(UPDATED BELOW)

A fresh dispatch from the imperial satrapy of Bactria brings word that the Pentagon has ended the eyeblink-brief "suspension" of one of its super-duper missile systems following the "unfortunate" slaughter of 12 civilians, including five children, in the opening hours of the all-out media blitz -- sorry, the "largest military operation of the Afghan war" -- now being inflicted on the city of Marja.

As you'll recall, after this initial child sacrifice to waft the pleasing smell of innocent blood to great Ares, that he might smile upon the bold Achaeans in their martial endeavor, mighty Agamemnon himself -- now robed in the flesh of General Stanley "Black Ops" McChrystal -- stepped forth before the cameras, and with great show of crocodilian regret, declared that the "errant" missile system would be withdrawn from battle forthwith, until such time as it could be determined why it killed all those civilians and, worst of all, gummed up the glowing press which the Pentagon had painstakingly cultivated during the run-up to the attack.

But as the ever-astute Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com notes, the Pentagon concluded its in-depth investigation of the incident in a matter of hours. What's more, the brass found that not only was there no error whatsoever in the hi-tech death-hurling technology, but also that the whole incident was actually the result of the heroic efforts of a clean-limbed young Leatherneck to save the cowering civilians in his tender care.

Yes, that's right. The Pentagon's story now is that it killed 12 civilians in order to save civilians. As Reuters reports:

"We know now that the missile arrived at the target it was supposed to arrive at. It wasn't a rogue missile. There was no technical fault in it," [Major General Nick Carter, the British commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan] told reporters ...  A young U.S. Marine Corps officer in charge in the area where the rockets were fired was protecting a number of civilians behind his positions, Carter said.

And so he called in the missile strike on the house, because, as another occupation spokesman put it: "It is not unusual for the insurgents to operate in compounds where there are civilians sheltering."

So you kill civilians in order to protect civilians. And every civilian is a potential enemy who might harm civilians -- so you kill them. (Three more civilians in Marja were shot down just yesterday.) Every house is a potential nest of no-goodniks -- and thus a legitimate target for destruction.

And if it turns out that you kill a whole houseful of civilians -- if it turns out you take five children and shatter their skulls, spill their viscera from gaping holes torn across their bellies, and crush their small, undefended bodies beneath rubble and stone -- why, that's OK. Because all that matters is that the weapon functioned in the way it was intended to function. The rules of engagement were followed to the letter. Everything happened as it was supposed to happen.

The five children died because they were supposed to die. The system worked. 

This point seems difficult for some to grasp. Oh, how terrible, they say, when these "mistakes" are made! Oh, how these "unfortunate tragedies" detract from the altruistic intentions of our young, progressive president and his humanitarian war machine! Oh, isn't it such a shame when things go wrong!

But nothing is going wrong. When you read of children lying in a broken heap, their lifeblood draining away into dark, coagulated pools -- that means the system is functioning properly. That's what the system does. That is what it is there to do: to kill, destroy and dominate. That's why we have installed the system in Afghanistan.

II.
And what is the ultimate goal of this system, the purpose of the killing, destroying and dominating?

Profits.

As Frida Berrigan at TomDispatch points out, the United States now owns a virtual monopoly in the ever-burgeoning world market for weapons of death. And under its young, progressive president, Barack Obama, the government is relentlessly pushing to strip away the few remaining fig leaves of regulation hindering this immensely destructive but staggeringly profitable business:

As Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell explained in January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates wants to see "wholesale changes to the rules and regulations on government technology exports" in the name of "competitiveness."

When he says "government technology exports," Morell of course means weapons and other military technologies. "Tinkering with our antiquated, bureaucratic, overly cumbersome system is not enough to maintain our competitiveness in the global economy and also help our friends and allies buy the equipment they need to contribute to global security," he continued, "[Gates] strongly supports the administration’s efforts to completely reform our export control regime, starting ideally with a blank sheet of paper."

... In addition to revising these export controls, the administration is looking at the issue of "dual-use" technologies. These are not weapons. They do not shoot or explode. Included are high-speed computer processors, surveillance and detection networks, and a host of other complex and evolving technologies that could have military as well as civilian applications. This category might also include intangible items like cyber-entities or access to controlled web environments.

