- When I was a boy, a common sales technique was for a
local store to advertise a deep-discount special that would pull lots of
shoppers into its showroom. Shoppers would be met by a salesman who was
trained to sell them an upscale model of the product, which cost
substantially
more. Shoppers would be told that the product was "out of stock due
to high demand." This marketing technique relied on highly skilled
salesmen. The mark of bait-and-switch selling is an inventory that never
has the promised item.
-
- (Note: When you think "out of stock due to
high demand," think "Osama bin Laden.")
-
- The Federal Trade Commission long ago made this sales
technique illegal. So did most states. But it still goes on. On the Web,
you can read about fabulous prices for certain items. You place the order.
They promise to send it out that day. But you will get a call-back trying
to up-sell you on some high-priced related item that you never asked for,
and which was never mentioned in the ad. If you resist, you will finally
be told that the item is out of stock and won't be back in stock for weeks.
A twenty-something hustler tried this strategy on me this summer with a
$595 price on a $750 camcorder. When I refused to buy a $15 battery charger
for $120, the camcorder that had been in stock (which I had twice asked
him to verify) disappeared from stock a week later.
-
- This sales technique is immoral - fraudulent - and it's
also illegal. But it's only illegal for businesses. It is a way of life
in democratic politics everywhere.
-
- The technique over the last two months has been used
to establish a new government in Afghanistan. The United States, as of
this week, has officially joined with the United Nations in a joint
nation-building
operation.
-
- We have seen all this many times. Let me review, briefly,
how this bait-and-switch technique works in American foreign policy.
Remember
this: "War is foreign policy conducted by other means"
(Clausewitz).
-
-
- Getting Us Into War
-
- In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson ran for his second
term on this political platform: "He kept us out of war." He
won the election, but just barely. The campaign slogan was fraudulent from
the beginning. From 1915 onward, he had been re-shaping American foreign
policy in order to get America into the war on the side of the British,
a goal that he achieved in 1917. His Secretary of State, William Jennings
Bryan, had resigned in 1915 in protest to Wilson's phony neutrality
program.
This was the highest-level resignation in American history, before or
since.
(The best book on Wilson's strategy is Charles C. Tansill's America Goes
to War [1938].)
-
- Wilson's ultimate goal was to set up a post-war League
of Nations: the first stage in the creation of a world government. Had
the Senate not refused to ratify the treaty, he would have pulled it
off.
-
- I came across a key document a few years ago, a letter
from the American Under-Secretary of the League of Nations, Raymond
Fosdick,
which he sent to his wife in July 1919. Fosdick told her that he and
France's
Under-Secretary, Jean Monnet, were working daily to lay the foundations
of "the framework of international government. . . ." (Fosdick
to his wife: July 31, 1919; in Fosdick, ed., Letters on the League of
Nations
[Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966], p. 18.) This
was no idle boast. Over the next six decades, Jean Monnet became the
driving
force behind the creation of the European Common Market and the New
European
order. Meanwhile, after the Senate refused to ratify the Versaille peace
treaty treaty in 1919, Fosdick returned to New York, where he became John
D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s lawyer. He ran the Rockefeller Foundation for the
next three decades. He had been on Rockefeller's payroll since 1913. He
became a founding member in 1921, along with Rockefeller, of the Council
on Foreign Relations.
-
- Fast forward two decades. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt
ran for an unprecedented third term. He ran on a platform of neutrality
toward the war in Europe. "I abhor war," he said. "My wife
Eleanor abhors war. I will not send American boys to war." But he
had already promised Churchill that he would bring America into the war.
He then established restrictive trade policies that pressured Japan to
attack us. (The best book on this is Tansill's Back Door to War [1953].
Robert Stinnett's Day of Deceit [1999] is also good.) Hitler accommodated
him by declaring war on the US on December 11, which was the worst foreign
policy decision in modern history.
-
- The anti-Axis allied nations during the war called their
alliance "the United Nations." In a classic bait-and-switch
operation,
the foreign policy internationalists took this name in 1945, added the
word Organization, and attached it to the replacement of the failed League
of Nations. America's Alger Hiss was elected as the first Secretary General
of the UN in 1945. He had been a Soviet spy ever since his days in the
Department of Agriculture, a member of the "Ware cell," the
Communists'
first spy ring inside the U.S. government. By 1945, he was a senior
official
in the State Department.
