Whistling Past the Afghan Graveyard

It is now a commonplace -- as a lead article in the New York Times's Week in Review pointed out recently -- that Afghanistan is "the graveyard of empires." Given Barack Obama's call for a greater focus on the Afghan War ("we took our eye off the ball when we invaded Iraq..."), and given indications that a "surge" of U.S. troops is about to get underway there, Afghanistan's dangers have been much in the news lately. Some of the writing on this subject, including recent essays by Juan Cole at Salon.com, Robert Dreyfuss at the Nation, and John Robertson at the War in Context website, has been incisive on just how the new administration's policy initiatives might transform Afghanistan and the increasingly unhinged Pakistani tribal borderlands into "Obama's War."

In other words, "the graveyard" has been getting its due. Far less attention has been paid to the "empire" part of the equation. And there's a good reason for that -- at least in Washington. Despite escalating worries about the deteriorating situation, no one in our nation's capital is ready to believe that Afghanistan could actually be the "graveyard" for the American role as the dominant hegemon on this planet.

In truth, to give "empire" its due you would have to start with a reassessment of how the Cold War ended. In 1989, which now seems centuries ago, the Berlin Wall came down; in 1991, to the amazement of the U.S. intelligence community, influential pundits, inside-the-Beltway think-tankers, and Washington's politicians, the Soviet Union, that "evil empire," that colossus of repression, that mortal enemy through nearly half a century of threatened nuclear MADness -- as in "mutually assured destruction" -- simply evaporated, almost without violence. (Soviet troops, camped out in the relatively cushy outposts of Eastern Europe, especially the former East Germany, were in no more hurry to come home to the economic misery of a collapsed empire than U.S. troops stationed in Okinawa, Japan, are likely to be in the future.)

In Washington where, in 1991, everything was visibly still standing, a stunned silence and a certain unwillingness to believe that the enemy of almost half a century was no more would quickly be overtaken by a sense of triumphalism. A multigenerational struggle had ended with only one of its super-participants still on its feet.

The conclusion seemed too obvious to belabor. Right before our eyes, the USSR had miraculously disappeared into the dustbin of history with only a desperate, impoverished Russia, shorn of its "near abroad," to replace it; ergo, we were the victors; we were, as everyone began to say with relish, the planet's "sole superpower." Huzzah!

Masters of the Universe

The Greeks, of course, had a word for it: "hubris." The ancient Greek playwrights would have assumed that we were in for a fall from the heights. But that thought crossed few minds in Washington (or on Wall Street) in those years.

Instead, our political and financial movers and shakers began to act as if the planet were truly ours (and other powers, including the Europeans and the Japanese, sometimes seemed to agree). To suggest at the time, as the odd scholar of imperial decline did, that there might have been no winners and two losers in the Cold War, that the weaker superpower had simply left the scene first, while the stronger, less hollowed out superpower was inching its way toward the same exit, was to speak to the deaf.

In the 1990s, "globalization" -- the worldwide spread of the Golden Arches, the Swoosh, and Mickey Mouse -- was on all lips in Washington, while the men who ran Wall Street were regularly referred to, and came to refer to themselves, as "masters of the universe."

The phrase was originally used by Tom Wolfe. It was the brand name of the superhero action figures his protagonist's daughter plays with in his 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities. ("On Wall Street he and a few others -- how many? three hundred, four hundred, five hundred? had become precisely that... Masters of the Universe…") As a result, the label initially had something of Wolfe's cheekiness about it. In the post-Cold War world, however, it soon enough became purely self-congratulatory.

In those years, when the economies of other countries suddenly cratered, Washington sent in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to "discipline" them. That was the actual term of tradecraft. To the immense pain of whole societies, the IMF regularly used local or regional disaster to pry open countries to the deregulatory wonders of "the Washington consensus." (Just imagine how Americans would react if, today, the IMF arrived at our battered doors with a similar menu of must-dos!)

Now, as the planet totters financially, while from Germany to Russia and China, world leaders blame the Bush administration's deregulatory blindness and Wall Street's derivative shenanigans for the financial hollowing out of the global economy, it's far more apparent that those titans of finance were actually masters of a flim-flam universe. Retrospectively, it's clearer that, in those post-Cold War years, Wall Street was already heading for the exits, that it was less a planetary economic tiger than a monstrously lucrative paper tiger. Someday, it might be a commonplace to say the same of Washington.

Almost twenty years later, in fact, it may finally be growing more acceptable to suggest that certain comparisons between the two Cold War superpowers were apt. As David Leonhardt of the New York Times pointed out recently:

"Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist, argues that the U.S. bubble economy had something in common with the old Soviet economy. The Soviet Union's growth was artificially raised by huge industrial output that ended up having little use. America's was artificially raised by mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations and even the occasional Ponzi scheme."

Today, when it comes to Wall Street, you can feel the anger rising on Main Street as Americans grasp that those supposed masters of the universe actually hollowed out their world and brought immense suffering down on them. They understand what those former masters of financial firms, who handed out $18.4 billion in bonuses to their employees at the end of 2008, clearly don't. John Thain, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, for instance, still continues to defend his purchase of a $35,000 antique commode for his office, as well as the $4 billion in bonuses he dealt out to the mini-masters under him in a quarter in which his group racked up more than $15 billion in losses, in a year in which his firm's losses reached $27 billion.

