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Man, what a windfall for Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater,
and other death merchants and war profiteers. Newt
Gingrich believes the “Long War with the Irreconcilable Wing
of Islam” (no kidding, this is what the Straussian neocons now call their
mass murdering criminal behavior, formerly known as the war on terrorism) will
“last as long as 70 years.” Gingrich is the former Speaker of the
House, neck deep in the Straussian and neolib mire—he is both a senior
fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where Bush gets his “minds,”
and also plays footsies over at the Council on Foreign Relations.
It is interesting to note Gingrich name-drops the late George Kennan, considered
the intellectual force behind the so-called Cold War (another long term scam
devised to enrich the death merchants their and associated industrial stockholders).
Gingrich mentions Kennan’s “Long Telegram,” a response to
the Soviet Union’s refusal to go prone before the World Bank and the IMF,
two newly conceived institutions of the emerging neoliberal order in the late
40s.
Kennan’s telegram, also called the “X Article,” eventually
shaped NSC-68 (the National Security Act), Truman’s official roll-out
of the national security state and permanent war economy as devised by Paul
Nitze, an oh-so profitable arrangement for the death merchants. Gingrich hankers
for a newly minted NSC-68, a “compelling explanation of the Long War,
the theory on how to win it, and the strategy and structures which that victory
will require.”
Officially formulizing a new NSC-68 will most assuredly require a few adjustments
on the part of the American people, who are naturally squeamish and reluctant
when it comes to generational war, as they are the ones to pay the bill and
donate the lives of their sons, daughters, mothers and fathers.
However, if we really want to know what Gingrich and the Straussian neocons
have in mind, it pays to get to the bottom of Kennan’s political philosophy.
For instance, consider the following Kennan quote from the days when he was
the head of a State Department planning committee:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population….We
cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the
coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national
security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming,
and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate
national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today
the luxury of altruism and world benefaction.
In other words, the Pentagon death machine will inflict high-tech misery and
enforce bone-grinding poverty on most of the world over the next 70 or so years,
and the American people “will have to dispense with all sentimentality
and daydreaming” and concentrate of slaughtering official enemies, beginning
with the Muslims and suicidally ending with the Chinese and Russians (who happen
to have a whole lot of nukes). It will take a populace that responds like an
army of automatons, but what the heck—the Straussian neocons believe they
can accomplish this if they successfully whip up enough fear and mix up the
requisite amount of irrational xenophobia over the next fifty or sixty years.
It is a certain recipe for cataclysmic disaster—but then Leo Strauss
was a demented nihilist who warped Plato’s teachings and had Carl Schmitt,
a Nazi jurist and philosopher of dictatorship, as a mentor, so we can expect
things to turn out badly in the end, probably not a whole lot different than
things turned out for the German people after their infatuation with Hitler
came to a violent and bitter end.
Of course, there is one big difference—Hitler didn’t have nukes.
