January 13, 2012 05:53 PM UTC

Will Bain Prove to be the Main Issue?

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• by: JO

Beware the temptation to imagine that Obama and his Republican rival are the only players in the presidential election. While all eyes are on South Carolina and Bain capital at the moment, there is also this from the NYT ( http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01… )

In 2002, a classified, $250 million Defense Department war game concluded that small, agile speedboats swarming a naval convoy could inflict devastating damage on more powerful warships [in the Gulf]. In that game, the Blue Team navy, representing the United States, lost 16 major warships – an aircraft carrier, cruisers and amphibious vessels – when they were sunk to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in an attack that included swarming tactics by enemy speedboats. . . . ‘The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes.’

We are not talking here about orders from the supreme ayatollah or the president of Iran, both of whom can understand and evaluate the threat to Iran posed by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, or by attacking U.S. Navy ship in that neighborhood (and both of whom are also playing to their own domestic audiences). The Revolutionary Guards have their own fleet of armed speedboats, and the fanatics to steer one or two into an American carrier, or to surround U. S. ships with mines, or even to fire rockets from shore, with or without authority from HQ in Teheran. It is in the real-time reaction(s) to such a provocation that the next dismal chapter of our role in defending supplies of oil may be written, not in a full-length position paper drafted by an Ivy graduate who majored in Middle Eastern studies, but by an Iranian student of the Quorn convinced that Allah is his helmsman.

Or will we seen retaliation for the latest assassination of an Iranian working on the uranium enrichment project? And counter retaliation, until someone, somwhere, pushes the Big Red Magic Button left unattended by more rational thinkers? Or the overnight doubling, even tripling, of oil prices in a panicky reaction to rhetoric delivered to a domestic audience in Farsi, Arabic, or Hebrew, with nary an interruption in actual shipments. Suddenly the 2 in $2.97 is replaced by a 3 or a 4, and $29.97 becomes $39.97 or $49.97 without a shot fired.

McCain didn’t plan on running in the face of a financial meltdown–but that was the case in just the last eight weeks or so of the ’08 campaign. How will Mitt’s experience at Bain Capital, or his proclaimed pleasure at being able to fire someone who provides him services, serve him in the light of a crisis in the Gulf, to say nothing of a Euro financial crisis that spreads to Wall Street in minutes and to Main Street a few days after that, thereby underscoring the role of capital in capitalism?

If the South Carolina primary, or Newt vs Mitt, seems to you to be the most interesting story in the Breakfast Soap Opera with Charlie Rose, by all means enjoy. But don’t ignore the rest of “the paper,” however it’s delivered.

H