If It’s Tuesday, This Must be Iran ..., by Manuel Miles

Special to TLE

In a series of articles, I have been trying to enumerate the various casualties of the US Empire’s bogus "war on terrorism". Satire, I listed as number two, right after truth, and it continues to be collaterally damaged with each absurd, inhuman act of the Imperial Military/Industrial/Governmental Complex. It is impossible for fiction to compete with fact for sheer absurdity when a maniac like George W Bush claims to be waging war against "evil". Now even minimal sanity has been added to the casualty list -- at least among the leaders of the Bush Imperium.

Many years ago, back when your humble scribe was young, there was a movie about American touristas entitled something like "If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium". It concerned the misadventures of the victims of a package tour who were trying to see all of Europe in a week. Of course, this is not possible, hence the resultant effort to determine geographic location from a schedule.

The current chaotic imperial sabre rattling is very much in this same frenetic spirit; there is a world to be conquered, and only a little time in which to do it ere The Forces of Evil regroup and level every building in Manhattan over three stories tall. Hence the burning question: "Where to firebomb next?" The various factions of the US power structure’s government are engaged in a furious, Byzantine struggle to determine who and where The Forces of Good shall incinerate tomorrow. Some factions recommend staying put (temporarily) in the current 100+ countries in which the US military has bases, the better to consolidate their hold over the Empire as it exists, while others advocate charging through the window of opportunity and attacking everywhere at once, in order to seize control of the entire planet.

Attempts to create a priority list of targeted "rogue states" and "terrorist harbouring nations" resulted in the inane "axis of evil" speech in which Mad King George attempted to link historic (and contemporary) enemies Iran and Iraq with totally isolated North Korea and Somalia in a conspiracy against K-Mart shoppers in Muncie, Indiana. Day by day, speculative assaults on these (and other) countries are predicted, announced, threatened and surmised by Rumsfeld, Powell, Ashcroft, the Wall Street Journal, and various pundits and necromancers from within the Beltway Pale.

Meanwhile, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other brain dead leftover Cold War bureaucracies continue to issue vague bimonthly warnings of unspecified, impending attacks on American civilians. This serves two purposes; it keeps the masses convinced that the State’s campaign to alienate and infuriate the entire world will somehow keep Des Moines safe for democracy and late-night shopping and, when the next revenge attack comes, as this insane imperial programme/pogrom guarantees it will, it will make the FBI and the other bumbling spy agencies seem prescient. [Mind you, if they were really all that smart, they’d have noticed illegal aliens openly practicing aircraft hijacking in Florida aviation schools. However, with a budget of mere billions of confiscated tax dollars, they have only managed to shoot and burn to death innocent American women and children in Texas and Idaho, so expecting them to notice the obvious in Florida may be expecting a wee bit too much.]

Who and what the rudderless imperial ship of state will ram next is really impossible to know. Statist insanity follows a pattern only so far; once it attains the level of rampaging imperial power, its moves are unpredictable in the extreme. The kind of homicidal madness we are witnessing now has not been seen since a clique of chicken farmers, shoe salesmen, and failed artists seized control of the German state in 1933. What insane slaughter the Bush Leaguers will next perpetrate on the poor peasantry of which unsuspecting pre-industrial land, even they won’t know until they are already "collaterally damaging" them. It is certain, however, that if the lunatics keep on at the present rate, one day real soon we’ll realise that "If it’s Wednesday, this must be Armageddon."

May God forbid.

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