Dubya told us that we were going to "fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here." And sure as shootin' the end of the Iraq occupation has set off all those Occupys over here. Who knew that "them" is all the people who aren't in Dubya's base, the 1%ers?
While I've been writing about what exactly the U.S. was fighting "over there," since October 2005, it wasn't until 2007 that I made the connection between "them" and urban dwellers. Pulling the troops out of Iraq signals the end of an agenda that was about much more than Iraq.
While I am not big on prognostication or tooting my own horn, I do think some of what I penned back in 2007 is worth noting to give context to what we see happening now.
I entitled my essay, "The City or the Camp," which may seem prescient now that we've got OWS camping in the middle of the financial district, as if the evicted were coming back to claim their roots.
It’s been apparent for some time, to anyone who paid close attention to the urban renewal/removal craze of the seventies and eighties, that the invasion of Iraq was largely motivated by the same urge to “open up” the center cities and “redevelop” them according to a more spacious design.
The sociological premise for urban redevelopment is the conviction that dense habitation produces poverty and crime. That this is not borne out by districts such as lower Manhattan island is beside the point. In any event, this premise tended to get lost or forgotten in practice in our American cities because, in most instances, though the original urban populations were removed and relocated, “redevelopment” hardly ever went beyond the destruction phase. Which, among other things, is probably what makes the Iraq project look so familiar.
In short, the "cradle of civilization" got bombed to smithereens, the rubble got divided into walled enclaves and now the population that could not be defeated, will have a chance to rebuild. And, from the "creative destructionist" perspective, it will look like the creative spirit will take off like the phoenix rising from the ashes. You see, if you don't pay attention to who's actually doing what and don't see the costs being born by one person and the benefits going to another bloke, then it's easy for the myopic self-centered destroyer to conclude that the act of destruction is all that's needed to make the world new. Destruction serves as a prompt to creation. That's the theory. Nothing personal.
There was a grand scheme afoot. Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt wrote about it in 2007, looking almost two decades ahead.
Baghdad 2025: The Pentagon Solution to a Planet of Slums
by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt
In our world, the Pentagon and the national security bureaucracy have largely taken possession of the future. In an exchange in 2002, journalist Ron Suskind reported a senior adviser to President Bush telling him:
"that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality… We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
I quoted one section of their article at length and will again:
This past fall, the Pentagon’s U.S. Joint Forces Command engaged in a $25 million, 35-day, computer-based simulation exercise involving more than 1,400 soldiers, marines, airmen, and sailors. A year in the making, “Urban Resolve 2015″ had one simple goal – to test concepts for future “combat in cities” – and, not surprisingly, it was set in Baghdad 2015. An article put out by the Pentagon’s American Forces Press Service was quick to say, however, that the virtual exercise really could be taking place in “any urban environment.” And the reason why was clear, in the words of Dave Ozolek, the executive director of the Joint Futures Lab at the Joint Forces Command. Urban zones, he said, are “where the fight is, that’s where the enemy is, that[’s] where the center of gravity for the whole operation is.”
"Urban zones are where the fight is." That's the Pentagon perspective. But, since they can't practice here at home, they need a foreign venue.
My reaction in 2007 was as follows:
While the Joint Forces Command may already be war-gaming the 2015 Battle for Baghdad, right now it looks like the U.S. military will have trouble hanging on there for even a couple of more years. Still, if present plans become reality, odds are U.S. military planners will be attempting to occupy some city, in some fashion, come 2015 and 2025. In the future, as the Army’s new Urban Operations Manual puts it, “every Soldier – regardless of branch or military occupational specialty – must be committed and prepared to close with and kill or capture threat forces in an urban environment.”
See? That was not a prediction. That was a reasoned extrapolation from experience, rather than the "idea" which motivates the destroyers' intent and accounts for why "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." In the real world, intending to create by destroying what's already there just doesn't work--unless creative people jump in and clean up the mess. It's momma kissing the bobo writ large.
When I first learned of Saddam Hussein’s elimination of 4500 villages, I thought perhaps that this population relocation to the cities program, preparatory to industrializing both the agricultural and manufacturing sectors, was a development that international corporate interests were desirous of arrogating to themselves. But, after reviewing the Pentagon’s planned assault on urban areas around the globe, I’m more inclined to speculate that Saddam Hussein’s program of urbanization was actually one of his major offenses and to conclude that the oft repeated “fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them here” refers to urban dwellers, not terrorists.
Of course, I immediately reconsidered that hypothesis.
Or, perhaps more accurately, “let’s do over there what we haven’t been able to accomplish here”–i.e. defeat the unruly urban dwellers who keep giving us such fits. Which would also explain the increasing agitation over the “flood” of immigrants who are swelling our cities, as we speak. How can we defeat them over there, if they’re already here?
One thing seems clear. Our ruling elite exist in a state of terror. Their gated communities and lear jets and their SUVs just aren’t providing the sense of security they so desperately need. So, they’re looking to find it somewhere else, never realizing that the terrors they are trying so desperately to escape are created by themselves; that the civilized peoples of the earth don’t even want that by which they set such store and certainly not a freedom that involves hiding behind locked doors.
See?