Endstation America

--February 25th, 2009--

[Revised March 22nd]

“We don’t need no stinkin accountability.”

--Another recent note

from a prep school classmate. 

I

Has the hard rain begun to fall? Not quite. But the USA is heading pell-mell for a bad state of affairs where anything may be possible. I talked to an older, distant relative yesterday. She lived through the Great Depression in the 1930’s. She remembers eating sliced white bread with sugar sprinkled on it, then folded over, for lunch. Oatmeal was a common dinner fare. 

Her Irish father, an honest working man, was not fooled by Franklin Roosevelt and disliked him intensely, for among other good and valid reasons because he acted like an Anglophile. No doubt my friend's father drank more than he should have; nevertheless he was dead right about Roosevelt. 

FDR was a grand talker who gave people hope, but his schemes and that of his Brain Trust did not pull the country out of the Depression. FDR was elected in a landslide at the end of 1932. From his inauguration in March 1933 until December 7th, 1941, FDR initiated all sorts of high-sounding programs based upon federal spending, regulation and intervention into the private sector, some of which were ruled unconstitutional. In fact, it was only his last scheme, that involving foreign policy, which did the trick. 

Roosevelt dragged a confused, resistant America into the open arms of the British hyper-imperialist Winston Churchill and the Bolshevik butcher Josef Stalin. How? By inciting Japan and then arranging for the Japanese "surprise" attack at Pearl Harbor. The Tripartite Pact between Berlin, Tokyo and Rome of September 1940 meant that war with Japan would mean war in Europe. The aptly-termed, "Back Door to War" was the final grand imposture which succeeded at last in vanquishing the Great Depression. It also, as a byproduct, created the American and Soviet empires, while destroying the storied British Empire, which a deluded Churchill mistakenly proclaimed he was saving.

From an historical perspective, this begs the question--what trick will the Obama White House, or its successor, manufacture to reverse the current economic collapse? FDR used the ruse of a gratuitous world war. It worked. Does Obama have a similar option? No, he does not. I have already written off the Obama Presidency as a failure in "Mad Dogs & Zionists". This may have seemed too hasty, but it was not, in view of Obama's subsequent actions.

His prescription for economic recovery, and that of the establishment Democrats he represents, is the same as FDR in his first term. (Obama’s plans are even more unrealistic.) It did not work for FDR under the New Deal agenda, and there is no reason to think it will work for Obama. We are going down the same darkened road, after experiencing a similar financial breakdown. Personalities and programs aside, the average person has extravagant expectations, then as now. Pied Piper politicians like Obama and Roosevelt feed off of such mass naïveté to get elected.

Despite his tremendous personal popularity coming into office, Obama remains little more than a front man for the existing Washington political establishment. He can do only so much. He certainly cannot do the impossible, anymore than FDR. At the top of the list of the impossible and important things Obama cannot do is (a) shut down the so-called "global war on terror" and (b) tell the truth about what is driving U.S. Middle East policy and (c) call to account the incendiary and criminal foreign policy of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush. 

Why not? The short answer is that doing any of these things will blow the lid off the phenomenon called the "Israel Lobby", the most powerful, entrenched special interest group in America. This is the same reason why the Democratic leadership in Congress could not impeach Cheney and Bush for malfeasance. In any honest impeachment proceeding, the truth about "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and perhaps even the truth about 9/11 and the relationship of the Lobby to Congress and to the White House would have been unmasked, thereby exposing the leaders of both political parties as frauds and flunkies.

Another thing Obama cannot do is wave a magic wand and make disappear the economic crackup created by the anti-constitutional or extra-constitutional Cheney Regency over the past eight years, which crackup was fully enabled and abetted by the establishment Democrats in Congress, cooperating with the brain-dead Republicans in that same madhouse over the same time period. 

A contributing factor in driving America to near ruin and bankruptcy has been the self-fulfilling, grandiose "clash of civilizations" and the "global war on terror" aforesaid. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. Fraud in foreign affairs translates into fraud in domestic affairs. It is a continuum. 

In addition to American profligacy on the domestic front (best explicated in Andrew Bacevich's sentinel book The Limits of Power) it has been Washington’s foreign wars and a bellicose, arrogant foreign policy since 1990, in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, that has brought about the current economic crisis....

In December of 2007, I wrote an article entitled "Endstation Moscow" about the formative stages of this crusade to nowhere, which was published in Taki's Top Drawer. The impetus for the misadventure was the apparent requirement by Washington to find a new enemy to replace the Soviets...

