News from Tashkent, Uzbekistan came to us that US military aircraft landed at a military airport on Sunday. The first installment of bombers is poised to blast Afghanistan from the map, to render the region into the parking lot of Lyndon Johnson's fantasy. Iraq will perhaps bear some of the brunt of the attack, since, as Stratfor (the intelligence forecaster) puts it "Iraq is very convenient for an air attack" and "extending the list of nations that supported the attackers [even without evidence] from one to two would solve a number of problems for the United States."
Three aircraft carriers are in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf, and supply ships have entered the final stages of their journey into the Indian Ocean.
The Saudi's say that they will not permit the US to use the retooled Prince Sultan Air Base south of Riyadh for retaliation against Afghanistan. During the Gulf War, in public the Saudis and the US said that these bases would not be used, but during the war, US planes took off from Arabia to conduct missions in Iraq. Similar things might happen when the bombs begin to rain. Four and a half thousand US military personnel sit at Prince Sultan, including a host of aircraft. The 5th Fleet is in Bahrain, Yemen says that the US can refuel, and Kuwait's airports are always open for their liberators.
B-52s and B-1s are in the air, ready to drop an enormous payload, as RC 135 fuel tankers fly along for air-support along with a set of surveillance crafts. Some estimates tell us that over two hundred planes are on hand for the assault.
Diego Garcia and the bases in the Gulf are on alert, as, perhaps, is Quetta, Pakistan.
The Pakistani government, afraid of the outcome of the assault, has moved two brigades of its 16th Division from the Umarkot-Panaoqil sectors, along the border that divides it from Gujarat and Rajasthan in India. Eager to do its bit for the alliance, the Hindu-Right led Indian government's foreign minister Jaswant Singh announced, "India had no intention to add to the complexities that the Government and people of Pakistan were faced with." The convoluted grammar perhaps reveals the ambiguous sensibility of the government, otherwise eager to use any opportunity to put Pakistan on the margins of US policy.
The drums of war could not be any clearer.
And yet, many of us in the US remain shrouded in that classic American posture: innocence.
The demand for revenge comes without any consideration of the long-term costs of our actions. If profits can be posted each quarter without any sense of the long-term human consequences of our economic actions, why can't our armies and state department act on the short-term as well? Why do we have to wait, when we can just act? Why does the long-term hinder our short attention span? Why doesn't the military, like our children, suffer from ADD?
In 1822-23, G. W. F. Hegel ignored the Napoleonic wars that tore Europe up around him to hold forth for four hours a week on the philosophy of history. He concentrated his discussions on the "oriental world" (too much of either civil society or of state, an excess of things), on the Greek and Roman worlds (the correct, if primitive, balance between the people and their state) and the "German or Modern world" (perfection incarnate in the Prussian state).