At least now, however, no one -- except perhaps Thain himself -- would mistake the Thains for masters rather than charlatans, or the U.S. for a financial superpower riding high rather than a hollowed out economic powerhouse laid low.

As it happens, however, there was another set of all-American "masters of the universe," even if never given that label. I'm speaking of the top officials of our national security state, the key players in foreign and military policy. They, too, came to believe that the planet was their oyster. They came to believe as well that, uniquely in the history of empires, global domination might be theirs. They began to dream that they might oversee a new Rome or imperial Great Britain, but of a kind never before encountered, and that the competitive Great Game played by previous rivalrous Great Powers had been reduced to solitaire.

For them, the very idea that the U.S. might be the other loser in the Cold War was beyond the pale. And that was hardly surprising. Ahead of them, after all, they thought they saw clear sailing, not graveyards. Hence, Afghanistan.

Twice in the Same Graveyard

It's here, of course, that things get eerie. I mean, not just a graveyard, but the same two superpowers and the very same graveyard. In November 2001, knowing intimately what had happened to the USSR in Afghanistan, the Bush administration invaded anyway -- and with a clear intent to build bases, occupy the country, and install a government of its choice.

When it comes to the neocon architects of global Bushism, hubris remains a weak word. Breathless at the thought of the supposed power of the U.S. military to crush anything in its path, they were blind to other power realities and to history. They equated power with the power to destroy.

Believing that the military force at their bidding was nothing short of invincible, and that whatever had happened to the Soviets couldn't possibly happen to them, they launched their invasion. They came, they saw, they conquered, they celebrated, they settled in, and then they invaded again -- this time in Iraq. A trillion dollars in wasted taxpayer funds later, we look a lot more like the Russians.

What made this whole process so remarkable was that there was no other superpower to ambush them in Afghanistan, as the U.S. had once done to the Soviet Union. George W. Bush's crew, it turned out, didn't need another superpower, not when they were perfectly capable of driving themselves off that Afghan cliff and into the graveyard below with no more help than Osama bin Laden could muster.

They promoted a convenient all-purpose fantasy explanation for their global actions, but also gave in to it, and it has yet to be dispelled, even now that the American economy has gone over its own cliff. Under the rubric of the Global War on Terror, they insisted that the greatest danger to the planet's "sole superpower" came from a ragtag group of fanatics backed by the relatively modest moneys a rich Saudi could get his hands on. Indeed, while the Bush administration paid no attention whatsoever, bin Laden had launched a devastating and televisually spectacular set of assaults on major American landmarks of power -- financial, military, and (except for the crash of Flight 93 in a field in Pennsylvania) political. Keep in mind, however, that those attacks had been launched as much from Hamburg and Florida as from the Afghan backlands.

Given the history of the graveyard, Americans should probably have locked their plane doors, put in some reasonable protections domestically, and taken their time going after bin Laden. Al-Qaeda was certainly capable of doing real harm every couple of years, but their strength remained minimal, their "caliphate" a joke, and Afghanistan -- for anyone but Afghans -- truly represented the backlands of the planet. Even now, we could undoubtedly go home and, disastrous as the situation there (and in Pakistan) has become under our ministrations, do less harm than we're going to do with our prospective surges in the years to come.

The irony is that, had they not been so blinded by triumphalism, Bush's people really wouldn't have needed to know much to avoid catastrophe. This wasn't atomic science or brain surgery. They needn't have been experts on Central Asia, or mastered Pashto or Dari, or recalled the history of the anti-Soviet War that had ended barely a decade earlier, or even read the prophetic November 2001 essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, "Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires," by former CIA station chief in Pakistan Milton Bearden, which concluded: "The United States must proceed with caution -- or end up on the ash heap of Afghan history."

They could simply have visited a local Barnes & Noble, grabbed a paperback copy of George MacDonald Fraser's rollicking novel Flashman, and followed his blackguard of an anti-hero through England's disastrous Afghan War of 1839-1842 from which only one Englishman returned alive. In addition to a night's reading pleasure, that would have provided any neocon national security manager with all he needed to know when it came to getting in and out of Afghanistan fast.

Or subsequently, they could have spent a little time with the Russian ambassador to Kabul, a KGB veteran of the Soviet Union's Afghan catastrophe. He complained to John Burns of the New York Times last year that neither Americans nor NATO representatives were willing to listen to him, even though the U.S. had repeated "all of our mistakes," which he carefully enumerated. "Now," he added, "they're making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright."

True, the Obama crew at the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, the Pentagon, and in the U.S. military, even holdovers like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, are not the ones who got us into this. Yes, they are more realistic about the world. Yes, they believe -- and say so -- that we're, at best, in a stalemate in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that it's going to be truly tough sledding, that it probably will take years and years, and that the end result won't be victory. Yes, they want some "new thinking," some actual negotiations with factions of the Taliban, some kind of a grand regional bargain, and above all, they want to "lower expectations."

As Gates summed things up in congressional testimony recently:

"This is going to be a long slog, and frankly, my view is that we need to be very careful about the nature of the goals we set for ourselves in Afghanistan… If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose, because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience and money."

Okay, in Norse mythology, Valhalla may be the great hall for dead warriors and the Secretary of Defense may have meant an "Asian Eden," but cut him a little slack: at least he acknowledged that there were financial limits to the American role in the world. That's a new note in official Washington, where global military and diplomatic policy have, until now, existed in splendid isolation from the economic meltdown sweeping the country and the planet.