“During the run-up to Gulf War I in 1990, as communism was collapsing in eastern Europe and in Russia itself, somebody in the Administration of George H.W. Bush decided that the U.S. should declare a ‘new world order’. See President Bush’s speech to a joint session of Congress on September 11th, 1990. It was going to be a unipolar world, with Washington calling the shots. Subsequently, the battle of good versus evil was diverted from the Soviet and the international communist threat to a preoccupation with the Arabs and the Middle East.

“As a practical matter, this diversion translated into a self-perpetuating crisis, starting with the Persian Gulf War of January/February 1991 against Iraq. The knee-jerk reaction and disproportionate response by Washington to the intra-Arab dispute between Iraq and Kuwait over their common borders and oil opened the door to 9/11.

“With American troops encamped in Saudi Arabia, supposedly to protect the House of Saud and Saudi oil from Saddam Hussein, Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm turned a wealthy Saudi Islamist named Osama Bin Laden into an enemy of the U.S. (after having first been an ally in Afghanistan against the Russians) and demonstrated that the Kingdom was a Potemkin village.

“Then came the decision by Washington to clamp draconian economic sanctions on Iraq in the aftermath of Desert Storm, and to do it indefinitely, no matter how many civilians got killed as a result. Remember, it was considered to be “worth it”. Concurrently, Bill Clinton was presiding over an eight-year fraud known as the Oslo ‘peace process’, which was a cover story to legitimize the ongoing colonization of Palestine, using American assets and diplomacy. It was all good domestic American politics, and it still is.

“This constant stirring of the Mideast cauldron by those in power in Washington led directly to the 9/11 atrocities and, in turn, to Operation Iraqi Freedom and ‘the war on terror’. These latter endeavors have been executed under the nominal leadership of George W. Bush, but under the direct supervision of the experienced Washington wingnut, Vice President Richard B. Cheney, who was assisted by a band of ‘neocon’ ideologues. They were given a free pass to carry out their Likud agenda, which became part and parcel of American foreign policy. 

“In sum, first came the sidetracking under H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; next, the hijacking under Dick Cheney’s junior partner, G.W. Bush. The current misadventure--the human disaster of Iraq caused by the ‘war on terror’--can be viewed as the logical result of Washington’s overreaction to the downfall of communism and to events which took place in eastern Europe in the late 1980’s and in Moscow and St. Petersburg on August 19th, 1991.”

Why did Washington bomb and attack Iraq initially in 1991, instead of exploring a modus vivendi? Why did Washington play god by imposing a murderous economic embargo on Iraq in the aftermath? Why was America hit on 9/11? Why did Washington invade and occupy Iraq in 2003? Why did Washington wholeheartedly support Tel Aviv's predatory attack on Lebanon in 2006 and then cheer its wanton assault upon the colossal concentration camp of Gaza just several weeks ago? 

If Americans  knew the answers to those basic questions, they might realize how they have been fooled and taken to the cleaners. They would understand that Obama is in no position to do anything but tread water. Obama is part of the problem because he is a prisoner and member of the same Washington establishment which created the problem. Pretending otherwise does not change reality. In fact, Obama is almost beside the point. Obama is a coda. The USA is in the process of imploding. Americans at least have a right to wonder why, and they should. How did it happen?

Commentators have overlooked or misdiagnosed what is destroying the United States, post Cold War. The conservative-versus-liberal divide, so much in evidence in the mass media, serves as a convenient smoke screen for all concerned. The chatter of the chattering class and the writings of the pundit class are mostly irrelevant pap. Right/left ideology obfuscates the real issues. The actual problem relates to official corruption, intellectual dishonesty, and complacent ignorance--and not to the vagaries of ideology or the fatuousness of Republican v. Democrat politics.

II

After every war many years are required to reduce its great figures 

to their just proportions and to bring the whole pretentious legend 

back into focus with the truth.

--John T. Flynn, 1948 

Which brings me back to FDR, to his regime which transformed America into Ex America. That is how Garet Garrett, chief editorial writer for the Saturday Evening Post at the time, described the results of FDR's crackbrained experiment in restructuring the American body politic, which experiment finally railroaded the United States into World War II. In the aftermath of that global blood-letting, Garrett became discouraged. 

