything else," Arkin warns, and "forever pit the Arab and Islamic world against us."
Suppose we drop the nuke in the wrong place? Even Harlan Ullman admits it could easily happen: "Of course, there will always be intelligence gaps, and no solution is perfect." But that's just the point. "The threat would be a Damoclean sword that might or might not descend." In other words, the fear of nukes falling who-knows-where would scare them into surrendering without a fight. Let other Islamic nations get as angry as they like. We'll just shock and awe them too.
And why not North Korea, while we're at it? Ullman wants a nuclear threat there, if North Korean leaders don't heel to U.S. commands: "To remind the North of its vulnerability, one or more Trident ballistic submarines could be permanently assigned to target North Korea." Tridents carry 240 nuclear warheads each. One Trident might not be enough, it seems. When you use shock and awe, you use it big-time.
So here we are, preparing to destroy a huge modern city, kill tens of thousands, and threaten nuclear attack -- all against people who have not fired a single bullet at us. Yes, it's about oil. But it's also about shock and awe, putting on a terrifying show for the whole world to see.
If all this leaves you in shock and awe, you have had your vision raised several levels too. You see what Ullman, Powell, and all the Bushies see: the U.S. frightening the whole world so badly that no one will dare fire a single bullet at us. Let them be as angry as they like, just so they know who is the meanest, toughest son of a bitch on the global block.
That is now becoming the essence of U.S. foreign policy. And they seriously believe it will put an end to war. I suppose the Romans believed it too.
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
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