Empire of Stupidity: Seven Years in Hell

By Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

Tuesday 04 September 2007

On body counts, dead zones, and an Empire of Stupidity.

On August 22nd, breaking into his Crawford vacation, the President addressed the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, giving what is already known as his "Vietnam speech." That day, George W. Bush, who, as early as 2003, had sworn that his war on Iraq would "decidedly not be Vietnam," took the full-frontal plunge into the still-flowing current of the Big Muddy, fervently embracing Vietnam analogy-land. You could almost feel his relief (and that of his neocon speechwriters).

In that mud-wrestle of a speech, he invoked "one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam.... that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people,' 're-education camps,' and 'killing fields.'" The man who had so carefully sat out the Vietnam War now proclaimed that Americans never should have left that land. As he's done with so much else, he also linked the Vietnam War by an act of verbal ju-jitsu to al-Qaeda and the attacks of September 11th. 9/11, too, turned out to be part of the "price" we'd paid for succumbing to "the allure of retreat" and withdrawing way back when. ("In an interview with a Pakistani newspaper after the 9/11 attacks," intoned the President, "Osama bin Laden declared that 'the American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. And they must do the same today.'")

Whatever brief respite his August embrace of Vietnam may have given him in the polls, it involved a larger concession on the administration's part. Like its predecessors, the Bush administration and its neocon supporters simply couldn't kick the "Vietnam Syndrome" - much as they struggled to do so - any more than a moth could avoid the flame. Now, they found themselves locked in a desperate, hopeless attempt to use Vietnam to recapture the hearts and minds of the American people.

Entering the Dead Zone

It's possible to track this losing struggle with the Vietnam analogy over these last years. Take one issue - the body count - on which we know something about administration Vietnam thinking. For Americans of the Vietnam era, a centuries-old "victory culture" - in which triumph on some distant frontier against evil enemies was considered an American birthright - still held sway. In Vietnam, when it nonetheless became clear that the promised frontier victory was, for the second time in little more than a decade, nowhere in sight, American military and civilian officials tried to compensate.

One problem they faced was that the very definition of victory in war - the taking of terrain, the advance into hostile territory that signaled the crushing of enemy resistance - had ceased to mean anything in Vietnam. In a guerrilla war in which, as American grunts regularly complained, you couldn't tell friends from enemies, no less hold a hostile countryside, something else had to substitute for the landing at D-Day, the advance on Berlin, the island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. And so the "whiz kids" of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's Pentagon and the military high command developed a substitute numerology of victory.

Everything was to be counted and the copious statistics of success were to flow endlessly up the chain of command and back to Washington, proof positive that "progress" was being made. The numbers looked convincing indeed. In fact, to believe loss possible in Vietnam, when by any measure of success - from dead enemy and captured weapons to cleared roads and pacified villages - Americans had such a decisive advantage, seemed nothing short of madness. Yet, to accept the figures pouring in daily from soldiers, advisors, and bureaucrats was to defy the logic of one's senses. To make the endlessly unraveling situation in Vietnam madder still, the impending defeat did not seem to be a military one. Those who directed the war (as well as the right-wing in the post-war years) regularly claimed, for instance, that not a single significant battle had been lost to the Vietnamese enemy.

Sometimes it seemed that Americans in Vietnam did nothing but invent new ways of measuring success. There were, for instance, the eighteen indices of the Hamlet Evaluation System, each meant to calibrate the "progress" of "pacification" in South Vietnam's 2,300 villages and almost 13,000 hamlets, focusing largely on "rural security" and "development." Then there were the many indices of the Measurement of Progress system, its monthly reports, produced in slide form, including "strength trends of the opposing forces, efforts of friendly forces in sorties ... enemy base areas neutralized," and so on. And don't forget that there were figures by the bushel-load on every form of destruction rained down on the Vietnamese enemy - sorties flown, tonnage dropped, "truck kills," you name it. The efforts that went into creating numerical equivalents for death were endless.

For visiting congressional delegations, the commander of U.S. forces, Gen. William Westmoreland, had his "attrition charts," multicolored bar graphs illustrating various "trends" in death and destruction. Commanders in the field had their own sophisticated ways to codify "kill ratios"; while, on the ground, where, in dangerous circumstances, the actual counting had to be done, all of this translated, far more crudely, into the MGR, or, as the grunts sometimes said, the "Mere Gook Rule" - "If it's dead and it's Vietnamese, it's VC [Vietcong]." In other words, when pressure came down for the "body count," any body would do.

Back in the U.S., much of the frustration that had gathered in the face of mounting years of claimed progress and evident failure would focus on the "body count" of enemy dead, announced in late afternoon U.S. military press briefings in the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon. For the element of the fantastic in those briefings (and the figures proffered), they came to be known among reporters as "the Five o'clock Follies."

In a war in which D-Day-like landings were uncontested publicity events and "conquered" territory might be abandoned within days, the killing of the enemy initially seemed nothing to be ashamed of and an obvious indicator of "progress" - a classic word then and now. (Witness the upcoming Petraeus "progress report" to Congress.) As time went on, however, as success refused to make an appearance despite the claims that it was just around some corner, and as "defeat," a word no one cared to use, crept into consciousness (while American officials like National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger privately fulminated about the impossibility of losing a war to "a little fourth-rate power"), those dead bodies decoupled from the idea of victory. They began to seem like a grim count of something else entirely - of, depending on your position at that moment, frustration, futility, brutality, tragedy, defeat.

The body count took on a grim life of its own. Detached from reality, yet producing the most horrific of realities - and, among increasing numbers of Americans, a sense of shame - it morphed into something like a never-ending Catch-22 of carnage. In this way, as the bodies piling up looked ever more like so many slaughtered peasants in a "fourth-rate" land, successive American administrations entered the dead zone.

Of course, if the statistics of slaughter had been accepted by all sides (then or now) as the ruling logic of the struggle, the United States would have won the war any day from the mid-1960s on (or, in the present case, from March 2003 on). Instead, by the sacrifice of untold numbers of lives, the enemy somehow succeeded in capturing the only set of numbers worth having - the numbers of weeks, months, years that the fighting went on.

