All Aboard for Zombieland!

by Jeff Huber

Elder Lady, a long-time friend of Pen and Sword and a keen observer of the sorry scene playing out across our country and the world, recently shared this quote from British author John le Carré: 

"God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist."

 -- Published in The London Times, 15 Jan. 2003

Nine years after le Carre published that statement, America and its snippy British lap dog are imposing all new and improved set of draconian sanctions on Iran that, the political theory goes, will coerce Iran into doing things that the old shopworn set of draconian sanctions failed to make Iran do. 

American Diplomacy: It's code for "war."

The pretext for this latest round of “diplomatic” preparations for all out war on Iran was the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report
that said Iraq might still have a nuclear weapons program.  The report, which has been thoroughly refuted in every forum except the war wagging mainstream media, was based on hearsay evidence from “member nations” that could only have been Israel, the UK and the US, and on the activities of a “nuclear scientist” who turns out not to have been a nuclear scientist at all but a pioneer in the field of nanodiamond technology that is use for industrial and medical purposes.

Iranian Students stormed the British Embassy in Tehran, the Brits closed the embassy and hauled scones, and now we don’t even have second-hand diplomatic lines of communication with Iran. Still, the bull feather merchant marines who spin our foreign policy shenanigans can replay the Team Cheney meme that said "we tried diplomacy and it didn't work," even if said diplomacy consisted of refusing to speak directly to parties we were punishing with sanctions until they agreed to pre-conditions that no country in its right national mind would agree to.  (In the case of Iran, we insisted that they give up their UN guaranteed right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.  What a surprise that they passed on the offer.  Telling the Iranians they could have a nuclear energy industry if they got their nuclear fuel from us was like telling them they could have an auto industry as long as they made their cars in Detroit and called them Buicks.)

I’ve delineated many times how possession of nuclear weapons would be, for the Iranians, the equivalent a doomsday device that would spell doom for the entire ancient Persian race.  I only know of one group of people crazy enough to take those sorts of risks in the name of acquiring more power, and that group of people is the group of people who led us down the Long War path that began in Iraq and that is about to intersect with the road to ruin.  

Who's your worst nightmare now?

It is perhaps because of the state of the economy and because our  our body politic has become such a FOX News driven menagerie that the American public continues to allow its government to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocents overseas over…what?  Certainly not 9/11.  The evildoer young Mr. Bush swore to bring in dead or alive is sleeping with the whales.  Certainly not to preempt an invasion of our soil.  Despite what Mr. Bush’s speechwriters told us, the oceans still protect us from that sort of thing.  Nobody has the kind of army or air force or navy required to invade and occupy us the way we’ve made a national pastime out of doing to everyone who is a supposed threat to us, and nobody ever will have that kind of military force.   

We have gone from a mighty nation dedicated to become Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” to a global bad guy; a global bad guy who is about to dwarf the malignant accomplishments of every global bad guy who came before us.  As le Carré put it in 2003, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”

Countless sages of eastern and western cultures have noted that human events have a way of leveling themselves in the same manner that nature does.  Actions produce opposite but equal reactions among societies just as they do in the physical universe.  As one popular volume of spiritual guidance admonishes us, “ye shall reap as ye shall sow,” and as we used to say in the Navy, “What goes around comes around.” 

The 2012 Tea Party Convention.  

The longer we as a nation stay on this neoconservative, post-modern imperialist crazy-train joy ride, the further we’re going to fall when China calls in our debt or the tea baggers turn the country into Zombieland or a space ship lands and a guy who looks like Michael Rennie steps out of it and tells us to pack our bags for a one-way trip to oblivion.

Say goodbye to hegemony.

My biggest concern regarding our inability to correct our behavior before God, nature or Mr. Spock’s relatives correct it for us is that the anti-war movement has been hijacked by paleo-conservative libertarians who don’t want to pay for roads because they don’t think we need roads and by latter-day hippies who are more interested in legalizing pot than in putting an end to self-defeating wars. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.