The War That Finished Off America’s Century
By Ian Bell
The Herald, UK
October 24th, 2006

Arrogance and stupidity. The former is “undue assumption of importance conceit, self-importance”, says Chambers. Stupid is “stupefied or stunned; senseless; insensible; deficient or dull in understanding; showing lack of reason or judgment; foolish; dull; boring” (Ditto).

Interesting language, you will allow. Brief, to the point and probably better than merely accurate, given the context. Yet we can be forgiven for thinking that the previously unknown, soon-to-be-invisible Mr Alberto Fernandez wishes this morning that he had spent more time with his dictionary and his thesaurus before chatting, presumably with someone’s approval, to Al Jazeera television.

To put it no higher, you do not further a career in the State Department, down in Washington’s Foggy Bottom, by composing the obituary for a presidency in public. Your superiors are liable to get the wrong idea. In the absurd language of the Beltway, Fernandez says now that his words were “seriously mis-spoken”. One guesses his bosses may have suggested a more succinct formulation.

Still, there we have it. How does one US government functionary define his country’s intervention in Iraq? Dumb and driven by hubris, that’s how. White House-watchers may tell you that this was merely State hitting back at Defence, or Condi’s mouthpiece biting a chunk from Rummy’s policy. It hardly matters. With President Bush confessing to a Vietnam parallel, with Britain’s government showing every sign of policy paralysis, we are where we are: defeat looms. What follows?

The gossip from Washington suggests that the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, headed by former Secretary of State James Baker, will zip the last body bag when it reports this winter. Students of family tragedy detect the hand of George Bush senior in a former employee’s efforts to slap down Bush junior. This is interesting, but not relevant. Instead, if the leaks from the commission are to be believed, even Republican America has begun to think the unthinkable: Iraq is a catastrophe. The time to cut and run is approaching.

If that is the case, the destruction of Britain’s global influence, commenced at Suez a neat half-century ago, will be complete. No-one trusts us. No-one values our independence of mind or spirit, such as it remains. We are no-one’s idea of honest brokers, and too puny militarily to replace even a decent police force in Basra or Helmand. Boys are dying needlessly for the sake of Tony Blair’s self-esteem. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

If Fernandez is any sort of weather vane, or if Baker’s group demands a sharp change in US “tactics”, as most expect, something important has happened. Call it this: with Iraq, the last superpower has demonstrated its essential impotence. The American century has drawn to a close, finally. Yet very few people have begun even to imagine what might follow.

Forget Iraq and global terror, just for a second. Did you notice how Bush brought North Korea to heel? Were you impressed when he put Iran, nuclear ambitions and all, back in the box? Did you detect China’s respect for America’s status when the Korean peninsula became a troubling issue? Was that Vladimir Putin cocking a snook at the White House? Or was that Hizbollah laying down its rocket launchers in deference to American ideals?

Europe has no right, need or excuse to mock. America remains hugely powerful, with an enormous potential for good. The global economy depends still on the greenback and, more importantly, on the capacity of the US to swallow everyone’s debts. The point is no longer the comical verbal infelicities of the junior Bush, Donald Rumsfeld’s manifest incompetence, or the lies of a Prime Minister. We are entering the post-imperial phase. So what comes next?

Such sense as emerges from Washington these days betrays incomprehension. All those who were once gung-ho, wrapped in the flag with their metaphorical boots on foreign ground, cannot grasp how it came to this. America has all the firepower, all the technology and all the borrowed money anyone could desire: so what’s the problem? Yet America cannot, on the evidence, subdue one small country and a relatively minor insurgency. Whether it can then propose to quell low-intensity global terrorism thus becomes a key question for the Bush presidency, and for what remains of the American imperium.

I am no fan of empires. I lack the specific patriot gene. I know perfectly well, equally, that the econ-omy of the US did rather well from the humiliation of Vietnam, that it bounced back without breaking sweat, and that the decline of the west has been predicted rather too often. Some comparisons are interesting, nevertheless. Didn’t little Britain once keep order, if bloodily, all across Iraq?

America has the wrong kind of power, in abundance. If you cannot crush North Korea, the tin-pot of tin-pots, what can you crush, precisely? If you can dream of star wars and fail to cope with mere militia, what is the meaning of “arrogance”, exactly, never mind “stupidity”? Alberto Fernandez can regret his frankness while he contemplates a wrecked career. He can claim to have attempted honest debate. But we are invited to wonder at the failure of American confidence. Iraq, remember, was supposed to be easy.