I quote from the afterward to the 1965 edition of his three-essay book, Ex America: "Before his death in 1954, Mr. Garrett retired to a cave on a river bank at Tuckahoe, New Jersey, where he lived very quietly with his wife, making notes and comments on the passing show of monstrous human folly." The epic poet Robinson Jeffers, who made the cover of Time in the 1930's, wrote similar gloomy observations on the shores of Big Sur, California. For example, take "Wilson in Hell" written in 1942:

Roosevelt died and met Wilson; who said “I blundered into it 

Through honest error, and conscience cut me so deep that 

I died in the vain effort to prevent future wars. But you 

Blew on the coal-bed, and when it kindled you deliberately 

Sabotaged every fire-wall that even the men who denied 

My hope had built. You have too much murder on your hands.

I will not speak of the lies and connivings. I cannot understand the 

Mercy that permits us to meet in the same heaven.

--Or is this my hell?” 

FDR's road to the White House started out in a more upbeat fashion. The key to his nomination in 1932 seems to have been my favorite American personality of the 20th century, Joseph Patrick Kennedy. Here was an Irish-American who was not eating oatmeal for dinner. In an overlooked book by Steve Neal about the 1932 Democratic convention in Chicago, Happy Days are Here Again, Kennedy is described thusly: "As one of the few Wall Street speculators to get out of the stock market before the Great Crash, he was the toughest and shrewdest of FDR's men. The tall, red-haired financier had a fortune estimated at $100 million and was among Roosevelt's more generous contributors." 

Neal relates that during the deadlocked convention, Kennedy placed a phone call to William Randolph Hearst at his San Simeon castle to get him on board for Roosevelt. Hearst controlled some important delegates. Kennedy knew Hearst from his glory days in Hollywood. The phone call broke the deadlock.

Without Hearst and Kennedy, the Hyde Park grandee Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, probably would not have secured the nomination. But soon thereafter Hearst realized he had made a big mistake. To quote Neal: "William Randolph Hearst contributed generously to Roosevelt's campaign in the fall of 1932 and also used his newspapers and newsreels to promote FDR. But Hearst quickly became disillusioned with the New Deal, which he labeled the 'Raw Deal'. In the next three presidential elections, his newspapers supported Roosevelt's unsuccessful opponents." 

In the meantime, "Joseph P. Kennedy, whose courtship of Hearst helped deliver the nomination to FDR, was rewarded with appointments as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and, later, as ambassador to Great Britain."

Apparently, it took Kennedy longer than Hearst to see through Roosevelt. In fact, it was not until sometime after Joe Kennedy landed in London, as U.S. ambassador to the "Court of St. James's" in 1938, and saw what was going on behind the scenes at Whitehall in 1939 to instigate a war in Europe, that he realized Roosevelt was a disaster for America. But by then, it was too late. 

By then, Roosevelt understood that the New Deal had failed to end the Great Depression and that he had run out of options. As a consequence, he decided that a war in Europe against fascism could be an overnight solution to his problems on the home front. I covered the subject briefly in The Unauthorized World Situation Report (2005) in the chapter "Europa and the Daughter of Europa"...

"Roosevelt was not just your garden variety politician. He had evolved into a world-class sociopath and egomaniac during his years in the White House. Roosevelt repeatedly was forced by circumstances to lie to Congress and to the innocent at large about what he was actually doing. He had little choice and no qualms. His whole life was politics, lies and showmanship. Only a full-scale war could save the Roosevelt Presidency. Roosevelt realized this, and acted accordingly. Under wartime conditions, the frauds, the failures and the lies of the New Deal would soon be forgotten in the mass, patriotic hysteria.

"Joseph P. Kennedy, United States Ambassador to England, knew the whole truth, or almost the whole truth, firsthand from the contents of the encrypted, top-secret cable traffic taking place between  Roosevelt and Churchill through the U.S. Embassy in London, nine months prior to Churchill becoming Prime Minister. This story has been set forth most recently in chapter five of Seymour Hersh's 1997 book, The Dark Side of Camelot. 

"Joe Kennedy's priority was to prevent another European war--which he felt would leave Europe battered and bankrupt--and to keep America neutral, if war did come. Inconveniently for Kennedy and America, Roosevelt and those surrounding him had the exact opposite agenda. Hersh quotes a trusted Kennedy aide in London, Harvey Klemmer, as recalling in 1992 what the Ambassador said at lunch the day before leaving his post in October, 1940: ‘I’m going back and tell the truth. I’m going home and tell the American people that that son of a bitch in the White House is going to kill their sons.’

