Bush’s Tower of Babble

by William Bowles - Nov 4, 2007

“[W]e got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from haveing the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon…” — President Bush in a White House press conference, September 5, 2006

‘Iran’, ‘Israel’, ‘Destroy’, “Nuclear Weapon’, ‘WWIII’, ‘Knowledge’, ‘Prevention’ — Bush

Talk about using loaded words! Israel is both literally and figuratively, loaded. The other of course is nuclear. Note however that in this instance, Bush talks not about Iran actually building nuclear weapons, now he’s talking about Iran gaining the knowledge to build one.

The change may appear to be slight but it makes perfect sense given the trajectory of the propaganda war and its outcome, namely the failure by the US to utilise the UN in its nefarious plans and that the central plank of the Bush/Gordon assault, that somehow Iran is hiding its atomic ambitions, has failed notably to impress. Thus the retreat into ‘thought crimes’. However, ‘thought crimes’ are notoriously difficult to refute, who knows what anybody is thinking?

The knowlege of what it takes to build a nuclear weapon is freely available in any public library or university anywhere in the world, more difficult to acquire is the developed industrial base needed to actually carry it out (which aside from any other considerations is the main reason why so few countries actually possess them). (See for example, ‘How to Build a Nuclear Bomb: And Other Weapons of Mass Destruction’ by Frank Barnaby although a Google search yielded 157,000 hits using the phrase ‘How to build a nuclear weapon’, so the knowledge is out there for anyone to find, and Barnaby ought to know, he was part of the original team which built the UK’s first atomic weapons back in the 1950s).

And in any case, how do you prevent someone or some country from acquiring knowledge, any kind of knowledge, whether it’s used or not? The answer of course is that the only way to prevent the acquisition of knowledge is to eliminate the inquirer physically.

The propaganda onslaught is nothing if not consistent, even if somewhat repetitive but then that’s the entire point isn’t it, it varies only in the focus. The current escalation of tensions by the Bush regime is the culmination of a carefully timed sequence of both leaks and public statements (about which I’ve written before), each pronouncement designed first and foremost to create an atmosphere conducive to upping the anté one more notch until the desired fever pitch is achieved, at which point, anything is possible.

Without a compliant media, it would be virtually impossible to carry out such a prolonged and sophisticated propaganda campaign depending as it does on the media ‘distilling’ the essential power words (handed to them on a plate by the army of ‘creative’ writers employed by the state).

It’s a heady mixture that pushes every known button (evocations of the Holocaust and Satan or the Anti-Christ, evil but not mad, bent on world domination, all rehashes of the Cold War and unashamedly so, well it worked the first time didn’t it?).

The role of Israel in all this is patently obvious; it’s the venomous scorpion in your pants. Armed to the teeth and aggressive with it (knowing that it has the wholehearted backing and involvement of the US), it operates as a de facto fifth column in the Middle East, an outpost of the West (why does Israel play in the European Football Cup, it’s not in Europe? It’s actually in what used to be called North Africa until Europe moved it back in the 19th century).

It’s taken approximately two years to reach this stage and it hasn’t been plain sailing (even Bush’s slavish partner-in-crime, the British government has been torn over the US approach, but with Brown’s ascendency to the throne, such quiblings over tactics appear to be a thing of the past judging by Brown’s statement made in Washington DC. If you thought Blair was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet) because the ruling elites of the US are deeply divided over the tactics and even question the ability of Bush’s mad dogs to achieve their aims what with threats of unleashing nuclear war on the region (but not with the objectives — ‘regime change’ which translated means the establishment of a regime in Iran friendly to US strategic objectives in the region, mostly ‘containing’ China).

But perhaps more than anything else, the inexorable meltdown of the ‘global economy’ has made the situation more urgent, with ominous parallels emerging with the situation in Europe in the 1930s and the need to burn off all the surplus capital and labour with a good ol’ capitalist war but on a much grander scale than that of the Iraq ‘skirmish’. No mean feat to achieve, demonising Ahmadinejad is not easy, he’s an affable kind of fellow but by the looks of it, not too sussed when it comes to dealing with the pirates.

So on the side of the US we have the UK, Australia, France, a tentative Germany and of course Israel, ranged against China, Russia and India and pretty much the rest of the planet. So general war is by no means inevitable but all depends on the ability of our domestic populations to resist the clamour for conflagration, which explains Bush’s comparison of Ahmadinejad with Hitler (Hitler, the Jews, the Holocaust, geddit? Almost a word-for-word replay of the Saddam demonisation routine, hey but it worked the first time didn’t it). But will it work again?