Return of the Body Count

Little wonder then that, in the beginning, the Bush administration was eager to avoid the body count, along with body bags and those disintegrative images of the Vietnam war dead coming home in full daylight in sight of television cameras; that it was eager, in fact, to avoid every aspect of a thoroughly discredited war. But here's the irony: From the moment the Afghan War began in 2001, no one had the Vietnam analogy more programmatically on the brain than the Bush team.

In this, they were no exception to the rule. Ever since the 1970s, the Pentagon and various administrations had been playing a conscious opposites game with what they imagined as Vietnam's failed practices in each of the many smaller interventions, invasions, and wars launched from the invasion of Grenada through the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the Kosovo air war.

The Bush administration began similarly, if more confidently, in opposites mode; for they expected that, as the sole superpower on a modest-sized planet with the mightiest military in sight, victory would be theirs in a "cakewalk", to use a winning word of that moment. It would also happen in the most obvious of ways - the taking of the enemy capital, the destruction (or as they liked to say, "decapitation") of the enemy regime, and the long-term garrisoning of American forces on gigantic bases in the Iraqi countryside (not to speak of the bouquets that were to be thrown by thrilled Shiites at the feet of the invading "liberators"). Vietnam? They'd skip it entirely - and all its notorious ways. As Gen. Tommy Franks, who ran the Afghan war, so famously said: "We don't do body counts."

Jump almost five years to October 2006 and a President thoroughly frustrated by an inability to show "progress" in his war of choice, despite proclaiming that "major combat operations in Iraq" had "ended" in May 2003 and presenting a National Strategy for Victory in Iraq in November 2005. In an outburst to a group of sympathetic conservative journalists, he revealed just how much he yearned for the return of the body count: "We don't get to say that - a thousand of the enemy killed, or whatever the number was. It's happening. You just don't know it," he exclaimed in frustration.

And why exactly couldn't the President reveal that figure - of which he was inordinately proud - to the American people? "We have made a conscious effort not to be a body-count team," was what Bush told the assembled journalists and pundits, indicating in the process how much conscious planning for Iraq as the not-Vietnam had actually taken place in the White House as well as the Pentagon. (Of course, as the Washington Post's Bob Woodward pointed out, the President privately kept a body count, "'his own personal scorecard for the war' in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists - each ready to be crossed out by the President as his forces took them down.")

Not so long after Bush made his body-count comments, the body count itself returned as military spokespeople in Iraq and Afghanistan began releasing numbers of enemy killed in "coalition" military operations. Six months or so later, the body count has already become a commonplace as typical recent headlines indicate: "U.S., Iraqis kill 33 insurgents"; "Over 100 Taliban Killed in Afghan Battle."

In his VFW speech, the President finally got to salve his own frustration. "In Iraq," he told his audience, "our troops are taking the fight to the extremists and radicals and murderers all throughout the country. Our troops have killed or captured an average of more than 1,500 al Qaeda terrorists and other extremists every month since January of this year."

Forgetting the absurdity of the figure (which, if accurate, would essentially mean al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia has been wiped out), let's just note that, as with the Vietnam analogy itself, the body count in administration hands arrives not as a substitute for victory, but as a way of staving off thoughts of defeat. The President, that is, picked up not where the body count started in Vietnam, but where those Five o'clock Follies left off.

In its own strange way, Bush's speech was an admission of defeat. Somehow, Vietnam, the American nightmare, had finally bested the man who spent his youth avoiding it and his presidency evading it. The President had finally mounted the tiger you are always advised not to ride and had officially entered the dead zone, where the bodies pile high and victory never appears, taking the rest of the country with him. It's clear that, barring some stunning development in Iraq (or perhaps an assault on Iran), whatever the "progress reports," whatever the debates, that's where we'll be until January 2009 when it will automatically become Hillary's or Barack's or Mitt's or Giuliani's war. (From the Vietnam years, we also know what happens when a president, who inherits a war, fears being labeled the person who "lost" it; we know just how hard it is to get out then.)

"The Greatest Force for Liberation the World Has Ever Seen"

Arriving 40 years after the Vietnam War ended, the war in Iraq has turned out to be its spiritual twin in the American pantheon of disaster and defeat. But what a 40 years they were! In fact, if in all sorts of ways Iraq wasn't actually Vietnam, then the United States of 2003 wasn't the U.S. of the Vietnam era either. Not by a long shot.

The President's Vietnam speech was a clever historical montage, if you assume that no one remembers anything about the past. As it happens, almost every line of the speech has since been analyzed, attacked, and dismembered by critics, pundits, and historians who do remember. But in all the commentary, one line - perhaps the most striking - slipped by uncommented upon. And yet it was the line that offered an entry ramp onto the royal road to understanding what exactly has changed in our country over the post-Vietnam decades, not to speak of the seven-plus years from hell of the Bush administration.

Here's what the President said to applause from the assembled vets:

"I'm confident that we will prevail. I'm confident we'll prevail because we have the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known - the men and women of the United States Armed Forces."

Let's stop on that breathtaking, near messianic claim for a moment. Try, as a start, putting it in the mouths of Presidents John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or even Richard Nixon, no less Gerald Ford. Or try imagining Abraham Lincoln, in the midst of a great civil war that would indeed lead to the emancipation of the slaves, saying something of the sort; or Dwight D. Eisenhower, a former general who had led a great "crusade" - it was his word of choice for the title of his memoir - to free Europe in World War II but would be the first to warn of a "military-industrial complex" as his presidency ended.

Past American presidents might perhaps have spoken of the "greatest force for human liberation" as being "the American way of life" or "the American dream," or American democracy, or the thinking of the Founding Fathers. But it took a genuine transformation in, and the full-scale militarization of, that way of life, for such a formulation to become presidentially conceivable, no less to pass unnoticed, even by fierce critics, in a speech practically every word of which was combed for meaning.

Now, read the speech again and you'll see that the line in question wasn't simply passing blather for an audience of vets, but a thematic summary of the thrust of the whole address, of, in fact, the very vision the Bush administration and supporting neoconservatives carried into office. Much has been said about the Christian fundamentalist nature of the administration, but if that had truly been the essence of these last years, the President would have identified Jesus Christ as that "greatest force."

