In February 2003 the tapestry copy of Picasso's Guernica hung in the anteroom to the UN Security Council Chamber was curtained over, at American insistence - not 'an appropriate backdrop', it was explained, for official statements to the world media on the forthcoming invasion of Iraq. The episode became an emblem: of the state's relentless will to control the minutiae of appearance, as part of - essential to - its drive to war. But was the crudity of the attempt at censorship not counterproductive? And did not the whole incident speak above all to the state's anxiety as it tried to micro-manage the means of symbolic production? A manifesto for the new anti-war generation, Afflicted Powers is the first formal Situationist response to 9/11 and its aftermath. In a short, readable intervention the Bay Area Report Collective take an idiosyncratic and highly critical look at US foreign policy and the methods it employs. They perpetuate the legacy of Guy Debord with his hatred of the image-life, upon which so much of 9/11 and after has revolved. Topics explored include 'Islamism and the Crisis of the Secular Nation-State', 'Permanent War', 'Blood for Oil?' quirkily significant book, which will resonate for years to come - long after the current US administration has had its day. Afflicted Powers is an account of world politics since 11 September 2001. It aims above all to confront the perplexing doubleness of the present -- its lethal mixture of atavism and new-fangledness. The world careers backward into forms of ideological and geo-political combat that call to mind now the Scramble for Africa, now the Wars of Religion. But this brute return of the past is accompanied by an equally monstrous political deployment of (and entrapment in) the apparatus of a modern, not to say hypermodern, production of appearances. Capital is on the move again. In the Middle East and elsewhere it is attempting, nakedly, a new round of primitive accumulation and enclosure. Now, however, it is obliged to do so in unprecedented circumstances. for hegemony in the world of images; and never before has the dominant world power been subject to real catastrophe in the realm of the Spectacle, as happened to the US on September 11. The present turn to empire and enclosure - what Afflicted Powers terms military neo-liberalism - is confronted not only by various forms of radical Islam but by a new kind of vanguardism armed with the toolkit of spectacular politics. This book attempts to rethink certain key aspects of the current global struggle within this overall perspective, and to provide some critical support for present and future oppositions. Its main themes are: the Spectacle and September 11; blood for oil; permanent war and illusory peace; the U.S.-Israel relationship; revolutionary Islam; and modernity and terror.