What
You're Missing in our subscriber-only CounterPunch newsletter
CHINA'S GREAT LEAP BACKWARDS
Peter Kwong
gives us the "New China" without illusions: from the
"millionaires' fair" in Shanghai, with $60,000 diamond-studded dog leashes
to one
of the most savagely repressed working class and peasantry on
the planet. How China's
leaders swapped Marx and Mao for Milton Friedman. Alexander Cockburn
on What's wrong with the U.S. left.
They're sitting in darkened rooms weaving conspiracy fantasies
about 9/11; they're blogging; they're confusing a medium with
a movement; they're not doing enough to stop the war in Iraq.
John Ross
takes us along the stormy trail of the Mexican election. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers
each month! But
remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the
print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription
to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find
anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions
are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now!
There is of course no danger of a Kim
Jong Il-starred missile ever grazing so much as a Pentagon radar's
anxieties: North Korea is a nation where even ants starve and
technology runs on the digestive clockwork of oxen. Its ability
to fire off an ICBM that could do more than kill a few hapless
fish in the Sea of Japan is somewhere between one-in-a-million
and the Hubble Deep Field (though its ability to turn patches
of South Korea into a deep field of its own is less in doubt).
But if Bush could turn al-Qaeda's posse of spectacular fanatics
and conventional imbeciles into a threat on par with Nazi Germany,
and if his administration could turn Saddam into the greatest
evil since Stalin, then surely his Cheney-trained handmaids can
spin a tale of North Korean missiles threatening everything from
the Golden Gate to Aunt Bethel's collection of souvenir spoons
in Miami Beach. And if they can do that, as they have, then North
Korea can be a running advocacy campaign for Bush's version of
Star Wars--his "missile defense" initiative currently
devouring $10 billion a year to go with the $150 billion spent
on the blanched elephant since Ronald Reagan concocted it in
March 1983. Sure enough, on Friday Bush was all engorged for
his missiles: "It's been three days since North Korea fired
those missiles," a reporter asked him in Chicago. "Yesterday
you said you did not know the trajectory of the long-range missile.
Can you now tell us where was it was headed? And if it were headed?
And if it were headed--if it had been headed at the United States,
how would our national ballistic missile system have taken it
down?"
Bush's response was at first
jocular, because he's a great kidder, because ICBMs are a hoot,
and because, gosh darn it, people like him that way: "I
still can't give you any better answer than yesterday. I can
embellish yesterday's answer. It may sound better. No, really,
I haven't talked to the Secretary of Defense about that."
Then he got somewhat serious, and as always when he does, his
answer took on the meandering surface-to-crash trajectory of
a North Korean missile (with a golf metaphor as subtitles): "Our
missile systems are modest, our anti-ballistic missile systems
are modest. They're new. It's new research. We've gotten--testing
them. And so I can't--it's hard for me to give you a probability
of success. But, nevertheless, the fact that a nontransparent
society would be willing to tee up a rocket and fire it without
identifying where it's going or what was on it means we need
a ballistic missile system. So that's about all I can tell y!
ou on t hat. Obviously , it wasn't a satisfactory answer."
Obviously. But he was asked
about an intercept. Bush, knowing a headline when he sees one,
teed off with his own Kim Jong Il moment: "Yes, I think
we had a reasonable chance of shooting it down. At least that's
what the military commanders told me."
Bush and his commanders are
using the same logic of "reasonable chances" that they
do when they turn miserable missile-test failures into successes.
This from a New York times account on December 18, 2002: "A
week ago over the Pacific, in the latest $100 million test of
the nation's prototype antimissile system, an interceptor warhead
failed to separate from its booster rocket. It missed its intended
target by hundreds of miles and burned up in the atmosphere,
while the mock enemy warhead it was meant to destroy zoomed along
unscathed. A resounding failure? Not according to the Pentagon.
In its new assessment process, the tests that really count are
those in which the warhead makes it past the booster-rocket stage
to what Pentagon experts call "the endgame": trying
to find, home in ! on, and hit a mock warhead. The new logic
ignores tests that fail in the earlier, less challenging stages--like
the one on Dec. 11, t he third in eight tests of the long-range
system since 1999, according to the Pentagon. Private experts
say the new logic helped clear the way for President Bush's announcement
yesterday that the missile interceptors would be deployed in
Alaska and California. But critics say that not taking account
of early-stage test failures is like wiping the slate clean of
laggards in footraces or political contests. By the new logic,
the races acknowledge only winners and runners-up."
But they've had a few more
years to work on the elephant, you say? This from a Washington
Post story in December 2004: "The Bush administration's
effort to build a system for defending the country against ballistic
missile attack suffered an embarrassing setback yesterday when
an interceptor missile failed to launch during the first flight
test of the system in two years." Here's one from the Washington
Post story last year: "For the second time in as many months,
the Bush administration's new missile defense system failed to
complete a key test yesterday, automa! tically shutting down
a few seconds before an interceptor missile was to launch toward
a mock enemy warhead." March 2005: "The general in
c harge of the Pentagon's faltering effort t o develop a system
for defending the United States against ballistic missile attack
said yesterday that he has ordered a thorough review of all ground
equipment used in testing and appointed a senior Navy officer
to oversee future test preparations." And here's what these
missile-interceptors do shoot down (this from the Post,
December 2004): "A military investigation has concluded
that a friendly fire' incident in which! a Navy pilot was shot
down and killed by U.S. forces during the spring 2003 invasion
of Iraq occurred because operators at two Patriot missile batteries
and a command center all mistakenly took his F/A-18 Hornet for
an incoming Iraqi missile, the U.S. Central Command said last
night."
Of course Bush is rejecting
talks with North Korea. Why bother? To the delight of military
contractors, he's playing Kim Jung Il perfectly. Another source
of endless fear to stoke, another conveniently unprovable stash
of supposedly deadly evidence, another vindication for seeing
the world as an evil ax to grind. We had it coming. The war in
Iraq is lost. Afghanistan is being lost. We needed a new front,
cost-free (Bush wouldn't dream of tempting Kim to fire off a
missile or two south of the 38 th parallel, so it's purely a
war of words and images, not costly comb! at). Ri ng up those
contractors. They have one hell of a Christmas bonus coming their
way.
Pierre Tristam is a columnist and editorial writer
at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, and editor of Candide's
Notebooks, a Web site. Reach him at ptristam@att.net.
Now
Available
from CounterPunch Books!
The Case
Against Israel
By Michael Neumann
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
