The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Whether Osama is or is not in that Tora Bora hidey hole we will surely find out at any moment. If he is, then he is about to be martyrized -- because the chance that the US wants to put on the spectacle of an Osama murder trial (even a military tribunal version) is about the same as the chance that Emeril Legasse will become the next Secretary General of the United Nations. If he's in there, I still see Osama getting the Che Guevera treatment: news pool photo op on a cold slab followed by incineration. But he'll still be a martyr.
Meanwhile, animadversions are flying between India and Pakistan, following a suicide storming of the Indian Parliament late last week (Twelve dead). It is hard to imagine India not taking some kind of retaliatory action against Pakistan, even though it could provoke both a nuclear exchange and / or the meltdown of Pakistan into anarchy (with those much-talked-about eleven nuclear warheads up for grabs).
Back in Israel / Palestine, we now have the pitiful (and dangerous) spectacle of Arafat begging to re-start peace talks with an Israeli government that has declared him "irrelevant" -- and rightly so, since he has proved absolutely impotent to control the level of violence emanating from the Palestinian side of the conflict. Over in Egypt, Hosni Mubarak is making noises to the effect that the Israelis are provoking a major war in the region. It's hard to tell whether the Egyptian president's utterances are designed for home consumption, but I dothink that events in Israel are headed in an ominous direction, perhaps inexorably so. We repeat what we asserted last year: Israel's military can probably wipe up the floor with most of its regional adversaries.
Anyway, here at home the US still faces the prospect of an economic meltdown of our own. All the wishful thinking in the world will not stop nature from wringing out the debt-hobbled American economy with its tragic dependence on recreational shopping, tourism, excessive motoring and the accompanying addiction to imported oil. We are going down the path to a long and harsh period of austerity, whether Wal-Mart and Michael Eisner like it or not, and we are not prepared. After Christmas, we are going to see a retail work-out that will make your heads spin, including (Kunstler predicts) the tanking of some major national chains. Duck and cover.