The Summer of Red Death: The Only Way Out Is Through
by Tamara Baker

July 24, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- The astrologers tell us that Mars, which right now is getting closer to Earth than it has been in the past 78,000 years, has been pretty angry recently. Looking at the carnage that surrounds us in the world, it's an easy thing to believe.

There is a titanic worldwide struggle going on, with many different parties involved.

On one side, we see Bush's minions, paymasters, and puppetmasters, a group of supremely rich and supremely greedy persons who went after what they thought was an easy target, only to find themselves choking on the low-hanging fruit.

On the other side, we find a group of people with different ideologies, and who would normally be fighting amongst themselves, united in one thing: to make Iraq so hot to hold that even the PNAC/Halliburton brigade realize that the deaths-to-profits ratio is too high.

(And the true tragedy is that, now that the PNAC Platoon has got our sons and daughters stuck in this quagmire, our leaving it now would leave the secularized citizens of Iraq -- a country with nearly a century of Westernized cultural reforms -- to the mercy of the radical clerics who want to reimpose purdah on the women and Sharia on everyone.)

The one good thing that is going to come from this horror is that it may well be what takes down the PNAC Platoon and their whole rotten power base.

The BBC is currently engaged in a fight to the death with Tony Blair and Blair's Murdoch-media puppetmasters. The pretext is the death of Dr. David Kelly, who Blair had hung out to dry for the crime of telling the truth about PNAC UK's dodgy dossier. Blair and Murdoch want to cow the Beeb, to break its independence forever so Tony and the Tories can enjoy the same sort of lapdoggy media that conservative Republicans enjoy (or at least did, until last week) in the US.

But the Beeb, bless her, is fighting back -- and it will be Blair that goes down over this.

Meanwhile, the US media, which had for so long been so willing to serve as the PNAC Platoon's American publicists, have now started to turn on the Bushistas. Several theories have arisen for this, and all of them may well be true:

1) The Bushistas tried to dump on the CIA, Pentagon brass (which to a man hate Rumsfeld and the PNACers) and State Department. However, the CIA has very tight, longstanding links to several key media entities, especially the Washington Post. They know how to use the press to defend themselves. (This may be why the WP's Walter Pincus, a known CIA operative from way back, has been the Post's go-to guy on the bogus Niger uranium story.)

2) The Bushistas' corporate controllers have finally realized that Usurper Boy and his neocon minders are Bad for Business. It's not that BushCo, as Mark Morford calls them, is corrupt -- corrupt they can handle. Corrupt they can deal with. It's that the Bushies are corrupt AND incompetent, and that, my friends, is a deadly combination. It's difficult to make a profit, even a crooked one, from an economy that is being destroyed.

3) Enough kids have been sent to Iraq that virtually every US family has been touched by it. Even the rich and powerful know of nieces and nephews and co-workers -- if not sons or daughters -- who are currently over sweating and dodging RPG fire in a war that was advertised as a quick "in-and-out" action. (Remember how Rummy kept saying that we had to invade in the winter, so we could have our kids out of there by this summer? He apparently didn't know, or chose not to mention --and at this point, I'm not sure which is worse -- that our kids would be over in Iraq for several summers.) Everyone knows that this invasion was a hideous mistake, and now lots of persons are joining people like Howard Dean in saying so. (And it doesn't help matters to see the Bushistas' bizarre attitude towards North Korea, a country that unlike Iraq actually has nuclear weapons, and to know that so many US troops are now tied up in Iraq that we can't make any sort of meaningful military response to Kim Jong-Il's provocations.)

The Bushistas got a bit of a morale-booster the other day when they killed Saddam's sons and grandson. The airwaves were filled with gassy pundits proclaiming that with the deaths of Saddam's progeny, the Iraqi resistance to the invasion would crumble. These proclamations were proved wrong less than twenty-four hours later, when persons thought to be Baathist fighters killed two American troops.

It's the Summer of Red Death, all right. All too much of it unnecessary, but some of it might well be beneficial for the world as a whole.

Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope that we're still here when it's done.