Heard a story on public radio this week (here it is) about some Iraqi nationals – educated people – who had worked for the U.S. military and U.S. contractors in Iraq. The ones the reporter spoke to were among the very few who have managed to immigrate to America. Now they are out of work, out of money, and essentially unemployable except at the very bottom of the service economy. One man, speaking of his experience back in Iraq, told of how an American officer once told him that “working for the American government is a future”. Now this unfortunate fellow is contemplating taking another job in Iraq – no small consideration, since doing so could easily cost him his life. Here all he can find is janitorial work at McDonald’s-level wages, though he is a trained engineer. His expectation had been that in return for having served this country, he would be taken care of. All the government seems willing to do for these people is bring them here, get them hooked up with some goofy job counseling agency called “Upwardly Global”, and fuck up their paperwork so that it’s even harder to get a job. Welcome to America.

Can’t blame these folks for being fooled. Our own people lap up the same lies about how we came to Iraq to help the Iraqi people. There are lessons in this for all of us, I suppose. The first is that Iraqis – in fact, any subject peoples within the American empire – do not matter beyond their relative utility at a given moment. Think about it. Our government did not arm and support Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war because they wanted all of those Iraqis to die on the battlefield; they didn’t pursue deadly sanctions for a dozen years for the express purpose of killing half a million children; they didn’t prosecute their unprovoked 2003 invasion to generate a million fatalities and 4 million refugees. No, our government did all of those things because they were a means to an end. The Iraqis simply served the imperial strategy by dying, starving, etc., and that is all. And when Bush’s bogus rationale for invading Iraq (WMDs and Al Qaeda) fell apart like the house of cards that it obviously was, Iraqis served their strategy again by being the oppressed people to whom we would confer the blessings of liberty. Useful, but not important – a status doubly underlined by the fact that our government refuses to realistically estimate the number of people who have died as a result of their war of choice.

Iraqi expatriates like the ones NPR spoke to have learned this the hard way – by risking their lives to serve the U.S., only to be dropped like an apple core when their utility expires. (Our own G.I.s get similar treatment, but that’s another column.) Fact is, this is a world run by pirates, and America is Long John Silver. Ours is a fully bipartisan pirate ship, it bears remembering. Aside from style, there is little that separates the foreign policy establishment in the Republican and Democratic parties. The G.O.P. is mostly a scurvy crew of unabashed cutthroat privateers, ready to burn and plunder at will. The Democrats, well… they put a nice tie on it, dress it up a little bit, tone down the rhetoric, but it’s essentially the same set of rules: We own the world, and what we say goes. The first half of that is obvious from our behavior, the second and explicit declaration by Bush the First (a.k.a. “Pappy”).

Now, if that isn’t a pirate’s creed, I don’t know what is. ARRRrrrrrrrrrr…..

luv u,

jp

The U.S. military shot down one of its own spy satellites this week. The satellite (like our military policy itself) was dysfunctional and the Pentagon’s originally-stated reason for the shoot-down was the fear that its fuel supply would survive re-entry, land in a populated area, and possibly expose people to lethal chemicals. Once the deed was done, however, that rationale started breaking down, at least judging by what I heard of the coverage (from NPR’s Pentagon reporters, who are pretty close to being official spokespersons). The next day the military was suggesting, though its press surrogates, that the fuel wasn’t all that dangerous and that, in any case, chances of its falling near civilization were around 3 out of 100. (Good thing, too, since as of Thursday morning they couldn’t be certain they had destroyed the fuel tank.) Of greater concern to them at that juncture was the possibility that components of the satellite’s surveillance technology would fall into the “wrong hands”, such as those of the Russians and the Chinese. (You heard right – the Russians and the Chinese. Apparently it’s 1960 again.)

Okay, so… Russia and China are our adversaries again. Good to know. And it appears that this is where the Pentagon sees a significant threat of war, at least according to what their officials were feeding NPR the other day. Per that report, they are worried about the integrity of our satellites and how vulnerable they are to attack. I will admit to being somewhat taken aback when one “senior official” the NPR reporter had dinner with is reported to have asked rhetorically, “How do we care for our satellites? How do we protect them?” W.T.F. – if war breaks out with the Russians or the Chinese, the last thing I’m thinking about is their fucking satellites. Here we’re threatened with nuclear obliteration, and these guys are obsessing over whether Russia can take down our Blackberries and ATM machines! Glad they’ve got their priorities straight. (Being burned to a cinder is bad enough, but what if I don’t get that important e-mail on my PDA???)

Anyway… no reason to be surprised that they’re more concerned with caring for their satellites than for the human race. By Friday of this past week, the newspapers were running stories about how this shoot-down was a crucial test of our “missile defense” capability. Missile defense is, as you likely know, that amazing system we’ve been spending tens of billions of dollars developing and deploying that, while not so good at shooting down incoming missiles, provides excellent protection for favored military contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. The satellite story morphed into basically a P.R. bonanza for Raytheon, inventor of the famously ineffective Patriot missile (much touted during the Gulf war as a tremendous success, the Patriot was later shown to have failed consistently and even to have erroneously targeted one of our own planes). Assuming the Pentagon is telling us the truth when they say the missile struck its target (i.e. assuming a lot), the system may be marginally useful if our adversaries start lobbing broken-down spy satellites at us with more than a week’s notice.

Lawd-o-mighty. How will we care for our poor ATM satellites then?

luv u,

jp