If you ever needed a sign of how far the US has fallen under neocon stewardship, this is it. Kagan was one of the principals in the now (very) defunct Project for a New American Century, an organization whose name tells you just about everything you ever needed to know about these clowns. Why they didn’t just go with Project for Imperial Sickness and Subjugation, I’ll never know, but maybe the resulting acronym would have been too obnoxious even for these walking personifications of Yankee arrogance. Anyhow, PNAC was an attempt to demonstrate just how bullying America could be, by advocating for the invasion of Iraq, going all the way back to the Clinton era. Once they finally found a president who would actually do the deed, it then became a successful attempt at demonstrating how stupid the country could be, as well.
Of course, people like this absolutely never admit to being wrong, even (especially?) when they are at their most egregiously erroneous, and it probably doesn’t help that the American media continues to feature them on broadcasts as experts of some sort, as if they have any clue whatsoever of what they’re talking about. But the truth is that the Georgia episode demonstrates nothing more clearly than just how seriously these hypernationalists have actually damaged American military power and world security. These are the same sort of people, mind you, who derided the conservative ‘realists’ of the previous century for their timidity in merely containing the Russian bear, rather than launching World War III in order to roll back Soviet territorial gains in Eastern Europe and beyond. The kind of folks who thought they were hot shit because they got Reagan to ‘liberate’ Grenada, that vast and strategically crucial chunk of the Soviet empire. The kind of people who don’t have to bother doing their homework because they just govern from the gut, allowing them to look into someone’s eyes and see right down to his soul.
Now look what they’ve wrought. Iraq is an open wound that shows little sign of healing anytime soon. It was supposed to be a kick-ass little blowout that would easily secure a slew of bases in the region, buckets of oil, Bush’s domestic agenda (along the lines of selling off Social Security, etc.), and put the fear of a real god into the hearts of heathen Iranians, Syrians and Palestinians, as well as perhaps your odd Cuban or Venezuelan to boot. Instead, Colin Powell has described the US Army as "broken", and that was years ago. It’s certainly that, plus stuck, plus completely maxed-out, short of a draft, which neither Bush nor McCain would dare attempt. American soft power – the ability to lead, to persuade, to appeal to higher moral convictions of others – is now similarly in the toilet. And thus it is that the neocons of the world have traded a disaster in Iraq for the inability to even do that which they once derided as inappropriately minimalist in the past – protect allies from Russian imperialism.
Of course, that’s only the beginning of the stupidity. How is it, by the by, that Russia went from being a former superpower on the way toward becoming a third world country – so severely flattened that the very life span of its citizens had decreased by some ten years or so – to now racing back toward becoming a global great power again, and a very pissed off one at that? Well, one good explanation would certainly have to do with how the US reacted as the country was imploding in the 1990s. Rather than reaching out with Marshall Plan type assistance, we sent an army of right-wing economists instead, who advised privatizing everything in sight. Which they largely did, and largely to disastrous consequences. One of Putin’s achievements has been to regain the primacy of the state, and bring the hammer down on the latter-day robber barons who were formerly carting it off, piece by petro piece. In doing so, he has restored a measure of Russian dignity following the humiliation of the triumphalist US fire-sale treatment, and along with that comes no small degree of national pride at humbling exploitive and supremely arrogant Americans.
These sentiments were only further exacerbated by the expansion of NATO deep into the traditional Russian sphere of influence, and the unilateral American scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in order to pursue the military-industrial complex’s greatest boondoggle ever, a missile ‘defense’ system, now being deployed in Eastern Europe. Lastly, as if antagonizing a potential enemy wasn’t stupid enough, the bright candles in charge of American foreign policy have done so while completely failing to significantly wean the country off of our petroleum addiction, all while driving up prices dramatically. Hey, guess who’s got a whole ocean of oil at their disposal? Guess which country is growing rich and powerful because of that? Guess who is able to throw its political weight around based on this economic power?
If you were wondering a week ago how the buffoons in charge of American foreign policy could possibly screw it up any worse than they already had, now you know. If you were pondering whether the results of America’s invasion of Iraq could conceivably get more disastrous than they have been for the last five and a half years, look no further.
For the neocon fantasy has now not only wrecked Iraq and wrecked America and wrecked US relations with longtime allies and destroyed the reputation of America abroad. It has also torn a gaping hole in the power and significance of international law and the hopeful notion that wars of territorial acquisition were a thing of the past. And it opened the door for the Russians to do precisely the same thing, further exacerbating those tendencies. The post-Cold War moment of hopefulness regarding a more peaceful world has now been crushed, and it wasn’t the supposed black hats who originally kicked down that door. It was us nice, peace-loving, god-fearing, law-abiding folks here in good old ‘Murica who did it.
With apologies to Churchill (who owes an apology or two of his own), it may be said of our time, and of the those in charge of running the world’s only superpower, that never have so many been so damaged by the insanely stupid actions of so few.
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