-
- There is an old rule in football: when you have a play
that works, keep using it until it doesn't work any more. Bait-and-switch
in foreign policy keeps working. So, they keep using it.
-
- Alice Through the Looking
Glass:
- www.whitehouse.gov
-
-
- The President is quoted all over the Web in a September
25 speech as saying, "We're not into nation-building, we're into
justice."
(I used Google and searched for: Bush, nation-building, justice.)
-
- I wanted to verify this speech. I failed. This speech
has gone down the White House's memory hole. It's a very big hole.
-
- The White House Web site is a masterpiece of keeping
voters away from anything really important that the President has said
or done. Let me explain.
-
- If you click on the Home Page, "President: Oval
Office," you get a search engine for his speeches. There are choices
of topics. Terrific! I selected "Foreign Policy." Here is what
I got: a September 28 speech delivered to the King of Jordan. The next
one down is a May 29 speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs
Council.
-
- At the top of the page, we read this: "23 results
found, sorted by relevance." Sorted by relevance? Hey, guys: America
went to war in between these two speeches! There is not one speech on this
list later than June.
-
- Well, maybe there is a list of speeches under
"Military
Affairs." Sorry: no such category. Nothing on the military. But you
can select "Faith-Based & Community Initiatives."
-
- Then I spotted an option at the bottom of the page of
ten foreign policy speeches. It's not in the topical search's options list:
"PoliciesDefense." I clicked it. I got 116 speeches, beginning
with January 20. Then I selected "Sort by Date." At the top of
the screen was a September 26 speech, "President Commends House for
Passing Defense Bill." It is six lines long. Next: "U.S., China
to Discuss Missile Defense." The date on that is September 5. Odd.
I recall several speeches in between September 5 and September 26. There
was this problem on September 11. Oh, well.
-
- This site was apparently designed by a disciple of Lewis
Carroll: "Alice Through the Looking Glass."
-
- I used the Home Page's general search engine to find
the words "nation-building" and "justice." The search
engine retrieved dozens of speeches, but not the September 25 speech. I
spent an hour looking for it. Gone! Or maybe never posted. Or lost. (On
Clinton's site, I could always find any speech I was looking for.) I
finally
found it through Google by tracing it down to a Q&A session after a
Rose Garden meeting with Japan's Prime Minister. It is posted on the
Website
of the Department of State.
-
- I did stumble onto this. Write this down. Keep it in
your scrapbook.
-
- The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's
not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. (Remarks by the President
at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. [Sept. 17, 2001]) Note for
historically
inclined: the word "Islam" means submission.
- Nation-Building Is Us!
http://www.submission.org
-
-
- Back to this theme: "We're not into
nation-building."
On September 27, James Pinkerton, who made famous the phrase, "a new
paradigm," commented on the origin of Bush's public commitment not
to build nations.
-
- In the 2000 presidential debates, George W. Bush
repeatedly
ripped the Clinton-Gore foreign policy record. In Boston on Oct. 3, he
declared that he and Al Gore "have a disagreement about the use of
troops. He believes in nation-building." And what was Bush for
instead?
"I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and,
therefore,
prevent war from happening in the first place." And so, he continued,
his focus wouldn't be nation-building but rather "rebuilding the
military
power." Mr. Pinkerton has a very different vision - the same vision
that President Bush, Sr. called the New World Order back in 1990, as we
were getting ready to attack Iraq's troops. Mr. Pinkerton worked in the
White House back then, and in the Reagan Administration, too. Mr. Pinkerton
spells out his vision, brought up to date.
-
- Soon, the Americans will go and get Bin Laden. As Bush
said, "We're focused on justice." But what happens after that?
Does the US simply collect Bin Laden, "dead or alive," as Bush
said on Sept. 17, and come home? If ever a nation needed building, it's
Afghanistan. Its 26 million people - literacy rate, 32% - eke out a
subsistence
living; a country the size of Texas has just 1,700 miles of paved roads.
