Back Scratching

Modern politics -- maybe all politics throughout history -- is really nothing more than elaborate stagecraft. Often, it is a tragedy played out on a world stage. There is the story line, the major stars and enough bit players to make the whole thing seem plausible. The sad part is that the story being told rarely resembles reality.

Remember when the administration of Bush II decided to invade Iraq? To sell the idea to a suspicious American public, an elaborate ruse of the "coalition of the willing" was cobbled together to provide legitimacy. The list itself (see below) was less important -- particularly since it was missing most of our chief allies.

Afghanistan, Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Colombia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, El Salvador, Eritrea, Estonia, Ethiopia, Georgia, Hungary, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and Uzbekistan.

Here we are a presidential administration later and the same stagecraft is at work. The US and the two colonial powers most associated with the African continent -- France and England -- want to attack Libya, but the three don't want it to look like a modern imperialist invasion. They need to provide themselves with a bit of political cover and what better cover than to receive the support of the Arab League itself! But as Pepe Escobar reports at the Asia Times Online,

You invade Bahrain. We take out Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. This, in short, is the essence of a deal struck between the Barack Obama administration and the House of Saud. Two diplomatic sources at the United Nations independently confirmed that Washington, via Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, gave the go-ahead for Saudi Arabia to invade Bahrain and crush the pro-democracy movement in their neighbor in exchange for a "yes" vote by the Arab League for a no-fly zone over Libya - the main rationale that led to United Nations Security Council resolution 1973.

...As Asia Times Online has reported, a full Arab League endorsement of a no-fly zone is a myth. Of the 22 full members, only 11 were present at the voting. Six of them were Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) members, the US-supported club of Gulf kingdoms/sheikhdoms, of which Saudi Arabia is the top dog. Syria and Algeria were against it. Saudi Arabia only had to "seduce" three other members to get the vote.

Translation: only nine out of 22 members of the Arab League voted for the no-fly zone...

This is what political stagecraft is all about; taking inconvenient circumstances and weaving them together into a plot line of your own making that serves your own self-interested purposes. What is real doesn't matter. No, what matters is what you can sell as being "real."

In today's world, it is hard not to be a cynic.