US To Pull Troops Out Of Germany

Germans Say: Don’t Let The Door Hit Your Arse On The Way Out

I note that in an effort to “punish” Germany, Bagman Rumsfeld wants the US to withdraw from Germany all its troops stationed there that annoy people so much. That’s military intelligence right on the scale of “we had to destroy the village in order to save it”. What’s next? Take the US troops out of Korea when they realise both the North and the South Koreans don’t like them? If you’re going to be a global bully then you have to learn to live with the consequences of your actions. This Bush Gang seems to be spending their international currency at an amazingly fast rate… and they got to lodge so much goodwill in the bank after the airplane attack in New York. Nevertheless, when even a disturbingly pro-US aligned country such as Ireland can find one morning that one of the largest street protests in its modern history against US unilateralist policy suddenly emerges then it’s time to be worried. Sadly though, these bozos in the White House really do think they can fight the world. Meanwhile in the UK, Bush’s only political ally that doesn’t export bananas as its economic mainstay, the popular mood has not been more oppositional to a sitting Prime Minister since Thatcher supported the Poll Tax. I noted the massive UK protests went largely unreported in the US in a case of censorship-by-eliding. US media did, of course, show footage of protesting French and Germans, because they are represented as “against” the US while everyone in the UK is, of course, rooting for the war. Strangeley enough, the right-wing in the US is so desperate to find people to agree with them that they have recruited many of the podunk leaders of the former Warsaw Pact nations (and wannabe EU expense account big spenders) into the war effort, despite the disavowal of the war by their subject populations.

With the Labour Party enjoying a huge parliamentary majority but a PM with rapidly declining popularity, it won’t be long before Blair is seen more as a liability than as an asset. His colleagues may become emboldened to force Blair out of the PM job and replace him with someone perceived to be less of a Bush lapdog and more in tune with popular feeling. Unfortunately though, right now Blair’s mis-steps are causing support for the Tories to rise to within spitting distance of Labour, and the current Tories with their anti-Euro ideology are bound to support this currency war even more fervently than Labour.

Of course, there is also latent energy manifesting here. Not all the marchers against Blair’s policies would ordinarily be so anti-war, just as not so many people were so fervently anti-Poll Tax when they campaigned against Thatcher. Politics is never simply the application of cause and effect but instead can be influenced on a gigantic scale by group psychodynamics and unspoken paranoias. Street politics reflect the ebb and flow of extraordinary popular delusions, and many people who feel a generalised sense of dissatisfaction with the idoelogies of the day can be recruited by eager street protest organisers and their nervous energy given focus and direction. The Fascists knew this, and so did the Bolsheviks, when they hijacked people’s anxieties to give their movements credibility. What we are seeing now across the world has impetus from the unilateralist actions of the US, yes, but the sheer numbers involved are also just the latest manifestion of the current anti-globalization zeitgeist. Capitalism over-reached itself during triumphalist 90s and provoked a predictable response from the body politic. We live in interesting times. Of course, with their list- and PR-based political systems (and the UK’s peculiar majority-swing pocket borough system), the Euro democracies tend to respond quite quickly to political undercurrents. By comparison, the ossified US system is straitjacketed and well-insulated against any notion of responsiveness to anything but minor issues. It took nearly 20 years for popular revulsion against the enormous crime,waste, and plain illegality of the US’s war in Vietnam to penetrate their political system and lead to Nixon’s “Vietnamization” scorched earth withdrawal… I am not expecting any miracles to come quickly from the streets.