Black Holes
By John Chuckman
YellowTimes.org Columnist (Canada)
(YellowTimes.org) – One of the great
discoveries of the late 20th century was
the existence of black holes.
Their existence was implied by Albert Einstein's relativity
theory, and their necessary characteristics were worked out by
Stephen Hawking and others. Eventually, a new generation of
powerful visible-light telescopes and x-ray observatories gave
us direct observations supporting what previously had only
been theory.
As every kid fascinated by science knows, black holes come
from stars that collapse as their fusion engines sputter out of
fuel. The resulting, unimaginably dense bits of mass have the
remarkable ability to grow by capturing matter and energy
entering their space-bending gravitational fields.
Modern Israel started as a bright star of an idea, a place of
refuge for a horribly abused people, but many observers today
might agree that the bright star appears to be collapsing into
a dark mass bending the geopolitical space of the entire
planet.
The world waits for Mr. Bush to launch a terrible war against
Iraq. The only purpose for this war is a preemptive strike at
Israel's most tireless opponent. But the honesty of national
debate in America is so distorted by massive gravitational
tides, even many of the war's opponents do not understand
what it is they are opposing.
No meaningful evidence has been offered for Mr. Bush's shrill
assertions. An argument for protecting intelligence sources
might be accepted as reason for not releasing details to the
general public, but what is ridiculous is that no evidence has
been supplied to the leaders of major NATO allies. France and
Germany would not require the "report" now being quickly
cobbled together for Mr. Powell, were the case otherwise.
Iraq has bothered no one for twelve years, so why the sudden
rush to war before weapons inspectors even complete their
work? The only explanation appears to be so that the furious,
temporary momentum of American public opinion generated by
September 11 can be harnessed for a war that would not be
supported otherwise.
Never mind the deliberately misleading, invented term
weapons of mass destruction; there is no evidence that Iraq
has strategically significant weapons. There is virtual certainty
that Iraq has no fissile materials for nuclear weapons, and we
know from the previous chief weapons inspector that Iraq's
costly facilities for manufacturing fissile materials were
destroyed.
There is no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any past
dealings with al-Qaeda. Indeed, it is known there was
considerable animus between Hussein and bin Laden.
The notion that secret national weapons programs, if any have
been reconstituted since weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998,
can be successful when teams of well-equipped inspectors,
kept informed by intelligence agencies, roam over the Iraqi
countryside, free at any time to enter any facility, truly is
delusional. And delusional notions are a mighty dangerous
basis for going to war.
To reassure Israel, all reasonable parties are willing to see a
strict inspection regime maintained in Iraq, but this is not
enough for the single-minded American President who insists
on going to war and inflicting more horror on Iraqi civilians. And
it is certainly not enough for Mr. Sharon who cheers Mr. Bush
on and proclaims maniacally that Iran should be attacked next.
How easily people forget, or perhaps they do not care, that
modern war means killing civilians in large numbers. The
proportion of civilians killed to military personnel killed has
grown exponentially since World War I. America's focus on
overwhelming air power and its reluctance to accept any
casualties of its own only makes the trend worse. The
question of going to war now is one in which Americans take
little account of death, for the deaths are almost all on the
other side and remain unseen by a comfortable public thinking
itself informed by its heavily-biased press.
General Schwarzkopf's well-staged press briefings with highly
edited film clips during Desert Storm left the impression that
precision munitions have turned war into a neat, almost
bloodless computer game. The truth is that about 95 percent
of the munitions used in Desert Storm were not precision.
Precision munitions are extremely costly; they slow operations
down; and they can, themselves, go wrong, so they are
reserved for special applications. Good old-fashioned dumb
bombs and artillery are the only things to use when you want
to do a lot of killing in a hurry. Something like a hundred
thousand Iraqi civilians were killed by American munitions that
were not precision.
As we wait for this war, we feel the world's economy buckling
and yielding to the threats and uncertainty of a vast,
destructive enterprise, to the promise of inflation and
dislocation that always accompanies war, and to unavoidable,
crazed gyrations in the price of oil.
As we wait for this war, the President addresses an uneasy
world in the cadences of a fundamentalist tent-preacher
thumping his pulpit and threatening hell's fire, offering the five
and three-quarters billion people who live outside America but
are still affected by its arbitrary decisions, such reassuring
observations as, "The course of this nation does not depend
on the decisions of others."
This President compounds economic uncertainty by running
huge deficits and by offering to keep preoccupied Americans
happy with huge tax cuts -- a bizarre, economically illiterate
version of "You can have it all and have it all now!"
As we wait for this war, Israel reduces the West Bank to an
utterly bleak and hopeless landscape. All past commitments,
as those of the Oslo Accord, are ignored. All the many past
resolutions of the United Nations imposing obligations on
Israel remain ignored, even while the U.S. asserts Iraq must
be attacked precisely for ignoring other United Nations'
resolutions. The leader of the Palestinians, with whom no
discussion can possibly be held, is degradingly treated as a
criminal, virtually under a form of house arrest.
No more worthy foes of injustice and hatred breathe than
Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. They have made
unmistakably clear what they see in the West Bank -- a repeat
in virtually every detail of South Africa's hateful apartheid
regime, but the collapsing star's force field sucks in even the
sympathetic emotions these observations should elicit from
Americans.
As we wait for this war, Israel has approached the United
States for another $10 billion or more in assistance, over and
above the $3 billion it receives automatically each year (and,
by rights, we should add the $2 billion paid annually to keep
Egypt quiescent). This money is deemed necessary because
Israel is run on a war footing seemingly in perpetuity.
Israel behaves as a regional, geopolitical miniature replica of
the United States, even to the extent of now building a triad of
nuclear forces (land-based missiles, bombers, and
submarine-based missiles -- all nuclear-capable) -- this in a
country whose population is about the size of Ecuador's, about
one-tenth of one percent of the world's people. The costly
wastefulness of this is almost beyond description.
Bush's War on Terror, rather than being a clearly focused
campaign against those actually responsible for September 11,
has become the label on a portfolio of grudges against all
those in the world who balk at or oppose American foreign
policy. The War on Terror is itself an emerging black hole
sucking in resources, energy, and principles.
It's not as though a good deal of the world does not
understand what is happening. Voices of reason are heard
from France, Germany, Italy, Canada, Egypt, South Africa,
Russia, China, and other lands, but Bush announces he is
willing "to go it alone" if necessary, meaning the entire planet,
willy-nilly, must be dragged into a great vortex of destruction.
[John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian
oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of
history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule
of reason, and concern for human decency. He is a member of no
political party and takes exception to what has been called
America's "culture of complaint" with its habit of reducing every
important issue to an unproductive argument between two
simplistically defined groups. John regards it as a badge of honor
to have left the United States as a poor young man from the
South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the
pointless murder of something like three million Vietnamese in
their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong
economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling
"t |