Not that a distinction need be made, but this administration's primary fundamentalism has been that of born-again militarists, of believers in the efficacy of force as embodied in the most awe-inspiring, high-tech military on the planet. This was the idol at which its top officials worshipped when it came to foreign policy. They were in awe of the idea that they had at their command the best equipped, most powerful military the world had ever seen, armed to the teeth with techno-toys; already garrisoning much of the globe (and about to garrison more of it); already on the receiving end of vast inflows of taxpayer dollars (and about to receive staggeringly more of the same); already embedded in a sprawling network of corporate interests (and about to be significantly privatized into the hands of even more such corporations); already having divided most of the globe into military "commands" that were essentially viceroy-ships (and about to finish the job by creating a command for the "homeland," NORTHCOM, and for the previously forgotten, suddenly energy-hot continent of Africa, AFRICOM.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, these fundamentalist believers in the power of One to twist all other arms on the planet managed to add a second Defense Department - the Department of Homeland Security (with its own "-industrial complex") - to the American agenda; they passed ever more draconian laws curtailing American rights in the name of "homeland security"; they went remarkably far in turning what was already an imperial presidency into something like a Caesarian commander-in-chief presidency; they presided over a far more politicized Defense Department (whose commanders today speak out, while in uniform, on what once would have been civilian political matters); they initiated far more sweeping means of government surveillance at home; they opened offshore prisons, giving their covert intelligence operatives the possibility of disappearing just about any human being they cared to target and their interrogators permission to use the most sophisticated kinds of torture. In short, they presided over a striking increase in the state's coercive powers, as embodied in a single, theoretically unrestrained commander-in-chief presidency and the first imperial vice-presidency in American history. (Of course, from the Reagan "revolution" on, the American conservative movement that first took power over a quarter of a century ago never meant to throttle the state, only the capacity of the state to deliver any services except "security" to its citizenry.)

How distant now is the American moment when a peacetime U.S. Army could still exist as a minimalist force (as between the two world wars or even, to some extent and briefly, after the demobilization of World War II). Similarly, it is no longer possible for American politicians of either party to imagine any region of the globe as not part of our national security sphere or not an object of our attentions, not to say our duty, if push comes to shove (or far earlier), to intervene or make war. As a name, Bush's Global War on Terror was no more meant as blather than that "greatest force for liberation the world has ever seen."

By the time the top officials of this administration and their various neocon backers arrived in power in 2000, they had already fallen deeply in love with the all-volunteer U.S. Armed Forces and the semi-militarized land they were about to inherit. They fervently believed their own propaganda about what such a military could accomplish in the world, despite the cautionary lessons of history stretching from Vietnam back to what the Catholic peasants of Spain, the Sunni fundamentalists of their moment, did to Napoleon's vaunted armies of occupation. (They would, of course, hardly be the first ruling group to mistake their own propaganda for reality.)

Like all fundamentalist believers, like their eternally "resolute" President, in the face of the flood of disasters the Big Muddy of reality has delivered to their doorstep, they remain undeterred - at least, those who are left. Changing their minds was never an option, though they might indeed still opt to double-down their bets and launch an attack on Iran before January 2009.

They truly believed that when you wrapped the flag of American exceptionalism, of American goodness, around the U.S. military, you would have the greatest force for liberation on the planet. Of course, they defined "liberation" in a way that coincided exactly with their desires for remaking the world. Hence, whenever democratic elections didn't produce the results they wanted, they simply rejected the results. In the bargain, they were convinced that, wielding that "greatest force," they could reshape the Middle East to their specifications, establish an unassailably dominant position at the heart of the oil heartlands of the planet, roll back the Russians even further, cow the Chinese, and create a Pax Americana planet. From their fervent unipolarity, they would, in fact, help to give premature birth to a newly multipolar world.

Because their faith was of the blind sort, they thoroughly misread the nature of power - of what was powerful - in our world. Among other disastrous miscalculations, they confused the power that lay in the threat of loosing the American military, for the actual act of loosing it (as they would soon find out to their chagrin in both Afghanistan and Iraq). Like the monotheists they were, they believed that a single God, personified by the military at their command, would sweep all before Him; that, with a "coalition of the willing" (that is, the submissive) but without the need for actual allies or peers, and so for restraints of any kind, they could take their God of force to the heathen at the point of a shock-and-awe cruise missile and that victory - in fact, an endless string of victories - would be theirs. How predictably wrong they were.

They did move far toward completing the strange process by which American society has, since World War II, been militarized without taking on the normal signs of militarization. We are now a nation armed for global war - from under and on the sea, on the land, in the air, and from the heavens, in jungles and urban jungles, in oil lands, wetlands, and arid lands. We are prepared to make war on the planet itself with an arsenal that is indeed a techno-wonder. As the President suggested in his speech, not thoughts of Thomas Jefferson, but of the latest wondrous armed robot or Hellfire-missile-armed Predator drone are the true hallmarks of early twenty-first century American civilization.

The result of all this has been seven years of hell (so far) delivered by an administration of boys with lethal toys at their command (and the women who enabled them). The dwindling band now left presides over a militarized land that lacks a citizenry of warriors. Think Teutonic without the Teutons. The President caught the essence of America's odd form of militarization when, while launching his wars, he urged American citizens to show their mettle by visiting Disney World and spending up a storm.

A chasm, unimaginable when the U.S. still had a citizen's army, has emerged between American society and a military increasingly from the forgotten towns of the rural hinterland (as the lists of the dead regularly remind us) and new immigrant communities, an all-volunteer military that has become ever less like the public it defends, ever more mercenary (as huge "quick-ship" bonuses are used to attract the reluctant "volunteer") and ever more privatized. These days, the U.S. military and the vast mercenary legions of private contractors who accompany them to war are beginning to take on something of the look of the Roman imperial legions in that empire's last years when they were increasingly filled with Goths and other despised "barbarian" peoples from the empire's frontier regions.

As David Walker, U.S. Comptroller and head of the nonpartisan Government Accounting Office, pointed out recently, the American government has also, in a remarkably short period of time, taken on the look of a faltering imperial Rome with "an over-confident and over-extended military in foreign lands and fiscal irresponsibility by the central government." And imagine - it was only a few years ago that neocon pundits were hailing the U.S. as a power "more dominant than any since Rome." Think instead: The Roman Empire on crack cocaine.

