Crony Hegemony

Seeing The Forest quotes Drudge today :

THE BLITZ, THEN SIEGE OF BAGHDAD STARTS IN FOUR DAYS: Troops hope to have Saddam Hussein surrounded in Baghdad within four days after an unprecedented aerial blitz which will obliterate one in 10 major buildings in Iraq… Developing…

He then comments:

This fits with one of these rumors we have been hearing — that the Iraq war is happening because the right wingers want to demonstrate America’s superior power to the world. They want to show the world what we can do to anyone that opposes us.

Destroying one of every ten major buildings in Iraq? Because we think Iraq might attack us someday? Because, as Bush said in his speech last night, they might attack us in five years?

I might add that there now appears to be several other very important reasons to destroy one in ten buildings in Baghdad:

Bechtel

Halliburton

Fluor

Parsons

LBG

etc

These are American owned international construction firms. In a move so cynical and so audacious that it is hard to wrap your arms around, it would appear that the Bush administration is preparing to destroy the infrastructure of an entire country and then repay their largest campaign contributors with huge no-bid contracts to rebuild it.

And, happily for all concerned, these companies — operating outside the onerous regulatory climate of the United States — can cut corners to their hearts content while obscenely overbilling the government by the billions, all under the fog of war. And nobody pays any taxes at all!

This is not unprecedented, of course. There is a long history of war profiteering on the part of major players in this administration going all the way back to the 30’s. Crony capitalism is nothing new. National corporatism has been seen before (notably Nazi Germany.) Colonialism is the oldest story in the book. But, this takes it to a new audacious level.

It’s not all about oil. It’s simpler than that. It’s just all about money. Big Business spent over 100 million dollars installing the idiot sock-puppet to do its bidding and he is doing it — not that he, or even many of those surrounding him probably know it explicitly. He thinks he’s been ordained by God and some others are sincere, if deluded, in their belief that the best thing for the world is American “benevolent hegemony,” however oxymoronic that is in the context of “Shock and Awe.” Being generous one could say that those neocon idealists like William Kristol, who laid out the positive vision for the Pax Americana, are the most useful idiots the corporatists could have ever dreamed of.

The real question now is whether the businesses who own the Bush administration are thinking long term or short term. Do they value stability and predictablity to protect their long term investments or are they modern quick hit artists? If it is the latter then we are led back to the corporate scandals and find that the scariest aspect of this is that Bush’s single most enthusiastic big money supporter was a company built on a foundation of quicksand — Enron.

It’s bad enough that the powers behind the throne are ruthless enterprises that care nothing for democratic institutions. What if the truth is that the modern American crony-run operations that really call the shots are not only undemocratic but incompetent as well? It’s literally the worst of all possible worlds.