This is the world that the Obama Administration is pushing hard to create: a hellish global dystopia of bristling, bloated military-dominated regimes wielding ever-greater control over their populations with ever-more intrusive "security" technology. It is the world described in the nightmare vision voiced, as a warning, by Dwight Eisenhower more than half a century ago:

[A] life of perpetual fear and tension; a burden of arms draining the wealth and the labor of all peoples; a wasting of strength that defies the American system or the Soviet system or any system to achieve true abundance and happiness for the peoples of this earth.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms in not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children ... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Now that nightmare has become the happy dream of our progressive government. Where Eisenhower, the top general in history's most destructive war, saw that the weapons business was a monstrous waste, an outright theft of the lives, blood, treasure and opportunity of all humankind, Obama and his handpicked Bush holdover Gates see it as a noble enterprise that actually "contributes to global security"! They are not concerned -- even rhetorically -- about the hungry being robbed of food and the cold being stripped of clothing. No, their focus is on "maintaining our competitiveness in the global economy" -- "competitiveness" in a business where, as Berrigan notes, the United States already controls almost 70 percent of the global market.

So that's why no super-duper hi-tech death technology is going to be pulled from the order of battle in Afghanistan for longer than a single news cycle, just long enough to offset the bad headlines that a slaughter of civilians will momentarily produce. These death technologies cost too much money -- and, more importantly, make too much money -- to be set aside for any reason.

Berrigan notes the naked profit motive underlying Obama's grand strategy of "Afghanistanization" -- i.e., building up the military and security forces of the American-implanted Afghan government. As in Iraq, the aim is not so much "nation building" as "market building": setting up yet another conduit to pass American taxpayer money directly to weapons dealers:

"What’s Hot?" is the title of Vice Adm. Jeffrey Wieranga’s blog entry for Jan. 4, 2010. Wieranga is the director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which is charged with overseeing weapons exports, and such pillow talk is evidently more than acceptable – at least when it’s about weapons sales. In fact, Wieranga could barely restrain himself that day, adding: "Afghanistan is really HOT!" Admittedly, on that day the temperature in Kabul was just above freezing, but not at the Pentagon, where arms sales to Afghanistan evidently create a lot of heat.

As Wieranga went on to write, the Obama administration’s new 2010/2011 budget allocates $6 billion in weaponry for Afghan Security Forces. The Afghans will actually get those weapons for free, but U.S. weapons makers will make real money delivering them at taxpayers’ expense and, as the vice admiral pointed out, that "means there is a staggering amount of acquisition work to do."

You ain't just whistlin' Dixie, Vice Admiral. There will be "acquisition work" out the wazoo as the war goes on -- for decades afterward. But of course, these "free" arms sales are just like the samplings that pushers pass around outside the high school gates. Because once the mark is hooked, once the native military and security forces are thoroughly entrenched, they will need constant replenishment with more weapons, new technologies, and more lucrative "training" from American sources, both public and private. This in turn will leave the client state saddled with crippling public debt -- necessitating the usual "shock therapy" of "economic reform," i.e., shredding "inefficient" social programs -- like, education, sanitation, health care, etc. -- and turning the material wealth and natural resources of the country over to a few select private investors, foreign and domestic.

This treatment is not just for client states anymore, by the way. As Michael Hudson points out at CounterPunch, the American people themselves are beginning to get this full treatment. With their economy, communities and social fabric being devoured by a bloated military establishment and voracious elites, the American people are now being told -- by these same voracious elites -- that they must address the "deficit crisis" by giving up their meager "entitlements" and accepting a vastly diminished and degraded way of life ... even as their young, progressive president continues to expand the bloated military establishment in all directions.

But again, this is what the system is intended to do. Like the missile launcher that stole the lives of five children in Marja, the whole militarist-corporatist system is functioning properly in nailing humanity on a cross of iron, diminishing and degrading life all around the world -- for money, for power and profit, for the power and profit of a tiny sliver of privileged elites, so they can strut and preen and gorge themselves in comfort, for a brief time, before they too, like all the rest of us, go down howling into darkness.

That is what it comes to. That is what the system is for. That is what the war is about. That is why the children died. That is why more will die tomorrow.

And that is why your own children's lives -- their opportunities, their hopes, their possibilities for a peaceful, secure, productive, fulfilling life -- are being systematically constricted and degraded before your eyes.

There is no dysfunction in all of this. As we noted here not long ago, quoting Alex Cox: The Purpose of a System is What It Does. 

UPDATE: Michael Hudson has more on the glowing future (as in the red glow of smoking ruins) that the system has planned for us, in this new Counterpunch piece.