Looking back, it will undoubtedly be clear, if it isn't already, that, with the adherents of the cult of force at the helm of the ship of state, the world of fantasy took over and, even in imperial terms, what resulted was an empire of stupidity, hustling headlong down the slope of decline. That's often the way with blind faith, with anything, in fact, that prevents you from actually taking in the world as it is.

Defeat

Recently, I watched a June Bug caught in a spider's web. It had evidently hit the web almost dead center; and, big as it was, had torn a hole in the fine filaments. Now, it dangled below the web, barely held (so it seemed) by a few strands of the spider's silk. A small brownish thing, glowing in the night light, the spider was working its way methodically around the madly struggling bug in what, for all the world, looked like the most unbelievable of contests. And yet, over time, the bug's flailing grew weaker, the filaments ever more numerous. By morning, with that bug fully wrapped, all its efforts long defeated, the visibly fantastic had turned into the most mundane of realities.

Now, what's left of an American fundamentalist cult of force, based on a prophesy of victory, led by naturals in the arts of destruction and deconstruction, but incapable of overseeing any task of construction or reconstruction anywhere on the planet or altering their path through the world, are faced with a word Americans have long proven themselves ill-equipped to handle - defeat. Today, as in the past, it's a word you only use as a curse to be laid biblically on your opponents. (Oppositional Democrats are reputedly now referred to privately in the White House as "defeatocrats.")

The Bush administration is not alone in being unable to face the idea of defeat. Sometimes even crushed imperial states, blind with defeat, can't admit what's happening to them. Think of Japan in August 1945, facing a defeat so total that just about every one of its cities had been burnt to a cinder. Japan's leaders still couldn't say the word. When the emperor gave his surrender speech (and his previously god-like voice was heard for the first time by ordinary Japanese), he claimed that, well, things hadn't turned out quite as expected. You can search that speech in vain for an actual acknowledgement of defeat.

So imagine a country whose fundamentalist leader sits in an untouched office, where the crisis of the day seems to be a faltering of the home sales market or a foot under a stall in a public bathroom, where the young he's sent to their deaths have largely come from out of the way places, where the stock market remains reasonably buoyant, and the worst casualties are taken on holiday highways.

The Vietnam experience is instructive as to why Americans, however dismayed by another "unwinnable" war, might be pardoned for having trouble coming to grips with the nature of that loss. After all, when the last Americans were lifted off that Saigon embassy roof as North Vietnamese forces entered the southern capital, the "victorious" country lay in ruins. Perhaps three million of its people (not counting neighboring Laotians and Cambodians) had - put in Iraq-era terms - become "excess deaths" during the previous years of fighting; perhaps 9,000 of the South's 15,000 hamlets and villages were in ruins; something like 19 million tons of herbicide had been sprayed on the land by the U.S. Air Force, and unexploded ordnance was everywhere. There were an estimated 1 million war widows, 879,000 orphans, 181,000 disabled people, and 200,000 prostitutes. At least 1.5 million farm animals had been lost and Vietnam's modest industrial base lay in ruins.

The defeated superpower had lost 58,000 dead and 300,000 wounded, but what's now called "the homeland" (a militarized term of our era unknown in the 1970s), except for some wrecked urban ghetto neighborhoods, a few dead or wounded students on university campuses, modest numbers of injured protesters and policemen, and a dead post-doctoral physics student in Wisconsin, lay remarkably untouched. The United States still remained the preeminent superpower on a two-superpower planet.

In the recent history of the reconstruction of war-torn lands, as with occupied Germany and Japan after World War II (as well as prostrate Europe via the Marshall Plan), Americans were supposed to generously offer help in rebuilding. But the land that now so desperately needed reconstruction was "the winner"; and Americans were still at heart a victory culture facing a losing war. Our war mythology had been built upon rare mobilizing defeats (think: the Alamo, Custer's Last Stand, or Pearl Harbor) that were destined to lead to ultimate victory. But what to do in the face of ultimate defeat? In one of the many strange reversals of the post-Vietnam years, Americans decisively turned their backs on the victorious land in ruins and began trying to reconstruct their own country, focusing not on some devastated environment but on the American psyche which, it was said, was suffering from something called the "Vietnam syndrome."

In relation to Iraq, we see a similar back-turning process underway. American politicians (mainly Democrats at this point) are already dumping the blame for Bush's War on Iraqis living in a devastated land that is now really little more than a series of bloodied, embattled religious and ethnic fiefdoms. Already Iraq by-the-numbers has a Vietnam-like look of horror to it, complete with more than two million of its own wartime bus (instead of boat) people and its own monstrous "killing fields." When, in some relatively distant future, Americans finally do face reality and "retreat" from Iraq in whatever fashion, count on a desire to forget it all. But this time, it may not be so simple.

For a whole group of analysts and pundits, the words "Iraq" and "fiasco" have become synonymous, fiasco standing in (as in the bestselling book by the Washington Post's Tom Ricks) for how the post-invasion period was bungled by the Bush administration and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon. But the essential fiasco lay not in acts, however blundering and empty-headed, in Iraq, but in the fundamentalism of a militarized (corporatized and privatized) cult of armed imperial isolationists, who blindly drove the country to the edge of an imperial cliff (or beyond) and were incapable of changing course even when reality essentially spit in their faces.

Forty years after Vietnam ended, the Bush administration made sure that Americans would have déjà vu all over again at least one last time. In the bargain, the President, Vice President, and their top officials ensured that "the greatest force ... the world has ever seen" would be a hurricane not of liberation but of destruction, the geopolitical equivalent of Katrina.

As it happened, 40 years later, the planet had changed. American military power not only would fail (as in Vietnam) to conquer all before it, but the United States would no longer prove to be the preeminent force on the planet, just the last, lingering superpower in a contest that had ended in 1991.

