[wordup] Sympathy For The Devil - John Parry Barlow

[Adam Shand]

This at least makes sense, now whether it's true or not is an entirely 
different story, but it makes more sense to me then any other 
description of what and why we're doing what we're doing.

Adam.

From: 
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200302/msg00186.html

Sympathy For The Devil
By John Perry Barlow

I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney was 
obscenely wrong about something I am now. Subsequent events raised the 
possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all.

With this in mind, I've given some thought lately to how all this might 
look to the Vice President (who is, I remain convinced, as much the real 
architect of American policy as he was while Gerald Ford's Chief of 
Staff or George the First¹s Secretary of Defense).

As I've mentioned, I once knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get 
elected to his first public office as Wyoming's lone congressman. I 
conspired with him on the right side of environmental issues. Working 
closely together, we were instrumental in closing down a copper smelter 
in Douglas, Arizona the grandfathered effluents of which were causing 
acid rain in Wyoming's Wind River mountains. We were densely interactive 
allies in creating the Wyoming Wilderness Act. He used to go fishing on 
my ranch. We were friends.

With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick Cheney is the smartest 
man I've ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he will take you 
on a devastatingly brief tour all the weak points in your argument. But 
he is a careful listener and not at all the ideologue he appears at this 
distance. I believe he is personally indifferent to greed. In the final 
analysis, this may simply be about oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it 
that way. I am relatively certain that he is acting in the service of 
principles to which he has devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that 
is unimpeded by sentiment or other emotional overhead.

Here is the problem I think Dick Cheney is trying to address at the 
moment: How does one assure global stability in a world where there is 
only one strong power? This is a question that his opposition, myself 
included, has not asked out loud. It¹s not an easy question to answer, 
but neither is it a question to ignore.

Historically, there have only been two methods by which nations have 
prevented the catastrophic conflict which seems to be their deepest habit.

The more common of these has been symmetrical balance of power. This is 
what kept another world war from breaking out between 1945 and 1990. The 
Cold War was the ultimate Mexican stand-off, and though many died around 
its hot edges - in Viet Nam, Korea, and countless more obscure venues - 
it was a comparatively peaceful period. Certainly, the global body count 
was much lower in the second half of the Twentieth Century than it was 
in the first half. Unthinkable calamity threatened throughout, but it 
did not occur.

The other means by which long terms of peace - or, more accurately, 
non-war - have been achieved is the unequivocal domination by a single 
ruthless power. The best example of this is, of course, the Pax Romana, 
a "world" peace which lasted from about 27 BCE until 180 AD. I grant 
that the Romans were not the most benign of rulers. They crucified 
dissidents for decoration, fed lesser humans to their pets, and 
generally scared the bejesus out of everyone, including Jesus Himself. 
But war, of the sort that racked the Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, and 
indeed, just about everyone prior to Julius Caesar, did not occur. The 
Romans had decided it was bad for business. They were in a military 
position to make that opinion stick.

(There was a minority view of the Pax Romanum, well stated at its height 
by Tacitus: "To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they 
misname empire; and where they make a wilderness, they call it peace." 
It would be well to keep that admonition in mind now.)

There are other, more benign, examples of lengthily imposed peace. One 
could argue that the near absence of major international wars in the 
Western Hemisphere results from the overwhelming presence of the United 
States which, while hardly a dream neighbor, has at least stopped most 
of the New World wars that it didn't start. The Ottoman Empire had a 
pretty good run, about 700 years, after drawing its borders in blood. 
The Pharoahs kept the peace, at least along the Nile, for over 2800 
years until Alexander the Great showed up.

If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the latter 
doesn¹t necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be made for 
global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in the light of 
history, than the proposition that nations will coexist peacefully if we 
all try really, really hard to be nice to each other.

It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability can 
be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one that 
terrified us into peace during the Cold War. Europe, old and new, is 
furious with the United States at the moment (if my unscientific polls 
while there in January are at all accurate), but they are a very long 
way from confronting us with any military threat we'd find credible.

I'm pretty sure that, soon enough, hatred of our Great Satanic selves 
will provide the Islamic World with a unity they have lacked since the 
Prophet's son-in-law twisted off and started Shi'ism. But beyond their 
demonstrated capacity to turn us into a nation of chickenshits and 
control freaks, I can't imagine them erecting a pacifying balance force 
against our appalling might.

I believe that Dick Cheney has thought all these considerations through 
in vastly greater detail than I'm 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.

Well, alright. It is about oil, I guess, but only in the sense that the 
primary goal of the American Peace is to guarantee the Global 
Corporations reliable access to all natural resources. wherever they may 
lie. The multinationals are Cheney's real constituents, regardless of 
their stock in trade or their putative country of origin. He knows, as 
the Romans did, that war is bad for business. But what¹s more important 
is that he also knows that business is bad for war. He knows, for 
example, there there has never been a war between two countries that 
harbored McDonald's franchises.

I actually think it's possible that, however counter-intuitive and risky 
his methods for getting it, 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.

How can this be? Return with me now to the last time I was convinced he 
was insanely endangering life on earth. This was back in the early 1983 
when Dick Cheney was, at least by appearances, a mere congressman. He 
was also Congressional point man for the deployment of the MX missile 
system in our mutual home state of Wyoming. (The MX was also called the 
"Peacemaker," a moniker I took at the time to be the darkest of ironies.)

The MX was, and indeed still is, a Very Scary Thing. A single MX missile 
could hit each of 10 different targets, hundreds of miles apart, with 
about 600 kilotons of explosive force. For purposes of comparison, 
Hiroshima was flattened by a 17 kiloton nuclear blast. Thus, each of the 
MX's warheads could glaze over an area 35 times larger than the original 
Ground Zero. Furthermore, 100 MX missiles were to lie beneath the 
Wyoming plains, Doomsday on the Range.

Any one of the 6000 MX warheads would probably incinerate just about 
every living thing in Moscow. But Cheney's plan - cooked up with Brent 
Scowcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and other familiar suspects - 
was not about targeting cities, as had been the accepted practice of MAD 
(Mutually Assured Destruction). The MX was to be aimed instead at the 
other side¹s missile emplacements.

The problem with this "counter-force strategy," as it was called, was 
that it was essentially a first-strike policy. The MX was to be placed 
in highly vulnerable Minuteman silos. In the event of a Soviet first 
strike, all of the Peacemakers would have been easily wiped out. Thus, 
they were either to be launched preemptively or they were set to "launch 
on warning." The MX was to be either an offensive weapon or the 
automated hair-trigger was to be pulled on all hundred of them within a 
very few minutes after the first Soviet missile broke our radar horizon.

In either case, the logic behind it appeared to call for fighting and 
winning a nuclear war. Meanwhile, President Reagan was bellowing about 
"the Evil Empire" and issuing many statements that seemed to consider 
Armageddon a plausible option.

I spent a lot of time on Capitol Hill during the winter of '81-'82. I 
lobbied over a hundred Congressmen and Senators against a policy that 
seemed to me the craziest thing that human beings had ever proposed. The 
only member of Congress who knew more about it than I did was Dick Cheney.

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 "circular errors probable" and "MIRV decoys" 
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, "I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person I've ever 
seen up here." 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 'n' roll and the systemic failures of 
central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism as did 
Dick's mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didn't look quite 
so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and Reagan's 
terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging 
psychological rather than nuclear warfare.

I'm starting to wonder if were aren't 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 I'm 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 it's 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 
McDonald's and the Home Shopping Network, all "news" 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 I'd 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.

-- 
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder & Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School