And that's not just a humanitarian problem for Afghans; it's a national
security problem for Americans because even after Bin Laden is gone, the
same chaotic countryside could yet again serve as an enterprise zone for
mass murderers.
-
- If the US takes military action against Afghanistan and
then comes home, it would be making the same mistake it made after World
War I. In 1918, the U.S. spearheaded the defeat of the Kaiser's Germany
at a cost of 116,516 American lives. But we stopped at the Rhine frontier,
told the Germans not to do it again and retreated back across the Atlantic.
Fifteen years later, the Germans elected Hitler.
-
- By contrast, in 1945, the US won a second, more costly
war against Germany, but this time, instead of stopping at the Rhine and
telling the Germans to get rid of Hitler, the Allies occupied much of the
country. As Secretary of State George C. Marshall warned, "Europe's
requirements are so much greater than her present ability to pay that she
must have substantial additional help or face economic, social and
political
deterioration of a very grave character."
-
- Resolved to see no repeat of political deterioration,
the U.S. combined justice - that is, the Nuremberg war-crimes trials -
with nation-building and rebuilding; the Marshall Plan poured $13.3 billion
into devastated Europe, about 1.3% of U.S. output during those years. If
that level of commitment were converted into today's dollars, the total
expenditure would be about $150 billion.
-
- But the ultimate reward, of course, has been a mostly
democratic and prosperous Europe that is now partnered with the U.S. in
the fight against terrorism.
-
- After Bin Laden, the US confronts the opportunity -
really,
the necessity - of building stable institutions in Afghanistan. Will it
be expensive? Yes. But will it be less costly than another Sept. 11? Yes
again.
-
- Today, Bush is more than a partisan, or even a president.
He's a war leader, and so he needn't feel bound by the shortsightedly
opportunistic
rhetoric recently uttered by Republicans - even if he was once the one
doing some of the uttering.
-
- If this commander in chief comes to realize that justice
and nation-building aren't either-or concepts but rather ideas that should
be twinned, he will have done the whole world a service and a greater
common
good will yet come from this tragedy.
-
- As of November 13, Mr. Pinkerton's "new
paradigm"
has become the official basis of American foreign policy in Afghanistan,
replacing President Bush's "no nation-building" vision. I call
this bait-and-switch.
-
-
- UNITED NATIONS (November
13, 2001 4:45 p.m. EST) - The United Nations called Tuesday for a two-year
transitional government for Afghanistan backed by a multinational security
force, while world leaders urged the world body to have a leading role
in the war-ravaged nation's peace process. Lakhdar Brahimi, the top UN
envoy for Afghanistan, told the UN Security Council that a plan to bring
Afghanistan's many ethnic and tribal groups together should be completed
"as early as humanly possible."
-
- As northern alliance soldiers replaced fleeing Taliban
forces in the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday, there was concern that the speed
of the military campaign was outpacing UN-led diplomatic efforts to get
a transitional government installed. Many countries cautioned the northern
alliance not to repeat the violence that wracked Kabul during their
previous
rule.
-
- "We need a UN presence there as soon as
possible,"
British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in London.
-
- And John Negroponte, the US ambassador to the United
Nations, told the Security Council: "An international presence must
be re-established as soon as possible."
-
- President Bush called for a broad-based government to
replace the Taliban.
-
- "We will continue to work with the northern alliance
to make sure they recognize that in order for there to be a stable
Afghanistan
... after the Taliban leaves, that the country be a good neighbor and that
they must recognize that a future government must include representatives
from all of Afghanistan," he said in Washington.
-
- I call your attention to President Bush's phrase,
"after
the Taliban leaves." Here is my prediction: the Taliban isn't going
to leave. It has to be defeated. This is easier said than done. It must
now be defeated in the hills. This will not be a piece of cake.
-
- The northern alliance foreign minister, who uses the
single name Abdullah, defended the opposition's move into Kabul, saying
it had no choice because the Taliban's sudden withdrawal left a security
vacuum. The United States had asked the alliance to avoid moving on the
capital, afraid its presence would complicate efforts to create a coalition
government. . . . UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wants Brahimi's deputy
to travel to Kabul soon, and the United Nations is eager to get its staff
back into the country and to deliver humanitarian aid.