When, finally - 2010, 2012? - we do pack up, head home from the Iraqi dead zone, and try to forget, it surely won't be as easy as it was 40-plus years ago (and, as the inability of our rulers to eradicate the "Vietnam syndrome" from their own brains indicates, it wasn't so easy even then). Whether or not, as the President claims, the crop of "terrorists" he's helped to grow will "follow us home," something will certainly follow us home. After all, when the troops return, if they do, they will return to a "superpower" that, in population life expectancy, has plunged from 11th to 42nd place in only two decades, and, in infant mortality terms, now ranks well below many far poorer countries.

Of course, by then, the President, Vice President, and those true believers still left in his administration will undoubtedly have entered the true American Green Zone, the one where a lecture to an audience of admirers can net you 75,000-100,000 greenbacks; where your story, no matter who writes it for you, will be worth millions; where your "library" can be a gathering place for "scholars"; and the "institute" you sponsor, a legacy recreating locus. It's a zone in which the accountant, not accountability, rules.

In the meantime, we live with all the pointless verbiage, the "debate" in Washington, the "progress reports," and the numerology of death, while the Bush administration hangs in there, determined to hand its war off to a new president, while the leading Democratic candidates essentially duck the withdrawal issue and the bodies pile ever higher.

It's important to remember, however, that there was once quite another tradition in America. Whatever our country was in my 1950s childhood, Americans were still generally raised to believe that empire was a dreadful, un-American thing. We were, of course, already garrisoning the globe, but there was that other hideous empire, the Soviet one, to point to. Perhaps the urge for a republic, not an empire still lies hidden somewhere in the American psyche.

Let's hope so, because one great task ahead for the American people will be to deconstruct whatever is left of our empire of stupidity and of this strange, militarized version of America we live in. We can dream, at least, that someday we'll live in a world where one Defense Department is plenty, where militarized corporations don't have endless battlefields on which to test their next techo-toys, where armies are for the defense of country, not to traipse the world in a state of eternal war, and victory is not vested in imperial conflict on the imagined frontiers of the planet, but in "progress reports" concerned with making life everywhere better, saner, and more peaceable.

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Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, "The End of Victory Culture" (University of Massachusetts Press), has just been thoroughly updated in a newly issued edition that deals with victory culture's crash-and-burn sequel in Iraq.

Note: Two recent essays which explore allied topics to those considered in this post are well worth checking out: "Destruction: American Foreign Policy at Point Zero" by Gabriel Kolko in which the historian wonders "why the US makes the identical mistakes over and over again and never learns from its errors"; and "The Waning Power of the War Myth" by Salon.com's fine essayist Gary Kamiya on Bush's absolute "addiction" to American triumphalism. "[Bush] will go down," concludes Kamiya, "certain that he was right, living the Myth to the end. And because of his addiction to unreality, many more real people will die."

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Empire Must Die

Or we will.

If we continue to support it's dark life we are taking our own, as surely as if we have committed suicide, and we are taking the futures of our kids and grandkids as well, if not their lives.

Published on Thursday, July 26, 2007 by The Nation

Clinton, Kissinger and the Corruptions of Empire

by John Nichols

Of all the corruptions of empire, few are darker than the claim that diplomacy must be kept secret from the citizenry.This hide-it-from-the people faith that only a cloistered group of unelected and often unaccountable elites - embodied by the nefarious and eminently indictable Henry Kissinger - is capable of steering the affairs of state pushes Americans out of the processes that determine whether their sons and daughters will die in distant wars, whether the factories where they worked will be shuttered, whether their country will respond to or neglect genocide, whether their tax dollars will go to pay for the unspeakable.

It allows for the dirty game where foreign countries are included or excluded from contact with the U.S. based on unspoken whims and self-serving schemes, where trade deals are negotiated without congressional oversight and then presented in take-it-or-leave-it form and where war is made easy by secretive cliques that are as willing to lie to presidents as they do to the people.

Unlike the excluded and neglected people, however, presidents have the authority to break this vicious cycle by making personal contact with foreign leaders, by publicly meeting with and debating allies and rivals, by taking global policymaking out of the shadows and into the light of day. When the president is personally and publicly in contact with the world, diplomacy is democratized.

As the most scrutinized figure on the planet, an American president who meets and maintains contact with leaders who may or may not follow the U.S. line on any particular issue involves not just him- or herself in the discussion but also the American people. The president lifts the veil of secrecy behind which horrible things can be done in our name but without our informed consent.

So it matters, it matters a great deal, whether those who seek the presidency promote transparent and democratic foreign policies or a continuation of a corrupt status quo that has rendered the United States dysfunctional, misguided and hated by most of the world - and that has caused more than 80 percent of Americans to say the country is headed in the wrong direction.

In the race for the Democratic nomination for president, the two frontrunners are lining up on opposite sides of the question of whether foreign policy should be conducted in public or behind the tattered curtain of corruption that has given us unnecessary wars in Vietnam and Iraq, U.S.-sponsored coups from Iran to Chile, trade policies designed to serve multinational corporations and a seeming inability to respond to the crisis that is Darfur.

Hillary Clinton, the candidate of all that is and will be, wants there to be no doubt that she is in the Kissinger camp.

The New York senator’s campaign is attacking her chief rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama ☼, for daring to suggest that, he would personally meet with foreign leaders who do not always march in lockstep with the U.S. government.

In Monday’s night’s YouTube debate, candidates were asked it they would be willing to meet “with leaders of Syria, Iran, Venezuela during their first term,” Obama immediately responded that, yes, he would be willing to do so. He explained that “the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them — which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration — is ridiculous.”

Clinton disagreed in the debate and now her camp is declaring that, “There is a clear difference between the two approaches these candidates are taking: Senator Obama has committed to presidential-level meetings with some of the world’s worst dictators without precondition during his first year in office.”

Leaving aside the fact that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, a popularly elected leader, is not one of the “world’s worst dictators,” it is particularly galling that Clinton — in her rush to trash Obama — is contradicting her own declaration in an April debate that, “I think it is a terrible mistake for our president to say he will not talk with bad people.”

Unfortunately, Clinton’s vote to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq and her defense of that war, her support for neo-liberal economics and a Wall Street-defined free trade agenda and her general disregard for popular involvement in foreign-policy debates suggests that the senator is showing her true self when she dismisses the value of presidential engagement with the leaders of foreign lands.

