Caesar Now

Global Eye
By Chris Floyd
The Moscow Times
May 20, 2005



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They keep going through the motions in Washington, much like the Roman Senate used to meet in solemn conclaves and pretend that their flatulent oratory had some effect on the real engines of imperial power. Today, Congressional factions strive in fierce agon over profound constitutional issues: filibusters, judicial review, church and state, executive privilege. Commentators knit their brows in sage analysis of these historic events, while activists choose their champions and drive them on with partisan heat. Yet none of it means a thing.

The U.S. Congress gave away its powers long ago to corporate interests and the almighty executive branch that every legislator secretly hopes to lead one day, Pentagon thunderbolts in hand. (Who would curb Caesar that might Caesar be?) This "degradation of the democratic dogma" has been the work of more than 50 years of bipartisan goonery, but it has now reached its nadir in the festering pit of blood and bile that is the Bush Regime.

American public life is now almost entirely a facade, a deadening -- and deadly -- sideshow: the multibillion-dollar electoral circuses, the increasingly frenzied "culture wars," the epic clash of interest groups across the media battlefields, the endless making, unmaking and remaking of laws. All this sound and fury merely obscures the ugly reality: that there are no effective restraints on the arbitrary exercise of power by the imperial court of President George W. Bush.


He can wage aggressive war based on lies. He can order the assassination of anyone on earth, anywhere, at any time, without trial, without evidence, at his unchallengeable whim, as we've often detailed here. He can set up torture chambers all over the globe. He can dole out billions of public dollars to corporate cronies in no-bid contracts. There is no punishment for these crimes, no political price paid for this corruption, no genuine resistance at all to this rape of liberty from the very institutions and civic structures being ravaged.

What's more, a great many of "the people" also embrace -- even celebrate -- this brutal reality. It is not at all true, as some progressives contend, that there is some kind of collective goodness in "just plain folks" – some magical kernel of broad-minded, open-hearted, democratic wisdom just waiting to be tapped if only "the people" could be freed from the bedevilling lies of their wicked leaders. Most lies succeed because people want to believe them.

This is doubly true in politics. Not only history but also our own daily experience shows us that those in power (or those seeking power) routinely lie, shuffle, deceive and manipulate. Nothing they say can be taken simply on faith; it must be met with stringent skepticism, examined in the harshest light. This has proved true in every single human society, without fail, throughout all recorded time. Yet millions of people willingly, happily swallow the most blatant political lies at face value. They have no wish to be undeceived and lose the illusions of their own specialness, their own righteousness, their exalted place in the world. If there must be violence to maintain this place, if someone out there must die, if someone must starve, if someone must wail, then so be it. If the truth convicts us, undermines us, discomforts us, then let the truth be changed. This is the unspoken credo of vast swaths of "the people." Leaders play upon this, they encourage it and prosper by it -- but they don't create it out of whole cloth.

This literally unspeakable situation accounts for much of the strange hollowness and sense of dislocation that pervades political life today. Leaders can't possibly say what they really mean or tell the whole truth about their policies, which rest ultimately on violence, corruption, suffering and fear. Nor do their followers want to hear the truth. The pious masks required to hide such unmitigated greed for loot and power thus become more outlandish, more cartoonish. That's why the maskers (and the "just plain folks" who support them) strive ever more ruthlessly to suppress or discredit all dissent -- they know that honest skepticism could destroy their ludicrous fraud.

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In Iraq, for example, the war criminals of the coalition cannot possibly admit that they are killing, torturing and despoiling innocent people in order to maintain and extend their own geopolitical dominance. Bush cannot possibly say, "I tore the eyeballs from that little girl's skull, I churned that woman's entrails with steel splinters, I sodomized that teenage boy and smeared him with his own filth to make a few of my cronies rich and keep the rubes out there fat and happy with big cars, cheap gas and 37 different brands of corn chips" -- although that's exactly what he's doing. He can't say, "We know Iraq posed no threat to us but we wanted to invade them anyway, so we 'fixed the facts and intelligence around the policy'" -- although that's exactly what was revealed in the just-leaked "Downing Street memo," the record of a 2002 strategy session between British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his advisers following top-level talks in Washington.

