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'War on Terror'
The postmodern state harbours within in it all the behaviours of the premodern state. The banker and the drug baron are at the
same end of the moral spectrum as the terrorist: the end justifies the means; "power comes from the barrel of a gun".
[The Trap]
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The so-called 'war on terror'; initiated after the 9/11 attacks on New York, and allegedly about the capture of Osama bin Laden, is now in its tenth year.
The decision to attack Iraq opened up a new, and, at the time, rather mysterious front, since bin Laden and his followers were anathema to Saddam Hussein,
who was more Stalinist than Moslem fundamentalist.
However, none of this seemed to bother Bush and Blair, neither of whom levelled with their respective electorate as to the real reason for the war: oil.
Since no other explanation seemed to make any sense, it came as no surprise to learn that BP was party to the pre-war discussions.
[Ind]
In this context, and Vice President Dick Cheney's awareness of peak oil - [DC] - the war
slots into Richard Heinberg's 'last man standing' hypothesis: the war on terror is the war for resources, and in Iraq's case the war for oil.
David Cameron's enthusiasm for involvement in the Libyan civil war can only be explained in the same way, since the conflict cuts across his previous
enthusiasm for axing defence spending.
[Oxy]
Cost of foreign 'wars on terror' may top $4trillion
The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related
military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4trn (92.5trn) - more
than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.
This staggering sum emerges from a new studv by academics at the Ivy League Brown University
that reveals the $1.3trn officially appropriated on Capitol Hill is but the tip of a spending iceberg.
Including other Pentagon outlays, interest payments on money borrowed to finance the wars, and the $400bn estimated
to have been spent on the domestic "war onterror", the total cost is already between $2.3trn and $27trn.
And even though the wars are now winding down, future military spending and the cost of looking after veterans are likely
to leave the total bill somewhere between $37trn and $4.4trn.
i 30 June 2011
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Afghanistan
American Empire Home Page
Chilcott Inquiry: Iraq War
David Cameron's Libya Resolution
'Due Process'
Iran
Israel: Directing the War on Terror
'Last Nation Standing'
Osama bin Laden, assassination of
Pakistan
The War on Terror & The Christian Right
Using the 'war on terror' to promote market norms
Why we need a proper study of mankind
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Using the 'war on terror' to promote market norms
Brown's article in The Observer - 22 March 2009 - outlined plans to train 60,000 people - "from security guards to store managers" - to
watch for al-Qaida suspects as they go about their plans to repeat the 7/7 atrocities.
Since it was not thought necessary to implement such a vast panoply of security measures
when the IRA were bombing mainland Britain in the 1970s, and given the propensity of New Labours' public, er, 'servants' to use such measures on people who are
not members of al-Qaida and are clearly not planning to bomb their local communities - RIPA -
it's advisable to poke around for the other agendas that are riding pillion with the security plans.
Superficially there are two aims here: to combat 'terror' [9],
and to integrate Moslems into the indigenous 'community'.
[1]
In the latter case the agenda is not new. Several previous reports signal the government's desire to persuade 'moderate' Moslems that integration into
British society will obviate the need to bomb the indigenous population.
[1]
[4]
[6]
A BBC World Service documentary - 22/23 March (?) - suggested that the Moslem community might be split between an older generation
of non-fanatics, and a radicalised younger generation eager to extract revenge for events in the Middle East.
Since the British Government has both nailed its colours to the 'war on terror' in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, and the BBC has shown itself unwilling to
offend Israeli hardliners in respect of the Gaza charity appeal, radicalised Moslems have been handed a double propaganda coup, which no amount of flim-flam
from the likes of Hazel Blears will counteract.
[HB]
There is, however, a larger background which casts doubt on the overt aims of New Labour's 'cohesion' agenda.
First, it assumes there is some ready-made social order which Moslems might wish to join.
There is not: the other 'society' which Moslems might wish to join is now absorbed into the wider world of market norms which admits of, to quote a
famous phrase, 'no such thing as society' - in the sense of a shared community with obligations beyond market norms, norms designed for the very purpose
of sacrificing social norms on the altar of profit.
The "British jobs for British workers" dispute highlighted the reality. Namely that the Lisbon Treaty's 'precarious and commodified citizenship'
[SBH] recognises only
market norms, to which Brown's "British workers" are expected to conform.
Hazel Blears offers no voice for them.
For them there is 'Police State Britain', and the use of New Labour's vast security
agenda by an expanding host of busy-bodies and corporate lackeys -
[TMS] - to pursue a wide range of miscreants, such as the parents thought to be misusing the schools' admission
procedure. [GDN].
The 'war on terror' helpfully provides the smoke-screen necessary to camouflage the reality: that both main parties have bought into 'market norms' to the
degredation of social norms, which are now of miniscule importance.
Yasmin Alibhai-Browns sums it up better than I can:
In 'The Spirit Level', two sober academics – Richard Wilkinson and his partner Kate Pickett, both medical epidemiologists – have published strong evidence to
prove that in unequal societies everyone suffers – even those who think they have it made for generations to come.
They looked at 20 of the richest nations and compared various social and health problems, measuring those against an index of equality.
The US, Portugal (feudal in the near past) and the UK are the most unequal nations, with the top 20 per cent earning nine times more than the bottom 20 per cent.
Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden are where the money gap is smallest.
Teenage pregnancies, mental illness, life expectancy, obesity, illiteracy, homicide, crime are all worse in the states of greater inequality and not only for
the poorest but for all citizens and residents.
Spain is more equal than its neighbour, Portugal and you can see how vastly different are the social ills in the two countries.
There is even evidence that in unequal societies, the people have higher levels of stress hormones.
[YAB]
Moslems now act as a lightning rod to deflect the anger and depression - the powerlessness - which touches anyone who recalls, or imagines, a different
Britain in which social norms transcend the greed of markets.
[FaG]
This is the ultimate - hidden - racism behind New Labour's multicultural mask.
Labour's 'war on terror' is yet another adoption of Steven Lukes' 'third face of power' - the use of one agenda to pursue a hidden one with a totally
differing aim. [TFP]
That a degree of Protectionism might restore the balance between social norms - social cohesion - and market norms is the no-go area in the
economic debates of the day, but a raft of recent papers have called into question the economic theories on which the global markets are constructed:
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