Last week a leading UK think-tank issued a report on both the position, and the power, held by the US in a post9/11 world. While the report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies went into an incredibly detailed breakdown of the global military/industrial/ cultural Gestalt — including a quote from Lawrence of Arabia, which is always nice in the middle of a pile of dry-bread stats, because you can imagine Peter O’Toole said it while looking all noble — no mention was made of what exactly would now happen to the report. Independent observers may conclude that, based on previous evidence, it might well have been greeted with, “Yeah yeah yeah”, then thrown on to a big pile in the corner of the Oval Office. The one that has the unopened copies of the Boden catalogue in it, and those fabric samples from Neiman Marcus that they were considering for recovering the pouffes.
This is unfortunate because, had the Americans read the report, they would have noted two vital findings. The first is that while the same old countries — Iran, China, North Korea, France probably, haha — want to have a pop at the US, America has to accept that we are now in a “nonpolar” world and must redefine its strategies to cope with “nonstate actors” — your Hezbollahs and al-Qaedas. These are defined as forces that are “strong enough to resist an American agenda but too weak to shape an internationally attractive alternative”.
Of course, by those criteria, America’s newest enemies are not merely Hezbollah and al-Qaeda. They would also include atheists, pedestrians, socialists, European film directors who make films with unhappy endings, drizzly weather and Courtney Love — but not, interestingly, vegetarians, who have been pretty strong in “shaping internationally attractive alternatives”, what with the Quorn burger and McDon-ald’s Toasted Deli Grill Veggie Melt.
The IISS’s second conclusion was that, in the “complex battlefield” of the 21st century, America needs to concentrate more on psychological warfare. Of course, those who have read Jon Ronson’s excellent The Men Who Stare At Goats will know that the US has already been, albeit in a low-key and mad way, experimenting with psychological warfare. The conclusion of its 20-year-long experiments resulted in the playing of heavy rock music, including Guns’n’Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle , within earshot of the former Panamanian President Manuel Nori-ega when he was holed up the Vatican Embassy in 1989. As many will have subsequently noticed, this particular tactic of psychological warfare did remarkably little in ending the siege, but oddly coincided with the high-water mark in Guns’n’Roses’ career — possibly marking out the thin red line between state-sponsored psychological combat and a very effective marketing campaign.
However, once an entity loses the ability to use Guns’n’Roses as a weapon, it’s understandable why the ensuing period would be one of intense confusion, bordering on panic, with no obvious alternative taking its place. US psychological warfare is at an all-time low at the moment. Luckily, however, I do have a few suggestions for future activity:
1)Stage a massive army-recruitment drive among the table-staff of Hollywood, and assemble a battalion of actresses/models/ whatevers. When invading a city, send in the Ninth Battalion of Hot Chicks first, dressed in skin-tight catsuits. Get them to enter the city with a series of excitable screams and yelps, while doing leaps, rolls and cartwheels down the high street — like Catherine Zeta-Jones’s training scene in Entrapment but, obviously, without Sean Connery sitting on a chair and watching. A man may well be devout enough to shoot old men in the head, but I’m pretty sure he would at least pause for a few vital seconds before shooting at an Angelina Jolie lookalike doing the splits in mid-air. And while he’s pausing, some giant Marine can shoot him.
2)Militant Muslim extremists believe in the destruction of Western civilisation. We have to accept, as the comedian Stewart Lee points out, that this doesn’t leave a great deal of room for negotiation. They’re just not going to settle for the dismantling of Blackpool Pleasure Beach, then back down with the suicide-bombs. However, if the US could use its peerless scientific resources to prove incontrovertibly that God/Allah does not exist, that would be pretty handy, from a psychological point of view.
3) No two ways about it: American tourists leaving from any Midwestern airport will have to be taken into a special booth and styled before we inflict them on, say, the French.
4)State funding of whatever therapy, emergency hairstyling, dirty women and cheap drugs Axl Rose needs to write another song as good as Welcome to the Jungle . It would be good to have it as back-up, just in case.
5)On reflection, immediate cessation of the recording, broadcast and overseas sale of Lost would be useful, too. It just makes America look a bit nuts.