In international affairs, a vacuum is abhorrent and ultimately intolerable. We can expect a Chinese 21st century, I suspect, and an Indian commercial hegemony at the margins. We can look forward to Europe’s brief resurgence, perhaps, in a kind of late cultural flowering. But if America’s incredible spending on defence cannot secure even the short-term interests of a single President, something historic has occurred. The guarantee that made the Cold War conceivable has been withdrawn. The consumerist maw that kept economies busy for 50 years becomes irrelevant.

All because of one President’s arrogance, and one dictator’s stupidity: simple, really. The point of Iraq, after all, was supposed to be democracy and the defeat of tyranny. These were America’s gifts to the world, vested in the legacy of the Second World War. That promise has not been kept. After Blair has departed, Britain will need to think again about necessities and loyalties.

Alberto Fernandez probably had no such thoughts in mind when he spoke too freely to Al Jazeera’s Arab audience. I suspect he intended to prove that humility survives within America’s body politic. If so, he underestimated both the inherent weakness of the republic and the determination of its enemies. I offer no comfort to the latter. I wonder, in fact, how those of us who have opposed the Washington neo-cons will feel if the US is enfeebled permanently. This was never supposed to be either/or.

History has little room for debating societies: they command no divisions. Imperial puissance fades, meanwhile, amid the usual arrogance and the standard stupidity. No-one can choose a world in their own image: that’s the fantasy. No force of arms can, meanwhile, ensure an empire’s survival. America’s decline begins to seem like a puerile kind of fable, one glutted with lies and bathos. Why is a Britain that knows better being dragged into the mess? Blair’s therapist might explain, one of these days.

The war has failed. The chickens are home, and roosting. We are witnessing a historic moment. As history tends to demand, however, innocents are perishing just to demonstrate the obvious.

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USTV Commentary: A Chinese 21st century is a decent guess, but by no means a lock. China needs imported oil as much as the U.S., and they need America buying their goods. Perhaps it will be an Iranian 21st century, if Iran gets the Iraqi oil, which is said to be most of what’s left. It that is the case, they’ll be raking in the cash. Maybe it’s a Russian 21st century, if Russia allies itself with Iran or conquers it (if the neo-con Bushevik regime doesn’t do it first). Maybe it’s nobody’s century, if fighting over the oil makes things so chaotic that nobody can really pump it out efficiently. We are all going to be out of it before long eventually anyway, so the sooner we think about moving towards a truly sustainable society the better.

There is nothing ‘clean’ about this, the blueprint for the American-Israeli Neo-Con Axis for warmongering militarism in order to ‘remake the mideast’ in some new Strangelovian vision.

William Rivers Pitt does a good job here in detailing the history behind this and reveals the depth of the roots which underly the recent fighting in Lebanon.

Over the last several weeks, an old White Paper found new life in the shattered ruins of Lebanon’s infrastructure. Titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” the paper was masterminded by three neo-con hawks who, in the fullness of time, became powerful members of the Bush administration: Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser. The three were working for a pro-Israel think tank called the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies when the paper was first drafted.

“A Clean Break” was originally written for the benefit of Benjamin Netanyahu after he rose to the position of Prime Minister of Israel in 1996. This, in and of itself, was unique; it is rare indeed to have a trio of American foreign policy specialists crafting national security policy for a foreign power. Those who have seen the hand of the Israeli Likud Party guiding American foreign policy over the last several years base their premise, to no small degree, upon the involvement of these three men in Israeli affairs before their ascendancy in American government. The arguments contained in this document eventually became the basis for the now-infamous White Paper by the Project for the New American Century titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” which was authored in 2000.

Perle, Feith and Wurmser’s vision for a new Israel centered around the re-invigoration of the discredited policy of pre-emption, i.e., attacking a perceived foe based on whatever premise can be found in order to show strength in the region and intimidate local governments into compliance. “Israel’s new agenda,” read the paper, “can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone, and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.”

Read The Full Article Here

David Korten writes a really good piece on the need to change the entire governing paradigm, and how this time period we are in just might be the point at which it can (and certainly should) be done….

Empire organizes by domination at all levels, from relations among nations to relations among family members. Empire brings fortune to the few, condemns the majority to misery and servitude, suppresses the creative potential of all, and appropriates much of the wealth of human societies to maintain the institutions of domination.

Earth Community, by contrast, organizes by partnership, unleashes the human potential for creative co-operation, and shares resources and surpluses for the good of all. Supporting evidence for the possibilities of Earth Community comes from the findings of quantum physics, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, anthropology, archaeology, and religious mysticism. It was the human way before Empire; we must make a choice to re-learn how to live by its principles.