Similarly, official Washington is increasingly willing to talk about a "multi-polar world," rather than the unipolar fantasy planet on which the first-term Bush presidency dwelled. Its denizens are even ready to imagine a relatively distant moment when the U.S. will have "reduced dominance," as Global Trends 2025, a futuristic report produced for the new President by the National Intelligence Council, put it. Or as Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's "top analyst," suggested of the same moment:

"[T]he U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished over this period of time… [T]he overwhelming dominance that the United States has enjoyed in the international system in military, political, economic, and arguably, cultural arenas is eroding and will erode at an accelerating pace with the partial exception of military."

Still, it's a long way from fretting about finances, while calling for more dollars for the Pentagon, to imagining that we already might be something less than the dominant hegemon on this planet, or that the urge to tame the backlands of Afghanistan, half a world from home, makes no sense at all. Not for us, not for the Afghans, not for anybody (except maybe al-Qaeda).

For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits.

Whistling Past the Graveyard

Back in 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, plotting to draw the Soviets into a quagmire in Afghanistan, wrote President Jimmy Carter: "We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War."

In fact, the CIA-backed anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan that lasted through the 1980s would give the Soviets far worse. After all, while the Vietnam War was a defeat for the U.S., it was by no means a bankrupting one.

In 1986, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev vividly described the Afghan War as a "bleeding wound." Three years later, by which time it had long been obvious that transfusions were hopeless, the Soviets withdrew. It turned out, however, that the bleeding still couldn't be staunched, and so the Soviet Union, with its sclerotic economy collapsing and "people power" rising on its peripheries, went down the tubes.

Hand it to the Bush administration, in the last seven-plus years the U.S. has essentially inflicted a version of the Soviets' "Afghanistan" on itself. Now the Obama team is attempting to remedy this disaster, but what new thinking there is remains, as far as we can tell, essentially tactical. Whether the new team's plans are more or less "successful" in Afghanistan and on the Pakistani border may, in the end, prove somewhat beside the point. The term Pyrrhic victory, meaning a triumph more costly than a loss, was made for just such moments.

After all, more than a trillion dollars later, with essentially nothing to show except an unbroken record of destruction, corruption, and an inability to build anything of value, the U.S. is only slowly drawing down its 140,000-plus troops in Iraq to a "mere" 40,000 or so, while surging yet more troops into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency war, possibly for years to come. At the same time, the U.S. continues to expand its armed forces and to garrison the globe, even as it attempts to bail out an economy and banking system evidently at the edge of collapse. This is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way.

Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time. If not, when the moment for a bailout comes, don't expect the other pressed powers of the planet to do for Washington what it has been willing to do for the John Thains of our world. The Europeans are already itching to get out of town. The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Indians… who exactly will ride to our rescue?

Perhaps it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are, after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.

Comments (43)

1. i have been saying this for years: we should have never invaded afghanistan. it was a tragic judgement by president bush, his advisors, his subservient congress, and the poorly educated citizenry of this country. afghanistan, along with iraq, have bankrupt the treasury, demoralized the public, and ruined the future of our children and grandchildren. and now, we have a looming environmental catastrophe.

   Posted by darladoon at 02/05/2009 @ 4:28pm

2. "For all their differences with Bush's first-term neocons, here's what the Obama team still has in common with them -- and it's no small thing: they still think the U.S. won the Cold War. They still haven't accepted that they can't, even if in a subtler fashion than the Busheviks, control how this world spins; they still can't imagine that the United States of America, as an imperial power, could possibly be heading for the exits."

   indeed. and i'd really like to hear the conservatives on this forum try and rebut this argument:

   "(Afghanistan) is a sure-fire formula for further disaster -- unless the new administration took the unlikely decision to downsize the U.S. global mission in a major way"

   for those who support an indefinite and extremely costly presence in afghanistan, just to prevent the resurgence of the taliban, how do you intend to "win" and pay for it? while i realize there are extremely vulnerable, desperate people living under a violent system of law and values (i.e. the taliban), is it worth bankrupting our future to save them? and if we save them, should we save others, from other countries, as well? we are mired in several intractable, tribal civil wars, spending billions of dollars. it's got to end, and immediately.

   Posted by darladoon at 02/05/2009 @ 4:36pm

3. Another tragic waste of time, lives and resources being in Afghanistan...that is another war we'll never win. Sending more troops is useless it will achieve nothing and no victory is going to be won over there either. Bring all the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan I say.

   Posted by Caj at 02/05/2009 @ 4:39pm

4. Great read!

   It is just sooooooooo hard not to tempt fate and just take one more pass through the graveyard.....

   Let's clear out - now. The earth is moving under the headstones.

   Posted by OneVote at 02/05/2009 @ 4:40pm

5. the various afghani tribes and ethnicities certainly will require humanitarian assistance well into the future, but we simply cannot militarily defend their crumbling democracy from extremists.

   poverty is the primary reason the taliban exists, so what we should do, is increase aids to peaceful, non-governmental organizations to build critical infrastructure for these people. the UN will have to have the role of protecting these humanitarian aids, but we must reduce our overt military presence.

   bin laden? we should forget about him.

   Posted by darladoon at 02/05/2009 @ 4:42pm

6. but for the iraq war...i think we could have gotten OBL...

   then we should have gotten the hell out.

   oh well...

   Posted by ibbleblibble at 02/05/2009 @ 5:12pm

7. "Great read!.....

   Let's clear out - now. The earth is moving under the headstones."

