This is NEW and TIMELY UPDATED and ENLARGED essay contains material previously posted under titles of coup d'etat, paper tiger, fiery dragon...
Andre, I have taken the liberty of putting your article on the Marxism list website: http://www.marxmail.org/agfrank.htm
It is too long to send out directly but since Marxmail and Pen-L have been discussing the role of oil in the world economy today, I am sure that there will be interest in your article, whose lead paragraphs appear directly below:
COUP d’ ETAT AND PAPER TIGER IN WASHINGTON FIERY DRAGON IN THE PACIFIC
by Andre Gunder Frank
Recent events in Iraq that require no further elucidation here make this essay now more timely than when it was written. For this essay is a combination of two: First, the coup one on the illegitimacy of the Bush government and the long standing agenda of the Cheney group who has made another coup within the Bush coup. Secondly there follows the paper tiger one about the underlying Achilles heels vulnerability of American power that rests only on the paper dollar and the military Pentagon. Vice President Gore’s major speech damning the policy of the Bush administration and calling the President himself incompetent, as he surely is, nonetheless judiciously avoided any direct mention of its and his illegitimacy. It was derived from a veritable coup d’ etat, not in having lost the popular vote, but first in having also lost the vote in the key state of Florida and “won” it through fraud and violence. And then they violated the fourteenth amendment of due process through the stacked vote in the Supreme Court and its refusal to let anybody abide by due process. Moreover, not only did Dick Cheney manage the entire transition to and construction of the Bush administration, but as Vice President he has continued to run the President’s show from behind the scenes. That is so much so that after their joint three hour testimony to Congress about their Iraqi malfeasance, the NEW YORK TIMES was moved to editorialize that it made evident that the President is no more than a puppet managed by the Vice-President. And as we know and the coup part of this essay further documents, the Vice-President himself was captured and molded to its own ends of long standing by a team of PNAC – Program for a New American Century – maniacal adventurers, led by “Wolfowitz of Arabia.”
This illegitimacy of the President’s and his administration’s inauguration now takes on enormous further significance with the revelations that after having lied to the electorate, they have continued to lie and even more so to the American and the world public about the State of the Nation and that of the world and about their policies in them. Documentation is overwhelming, but not even the tip of the iceberg is yet emerging in the Congressional inquiry, that the Administration and President Bush himself have consistently lied and covered up about September 11, 2001. They have lied about security and have deliberately weakened it and have themselves terrorized the American public, not to mention having torn the Bill of Rights to shreds and otherwise having violated the Constitution, and by sending the machine gun toting National Guard into every airport in the country, they are every day violating the Posse Comitatus Act that prohibits military participation in domestic civilian affairs that has stood since 1878 as well as more recent law prohibiting the CIA from doing so as well. All this only to scare the public and Congress into accepting their unconstitutional Patriot Acts and other measures from the agenda of a small right minority. And of course they have perpetrated monstrous lies about their war against Afghanistan and now against Iraq. Thus, an illegitimate president who promised an education presidency of gentle conservatism has instead taken the most radical departure of militarizing American society at home, privatizing the US. Military abroad, and antagonizing the rest of the world by his unilateral militarism and anti-environmentalism, not to mention their befuddled ‘’justification.” His and his government’s verbal denunciation combined with de facto generation and sponsorship of terrorism is wearing thin and has totally irresponsibly led them and us into a Catch 22 damned if you do, damned if you don’t debacle.
The one in Iraq demonstrates one of several underlying vulnerabilities of American reliance on the Pentagon. As this essay argues, this military Achilles heel also further weakens the other one, which is based on the paper tiger dollar. That has declined in value against the Euro and the Yen since I first wrote about this threat and how it in turn would weaken the Pentagon that must be financed by devalued dollars, especially in its increasing ventures abroad. At the same time, while the revelations and soul searching about American torture in Iraq – and now we know long since also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo - The US occupation in Iraq is proceeding unobserved and unbathered with its major agenda there: OIL and the economy. The Cheney sponsored oil pipeline through Afghanistan that the Taliban was supposed to but was unable to guarantee, thus converting it from friend to enemy , is now in the hands of the new American appointed government. In Iraq it is yet difficult to tell WHAT the US occupation is doing – nobody even bather to look beyond the torture any more - about the oil and the economy, other than that they are being privatized and sold off at bargain basement prices to big American companies, with Vice President Cheney’s Haliburton in the lead. He still derives income from it, although his super-hawk friend Victor Perle resigned his high Defense Dept position so that his conflict of interest would ‘’not hurt the President’s re-election chances.’’ Meanwhile President Bush himself defends giving a near monopoly of contracts for ‘’re-building Iraq’’ to US near monopolies on the grounds that ‘’WE’’ put our lives on the line and so are we legitimately entitled to the economic rewards there from. That would surely be good news to the GI’s, reservists, and privately employed but Pentagon contracted mercenaries who went to Iraq predominantly from poor rural America because the military offered their only option if that is really an offer for them now to join Cheney on the board of Halliburton.
But more important , with the region’s second largest oil deposits in Iraq , what is the US really doing there on the world oil market and its efforts to control or break OPEC? One thing is sure, and the oil section of the paper tiger paperpart of this essay speaks to this issue of the greatest world importance, Iraqi oil is again being priced in US dollars and no longer in Euros as under the dreadful Saddam Hussein.
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