One of the key lines from this essay…

The apparent political divisions notwithstanding, U.S. polling data reveal a startling degree of consensus on key issues. Eighty-three percent of Americans believe that as a society the United States is focused on the wrong priorities. Supermajorities want to see greater priority given to children, family, community, and a healthy environment. Americans also want a world that puts people ahead of profits, spiritual values ahead of financial values, and international cooperation ahead of international domination. These Earth Community values are in fact widely shared by both conservatives and liberals.

Bingo. If people want to see it happen and live in such a society, why isn’t it happening? The seemingly obvious answer is that we don’t live in a society governed of, by and for the People. If we did, what it did would reflect the purposes and ideals that clear majorities of people on all sides of the political spectrum share.

Read The Full Article Here

Stirling Newberry delivers an insightful and cautionary lesson from history as to the state of our nation today, and a well-reasoned warning as to the potentially fatal trajectory of its current path.

We remember the Assyrian Empire, even if not by name, because of its impact on both Hebrew and Hellenic culture - it provided the prototype of the evil empire, with its fast rise, brutal peak and implosive collapse. Reading the Assyrian chronicles, with their accounts of flaying alive rebels and enemies and plastering their skins to the walls of cities, and then burning alive the maidens and young men, and looking at the friezes of them impaling populations that they warred upon, one realizes that, despite there being an Assyrian lobby today, the Assyrians by and large deserve their reputation for fearful slaughter and savagery beyond the norms even of a dark age.

Assyria is of interest today, however, not because of its legendary quality to many, and its claims to legitimacy - it amuses me that San Francisco, the city of peace, has a monument to a genocide-practicing empire - but because the patterns of behavior that the Assyrians engaged in, and the reasons for them, have parallels to our own.

As Newberry goes on to conclude….

While there is a sense that perhaps America will suffer a gentle decline as the British did, the alternative is that those who feel that they have been tormented by our actions will look to deliver the same fate to New York City or Washington, DC, that ancient rebellion delivered to Ninuwa - absolute devastation. In the world of asymmetrical threats, this is not mere idle speculation nor undue alarmism but a reasonable extrapolation that has been explored by such popular writers as Tom Clancy.

The Armies of Ashur could conquer the world, but they could not even hold the hearts and minds of their own people. In the end, these armies themselves spearheaded the revolt against the cult-king and his worship. In the end, it was the internal polarization driven by the religious system against the geo-political and economic realities that destroyed their state, and that is destroying ours.

Read The Full Article Here

Historian and former CIA official Chalmers Johnson strikes another bullseye with this piece in the TomDispatch about the nature and history of American empire, and its relation to the whole notion of and role of ‘markets’ and ‘democracy.’

There is something absurd and inherently false about one country trying to impose its system of government or its economic institutions on another. Such an enterprise amounts to a dictionary definition of imperialism. When what’s at issue is “democracy,” you have the fallacy of using the end to justify the mean? (making war on those to be democratized), and in the process the leaders of the missionary country are invariably infected with the sins of hubris, racism, and arrogance.

We Americans have long been guilty of these crimes. On the eve of our entry into World War I, William Jennings Bryan, President Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, described the United States as “the supreme moral factor in the world’s progress and the accepted arbiter of the world’s disputes.” If there is one historical generalization that the passage of time has validated, it is that the world could not help being better off if the American president had not believed such nonsense and if the United States had minded its own business in the war between the British and German empires. We might well have avoided Nazism, the Bolshevik Revolution, and another thirty to forty years of the exploitation of India, Indonesia, Indochina, Algeria, Korea, the Philippines, Malaya, and virtually all of Africa by European, American, and Japanese imperialists.

We Americans prattle on endlessly about how our great crusade in the Middle East is about bestowing the blessings of democracy (in this case at the point of a bayonet and the receiving end of a JDAM). But this more on the lines of what Noam Chomsky described as ‘deterring democracy.’ He’s right. Here’s a money shot quote from Johnson’s piece…

We have done everything in our power to see that the Iraqis did not get a “free and fair election,” one in which the Shia majority could come to power and ally Iraq with Iran. As Noah Feldman, the Coalition Provisional Authority’s law advisor, put it in November 2003, “If you move too fast the wrong people could get elected.”

Read The Complete Article

Michael Schwartz writes in The TomDispatch that the…

“…rather comfortable portrait of the US as a bumbling, even thoroughly incompetent giant overwhelmed by unexpected forces tearing Iraqi society apart is strikingly inaccurate: Most of the death, destruction, and disorganization in the country has, at least in its origins, been a direct consequence of US efforts to forcibly institute an economic and social revolution, while using overwhelming force to suppress resistance to this project.”