   Posted by OneVote at 4:40pm

   If only it were that simple of course.

   Many great reads in the new issue of The Nation.

   On first pass I enjoyed the lead editorial, Chris Hayes on Biden as potential populist defender of the people versus Summers Inc., the Bernard Avishai review of Krugman's depression economics book re-issue, Naomi Klein's op-ed on Argentina revisited, and last but certainly not least, Alex Cockburn's highly entertaining oracle on Obama's "auguries".

   So much food for thought, so little time....

   Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/05/2009 @ 5:35pm

8. So much food for thought, so little time....

   Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/05/2009 @ 5:35pm | ignore this person | warn this person

   One bite at a time Kool. Each journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step. You know the drill.

   Mr. Tom's writing continues to impress.

   We had a lull there for awhile, but it looks like The Nation has kicked it into gear again. Probably just plain exhaustion, and well needed rest. Continuing to see new advertisers - a good sign too.

   Posted by OneVote at 02/05/2009 @ 7:11pm

9. Would PONTI admit that George Bush LOST in Afghanistan?

   Or does 28% Club Fever run too deep?

   Posted by Mask at 02/05/2009 @ 9:56pm

10. Englehart sure expended a lot of hot wind trying to convince us that Afganistan will turn out to be a failure! He was wrong on Iraq so I guess he is trying to at least hope he can get one out of two right. Wonder what he will do when that proves wrong also?

    Posted by comancheamerican at 02/05/2009 @ 11:12pm

11. "He was wrong on Iraq so I guess he is trying to at least hope he can get one out of two right. Wonder what he will do when that proves wrong also?"

    Posted by comancheamerican at 02/05/2009 @ 11:12pm

    You mean Iraq had WMD after all?

    Posted by V at 02/06/2009 @ 07:39am

12. <i>Posted by darladoon at 02/05/2009 @ 4:36pm </i>

    Hmm, didn't win the Cold War? Two questions:

    1) Does the United States still exist?

    2) Does the Soviet Union still exist?

    3) Are our actions during the Cold War directly causing whatever weakness we are currently experiencing?

    If you answer yes to (1) and no to (2) and (3), then by all reasonable standards, I'd count the Cold War a victory. Were our actions solely responsible for it. Probably not. Did they make a big difference? Yup.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/06/2009 @ 08:39am

13. Posted by Thrawn at 02/06/2009 @ 08:39am

    Yeah, darla, gotta go with THRAWN on this one.

    They're gone (as the USSR) and we're still here. And ideologically, they're mostly capitalist (so are the "Communist" Chinese really).

    I'd say the West won the Cold War.

    Posted by Mask at 02/06/2009 @ 09:01am

14. Why are we in Afghanistan? The Taliban stated shortly after the 911 attacks that they would turn Osama bin Laden over if we provided "evidence" of his guilt in the attacks. We have failed to provide this evidence. In fact, bin Laden is not even wanted by the FBI for the 911 attacks due to lack of evidence. Check their website. Benazir Bhutto stated that bin Laden had been murdered, yet this admission was edited by the BBC, and the world-famous interviewer, David Frost, did not follow up with any questions. No other major western media even covered the fact that she said this. What is going on here? She was murdered one month later. There is no credible video of bin Laden after 2001. With mounting evidence that the 911 official story involves multiple cover ups...such as the explosions in the lower levels of the towers...by government officials and our major media, we need a full scale "independent" investigation to find out the answers to who really attacked us on 911. Was it an inside job as many are saying on the internet? If it was not bin Laden or Alqaeda, we shouldn't be in Afghanistan. Everything should be put on hold until we find out the truth. Until then, it is the elephant in the room squeezing the life and trust out of this country.

    Posted by investigate911 at 02/06/2009 @ 11:30am

15. (Key point)

    "Was it an inside job as many are saying on the internet?"----Posted by investigate911 at 02/06/2009 @ 11:30am

    Well, if it's on the Internet, it's GOT to be true!

    Posted by Mask at 02/06/2009 @ 11:56am

16. In retrospect, we should have supported the Soviets in Afghanistan, not the jihadists.

    No Taliban, no safe haven for Al Queda terrorist training camps, etc.

    Posted by FDR43 at 02/06/2009 @ 12:34pm

17. 1) Does the United States still exist?

    2) Does the Soviet Union still exist?

    3) Are our actions during the Cold War directly causing whatever weakness we are currently experiencing?

    ~Thrawn at 02/06/2009 @ 08:39am

    I enjoyed this one, Thrawn.

    For everyone not paying attention --probably something close to 99% of Americans is a good ballpark estimate-- the "United States" are in your basic freefall, and the proximal cause has without any room for reasonable doubt been a "defense" establishment that has invaded the body politic like an agressive, nasty cancer. All else --repeal of Glass-Steagle, defanging the CFTC, "bubbles-bubbles toils and troubles", are essentially just the afterbirth of the Pentagon's fiscal insanity.

    No one has been minding the store even after Ike's dire warning about, oh, 48 years ago or so.

    So yes, the Soviet Union has collapsed into a shell of its former self, but the U.S. is well on its way to following suit --mark my words, "Thrawn".

    I guess MAD really was mad afterall.

    Historians will have a field day piecing together all the minutiae --lord knows that the scandals during "Dubya" alone were difficult enough to keep track of in real time. The broad outlines, though, were so damn obvious that the best adjectives to describe this debacle are yet to be invented.