No, such undermining truths wouldn't do at all. Instead, we first get the implausible lies about WMD and now the laughable cant about a "noble mission" to bring democracy to the "dark places of the earth." This while Bush succors Islam Karimov even as the Uzbek despot massacres his own people and runs a regime several magnitudes worse than the factions recently overthrown -- with copious U.S. assistance -- in Georgia and Ukraine.

And so the imperial engines grind on, untouched, untroubled, unrestrained, churning the world's entrails behind the facade.

Annotations

A Dictator Who Thrives With His People Under the Boot
The Times of London, May 18, 2005

Uzbek Ruler: A New Saddam Hussein?
Christian Science Monitor, May 16, 2005

Secret Way to War
TomDispatch/The New York Review of Books, May 15, 2005

Karimov's American Fan Club
Antiwar.com, May 18, 2005

Guantanamo Bay: Training Ground for Torture Techniques?
Informed Comment, May 16, 2005

Pentagon Prepped Torture Defense, Said President Not Bound By Law
CBS News, June 7, 2004

Memo Regarding Presidential Executive Order on Interrogations
Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 22, 2004

When People Power is a Problem
Washington Post, May 17, 2005

The Scourge of Nationalism
The Progressive, June 2005 issue

Uzbeks Say Troops Shot Recklessly at Civilians
New York Times, May 17, 2005

Bush Sold the War on WMDs, Not Regime Change
Editor and Publisher, May 15, 2005

Refugees Put Uzbek Dead in Thousands
Daily Telegraph, May 17, 2005

CIA Kills in Pakistani Shadows
International Herald Tribune, May 16, 2005

The Secret World of US Jails
The Observer, June 13, 2004

The Torture Memos: A Legal Narrative
CounterPunch, Feb. 2, 2005

CIA Takes on Major Military Role: 'We're Killing People!
Boston Globe, Jan. 20, 2002

Global Strike Plan, With a Nuclear Option
Washington Post, May 14, 2005

Uzbekistan's Nightmare: Made in Washington
Antiwar.com, May 16, 2005

Democracy in Action: White House Support for Karimov
Whisky Bar, May 13, 2005

Global Torture Ban Under Threat
Human Rights Watch, May 12, 2005

Four Bloody Lies of War, From Havana 1898 to Baghdad 2003
Columbus Free Press, May 8, 2005

Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
TomPaine.com, May 12, 2005

Terror Suspects Sent to Egypt by the Dozens, Report Says
New York Times, May 12, 2005

Arms Makers Find Being Cash-Heavy Is Mixed Blessing
New York Times, May 12, 2005

Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops
CounterPunch, May 11, 2005

America's Shame: Two Years On From 'Mission Accomplished'
The Independent, May 9, 2005

An Ethical Blank Check: The Anglo-American Way of War
Common Dreams, May 10, 2005

Reports Cite US and Egypt on Torture
Reuters, May 10, 2005

US 'Backed Illegal Iraq Oil Deals'
The Guardian, May 17, 2005

Marine-Led Campaign Killed Friends and Foes, Iraqi Leaders Say
Knight-Ridder, May 16, 2005

A 'Welcome Parade' of Blood and Seething Anger
Iraq Dispatches, May 16, 2005

Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land
The Independent, May 15, 2005

US Wants to Build Network of Friendly Militias to Fight Terrorism
AFP, August 15, 2004

Pentagon Plan for Global Anti-Terror Army
Sydney Morning Herald, Aug. 11, 2004

America's Amnesia on Torture
The Progressive, July 2004

U.S. Arming Baathist Militia's to Combat Shiite Cleric Rule
Asia Times, Feb. 15, 2005

Bush's Death Squads
Ratical.org, Jan. 31, 2002

Bush Has Widened Authority of CIA to Kill Terrorists
New York Times, Dec. 15, 2002

Special Ops Get OK to Initiate Its Own Missions
Washington Times, Jan. 8, 2003

Our Designated Killers
Village Voice, Feb. 14, 2003

A U.S. License to Kill
Village Voice, Feb. 21, 2003

General Ashcroft's Detention Camps
Village Voice, Sept. 10, 2002