Clinton is playing politics this week. But in a broader sense she is aligning herself with a secretive and anti-democratic approach to global affairs that steers the United States out of the global community while telling the American people that foreign policy is the domain only of shadowy Kissingers.

She is not just wrong in this, she is Bush/Cheney wrong.

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Copyright © 2007 The Nation

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Democratic Party and the Infantile Omnipotence of The Ruling Class.
By PhilRockstroh 06/26/2007 10:16:46 PM EST

This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they've disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest -- he's their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it's damned entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.

Why did the Democratic Congress betray the voting public?

Betrayal is often a consequence of wishful thinking. It's the world's way of delivering the life lesson that it's time to shed the vanity of one's innocence and grow-the-hell-up. Apropos, here's lesson number one for political innocents:

Power serves the perpetuation of power. In an era of runaway corporate capitalism, the political elite exist to serve the corporate elite. It's that simple.

Why do the elites lie so brazenly? Ironically, because they believe they're entitled to, by virtue of their superior sense of morality. How did they come to this arrogant conclusion? Because they think they're better than us. If they believe in anything at all, it is this: They view us as a reeking collection of wretched, baseborn rabble, who are, on an individual level, a few billion neurons short of being governable by honest means.

Yes, you read that correctly: They believe they're better than you. When they lie and flout the rules and assert that the rule of law doesn't apply to them or refuse to impeach fellow members of their political and social class who break the law -- it is because they have convinced themselves it is best for society as a whole.

How did they come by such self-serving convictions? The massive extent of their privilege has convinced them that they're the quintessence of human virtue, that they're the most gifted of all golden children ever kissed by the radiant light of the sun. In other words, they're the worst sort of emotionally arrested brats -- spoiled children inhabiting adult bodies who mistake their feelings of infantile omnipotence for the benediction of superior ability: "I'm so special that what's good for me is good for the world," amounts to the sum total of their childish creed. In the case of narcissists such as these, over time, self-interest and systems of belief grow intertwined. Hence, within their warped, self-justifying belief systems, their actions, however mercenary, become acts of altruism.

The elites don't exactly believe their own lies; rather, they proceed from the neo-con guru, Leo Strauss' dictum (the modus operandi of the ruling classes) that it is necessary to promulgate "noble lies" to society's lower orders. This sort of virtuous mendacity must be practiced, because those varieties of upright apes (you and I) must be spared the complexities of the truth; otherwise, it will cause us to grow dangerously agitated -- will cause us to rattle the bars of our cages and fling poop at our betters. They believe it's better to ply us with lies because it's less trouble then having to hose us down in our filthy cages. In this way, they believe, all naked apes will have a more agreeable existence within the hierarchy-bound monkeyhouse of capitalism.

This may help to better understand the Washington establishment and its courtesan punditry who serve to reinforce their ceaseless narrative of exceptionalism. This is why they've disingenuously covered up the infantilism of George W. Bush for so long: Little Dubya is the id of the ruling class made manifest -- he's their troubled child, who, by his destructive actions, cracks the deceptively normal veneer of a miserable family and reveals the rot within. At a certain level, it's damn entertaining: his instability so shakes the foundation of the house that it causes the skeletons in its closets to dance.

By engaging in a mode of being so careless it amounts to public immolation, these corrupt elitists are bringing the empire down. There is nothing new in this: Such recklessness is the method by which cunning strivers commit suicide.

Those who take the trouble to look will apprehend the disastrous results of the ruling elites' pathology: wars of choice sold to a credulous citizenry by public relations confidence artists; a predatory economy that benefits one percent of the population; a demoralized, deeply ignorant populace who are either unaware of or indifferent to the difference between the virtues and vicissitudes of the electoral processes of a democratic republic, in contrast to the schlock circus, financed by big money corporatist, being inflicted upon us, at present.

Moreover, the elitist's barriers of isolation and exclusion play out among the classes below as an idiot's mimicry of soulless gated "communities" and the pernicious craving for a vast border wall -- all an imitation of the ruling classes' paranoia-driven compulsion for isolation and their narcissistic obsession with exclusivity.

Perhaps, we should cover the country in an enormous sheet of cellophane and place a zip-lock seal at its southern border, or, better yet -- in the interest of being more metaphorically accurate -- let's simply zip the entire land mass of the U.S. into a body bag and be done with it.

What will be at the root of the empire's demise?

It seems the elite of the nation will succumb to "Small World Syndrome" -- that malady borne of incurable careerism, a form of self-induced cretinism that reduces the vast and intricate world to only those things that advance the goals of its egoist sufferers. It is an degenerative disease that winnows down the consciousness of those afflicted to a banal nub of awareness, engendering the shallowness of character on display in the corporate media and the arrogance and cluelessness of the empire's business and political classes. It possesses a love of little but mammon; it is the myth of Midas, manifested in the hoarding of hedge funds; it is the tale of an idiot gibbering over his collection of used string.

What can be done? In these dangerous times, credulousness to party dogma is as dangerous as a fundamentalist Christian's literal interpretation of The Bible: There is no need to squander the hours searching for an "intelligent design" within the architecture of denial and duplicity built into this claptrap system -- a system that we have collaborated in constructing by our loyalty to political parties that are, in return, neither loyal to us nor any idea, policy nor principle that doesn't maintain the corporate status quo.

Accordingly, we must make the elites of the Democratic Party accountable for their betrayal -- or we ourselves will become complicit. The faith of Democratic partisans in their degraded party is analogous to Bush and his loyalist still believing they can achieve victory in Iraq and the delusion-based wing of the Republican Party who, a few years ago, clung to the belief, regardless of facts, that Terri Schiavo's brain was not irreparably damaged and she would someday rise from her hospital bed and bless the heavens for them and their unwavering devotion to her cause.

Faith-based Democrats are equally as delusional. Only their fantasies don't flow from the belief in a mythical father figure, existing somewhere in the boundless sky, who scripture proclaims has a deep concern for the fate of all things, from fallen sparrows to medically manipulated stem cells; rather, their beliefs are based on the bughouse crazy notion that the elites of the Democratic Party could give a fallen sparrow's ass about the circumstances of their lives.