"When Kennedy got back from England, he had two private meetings with Roosevelt, according to Hersh. The first was at the White House, the very day Kennedy arrived in the U.S. The second one took place during Thanksgiving at the Roosevelt estate in Hyde Park. It was after this second meeting, which lasted ten minutes, that the President had Joe Kennedy ejected from the house.

"Whatever my have transpired at these meetings, Kennedy did not alter Roosevelt's determination to railroad America into the war in Europe. And neither did Roosevelt change Kennedy's resolve to stop it. The two titans represented the opposite camps which divided the country.

"Francis Neilson in his diary, The Tragedy of Europe, makes note of a radio address by Kennedy a few months later, on January 22, 1941: 'England is not fighting our battle. This is not our war. We were not consulted when it began. We had no veto power over its continuance... If I am called an appeaser because I oppose the entrance of this country into the present war, I cheerfully plead guilty. So must everyone of you who wants to keep America out of war.'"

Seizing upon the phony issue of Danzig and the arbitrary border between Poland and Germany, dictated capriciously in 1919 at Versailles, FDR conspired with Churchill to instigate the outbreak of another fratricidal European war in 1939. They succeeded in pushing Neville Chamberlain and France into a declaration of war against Germany in September. But afterwards, thanks to people like Joe Kennedy, Colonel Charles Lindbergh, and the average American such as my relative above, FDR could not get America into the very war he had been so eager to promote. He was stymied.

At the end of the day, FDR resorted to treason and the “back door to war”--namely, Japan and the Far East. This stratagem rescued Churchill, Stalin and himself. From the outset, in addition to megalomania, the prime motivation for FDR's foreign policy was to use war to end the Great Depression, thereby saving his presidency. It worked. Please be advised, however, in case you have been misinformed, that there was never any clear and present danger to America from Germany, Japan or Italy. Similarly in recent times, there was no danger from Iraq. Americans know that now, only after the fact; it must be pointed out that they were repeatedly warned beforehand in both instances.

*

Roosevelt faced a conventional war against established nation-states which could be defeated and would surrender unconditionally. The situation was challenging but straightforward. Today's conflict is a different story. It is open-ended. That is a problem. Unwise and misguided officials in Washington have involved America in counterproductive, asymmetric wars not involving nation-states. There would seem to be little prospect of surrender from multiple enemies whom Washington and Tel Aviv have created.  The "Islamists" or "Insurgents" or "Terrorists" can reproduce themselves indefinitely in various venues, including inside Europe, and many are happy to die for their cause. 

Note that this was true even for Iraq, which was a nation-state, but whose government did not surrender. No surrender was asked for or offered. Washington simply installed a Shi’ite satrapy in Baghdad, and let the chaotic situation inside Iraq slide from there. Insurgency and terrorism followed. We are suppose to believe that this development was by accident or due to incompetence, and not by insidious design of the so-called "neocons" who orchestrated the invasion of Iraq in the first place. Who knows? In November of 2003 for TomDispach.com, I touched upon the significance of Iraq's non-surrender and the bizarreness of the whole enterprise:

"Since there is no legal basis for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, one might think a withdrawal would be easier. But the opposite may be true. Remember, there was no surrender signed by the Saddam regime or his generals--like with Germany and Japan in WWII--and hence no transfer of power. Since there are no WMD and Bush has admitted that Iraq was not involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack upon the United States, there was no threat to the national security of the United States posed by this third world country whose infrastructure and civilian population had been decimated by sanctions throughout the Clinton Administration and whose armed forces had been reduced by 2/3rds since the attempted annexation of Kuwait.

"Therefore, the stated premise for the Bush Administration's attack upon Iraq was false. In addition, there was no declaration of war by the Congress or authorization by the UN Security Council to attack. This was strictly a Presidential war. Offhand, I would say reparations are in order for the damage done to the targeted country. But no American president wants to admit that his administration was wrong or has lied. I can't think of any who ever did with respect to foreign policy....