    "Phantasmagoric" might represent my crude first attempt.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 1:34pm

18. And lest I forget, shipping much of our manufacturing base overseas (except for "defense" operations of course) has been another key ingredient to this mud pie in our eye.

    Those who make mostly useless things will eventually become useless.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 1:43pm

19. <i>Posted by FDR43 at 02/06/2009 @ 12:34pm </i>

    Wait...what? Seriously? You could argue that we should have stayed out of Afghanistan when the Soviets invaded, and at least make SOME argument, but this position is just flat-out nuts. Would our combined force succeed? Yeah. Would the Soviets be laughing all the way to the bank? You bet. Would all the people in surrounding countries like us after we helped the Soviets flatten the Afghanis? Probably not.

    In short...we probably get some of the worst of both worlds. We still get people in the Middle East mad at us...and we irrationally help the Soviet Union.

    <i>Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 1:34pm </i>

    Is this the "America is going down the tubes" argument? A few thoughts:

    1) Somehow, this argument sounds familiar. Oh, right, that's because it's been made at least three times before in our history and been proven completely wrong every time.

    2) All of our problems are caused by too much military spending? Huh? I completely agree with you that Eisenhower was bang on target and we've spent much more than we should have, but to make the monocausal link between that and our current state makes no sense, especially since much of the issue with our current state links directly back to the financial sector rather than the Pentagon.

    3) We still exist, so the "Cold War" argument still holds even if everything else you argue is right. The fact that the Roman Empire bit the dust didn't retroactively wipe away prior victories. It may have made them somewhat hollow, but until there's actually good evidence that America is going away (evidence that no one has done even a remotely decent job of offering), I'll remain fairly confident in my Cold War assessment.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/06/2009 @ 2:14pm

20. Posted by Thrawn at @ 2:14pm

    Your "point" #1 is not even worth responding to --a red herring really. Not sure what you even mean by "it's been made three times before and has been proven completely wrong". Don't bother trying to clarify.

    Point #2 has some merit in that I made a rather casual --rather than directly causal-- connection between the Pentagon's gross excesses and Wall Street's. Not a point I care to get into an argument over, in any case. I believe it's quite evident that the culture that led to both is one that Washington DC represents in spades, and I'll just leave it at that. Others may blow their wads in wasted breaths.

    #3) "We still exist"......

    Good luck with that one, Thrawn. I won't spend much time on that point other than to simply say, "Open your eyes".

    Of course, "we still exist" as it currently stands, but even such an entrenched (and respected) mainstream media commentator as Fareed Zakaria has recently written a book on "The Post American World". Granted, his book is a soft sell --not a surprise coming from a prime defender of the imperium-- but items like these (there are plenty more where that one came from) in the mainstream are reasonable indicators of things gone awry.

    If you think the U.S. can hold out for long in its current guise, I wouldn't head for Vegas anytime soon with that wager.

    But we'll see soon enough who's right on this point, Thrawn.

    Bet on it.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:22pm

21. One thing to add.

    I do appreciated having someone to joust with who can at least rub two cogent points together and conjure a little light rather than just heat.

    These Nation blog threads, of late in particular, have been crawling with far too many rather reptilian, if not flat out invertebrate posters.

    As someone with an enormous appreciation for the biological world I find some fascination in their scrawlings, but Jezuz Kryst, does it have to predominate? I suppose it's partly my fault for refusing to use the "ignore" function, but to ignore is bit of a copout in it's own right.

    C'est la vie, in any case.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:41pm

22. TO THE MORE EVOLVED READERS HERE

    An excerpt of an excellent John Pilger piece that popped up today at Tom Feeley's always useful "Information Clearinghouse" site:

    THE POLITICS OF BOLLOCKS

    .....While Mark Thompson and his satraps richly deserve the Lord West of Spithead Bollocks Blue Ribbon, that honour goes to the cheer squad of President Barack Obama, whose cult-like obeisance goes on and on.

    On 23 January, the Guardian's front page declared, "Obama shuts network of CIA 'ghost prisons' ". The "wholesale deconstruction [sic] of George Bush's war on terror", said the report, had been ordered by the new president who would be "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network, banning torture and rendition...".

    The bollocks quotient on this was so high that it read like the press release it was, citing "officials briefing reporters at the White House yesterday". Obama's orders, according to a group of 16 retired generals and admirals who attended a presidential signing ceremony, "would restore America's moral standing in the world". What moral standing? It never ceases to astonish that experienced reporters can transmit PR stunts like this, bearing in mind the moving belt of lies from the same source under only nominally different management.

    Far from "deconstructing [sic] the war on terror", Obama is clearly pursuing it with the same vigour, ideological backing and deception as the previous administration. George W. Bush's first war, in Afghanistan, and last war, in Pakistan, are now Obama's wars – with thousands more US troops to be deployed, more bombing and more slaughter of civilians.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:57pm

23. On 22 January, the day he described Afghanistan and Pakistan as "the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism", 22 Afghan civilians died beneath Obama's bombs in a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds and which, by all accounts, had not laid eyes on the Taliban. Women and children were among the dead, which is normal.

    Far from "shutting down the CIA's secret prison network", Obama's executive orders actually give the CIA authority to carry out renditions, abductions and transfers of prisoners in secret without the threat of legal obstruction. As the Los Angeles Times disclosed, "current and former intelligence officials said the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role." A semantic sleight of hand is that "long term prisons" are changed to "short term prisons"; and while Americans are now banned from directly torturing people, foreigners working for the US are not. This means that America's numerous "covert actions" will operate as they did under previous presidents, with proxy regimes, such as Augusto Pinochet's in Chile, doing the dirtiest work.

