The Neo-Con Death Wish and Manna from Hell

by Dr. Robert Dickson Crane

  The newest conundrum is “who killed Zarqawi?”  Theories, both paranoid and otherwise, abound.  The equivalent of a Jordanian NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) is based on the following conclusion:

“As the insurgency became increasingly driven by Iraqis, Mr. Zarqawi expressed an interest in spreading his reach globally, in effect challenging Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri as the leader of a global terrorist war.”

  This intelligence comes from Jordanian King Abdullah II’s “Knights of God,” which is a Muslim initiative to do what Jim Girard’s Just Causes has been advocating now for years, namely to expose the terrorists as frauds who pervert every principle of Islam. 

  After the Amman hotel bombing a year ago, King Abdullah summarily fired the entire CIA staff that had been advising him and started his own more sophisticated analysis of what makes terrorists tick.  He rejected the Americans’ naive theory that terrorism in Iraq is run from abroad as part of some global strategy.  He also rejected the theory that terrorism is an inevitable result of Islam as a religion.  He concluded that nationalist opposition to the American occupation of Iraq had caused the hotel bombings in Jordan and that the major cause of global terrorism has become the NeoCon ideology of global conquest under the mantra of “freedom and democracy.” 

  This was not covered in the American press, but at the time many of those with access to the foreign press, uncensored by MEMRI, considered that this immediate expulsion of the CIA from Jordan was a turning point in the global campaign against American hegemony and perhaps the start of a much more effective global strategy to counter terrorism. 

  Osama knows the dynamics.  Zarqawi never caught on.  Unfortunately, now the real masterminds of global terrorism can carry out their long-range strategies more effectively, but only under the assumption that the American strategy will continue to backfire so splendidly without their help.

  An American attack on the Shi’a in Iran on behalf of Israel, even a demonstration one to grab the Iranians’ attention, would be more effective than hundreds of billions of dollars given directly from the U.S. Treasury to help the cause of global terrorism.  For Osama this would be like a shower of manna from his origins in hell. 

  So, who killed Zarqawi?  Perhaps it is all about the mob.  Osama is the Godfather, also known as the Mother of all Evil, whereas Zarqawi is merely his bastard son, an incompetent hit-man.  This bit of mobology would explain why Osama tipped off the Americans so they could bump off his increasingly insubordinate rival, Zarqawi, for the strategic error of attacking the Shi’a when he should have been recruiting them all around the world.

  Tacticians who slit throats come and go, but the strategists like Osama and Henry Kissinger just keep on going like the Bunnie rabbit.  Bush is gloating over his success in eliminating Zarqawi, but so is Osama, who was beginning to lose control of the mob.

  The problem is that now the underlings might try another 9/11.  This would be dumb, because the radicalization of the world is going so well that the heavy artillery should be saved until later.  Bush’s clumsy war on terror is doing a splendid job of recruiting terrorists in the overall offensive against America, so why launch another 9/11 and make people feel sorry for the Americans. 

  The deal is to wait until Al Qa’ida can “nuc” America, which, given a continuation of NeoCon control in Washington, is only a matter of time, one of those inevitabilities in the language of long-range global forecasting that lack only a reliable time-frame.  This “historical inevitability” supposedly would make the entire world knuckle under to the ultimate global decision-maker, that bearded mullah Midas hiding in occultation somewhere in a subterranean underground. 

  This is the stuff of myth, and Osama knows that whoever controls global mythology runs the world.  Bunker busters may be good at shock and awe, but Osama is aiming at the bunker, both actual and metaphorical, deep underneath the White House, which did not impress me at all back when I had access to such places.  Such a coup would shift the balance of what Herman Kahn forty years ago used to call escalation dominance in the psychological war of what the Neo-Con god-father, Robert Strausz-Hupe, used to call the ultimate protracted conflict.  Both the Neo-Cons and Osama bin Laden call this World War IV, the war to end all wars.

  Of course, I’m waiting for Zarqawi fans now to rat on Osama, so we can start inventing ever newer scenarios of creative paranoia.  My major job at the Hudson Institute forty years ago as Director of Third World Studies and as head of Rainbow Scenarios was to dream up scenarios to justify a bigger defense budget.  No-one at the time, however, ever dreamed of the ideal terrorism scenario whereby terrorism and terroristic counter-terrorism generate a perpetual motion momentum that fulfills its own prophecies in spades.  We might call this the NeoCon death wish.