Reply #94: Creative Destruction: From Iraq To Iran

[54anickel]

Why the Coming Attack on Iran

http://www.swans.com/library/art12/ga207.html

(Swans - April 10, 2006) Very few observers have noticed that the fix is in and that the U.S. is readying itself to bomb Iran. Scott Ritter mentioned the fix in his article, "The Art of War for the anti-war movement" (Alternet, March 31, 2006). Writes Ritter: "President Bush recently re-affirmed his embrace of the principles of pre-emptive war when he signed off on the 2006 version of the National Security Strategy of the United States, which highlights Iran as a threat worthy of confrontation." Jorge Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California San Diego, has been covering the issue in great, and alarming, detail since September 2005 in the pages of Antiwar.com. His grim prognostic, "War Against Iran, April 2006," is that the attack will take place this month, unannounced until ex post facto. His timing may prove incorrect -- we will know within the next 20 days -- but it's only a matter of time: the U.S. will launch another illegal and deadly aggression on a country that has not attacked, or even threatened to attack, anybody -- not the U.S., not Israel*, not Europe, not its neighbors. The question, like with Iraq, always left unanswered, is what makes the U.S. so determined to create mayhem? The answer has much to do with the status of the dollar and the competitive forces at play. The U.S., a ghost of its former self, economically and structurally in decline, must, out of sheer survival, hit at the competition. That competition has nothing to do with Afghanistan, Iraq, or Iran...or even Yugoslavia -- pawns in a bigger game or small fishes in the whirlwind waters of our times. It is about Europe and Asia. Higher oil prices, denominated in US dollars, far from being an impediment to US economy and interests, weaken the competition, and reinforce the comparative advantages of the US behemoth. A country that is by all realistic measurements broke, is going for broke.

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The bully theory is an attractive one, but it obfuscates the fact that this bullying behavior on the part of the U.S. largely predates 9-11. It also reinforces the idea that the US elites are dimwits who are acting irrationally, led by an incompetent administration and a less than thoughtful president.

Undoubtedly, the U.S. faces serious weaknesses:

Its manufacturing capacity, with rare exceptions, is all but wiped out (purposefully, one should add).

Its technological prowess, except in the military realm, has been overtaken by competitors, as Clyde Prestowitz, the President of the Economic Strategy Institute, outlines in a recent report, "America's Technology Future at Risk."

Its education system is also lagging far behind its Asian and European competitors through the widespread lack of qualified teachers (see the final report of The Teaching Commission) and the disrepair of school buildings, the latter requiring at least $125 billion to bring them to a minimum standard of structural safety, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Public Infrastructure (an issue that this author reviewed as far back as September 1996, in "Shame on us").

The same Commission reports on the advanced state of America's decaying infrastructure (bridges, tunnels, roads, railways, airports, levees, dams, clean water systems, etc.) and cites the Infrastructure Report Card 2005 from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) that estimates the cost of repairs at $1.6 trillion, without even taking into account Katrina (here again, we covered this issue in 2003: see "In The Grip Of A Permanent War Economy," by late Professor Seymour Melman, Swans, March 17, 2003. At that time, the ASCE estimated the cost of repairs at $1.3 trillion.)

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