    Bush's open support for torture, and Donald Rumsfeld's extraordinary personal overseeing of certain torture techniques, upset many in America's "secret army" of subversive military and intelligence operators as it exposed how the system worked. Obama's nominee for director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, has said the Army Field Manual may include new forms of "harsh interrogation", which will be kept secret.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:57pm

24. Obama has chosen not to stop any of this. Neither do his ballyhooed executive orders put an end to Bush's assault on constitutional and international law. He has retained Bush's "right" to imprison anyone, without trial or charges. No "ghost prisoners No "ghost prisoners" are being released or are due to be tried before a civilian court. His nominee for attorney-general, Eric Holder, has endorsed an extension of Bush's totalitarian USA Patriot Act, which allows federal agents to demand Americans' library and bookshop records. The man of "change", is changing little. That ought to be front page news from Washington....

    What the childish fawning over Obama obscures is the dark power assembled under cover of America's first "post-racial president". Apart from the US, the world's most dangerous state is demonstrably Israel, having recently killed and maimed some 4,000 people in Gaza with impunity. On 10 February, a bellicose Israeli electorate is likely to put Binyamin Netanyahu into power. Netanyahu is a fanatic's fanatic who has made clear his intention of attacking Iran. In the Wall Street Journal on 24 January, he described Iran as the "terrorist mother base" and justified the murder of civilians in Gaza because "Israel cannot accept an Iranian terror base (Gaza) next to its major cities". On 31 January, unaware he was being filmed, Israel's ambassador in Australia described the massacres in Gaza as a "pre-introduction" - dress rehearsal - for an attack on Iran....

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:57pm

25. It is time the Obama lovers grew up. It is time those paid to keep the record straight gave us the opportunity to debate informatively. In the 21st century, people power remains a huge and exciting and largely untapped force for change, but it is nothing without truth. "In the time of universal deceit," wrote George Orwell, "telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

    End quote.

    www.johnpilger.com

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:57pm

26. To Thrawn:

    Another vividly clear signal from the mainstream media backing up my (above) point.

    Excerpt:

    It's hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we're in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world.

    Consumers, their wealth decimated and their optimism shattered by collapsing home prices and a sliding stock market, have cut back their spending and sharply increased their saving - a good thing in the long run, but a huge blow to the economy right now. Developers of commercial real estate, watching rents fall and financing costs soar, are slashing their investment plans. Businesses are canceling plans to expand capacity, since they aren't selling enough to use the capacity they have. And exports, which were one of the U.S. economy's few areas of strength over the past couple of years, are now plunging as the financial crisis hits our trading partners.

    Meanwhile, our main line of defense against recessions - the Federal Reserve's usual ability to support the economy by cutting interest rates - has already been overrun. The Fed has cut the rates it controls basically to zero, yet the economy is still in free fall.

    It's no wonder, then, that most economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we're headed for a deep, prolonged slump. Some private analysts predict double-digit unemployment. The Congressional Budget Office is slightly more sanguine, but its director, nonetheless, recently warned that "absent a change in fiscal policy ... the shortfall in the nation's output relative to potential levels will be the largest - in duration and depth - since the Depression of the 1930s."

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 4:16pm

27. Worst of all is the possibility that the economy will, as it did in the '30s, end up stuck in a prolonged deflationary trap.

    We're already closer to outright deflation than at any point since the Great Depression. In particular, the private sector is experiencing widespread wage cuts for the first time since the 1930s, and there will be much more of that if the economy continues to weaken.

    As the great American economist Irving Fisher pointed out almost 80 years ago, deflation, once started, tends to feed on itself. As dollar incomes fall in the face of a depressed economy, the burden of debt becomes harder to bear, while the expectation of further price declines discourages investment spending. These effects of deflation depress the economy further, which leads to more deflation, and so on....

    So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

    It's time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation's future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

    ~Paul Krugman at the NY Times

    IT BEARS REPEATING:

    "The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe..."

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 4:16pm

28. For a fantastic (and phantasmagorical?) catalog of U.S. brutality and keystone kops incompetence in foreign policy I recommend the following piece by William Blum:

    www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21907.htm

    Excerpt:

    The Obama administration will not produce any significantly worthwhile change in US foreign policy; little done in this area will reduce the level of misery that the American Empire regularly brings down upon humanity. And to the extent that Barack Obama is willing to clearly reveal what he believes about anything controversial, he appears to believe in the empire.

    The Obamania bubble should already have begun to lose some air with the multiple US bombings of Pakistan within the first few days following the inauguration. The Pentagon briefed the White House of its plans, and the White House had no objection. So bombs away -- Barack Obama's first war crime. The dozens of victims were, of course, all bad people, including all the women and children. As with all these bombings, we'll never know the names of all the victims -- It's doubtful that even Pakistan knows -- or what crimes they had committed to deserve the death penalty. Some poor Pakistani probably earned a nice fee for telling the authorities that so-and-so bad guy lived in that house over there; too bad for all the others who happened to live with the bad guy, assuming of course that the bad guy himself actually lived in that house over there.

    The new White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, declined to answer questions about the first airstrikes, saying "I'm not going to get into these matters." Where have we heard that before?

