Five Years of Accelerating U.S. Decline

[marmar]

from Black Agenda Report:



Five years ago, anti-war forces were in deep depression, having failed to prevent Bush from launching his illegal war against Iraq. Pro-war circles were floating on top of the world, imagining that Washington was about to become the new Rome under an American arms umbrella that would hold the entire planet in Shock and Awe. As it turned out, the American offensive was tied down by indigenous Iraqis – a great defeat for a superpower. So repulsed was the world at Washington’s assault on global order and civilization, itself, that the U.S. has been on a many-fronted free-fall ever since March 30, 2003. This article includes a piece written by our team on the day of the invasion.

Five Years of Accelerating U.S. Decline
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

On March 20, 2003, the day the U.S. and its “coalition of the willing” launched the long awaited invasion of Iraq, leftist groupings in the United States behaved as if the last vestiges of civilization were crumbling before their eyes, and that somehow the American anti-war movement was singularly responsible for failing to hold back Bush’s legions. Although it is true that U.S. peaceniks have always harbored wildly inflated assessments of their own importance on the domestic and world scene, it is a group flaw they share with Americans of all political persuasions, most of whom believe themselves to be at the center of the universe, and therefore the greatest losers or the mightiest warriors in history, depending on which way the drama unfolds.

“Fat, flatulent pundits seriously contemplated whether the United States was about to assume the global responsibilities once borne by ancient Rome.”

So it was natural that the anti-war “losers” and bellicose “winners” of March 20, five years ago, were both wildly out of touch with the probable consequences of U.S. aggression. Anti-warists seemed to shrink into little balls of hurt and fear, as if the massive armed assault would inevitably usher in some multi-decade U.S. Cowboy Reich. The pro-war crowd convinced itself that nothing could stop the U.S. military on the march. Fat, flatulent pundits seriously contemplated whether the United States was about to assume the global responsibilities once borne by ancient Rome – and whether that was a good or bad thing.

Nobody, it seemed, appeared aware of a fundamental truth known to all professional soldiers. Few antagonists rush into war unless their own analysis indicates that what passes for peace is even more dangerous. Wars are initiated, in the main, by desperate men, who envision ever more threatening scenarios mounting, one after the other, unless they ACT to take the initiative out of fate’s hands and into their own.

The U.S. government was terrified of allowing the status quo to continue in the Middle East. By not decisively “winning” (as only militaries can do), the Americans were losing…something. One would have to deploy companies of military psychiatrists to strap down and massively drug Bush’s entire inner war council to assemble a picture of the nightmare scenarios that caused Washington to roll the dice under such unfavorable circumstances. Literally no one except Israel wanted the U.S. to succeed in a thrust that was designed to bring U.S. forces deep into the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. Anything less than a total victory, would be viewed as a superpower defeat. The worst conceivable scenario – that indigenous Iraqi forces would stop the Americans in their tracks – was so unthinkable that the Americans refused to think about it – guaranteeing that, over time, the U.S. would suffer a total military and diplomatic debacle. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=568&Itemid=36

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. A little tough on the peace folks there, isn't it?

They meet huge resistance, due to a conservative narrative which states that hippie conspiracies made the effort in Vietnam fail. So while while being harassed by expensive cointel-pro type tactics, I think it dawned on many of them how stupid it all is. Vietnam failed because it was a war against what turned out to be a fictitious threat, in the "domino theory", and the hippies were another fictitious threat, as were MLK's plans to destroy america that made the cointel-pro people to harass him. Saddam Hussein's WMDs were another fictitious threat. The thing about battling these fake threats is that you can't really lose, but at the same time you can't really win; whatever observed problems you blamed on the fictitious threat will continue after the fictitious threat has been neutralized, so the action in the end really accomplishes nothing. All you can really hope for is to pray that the fictitious threat becomes real, and validates your fictitious threat theory. But what when they don't?

When they don't, you look like an asshole, and REAL threats which were watching from the shadows the whole time come out, things like a crashing economy. And that's pretty much where we're at, WITHOUT any action from the peace community. If anybody in it saw the fact that these things come down on their own, I don't blame them. And I certainly won't say they collapsed into a ball of fear, they have been very, very brave.