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Comments (12)

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Art James, bebop-o, GoodCelery! said:

Canoe? Last night in DC, I hocked the contraption. I bought a holy canoe. Please send a photo. Ya self-portrait? A black and red photo too? I was gonna paddle to see you with a bagel. If I visit you Ya can have the holy canoe too. Wrinkle up. Plug ups the sinking pink canoe. gads Visit DC and pickup a flat chested bomber. If you can swim Ya can do cannonball flop. The Pentagon Pillars Of Death Thank Chris. Splash in thee polluted Potomac and weep. Legends `round here say Pocahontas weep. She drowned in the Potomac River. smoke? No smoke Kool. Winston? Marlboro? cigar. Ask Paul "Hank" Paulson? He paddle? butt.

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February 17, 2010
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Ed said:

The "System" IS the Problem Yes, "The Purpose of a System is What It Does." And the Corporatist-Militarist United States of Arrogance has one purpose: domination for profit. Systemic change is necessary for our threatened species to have a chance at survival. But how can that even begin, with the system so corrupted and controlled by the ruling class sociopaths? Who has clear ideas about specific steps we common citizens can take to start to dismantle this pathological system?

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February 17, 2010
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mandt said:

	... Who Knew? Lady Liberty is actually Medea....
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February 17, 2010 | url
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Harpfool said:

	... "The system" is a cancer and it has metastasized. Ask any surgeon about the possibility of dismantling that.
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February 17, 2010
Votes: +3

scott douglas said:

... Dr. Pillar, linked at Antiwar.com, points out that the current US policy-track is trending head-on towards war with Iran. Mr. Buchanan, that Very Savvy, nut-so Nixonite (Oh, Ye Gods! There was a Moderate!) enabler, sounds the same warning klaxon. There is NO awareness amongst the populace that the Establishment is heading recklessly towards War with Iran. The Congress has already declared war upon Iran, effectively. Declaring an embargo of refined petroleum products is an act of war. (Check-out: 'Japan, WWII, Why?') War is imminent. It will be initialized by a crazy-ass Israeli air-strike against supposed Iranian nuclear energy research sites. I have to wonder if a dramatic event which results in further massive economic dislocation - on top of the current depression - will awaken the masses to the game? Will you drop your personal concerns and go into the street when they commence an unprovoked war with a major regional power? This will not be humanitarian peacekeeping. This will not be revenge or housecleaning. This will be War with a nation far less guilty of any offense against the West than Saddam's Iraq - and far more able to resist. I wonder what I, myself, will do... I am leaning towards open civil disobedience, regardless of the result. I admit that I contemplate open defiance only because I am not now in a viable economic situation. But, I am wondering if that is not a blessing in disguise? Can't council the successful. But I hope you will come into the street with me if they take this one bridge too far... Fuck Afghanistan, right? Yeah. Always gotta put off that 'last straw event' till the next outrage...

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February 17, 2010
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jsf said:

One more Bridge? The plaintive question remains after each description of perfidy: What should we do? What can be done? The question must be answered. Why harness the truth and then just leave it there, reins slack, no forward motion? There is a great history to this antiwar knowledge, this awareness of imperial aggression. And yet why over and over, the bombers, the invasions, the trillions now in budgetary waste of killing millions of others? Because we, the common citizens, are not in power, and never were in power. We put no bullets in the chamber, dropped no payloads, massacred no one. Yes, the military with our national affiliation did so, with our tax money, but we are in a supersystem with no effective choice over any of it. The usual answers of righteous opposition from the libertarians, the leftists, the liberals, always place the onus on the individual, as if he or she was the killer, he or she the war-dealing bureaucrat. It's always a religious exhortation to the individual for he or she to become the victim, the sacrificial lamb, or the martyr. You, the lowly malcontent, are the true perpetrator, and you must cleanse the world, must become the great leader for eternal peace, or else you must be ignored, fall in line, feel nothing but guilt, be dutiful and abject. We are enmeshed in terrible, powerful systems. All this importuning to be the change, fight the power, declare yourself sovereign, march in the free speech Taser ready zones run into the reality of the institutions guiding the imperial war machine - the craven politics, the paycheck commands, the ability to chase happy entertainments, the cheap oil and massive corruption that underlies all of our social reality. If as unlikely a figure as the bone-headed general of pre-computer age USA is to be trotted out as our prophet of resistance, we are more than doomed - we are deluding ourselves that this is in our anonymous hands to change. The Obama con should have shown us all that scammers come in all varieties of power madness, but just try saying that in polite company. A mind should not be wasted on pathetic optimism or vitriolic denunciations of expressions that do not conform to established prejudices - which is why this view of the self-ennoblement tendency offends so many. Oh, by the way - kind of strange for me, an anti-Dylan dude, to say this, but CF's music is damn good - very well done.