    After many of these bombings in recent years, a spokesperson for the United States or NATO has solemnly declared: "We regret the loss of life."

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 4:47pm

29. These are the same words used by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on a number of occasions, but their actions were typically called "terrorist".

    I wish I could be an Obamaniac. I envy their enthusiasm. Here, in the form of an open letter to President Obama, are some of the "changes we can believe in" in foreign policy that would have to occur to win over the non-believers like me....

    End quote.

    But, by all means, read the whole piece with its breathtaking list of buffoonery:

    www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21907.htm

    And you may wish to purchase one of his books (or at least check it out from the library if available).

    Here's a good one:

    tinyurl.com/6hz2eh

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 4:47pm

30. Is this guy from the same planet?

    Hello, we did win the cold war. Have you been to East Germany, Poland, etc.

    Destruction and corruption in Iraq, excuse me, I thought he was talking about Illinois. I just saw a free election in Iraq where women candidates wore western dresses without veils. Wow, who would have thuk it two years ago.

    The only graveyard I see is the graveyard of left wing defeatism. The citizens of this great country realise the very real threat Islamic Extremism represents and will fight it in Afghanistan or wherever else Western Civilization is threatened.

    Posted by Mikebarr at 02/06/2009 @ 4:59pm

31. The citizens of this great country realise the very real threat Islamic Extremism represents and will fight it in Afghanistan or wherever else Western Civilization is threatened.-----Posted by Mikebarr at 02/06/2009 @ 4:59pm

    So you support their decision to elect Pres. Obama to do that job?

    Posted by Mask at 02/06/2009 @ 5:15pm

32. The only graveyard I see is the graveyard of left wing defeatism. The citizens of this great country realise the very real threat Islamic Extremism represents and will fight it in Afghanistan or wherever else Western Civilization is threatened.

    Posted by Mikebarr at 02/06/2009 @ 4:59pm

    Mmmmmmm, delicious kool-aid!

    Stop letting yourself be bullied into shitting your pants in fear! Stand up for your own right to exist and stop letting the Islamic extremists control your life!

    Jesus Christ, what's it going to take for you people to learn? For all of us to have dead children and to have our homes foreclosed on?

    Posted by TexasFlood at 02/06/2009 @ 11:39pm

33. <i>Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/06/2009 @ 3:22pm </i>

    All right; I'll avoid the historical arguments (though one of the too-easy references is, well, the Great Depression itself, which those comparing this too would do well to remember...ended).

    On your second point...I'll agree to an extent that some of the underlying logic is the same. For instance, there's the "I want money for my department"-type logic, and the military gets to use a somewhat-developed appetite for war to bolster budgets (though it also tends to not like wars it doesn't think it can win...).

    On the third point, the comparison is not even real. First off, we're still better off than the Soviet Union simply by existing, even if we're having difficulty now. Second, though we ARE having a serious economic downturn, the idea that the country will collapse seems pretty far-fetched. Contrary to your later reference, Zakaria makes no such claim; he was talking about an era in which America is no longer hegemonic in the technological and economic realm, not one in which the country implodes entirely.

    The bottom line is this...there's no reason to believe that the country is going to hell in a handbasket. That doesn't mean that everything's all coming up roses, but it does mean that if we've survived some nasty recession and a Great Depression, we can probably survive this.

    It may be the end of the world as YOU know it...but I feel fine.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 12:09am

34. It may be the end of the world as YOU know it...but I feel fine.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 12:09am

    So shall we begin partying like it's 1999?

    I'll bring cake.

    Posted by TexasFlood at 02/07/2009 @ 12:13am

35. All right; I'll avoid the historical arguments (though one of the too-easy references is, well, the Great Depression itself, which those comparing this too would do well to remember...ended). Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 12:09am

    Kewl! All we need is another World War to get our geriatric economy back on it's feet!

    This time I say we send the baby boomers.

    Posted by TexasFlood at 02/07/2009 @ 12:16am

36. <i>Posted by TexasFlood at 02/07/2009 @ 12:13am</i>

    It's a deal.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 11:23am

37. Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 11:23am

    You are sooo Rubinesque, dude.

    Posted by Sorelish at 02/07/2009 @ 12:24pm

38. >> A trillion dollars later... <<

    This hodgepodge of venom and lies begins with the suggestion that Afghanistan has so far cost us a trillion dollars. That is totally false and even the Time Magazine article on which Engelhardt's screed is based, does not make such a claim. It speaks of a $184 billion bill for Afghanistan.

    Just common sense should tell us that having 30,000 men [two light divisions] in Afghanistan for a few years, cannot be breaking the bank. The fighting is slight. Neither armor or artillery are involved, nor are fleets of bombers and fighters engaged, much less being shot out of the skies. Most of our losses are through accidents, more of our men are killed and injured from mishaps, suicides and illness than from enemy action. We have had around 50,000 men in South Korea for over half a century. We have had over 50,000 men in Japan for as long, and 25,000 in Okinawa, half of them, Marines. They are as far away as Afghanistan. Why did no one ever declare those deployments financially ruinous?

    We fielded over 90 Army divisions and half a million Marines in WWII. We suffered 400,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded. That did not break the bank, though our population was half of what it is today and our economy a tenth of today.

    Propagandists like Engelhardt, Dreyfuss and Cole are literally trying to muck up our minds. These humanitarians are betting on their ability to deceive and the public's inability to think. Such is their contempt for Americans and their fellow socialists.