-
- Brahimi ruled out a UN peacekeeping force for
Afghanistan,
which he said would take several months to put together. He said his first
preference would be an all-Afghan security force, but said a multinational
security force could probably be assembled more quickly.
-
- Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, called
Tuesday
for a U.N. peacekeeping mission made up of Muslim nations to deploy in
Kabul and said Turkey and Pakistan could contribute.
-
- "Kabul should remain as a demilitarized city,"
he said in Istanbul. . . .
-
- Things seem to be coming together nicely for the United
Nations and also for those nations with an interest in subduing bin Laden,
and whatever else they have planned, such as building an oil pipeline from
the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to the Indian Ocean.
On this point, see the 1999 maps, published by the Council on Foreign
Relations,
relating to the Caspian Sea.
-
- With this as background, consider this November 13 report
from CNN.
-
- In New York, the so-called "six plus two"
nations
- those neighboring Afghanistan along with the United States and Russia
- were slated to resume talks on a post-Taliban government. US Secretary
of State Colin Powell dispatched James Dobbins, his special envoy for
Afghan
opposition groups, to Rome, Italy, to meet with Afghanistan's deposed king,
Mohammad Zahir Shah, before heading to the region. And the UN special
representative
for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said he hopes to assemble the Afghan
groups in the "next couple of days."
-
- A senior State Department official told CNN that Dobbins
would make contact with the Pakistani government and work with Afghans
there on a future government.
-
- Over the last two years, America has sent $297 million
to Afghanistan, by way of the United Nations and "non-governmental
organizations" (NGO's). We have promised an additional $320
million.
-
- Now we know why. We have been trying to establish the
legitimacy of the UN in Afghanistan. Now the UN is about to supervise the
building of a new nation, but without a UN occupying force. Whose occupying
force, then? This will be something to see - at a distance.
-
-
- Winning This War
-
- The strategy for winning every war you get into is
simple:
redefine the enemy in mid-stream whenever you can't beat him - or, in this
case, locate him.
-
- Our original enemy was - way back when - Osama bin Laden.
I don't mean last July, when he was a patient in the American-run hospital
in Dubai for ten days. That's too far back. I mean on September 20, when
President Bush gave his resounding speech to Congress. Back then, bin Laden
and Al-Qaeda were the targets.
-
- Somehow, over the next few weeks, the enemy morphed into
the Taliban, whose recalcitrant leaders refused to hand over bin Laden
when told to by the Bush Administration. The media's news reports steadily
moved from the horror of the hijackings to the horror of bearded men who
do not let women go to college in a nation without any colleges. Then
America
started dropping bombs on cities where these women lived. As for killing
bin Laden, that was put on hold until the cities were destroyed. Or, to
coin a phrase, "We had to destroy Kabul in order to save
it."
-
- Now that the cities have fallen to the United Front,
President Bush has an opportunity to stop the bombing. Ramadan arrives
in Afghanistan today, U.S. time. Because the cities are now secured
militarily,
the justification for carpet bombing has ended, or at least been made far
less plausible. I hope and pray that the bombing stops.
-
- The pressing immediate need is to get Afghan civilian
refugees into safer quarters before winter hits. If civilians are no longer
afraid of more bombing, they may decide to go home, unless their homes
were destroyed. Whatever we can do to get them through the winter, we
should
do.
-
- The war has to go into hibernation mode anyway. If we
can't locate bin Laden even in good weather, there is no need to keep up
the bombing. Winter will make it difficult to conduct a war in the
mountains.
-
- The US government must conduct simultaneous public
relations
operations: the voters, the coalition, and the Middle East's Islamic
nations.
This will not be easy. The longer it takes to take out bin Laden, the more
his legend will grow in the Islamic world. It looks as though he will
inflict
a winter of discontent on us.
-
- Of course, for a man with kidney problems, a winter in
a cave could be lethal. His death would become a major problem for his
immediate followers. If he dies, his subordinates may decide to keep him
alive in the minds of their followers. They may decide to bury him
secretly.
He would join Elvis in the land of the not-quite-dead. But his TV
broadcasts
would then cease. That would create suspicion, once the snow melts.
-
- His continuing video broadcasts raise another question.