In the same manner, I could never reconcile myself with the Judea/Christian/Islamic conception of god -- some strange, invisible, "who's-your-daddy-in-the-sk y," sadist -- who wants me on my knees (as if I'm a performer in some kind of cosmic porno movie) to show my belief in and devotion to him -- I can't delude myself into feeling any sense of devotion to the present day Democratic Party.

Long ago, reason and common sense caused me to renounce the toxic tenets of organized religion. At present, I feel compelled to apply the same principles to the Democratic Party, leading me to conclude, as did Voltaire regarding the unchecked power of The Church in his day, that we must, "crush the infamous thing."

Freedom begins when we free ourselves from as many illusions as possible -- including dogma, clichés, cant, magical thinking, as well as blind devotion to a corrupt political class.

I wrote the following, before the 2006 mid-term election: "[...] I believe, at this late hour, the second best thing that could come to pass in our crumbling republic is for the total destruction of the Democratic Party -- and then from its ashes to rise a party of true progressives.
"[...] I believe the best thing that could happen for our country would be for the leaders of The Republican Party -- out of a deep sense of shame (as if they even possessed the capacity for such a thing) regarding the manner they have disgrace their country and themselves -- to commit seppuku (the act of ritual suicide practiced by disgraced leaders in feudalist Japan) on national television.

"Because there's no chance of that event coming to pass, I believe the dismantling of the Democratic Party, as we know it, is in order. It is our moribund republic's last, best hope -- if any is still possible."

I received quite a bit of flack from party loyalist and netroots activists that my pronouncement was premature and we should wait and see.

We've waited and we've seen. Consequently, since the Republican leadership have not taken ceremonial swords in hand and disemboweled themselves on nationwide TV, it's time we pulled the plug on the Democratic Party, an entity that has only been kept alive by a corporately inserted food-tube. In my opinion, this remains the last, best hope for the living ideals of progressive governance to become part of the body politic.

Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: philangie2000@yahoo.com

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Our Fellow Earthlings Do Not Want Us To Be Global COPs

Well, trust us when we say, we don't want to be; at least a large majority of us don't care for being COPs of any kind.

Actually, Bush and Cheney don't care about the law either. They do, however care about resources and money. But you already knew that, eh?

Why would someone who cared about international law have best friends like that savage in Uzbekistan, who boils his political opponents in oil.?

Why would Bush want to be best buddies with the House of Saud?

Why would enforcers of the law try to overthrow duly elected officials of other countries?

If Bush wants to overthrow tyrants, let him not make friends with some and overthrow others. As a matter of fact, let him begin by resigning!

No, No...the Bushites don't care about being cops, just about forcing us to be an empire.

I can speak for our blog:

We do not want to be an empire. We want to be genuinely helpful to all people in all nations, if we can and if we are asked, but we do not want to be an empire. Being an empire is not helpful to anyone, especially people, who are burdened with a conscious soul, in the belly of the beast.

It is a hell of a different kind than those in Iraq are enduring, but it is a hell, nevertheless.

It is a hell that involves heartbreaking, soul devastating, psychological shame and disgust.

Let it be known that vast numbers of Americans are suffering; grief, loss, heartbreak, shame, disgust with our own government and many of our own countrymen/women, frustration and psycho-emotional turmoil.

Let it also be known that we will not give up nor surrender to the criminals and idiots who have taken our country, and possibly the world, close to the abyss.

Just ask the Brits, the Germans, the French......... about the horrors of being an empire.


Published on Thursday, April 19, 2007 by Inter Press Service

World Opposed to U.S. as Global Cop
by Eli Clifton

WASHINGTON - The world public rejects the U.S. role as a world leader, but still wants the United States to do its share in multilateral efforts and does not support a U.S. withdrawal from international affairs, says a poll released Wednesday.The survey respondents see the United States as an unreliable “world policeman”, but views are split on whether the superpower should reduce its overseas military bases.

The people of the United States generally agreed with the rest of the world that their country should not remain the world’s pre-eminent leader or global cop, and prefer that it play a more cooperative role in multilateral efforts to address world problems.

The poll, the fourth in a series released by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and WorldPublicOpinion.org since the latter half of 2006, was conducted in China, India, United States, Indonesia, Russia, France, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Israel, Armenia and the Palestinian territories.

The three previous reports covered attitudes toward humanitarian military intervention, labour and environmental standards in international trade, and global warming. Those surveys found that the international public generally favoured more multilateral efforts to curb genocides and more far-reaching measures to protect labour rights and combat climate change than their governments have supported to date.

Steven Kull, editor of WorldPublicOpinion.org, notes that this report confirms other polls which have shown that world opinion of the United States is bad and getting worse, however this survey more closely examines the way the world public would want to see Washington playing a positive role in the international community.

Although all 15 of the countries polled rejected the idea that, “the U.S. should continue to be the pre-eminent world leader in solving international problems,” only Argentina and the Palestinian territories say it “should withdraw from most efforts to solve international problems.”

The respondents tend to agree that the US should do “its share in efforts to solve international problems together with other countries” in: South Korea (79 percent), United States (75 percent), France (75 percent), China (68 percent), Israel (62 percent), Peru (61 percent), Mexico (59 percent), Armenia (58 percent), Philippines (55 percent), Ukraine (52 percent), Thailand (47 percent), India (42 percent) and Russia (42 percent).

In a majority of countries — 13 out of 15 — publics believe Washington is “playing the role of world policeman more than it should,” including France (89 percent), Australia (80 percent), China (77 percent), Russia (76 percent), Peru (76 percent), Palestinian territories (74 percent) and South Korea (73 percent).

Seventy-six percent of those polled in the United States also agree that their country plays too big a role as a global cop, but 57 percent of Filipinos disagreed with the statement, and Israelis were evenly split on the issue.

Majorities think that the United States cannot be trusted to “act responsibly in the world” in: Argentina (84 percent), Peru (80 percent), Russia (73 percent), France (72 percent) and Indonesia (64 percent). But majorities or large percentages in the Philippines (85 percent), Israel (81 percent), Poland (51 percent), and Ukraine (49 percent) say the superpower can be at least “somewhat” trusted to act responsibly.