"The bottom line for undertaking this adventure was the perception by the Bush inner circle that it could be easily done, easily gotten away with, and that it would be good politics for 2004--a continuation of the "patriotism card" which suckered-punched the Democrats in the 2002 midterm elections. It has not worked out that way. If it had, a very significant withdrawal would be in the cards prior to November 2004. But now Bush is stuck with a failed policy based on false premises, which policy is blowing up in his face. To withdraw pre-November 2004 would be to admit failure. For political reasons, Bush can't do that. He has got to maintain multiple fictions, just like LBJ did. Any withdrawal pre or post November 2004 will be followed by a civil war. Mission accomplished. In fact, a civil war could get underway during the American occupation itself...."

The consequences of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and the more general "global war on terror" have not been positive for the American economy. Similarly, the consequences of LBJ's foray into Vietnam were terrible, on and off the battlefield. It led to almost a decade of stagflation and recession. So I am wondering, when Obama and the Democrats run out of economic stimulus bills to pass, what next? There is no conventional war on the horizon to provide further artificial stimulus. 

Obama's plan to escalate the conflict in Afghanistan is more of the same, only worse. It will be a waste of blood and treasure, a pointless diversion and distraction no matter what. An ongoing guerilla war in Afghanistan, like what Moscow confronted in the 1980's, will become (if it has not already become) a bankrupting agent of "change"--the sort of change America does not need. It will not be the engine bringing the U.S. out of an economic slump like what FDR achieved with World War II. 

In short, there appears to be no escape from the meretricious world of domestic politics or from the hammer-lock of the "Israel Lobby"--the partnership that dominates Washington and drives American foreign policy today. The U.S. Treasury is already insolvent thanks in large part to bipartisan triumphalism and adventurism in the aftermath of the Cold War. Washington now faces trillions of dollars in annual deficits to the horizon.

III

This might be a good place to pause and relate my encounter with the late Senator George Smathers on the topic of Ambassador Joe Kennedy. One has to wonder how things might have turned out if JPK had returned from London and challenged Roosevelt for the Democratic nomination in 1940. He thought about it. He may have won it by exposing Roosevelt's machinations with Churchill and others in London, Paris and Moscow to drag America into war. The country was still in a depression, and JPK could have put forth some new ideas, besides socialism and war, that may have appealed to the electorate. 

I talked to Senator Smathers around 2002 at a snack bar on a Miami golf course. He had given up golf by then; we were there to have lunch. He always called me "champ" due to my colorful, inflated reputation on the tennis court and because he was a gentleman and a former Marine. 

He and his brother owned banks and orange groves. He was a groomsman at JFK's wedding to Jackie in Newport in 1953, was JFK's best friend in the Senate, and managed Kennedy's presidential campaign in Florida in 1960. The revelations in the Hersh book made me bring up the topic. Smathers said Joe Kennedy was the most remarkable person he had ever known.

He related an incident after the election but prior to the inauguration when he was with JFK in Palm Beach at the big oceanfront Kennedy estate. He and Jack were at one end of the pool, and Joe Kennedy was down at the other end, out of ear-shot, reading the morning newspapers. 

Jack had a problem. He loved his younger brother Bobby, who had been his national campaign manager, but felt that Bobby may not have possessed sufficient experience to be the next U.S. Attorney General. His father disagreed. Joe wanted Bobby to be Attorney General. Jack shared his private thoughts with his good friend Smathers. The senior Senator from Florida was concerned, and suggested they needed to have a talk with Joe, the sooner the better. 

Reluctantly, like two school boys, they walked to the other end of the pool. They sat down. The patriarch looked up from behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. The President-elect expressed his misgivings, while Senator George Smathers made suggestions about what other Washington appointment might be more suitable for Bobby. Jack and George were acting as reasonable as could be. 

When they had finished, private citizen Joe Kennedy set his newspaper aside for a moment, and said "Now listen to me, Jack, your brother Bobby has worked his heart out for you in the campaign from one end of the country to the next, and he deserves to be Attorney General. He's earned it, and he is going to get it. Understood?" 

The senior Senator from Florida and the President-elect rose from the table and quietly walked back to the other end of the pool. In the following year, at the age of 73, Joe Kennedy, a teetotaler and non-smoker, suffered a stroke which left him speechless. He was confined to a wheelchair. He had no further impact upon the body politic of America. This was most unfortunate.

For one thing, if JPK had not been incapacitated, he would have continued to advise his son. We may assume that, if JFK had not been assassinated, the U.S. would not have become involved in a land war in Asia, which Douglas MacArthur had repeatedly warned against upon his return from Korea. Joe Kennedy would have stopped the Vietnam war in its tracks before it started, just like he tried to stop World War II.