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February 17, 2010
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scott douglas said:

... As I suggested in comments here a few weeks ago, the Abolitionist movement brought an end to slavery in the West. That is the consensus of current scholarship on the issue: slavery was still highly profitable when social pressure forced it's demise. What forced the British out of India? What forced the reform of civil rights in the United States in the 1960's? Go tell Louis' head in the basket that the people are helpless pawns. February 15-16, 2003: How many people hit the streets to signal their resistance to the upcoming war-crime against Iraq? 6 millions? 10 millions? 30 millions? That consciousness has not evaporated. In some quarters of that population, I believe it has hardened. I believe it has educated itself not to the hopelessness of the task at hand but to the ugly, cold realities of the workings of the machine it sought to oppose. Mr Floyd has played no small part in posing the questions to that active segment of the public mind that have helped mightily to focus the lens. And for the millions of others? That we did not in fact live in real, social democracies here in the Anglosphere was not obvious before this current slide into destruction began. Despite the 18 month blip of Obama-mania, that reality is now the sleepwalking giant. An incontrovertible axiom on the edge of consciousness. Is there a shout of Eureka! somewhere in a lost dream about to be remembered? Somewhere, near at hand, I hear a very large window breaking. Much of the social anxiety I observe all around me every day is a sure reaction to that perception, growing like a great invisible sun, irresistible, pushing it's way from some foreign dimension into the collective mind's eye of the public. That the System is utterly corrupt, some may have known for decades. To the millions who attempted to forestall the open fascism announced by the inauguration of the Middle Eastern Wars, the Truth will have a shockingly tangy sharp-edged novelty to it, like the sudden onset of gout. That sleepwalking giant is about to trip over Iran. I feel 1914 in the air... So, tell me, friend, that nothing can be done. But something will be done. In fact, I don't think anything can now stop it being done. The powers will have their war. The people will put an end to it.

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February 18, 2010
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john kelley said:

... "What can I do?" Other than agonizing over the question, I really don't think that there is anything you can do. Americans have lived far too long in the image of Madison Avenue, forsaking for far too long fundamental democratic principles like universal health care, a liveable minimum wage, an accountable social contract with their public servants. They have yawned at illegal wars abroad. The pharmaceuticals, the infotainment, the poisoned food chain, etc. have fostered enormous indifference. The powers that be have had their way. But they are cannibalizing themselves. You can prepare yourself for the coming economic shitstorm. I suppose when conditions get adverse enough you will hook up with who you can. Perhaps this will be the birth of a new cooperative era. I, too, have the nightmare/dream that a war with Iran will be the last one. Yeah, right. If you want to be a real revolutionary go join the real freedom fighters in Afghanistan. If you can't stomach the violence move to Iceland and support the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). They just might be on the cusp of some real change we can believe in.

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February 18, 2010
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scott douglas said:

Never the less, Mr. Allnut: Never. The. Less. I am aware that my pseudo-schizophrenia discredits my point of view with the ultra-rationalist smart enough to check this blog. But I endure the quiet contempt from all the lettered doctors happening upon my puerile temperolimbic ravings because I am confident that my madness only augments my view; it doesn't determine it. I will be glad to contest, on mutually verifiable, materially evidential grounds, any notion of what the immediate future holds. I only suggest that my artistic perspective quite properly challenges the self-defeating surrender of certain educated elements which should be leading the coming change instead of curling up and watching events go by without any action -- even if that action can be construed as moral, ethical, non-violent, and humanly sound.

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February 18, 2010
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john kelley said:

	Joe Stack, R.I.P. Scott Douglas, We are all screaming against hurricane force winds. Personally, I feel no contempt for anyone's "puerile temperolimbic ravings" against this monster. Quite the opposite. But watch the misguided, unfounded innuendoes...if you have some really bitchin' proactive agenda to save the world, well, spit it out. I, for one, am all ears.
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February 19, 2010
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scott douglas said:

... Dear John: Those are 'put up or shut up' kinna words. Can't contest the reality, honestly. It's the notion that there is no possibility of a communal social agenda that might defy this drift that sparks and offends me. I don't claim to have a concrete answer, but I am sure that despair ain't it. Is that an honest description of what I openly labeled my view to begin with...? Don't give up. We are not the only ones contemplating the horror... Love, Scott

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February 21, 2010 | url
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tawal said:

	... Project Mayhem is just under the surface. Best not itch too hard; likely to go all Alien and shit.
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February 23, 2010
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