Although most of the countries involved in the poll had majorities who believe the U.S. was too involved in policing issues of international concern, there were mixed views about whether it should reduce its military presence around the world. Only five out of 12 publics favoured decreasing the number of overseas U.S. military bases: Argentina (75 percent), Palestinian territories (70 percent), France (69 percent), China (63 percent) and Ukraine (62 percent).
Majorities in the Philippines (78 percent), United States (68 percent), Israel (59 percent) and Poland (54 percent) favour maintaining or increasing the current levels of U.S. military bases. Armenia and Thailand lean in favour of maintaining current levels or reducing base locations, while India was divided. No country favoured increases.

The survey clearly shows that the perception of the U.S. role in the world is negative and getting worse, but some publics did have significant numbers who felt relations between their country and the United States are getting better.

Most of the respondents in India (58 percent) and China (53 percent) felt relations were improving, while pluralities agree in Australia (50 percent), Armenia (48 percent), Indonesia (46 percent), and Thailand (37 percent). Majorities or pluralities in Poland (60 percent), South Korea (56 percent), Israel (52 percent), Ukraine (52 percent) and Russia (45 percent) say relations with the U.S. are about the same.

No countries had majorities or pluralities who say relations with the United States are getting worse.

Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

We Will be The First Empire to Fall, Laughing Our Asses Off!

Certainly not at the horror the American Empire has caused; the horror, the horror....... and not only by its military, but by it's many corporations, who, collectively, behave badly and criminally all over the world, including right here at home.

* Disclaimer: We certainly do not accuse every corporation of bad behavior, let alone criminal behavior. There are CEOs and other corporate officers who are good, decent, responsible citizens of this planet. They will be the commercial stars of this century, as the sociopaths and other criminally insane, money-sucking, bottom-line feeders flame out, as they surely will.

No, we do not find that funny in the least. We find it heart-rending and psychically painful in a way that is, frankly, indescribable. We have been fighting the forces of economic/corporate empire over here, in this country, most of our adult lives and we are gray-hairs, now.

Perhaps, we should revive the Gray Panthers.....

Perhaps, what is most hysterical, in a purely cosmic sense of things, is that it took George Walker Bush (the scion of America's number one family of shady/criminal business and politics), Dick Cheney and the neoconservatives, themselves, to do what we couldn't do alone.

Stop this Empire!

It took three average to failed CEOs, to bring to the sight of the many what the few have known for years; Bush, Cheney and Rummy, the caricatures of American Empire. From "Wanted: Dead or Alive" to shaking the hand of a sick, ruthless dictator, when it was in American corporate interests and killing him when it no longer was.

Had it not been for 9/11, these men would have been a footnote in history; one-termers, whose only war would have been on the American poor and lower middle class, like all other Republicans administrations since Reagan.

But there was a 9/11, and whatever one might believe about who all was responsible for that horrific day and the anthrax attacks which followed, it is clear that that day was the beginning of the Bush administration as we know it.

What seemed like such a "gift from heaven" for the Neocons, given their PNAC visions, simply gave them enough rope to hang themselves.

What the Theocons saw as the beginning of the end of the world, may well be the end for them, as far as political power in this country. They have been exposed as cranks, crackpots, hypocrites and dangerous. Americans who had paid them little attention, now see them as insane.

For the first time in my lifetime, serious people are beginning to question Israeli influence on American government foreign policy.

There are times when I just cannot help but fall in the floor laughing, at the absurdity of it all.

From scorn to laughingstock in 48 hours


More than anything, these days it's the rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration that fascinates, for it's an unintended verbal portrait of a world power self-wounded, self-marginalized, self-doubting, self-eviscerated and self-eclipsed.

It's a bit too soon to hold a wake, but for us geopolitical junkies, we are likely witnessing the accelerated death of an empire. The Bush administration has managed to execute in six years what most withering empires took decades or centuries to accomplish. And you can hear the American Century's essence expiring in the administration's own words.


The last 48 hours, I think, will be more than a comma in history books; they'll go down as an empirical turning point of note -- again, prominently noted by no other than the administration itself.

Most recently was its Cheneyesque "big-time" failure to wow anyone with its almost pathetic pleading about official Iranian rudeness in Iraq. No one any longer believes. And even worse for the administration, its once fear-stoking claims of threatening evil have become a laughingstock.
That assessment derives in part from a five-word news characterization of the immediate prehistory of the administration's intended momentous, weekend announcement regarding

Iran: Even Bush's own propagandists, the news report understated with unintended comic effect, "anticipated resistance to their claims." One need not ask why.


What's more -- less comical but just as profoundly damaging -- the administration's very own chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff openly questioned his empire's civilian leadership, telling reporters "I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit" in funneling instruments of American deaths into Iraq.

That's the military equivalent of saying enough is enough -- you guys are idiots.

At roughly the same time, in a second ring of the imperial circus, the administration's defense secretary was rhetorically displaying his empire's teetering fragility. On Saturday, the reemerging Bear had performed a geopolitical pre-autopsy on American power, and by Sunday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates still hadn't composed even a remotely persuasive rejoinder.

Mr. Gates' response was, rather pitiably, a mere pea shooter against an intellectual howitzer. "One cold war was quite enough ... Russia is a partner in endeavors, but we wonder, too, about some Russian policies that seem to work against international stability ... All of these characterizations belong in the past. The free world versus those behind the Iron Curtain. North versus South. East versus West."


But they don't -- not any more, anyway -- and it was the U.S. that single-handedly brought the harmful past upon itself.

Conceding that recent "abuses" -- another understatement -- "have negatively impacted the reputation of the United States" -- yet another understatement -- Mr. Gates also said American leaders hold firmly a "belief in political and economic freedom, religious toleration, human rights, representative government and the rule of law."


If that weren't so monumentally empirically disprovable, well, gee, he might have a point. But his emporer is unclothed, and all the world can see it.

Once a world power is met with unprecedented incredulity, once it is neither believed nor respected, once it moves to laughingstock from scorn, once, as a result, it becomes utterly friendless, the next logical but not unavoidable steps are rapid decline followed by internal decay.


Which is indeed avoidable, but such avoidance requires leadership with an upticked learning curve, which is sorely, staggeringly absent. And that is what depresses and makes decline seem, in fact, unavoidable. (Thank God!)


(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.