How do we know that he is still in Afghanistan? If he can smuggle
videotapes
to Qatar, what about smuggling himself? It would be difficult to keep this
a secret, but this man's organization seems highly skilled at keeping
secrets.
If he is not in Afghanistan, then our forces could wind up playing hide
and seek with a phantom.
-
- I think we're about to move into the Sitzkreig phase
of the war: "Hurry up and wait." Peace will not come to
Afghanistan
until the Taliban is eliminated. The tribes of the United Front will soon
be killing each other. Someone will have to maintain the peace. This will
require an occupation force, no matter what the UN says today. The
President
told us that the war against terrorism will take many years, but the war
against bin Laden is now going into hibernation until spring.
-
- Al Qaeda is not bottled up in Afghanistan. Bin Laden
may be. What the West has now done is to capture the cities of a Muslim
nation. It must now occupy the nation as an invading army. Washington's
deal-doers have shrugged this off. While no one would be so politically
incorrect as to say it, they are thinking, as the British said a century
ago, "machine guns can handle the wogs."
-
-
- Setting an Ancient Trap
-
- The Taliban's forces have moved from the cities - now
mostly rubble - into the hills. This news has led to a rise in the US stock
market.
-
- The Taliban's strategy is what every stock broker's
strategy
is: to lure the naive into a trap.
-
- The Taliban is a guerilla army that happened to take
over a nation. The Taliban's specialty is mountain fighting. This has been
Afghanistan's military tradition for centuries. When challenged in the
valleys, Afghan military forces move into the mountains and wait for their
opponents to come and kill them. To overcome this traditional defensive
strategy, Western forces (read: United States special operations units)
will have to clear them out, cave by cave. This may take a few
years.
-
- The invaders are not all Afghans. The toughest fighters
are Uzbeks, who are under the control of an ex-Communist. They may not
all be Muslims. I am informed by an Armenian Uzbek that the Uzbek Muslims
who run the government like to assign the front-line fighting to
non-Muslims.
-
- Thus, when the Taliban abandoned the cities, it was doing
what the Afghans' age-old military strategy requires. The invaders' trick
will not be in holding the cities. The trick will be to eliminate the
Taliban.
The Russians holed up in Kabul for a decade. They used Kabul as
headquarters.
Their possession of Kabul was supposed to give them a strategic advantage.
It didn't.
-
- Meanwhile, nobody in the attacking force has any idea
where Osama bin Laden is.
-
- I have doubts about the long-term prospects of the new
government of Afghanistan, whoever is in charge.
-
- Britain's Tony Blair on November 14 said: "Though
there may be pockets of resistance, the idea that this is some sort of
tactical retreat is just the latest Taliban lie. They are in total
collapse."
Or, as a previous British Prime Minister said, "Peace in our
time."
-
-
- Conclusion
-
- I end with a warning from Eric Margolis, who spent time
in Afghanistan with the mujahadin in the 1980's.
-
- In all my years as a foreign affairs writer, I have never
seen a case where so many Washington `experts' have all the answers to
a country that only a handful of Americans know anything about. President
George Bush, who before election could not name the president of Pakistan,
now intends to redraw the political map of strategic Afghanistan, an act
that will cause shock waves across South and Central Asia. Anyone who knows
anything about Afghans knows:
-
- 1. they will never accept any regime imposed by
outsiders
-
- 2. an ethnic minority government can never rule
Afghanistan's
ethnic majority, the Pashtun (or Pathan), roughly half the population.
Taliban are mostly Pushtun. Tajiks account for 18-20% and Uzbeks for 6%
of Afghans.
-
- Washington's plan for 'nation-building' in Afghanistan
is a recipe for disaster that will produce an enlarged civil war that draws
in outside powers.
-
- Nation-building requires peace. This peace must be
enforced.
The warring tribes that today are called Afghanistan will be killing each
other the day occupying Western forces leave the country. This is now our
war, for it is now our peace to impose. We will have to supply most of
the money, most of the weapons, and some of the troops - not just to get
bin Laden but also to enforce the peace among our Afghan allies.
-
- My prediction: Our troops won't be home by Christmas.
Not by next Christmas, either.
- Link
-
-
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|