    To judge the affordability of these wars we must understand their costs relative to GDP. Vietnam cost 9% of GDP, Korea 14% and WWII, in some years, 38.7%. Afghanistan and Iraq together have costs around 1% of our current GDP. That is their hole in our wallet.

    Posted by Hugo_Pirovano at 02/07/2009 @ 3:09pm

39. >> we increasingly resemble the dying Soviet Union <<

    With that wishful thought, Engelhardt shows himself nakedly. He drools for America's downfall. He sees hope in our current problems. He reflects the general tenor of THE NATION.

    No, the US is not deteriorating, not politically and not economically. This week's elections in Iraq are proving that the supposedly greatest foreign policy disaster in US history, is actually a success. Our most ambitious war goals are being met. We have not only installed a US friendly replacement for Saddam, we started a democratic regime in the Arab world.

    As to the economy, if the US lost 600,000 jobs last months, we lost 600,000 jobs a month under President Ford and there was no stimulus package and the country did not collapse.

    Engelhardt's comparison with the Soviet Union is false and foolish. She did not die because of excessive industrial output. She died because the best of her industrial output went to her military while the worst and least went to the domestic economy. Thus, as John Le Carre said, the Red Knight bled to death inside his armor. That first rate armor absorbed his wealth while inside the domestic economy withered. In the US, too many people bought homes they couldn't afford. That was the reverse of Russia's problem. Her consumer economy was starved, ours was over-nourished. They had to completely change the nature of their economy to satisfy their consumer needs. We just need to diet and exercise to turn fat to muscle.

    Posted by Hugo_Pirovano at 02/07/2009 @ 3:20pm

40. Readers here can disregard any posts by the puffed up pastry that goes by "Pirovano", of course.

    It is, of course, difficult for most Americans to come to terms with the real face of American government because that face has been so effectively disguised for so long. A case in point about media self censorship was made so effectively last night during the first half hour of Bill Moyers' Journal --I urge those who haven't seen the episode to check their local PBS listings for repeats or go to Moyers web site for an online viewing.

    Glenn Greenwald makes the point less than 10 minutes in that Flush Dimbulb's views --along with others of his ilk-- can get an airing in the so-called mainstream media because he's not going to call into question the activities of the Imperium abroad. Amy Goodman, on the other hand, getting her views aired on, say, Stephanopoulos would sound completely off key because serious scrutiny of U.S. foreign policy is pretty much verboten by the DC media club.

    In the 1994 introduction to William Blum's fascinating book, Killing Hope --originally published in '86-- he speaks frankly of the shadow government that has essentially run U.S. foreign policy since the end of WWII. It's the same shadow government that Eisenhower was warning us about in his '61 farewell address. The devil is in the details here, but those details as elaborated on by Blum are nothing short of horrifying. And yet, most Americans have virtually no clue about these long running foreign policy abortions.

    More recently, Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes- The History of the CIA" brings us up to date in a book that has been panned on Charlie Rose and other mainstream media outlets --somewhat surprisingly.

    From the jacket: And now, here is the hidden history of the CIA

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/07/2009 @ 4:43pm

41. cont.

    why eleven presidents and three generations of CIA officers have been unable to understand the world, why nearly every CIA director has left the agency in worse shape than he found it, and how these failures have profoundly jeopardized our national security.

    End quote.

    I'm no chicken little as Thrawn may wish to imply, I just happen to have a strong impulse to get to the truth in a society that has proven expert at keeping its populace in a general state of ignorance and bewilderment.

    I can only hope that recent events, along with a vibrant internet community will lead to a rapidly propagating crack in the ice, finally.

    And none too soon in a world that must face its greatest challenge since the dawn of humankind --the world's sixth mass extinction that is being ushered in by a species that hasn't learned how to wield its powerful intellect in an intelligent way.

    I wish us the best of luck --for all of our children's sake.

    Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/07/2009 @ 4:52pm

42. <i>Posted by b_kool_66 at 02/07/2009 @ 4:52pm </i>

    My conclusion from your post may have been mistaken, though I felt it justified from both the tone of your post and the lack of clarification on this after I responded to it. Nonetheless...fair enough.

    I would tend to agree with some of the great concerns you raise, particularly with regard to the military. Few people seem to realize, for instance, that the primary contact many foreign leaders have with the United States is a local military commander. I personally find this very disturbing. Or the fact that we have something on the order of 5-6 separate and independent air forces. And concurrently, any proposal to diminish military spending is treated as heresy. I know the political reasoning behind it "looks soft on defense," but that raises the question of WHY the two are correlated. I think Bacevich makes some strong points in this regard, suggesting that we have grown too used to the proposition that the solutions to problems should often be military in nature. Relatedly, we seem far too eager to commit military forces to a particular theater.

    These problems need to be addressed, and I think one answer to that may be a more vigorous use of the National Security Council the way Eisenhower used it, as a forum in which different viewpoints could be vigorously raised and the merits of each could be fused into a policy that the administration would carry out. The history of the solarium project, for instance, where the NSC was used to formulate a post-Stalin paradigm for relations with the USSR, is quite fascinating.

    Posted by Thrawn at 02/07/2009 @ 7:11pm

43. Posted by Hugo_Pirovano at 02/07/2009 @ 3:09pm

    So, Hugo, if a trillion dollars on the War on Terror is no big deal (GDP-wise)...

    then you can't argue that a trillion in stimulus spending is, either, can you?

    Posted by Mask at 02/08/2009 @ 07:59am