I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations
through in vastly greater detail than I¹m providing here and has
reached these following conclusions: first, that it is in the best
interests of humanity that the United States impose a fearful peace
upon the world and, second, that the best way to begin that epoch
would be to establish dominion over the Middle East through the
American Protectorate of Iraq. In other words, it¹s not about oil,
it¹s about power and peace.
...................
what Dick Cheney really wants is
peace. Though much has been made of his connection to Halliburton and
the rest of the Ol Bidness, he is not acting in the service of
personal greed. He is a man of principle. He is acting in the service
of intentions that are to him as noble as mine are to me - and not
entirely different.
.................................................................
Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one
of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an
hour listening to us argue about ³circular errors probable² and ³MIRV
decoys² and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were
leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day,
turned to me and said, ³I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous
person I¹ve ever seen up here.² At that point, I agreed with her.
What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used
to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when
their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho.
Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would
start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as
though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low
regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.
As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of
Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as
a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision
of implacable, irrational, lethality that the Soviet leaders would
decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation.
It worked. While I think that rock Œn¹ roll and the systemic failures
of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism
as did Dick¹s mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didn¹t
look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and
Reagan¹s terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging
psychological rather than nuclear warfare.
I¹m starting to wonder if were aren¹t watching something like the
same strategy again. In other words, it¹s possible Cheney and company
are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the
Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I¹m right
about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any
more than the MX missile did.
First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his
country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that,
they want to convince the Iraqi people that it¹s safer to attempt his
overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American
· > ground troops.
Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet
that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad
· > thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to
use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity
than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words,
they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate
weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed
with either.
By these terrible means, they will create a world where war conducted
by any country but the United States will seem simply too risky and
the Great American Peace will begin. Unregulated Global Corporatism
will be the only permissible ideology, every human will have access
to McDonald¹s and the Home Shopping Network, all ³news² will come
through some variant of AOLTimeWarnerCNN, the Internet will be run by
Microsoft, and so it will remain for a long time. Peace. On Prozac.
If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would
prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I¹d been in charge back
in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still
be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they
actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method.
Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble
reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas.
We¹ll probably know which it¹s going to be sometime in the next
fortnight.
By then, I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart of
darkness and closer to the heart itself.
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