Ian's Pentagon boondoggle commentary reminds me of the story about the grizzled storyteller who persuades the listener to keep coughing up silver pieces, to keep hearing more episodes of the story. The storyteller's job is to create the sensation or perception that a truth is being revealed, or some kind of psychological void is filled for the listener. The listener keeps forking the silver, even if they're already hungry.

Some narratives are more important than others. In 2000, cig manufacturer RJ Reynolds got indicted by the EU for having a boardroom-level corporate strategy to sell cigarettes to international mafias, and take payment from laundered drug money accounts. The US media didn't give a damn - they get plenty of longterm revenue from bluechips like RJR. (Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ads come to mind)

The military-industrial complex - the huge empire of weird corporate divisions especially in San Diego (Titan, the Wilkes corporations, SAIC etc) and northern Virginia (Blackwater, Woolsey's Booz Allen Hamilton, etc.) basically are like our storyteller. They promise to annihilate the woogie-boogies in our imagination if we pay them to develop fanciful and ill-described information technologies and energy weapons.

That warm and fuzzy feeling you get annihilating advertising-framed evil by spraying Monsanto Roundup (glyphosate) on weeds is just a little sample of the fat and rich feeling DynCorp gets dumping Roundup Extreme (glyphosate) by the ton on Colombian and (over the border onto) Ecuadorian leftists. They organize peasants to run into the jungle with sprayers, too...

On the other hand, Raytheon, for example, is actually developing directed energy weapons, but since everything is so perverse, they'll probably sell the energy weapons prototypes to the Chinese out the backdoor, so the American people will never have a monopoly on the sweet expensive weapons.

The rest of these companies are hanging around doing whatever - business strong-arming intelligence stuff in the developing world. Whatever ambitious Pentagon toadies overseeing these contracts are going to get hired by the corporate parasites right after they quit Uncle Sam, so they cover up the worthless projects.

The corps *promise* to annihilate psychological mirages - Zarqawis, Goldsteins, etc - in exchange for silver. Then they are hired as Pentagon consultants to sell the narrative - "meetings in Prague" or whatever - and the media fails to disclaim that "military analysts" are on a super-government-grade military payroll - and neither analyst nor mediaCorp can threaten the silver stream without endangering their slice.

Then again the media also forgets about all structural drug trafficking and the various blue-chip interests that benefit from money laundering. Why didn't the Bush regime tighten banking regulations?? Blue chips gotta eat too...

The Frankfurt school guys applied some Freudian concepts to effects of rhetoric when analyzing Nazi Germany. They called it negative narcissistic psychological projection. Propaganda persuades the public (with malformed egos) to paste their ugly, negative feelings onto external figures (Jews then, Arabs now), and project positive feelings to dear leader. Both the "Hitler" and "evil Jew" concepts are *actually* just illusory layers imposed on the core of the public's personality. The good one promises to annihilate the evil one, and the public supports it because they actually think killing (the Jew/Arab) will annihilate the ugly feelings within them.

American voters: Did you want to have a beer with Bush, or really just with yourself *as* Bush?

Final point: last april when i posted (here and dailykos) on the WaPo story about Centcom documents proving Zarqawi was used as a PSY OPS instrument for "Leveraging Xenophobia", i did a counter-intelligence trick of my own. I hosted embedded images myself and checked the server logs after 24 hours. ALL the biggies read the story - SAIC, Boeing, Raytheon, Homeland Security, etc. Boeing alone had 7 hits in 24 hours.

Zarqawi's iconic status was a part of their business strategy, and promising to annihilate him was a pillar of the revenue stream. This is why it's always an individual boogeyman. it is really hard to project annihilatory feelings about a class or set of people. You need an individual personality to fear and loathe.

And yeah, if you go back to the 1930s, Nazis always staged *individual* Jews as the "agents of evil events" like the Reichstag fire, and the shooting of the minister that Goebbels used to pretext Kristallnacht. My money's on Iran's Mugniyeh as the next retail demon of choice for the AEI and the rest of the war party.

AEI said a year ago (uber-hawks Michael Rubin, Caroline Glick, Ken Timmerman etc.):

There are many indicators that Iran is actively supporting al-Qaeda’s operations inside Iraq, led by the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The chief Iranian terrorist operative, Mugniyeh, has reportedly recommended coalescing the operational forces of al-Qaeda with other groups inside Iraq.[10] The regime in Tehran is also providing safe haven to al-Qaeda members and leaders inside Iran.[11]

Now that's what I call a profitable story. AL Qaeda's the ultimate MacGuffin- the shiny bauble you keep pouring a plot out of.