Count the Bodies,
Crunch the Numbers
[by Scott Thill]
Uh-oh. My man Alberto "VO5" Gonzales let slip his poker hand recently. Good thing no one blinked. Devising a legal escape hatch to get Bush out of future war crimes is a bold plan for an administration that also decided it can torture pretty much anyone, anytime it wants. And it worked. Is anyone surprised? I mean, this is an administration that had the balls to harass a critic as public as Edward Kennedy with its No-Fly List, which has so far caught more congressman than terrorists. Smooth moves, man. Smooth.
But the tectonic plates are moving in more ways than one. Especially when you look down the road and all you see are Republicans becoming Democrats and Democrats becoming independents, mostly because, pardon the irony, no right-minded progressive would otherwise vote for them. (I'm looking at you, Joe-mentum.) The outlook from that growing corner of our future is promising: If the United States can outlast the votejacking of 2006 and 2008 to swing leftward as forecasted, then it might be able to hold off both an environmental collapse and an economic recession. Which, for those of you keeping score on your investment portfolios, always go hand and hand. (Invest now.)
The scale of those imminent collapses? Well, those devils are in the details.
Which are the first things you need to shred, especially if you're the Deparment of Interior these days. Because those details are the places where valued yet suspiciously disappeared connections, for one reason or another, are revealed and codified for maximum legal clearance. In other words, if you're a Big Oil badass with rewarded friends in the Interior, you can exclude provisions in offshore drilling contracts to dodge the IRS to the tune of billions. Right in the middle of the fattest paydays in your corporate history. While resource wars over resource extractions -- from what environmentalists call "the environment" -- inflame regional skirmishes into what wacked-out televangelists call World War III.
And that chosen name is just for those slow learners who've only been counting since the crucifixion of Christ. Some people on Earth have memories that go back much farther. Like...well, pretty much everyone in the Middle East and Africa right now, who are steadily preparing our geopolitical sphere for a paradigmatic power shift. What the deep-fried crackers in America call Armageddon. It's right there in the first three letters. A-R-M. Arm yourselves.
But, like all marketing, World War III is about numbers, projected and otherwise. The more people pay attention to apocalyptic chatter, the more people won't mind paying, if you catch my drift. Pay for whatever the government asks, whether that is arming Israel or aiding the country it bombs, Catch-22 style. Like that novel's extreme capitalist Milo Minderbinder, the United States makes a killing every time Israel levels some hovel or house. Then it funnels some of that arms revenue to the same beseiged country, which uses those funds to build itself back up. Restart game. Cha-ching!
For this, one need look no farther than the oil market these escapades, whether in Iraq or in Lebanon, were designed to protect. The cost of a barrel has skyrocketed since the Bush administration took office, and if you think a massive chunk of that oil windfall isn't coming from the cost of war, and its economic production, I have a shithole in the middle of the desert to sell you.
No, war is just another confidence game invented by confidence men who occupy several strands of not just the American narrative (my favorite comes from Melville), but the the Earth's as well. We have literally been manufacturing excuses (and consent) for access to the planet's resources for millennia, and we've been sampling the public opinion for soft spots all the while. Along the way, we've shaped and steamrolled religion, science, art, race, sex and much more into workable ideologies for procuring those resources and confirming our empowerment. Unlike our false idols, we didn't really take any days off.
We've been warring over the world ever since we made it.
So let's be clear. When we talk about war, we are talking about numbers, and their literal and metaphorical crunching. Let's take Israel's always reliable, always ironic blitzkriegs (wonder where they learned that tactic?) and count the numbers. Which aren't pretty, especially if you're a peace-loving Israeli. At this writing, according to the Seattle Times and the Associated Press:
Lebanese killed by Israel: 520
Total Israelis killed by Hizbollah: 68
Total civilians Lebanese killed: 449
Total civilian Israelis killed: 27
First thing you learn from crunching those numbers? Israel either has really bad aim, or could give a shit who it kills. Roughly 86.34615384615385 percent of the time they're firing a shot, they're killing an innocent. Hizbollah, meanwhile, comes in at a modest 39.705882352941174. In other words, if you're a civilian Israeli, stay away from the Israeli army. They're cannon fodder. Same goes for a civilian Lebanese within laser-guided missile range of anyone with anything that says "Hizbollah" on it. Or not.
The point is that terrorism's general definition relies structurally upon the premise that a terrorist sees no distinction between a civilian or a soldier, demilitiarized zone or a battle theatre. By that definition alone, Israel's going to be in trouble when the war crimes tribunals come calling. Good thing they have Alberto "VO5" on speed-dial.
Which doesn't necessarily let Hizbollah off the hook, and not just because they are pawns in the power grab for the Middle East's 21st century. It's obvious that they're more popular than ever for their brazen defiance of a regional superpower, even though that defiance has cost Islam more dead Muslims than ever. Why? Numbers game. Ask the martyrs, who didn't even get to count the money they exchanged for their lives, short spans that will never witness their friends and relatives finally emerging from poverty and oppression.
No, their lives and ours aren't much more than scratches in a ledger. Which is why a bill raising the poor's minimum wage was hitched to the one cutting the wealthy's estate tax, dooming both to failure. Or why arms dealer and extreme capitalists like Saab can sell cars worlwide on the commercial boast "Born From Jets," but they can't actually sell anti-aircraft or anti-tank devices to Hugo Chavez. Hey, that's our cake we're supposed to be having and eating too!
That is the type of zero-sum game we are fighting in the Middle East, where religious hairsplitters have been jockeying for the finish line since the world was formed. (Or something like that, Frodo.) And the mounting signs that our dangerous game in the Middle East has gone nowhere doesn't really have anything to do with John Kerry and Hillary Clinton suddenly rediscovering their balls: They've been angling for a payday for years now. Remember, Kerry voted for the military campaign that sparked a civil war in Iraq before he voted against it. Hillary? In 2004, an election year(!), she confessed that she would still vote for it, all over again.
Ah, numbers. That's why they're so reliable. They are cold, calculating things. No concern for warmth, blood, geography. All that matters is the profit margins, and in times of war, it is usually there you can find the culprits who might some day face the gallows. It's a circular thing, as it always is with currency. The Bush family should know this well. After World War II's 9/11 -- the raid on Pearl Harbor -- Prescott Bush's economic and legal entanglements with the Nazi party became a national security issue. That his son and grandson's connections to the Saudis offered similar historical ironies -- beyond the fact that both became presidents, of course -- in the aftermath of 9/11 is lost on only those who choose to ignore it.
Take Oliver Stone's new film on 9/11, for example. This is a man who once gathered together the disparate strands of a national neurosis, no matter how scattered or specious, and wove them together to offer a snapshot of a stunned country reeling from the assassination of JFK. Back then, Stone couldn't wait to agitate, and inform. But now, given the opportunity to make a film about 9/11, the most explosive event of post-war American history, and explore its myriad intricacies, ceasless lies and devastating blowbacks -- our current wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Lebanon, to name a couple -- Stone opted for the safe route and made the feel-good movie of the year.
Spinal Tap was right. Money talks, bullshit walks.
So you better get in on the ground floor of this towering inferno, or you're bound to be left out in the cold. Where the numbers hide, the truth cocooned in their complexities. The inferno is much warmer, and full of smiles and lies, knives behind backs. Who needs math or science anyway, when World War III is the finest fiction available? Now that's some riveting cinema. Roll it!
August 6, 2006
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