This has all been reported on at some detail by folks like Naomi Klein with her excellent 2004 report “Baghdad Year Zero” and reports from the likes of Greg Palast on the corporate war profiteering going on in Iraq. This whole endeavor was a scam from the get go. It wasn’t about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberating’ Iraq. It was about instituting neo-liberal corporate economic policies from the ground up. A corporatist’s dream come true. Made possible by using the U.S. Marines as their own private Pinkerton enforcers. Some things never change, as Gen. Smedley Butler can tell you, way back in 1933 with his seminal work “War Is A Racket”.

Another part of what is really interesting about this report are the references to the ongoing intensity of action in Iraq, particularly the airstrikes. Totally under if not completely un-reported.

And then there is this…

A telling indicator of the condition of the Iraqi infrastructure and its immediate prospects can be found in descriptions of the elaborate embassy, referred to as “George W’s palace” by Baghdad residents, that the U.S. is now constructing inside the capital’s fortified Green Zone. According to the London Times, the $592 million structure will be “the biggest embassy on earth,” and will feature “impressive residences for the Ambassador and his deputy, six apartments for senior officials, and two huge office blocks for 8,000 staff to work in. There will be what is rumoured to be the biggest swimming pool in Iraq, a state-of-the-art gymnasium, a cinema, restaurants offering delicacies from favourite US food chains, tennis courts and a swish American Club for evening functions.”

Outpost of the empire. Your tax dollars at work.

Read The Full Report

Here are some insightful and well-researched pieces on the Committee on the Present Danger, what it is, who they are, and the threats it poses to the future of an open and free democratic republic. For those who want to understand the history of the players involved in the current administration, and how the current threats to the future of America’s constitutional republic have historical antecedents that stretch back for decades, should definitely read these reports.

A good piece by Jim Lobe from Common Dreams on the neocons reviving the vehicle of this organization dedicated, even if only inadvertently, to perpetual war and its national security state apparatus.

An article from 2001 from In These Times contributing editor Jason Vest on the history of Donald Rumsfeld and almost predicting the course of events that would transpire through his reign at the Pentagon and in the Bush administration.

Conservative Patrick Buchanan weighs in as well on the hypocrisy that this cabal of power reveals in what their true motivations are and the threats they pose to the nation.

All of this brings to mind Paul Craig Roberts’ essay on the NeoCons being a modern form of Jacobin radicalism, what with their revolutionary dictatorship relying on their own ‘Committee of Public Safety’ as an organ of state repression.

Why does the Bush Administration refuse to discuss withdrawing occupation forces from Iraq? Why is Halliburton, who landed the no-bid contracts to construct and maintain US military bases in Iraq, posting higher profits than ever before in its 86-year history? Why do these bases in Iraq resemble self-contained cities as much as military outposts? Dahr Jamail explores these questions and more.

Read His Expose Here

Excellent must read interviews with author, scholar and CIA veteran Chalmers Johnson published by Tomdispatch. His decades of intelligence and political experience, knowledge of history and academic discipline make Johnson one of the most insightful and effective analysts and critics of the current administration and the potentially devastating course America is set on, and the likely disastrous ramifications to the continued future of the republic. Of particular note are his points about the fiscal insolvency of the nation and the impact that will have on the nation’s future.

Something personally interesting with the history and biography of Johnson are his credentials as a veteran cold warrior, and his unwavering belief in the resistance to the USSR. He was even a supporter of the war in Vietnam at the time, as well as an advocate of the projection of American power in opposition to international communism. I, too, shared certain elements of support for those positions during that period, and like Johnson, saw the fall of the USSR as a crowning achievement and opportunity to scale back the enormous expenditure in armaments and militarization of our national security state.

But as he points out, that was not in the agenda of the ruling corporate classes which run our empire, and new enemies had to be created to justify the ever-expanding domination of global corporatism and the military-industrial complex.

It truly is a shameful sickness afflicting what is left of our republic.

Read the complete Tomdispatch interviews…
Part 1 - Cold Warrior In a Strange Land
Part 2 - Our Fading Republic

Another excellent treatise from one of America’s pre-eminent historians (and admittedly rare and oxymoronic breed, it seems. “American” and “historian”, something that doesn’t work well in the United States of Amnesia).

If you want some actual historical perspective on what is going on, and with an eye towards history being something that didn’t start in the 18th century, Read Here.