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Three Exceptional Facts About America: It’s Safe to Be Paranoid in the U.S.
from TomDispatch:
Three Exceptional Facts About America
Its Safe to Be Paranoid in the U.S.
By Tom Engelhardt
Given the cluttered landscape of the last 14 years, can you even faintly remember the moment when the Berlin Wall came down, the Cold War ended in a stunned silence of shock and triumph in Washington, Eastern Europe was freed, Germany unified, and the Soviet Union vanished from the face of the Earth? At that epochal moment, six centuries of imperial rivalries ended. Only one mighty power was left.
There hadnt been a moment like it in historical memory: a single hyperpower with a military force beyond compare looming over a planet without rivals. Under the circumstances, what couldnt Washington hope for? The eternal domination of the Middle East and all that oil? A planetary Pax Americana for generations to come? Why not? After all, not even the Romans and the British at the height of their empires had experienced a world quite like this one.
Now, leap a quarter of a century to the present and note the rising tide of paranoia in this country and the litany of predictions of doom and disaster. Consider the extremity of fear and gloom in the party of Ronald Its Morning Again in America Reagan in what are called debates among its presidential candidates, and its hard not to imagine that we aren't at the precipice of the decline and fall of just about everything. The American Century? So much sawdust on the floor of history.
If, however, you look at the country that its top politicians can now hardly mention without defensively wielding the words exceptional or indispensable, the truly exceptional thing is this: as a great power, the United States still stands alone on planet Earth and Americans can exhibit all the paranoia they want in remarkable safety and security.
.......(snip).......
Exceptional Fact #1: Failure Is Success, or the U.S. Remains the Sole Superpower
If you were to isolate the single most striking, if little discussed, aspect of American foreign policy in the first 15 years of this century, it might be that Washingtons inability to apply its power successfully just about anywhere confirms that very power; in other words, failure is a marker of success. Let me explain.
In the post-9/11 years, American power in various highly militarized forms has been let loose repeatedly across a vast swath of the planet from the Chinese border to deep in Africa -- and nowhere in those 14 years, despite dreams of glory and global dominion, has the U.S. succeeded in any of its strategic goals. That should qualify as exceptional in itself. After all, what are the odds that, in all that time, nothing should turn out as planned or positively by Washingtons standards? It could not win its war in Afghanistan; nor its two wars, one ongoing, in Iraq; nor has it had success in its present one in Syria; it failed to cow Iran; its intervention in Libya proved catastrophic; its various special ops and drone campaigns in Yemen have led to chaos in that country; and so, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut used to say, it goes. ...............(more)
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176050/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_superpower_as_victim/#more
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Three Exceptional Facts About America: It’s Safe to Be Paranoid in the U.S. (Original Post)
marmar
Sep 2015
OP
Hestia
(3,818 posts)1. This is well and good but the whole point since 2000 is the transfer of our Treasury to the hands of
the few who now control it.