"The Decade of the Stunned Superpower" -- Tom Englehardt (Long/Fascinating Read)
(If you want to continue reading this part I snipped at the link...scroll down to this heading.* The whole article is worth a read but it's quite long)
The Decade of the Stunned Superpower*
Just as still water is a breeding ground for mosquitos, so single-superpowerdom seems to be a breeding ground for delusion. This is a phenomenon about which we have to be cautious, since we know little enough about it and are, of course, in its midst. But so far, there seem to have been three stages to the development of whatever delusional process is underway.
Stage one stretched from December 1991 through September 10, 2001. Think of it as the decade of the stunned superpower. After all, the collapse of the Soviet Union went unpredicted in Washington and when it happened, the George H. W. Bush administration seemed almost incapable of taking it in. In the years that followed, there was the equivalent of a stunned silence in the corridors of power.
After a brief flurry of debate about a post-Cold War peace dividend, that subject dropped into the void, while, for example, U.S. nuclear forces, lacking their major enemy of the previous several decades, remained more or less in place, strategically disoriented but ready for action. In those years, Washington launched modest and halting discussions of the dangers of rogue states (think Axis of Evil in the post-9/11 era), but the U.S. military had a hard time finding a suitable enemy other than its former ally in the Persian Gulf, Iraqs Saddam Hussein. Its ventures into the world of war in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia were modest and not exactly greeted with rounds of patriotic fervor at home. Even the brief glow of popularity the elder Bush gained from his 1990-1991 war against Saddam evaporated so quickly that, by the time he geared up for his reelection campaign barely a year later, it was gone.
In the shadows, however, a government-to-be was forming under the guise of a think tank. It was filled with figures like future Vice President Dick Cheney, future Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, future Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, future U.N. Ambassador John Bolten, and future ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, all of whom firmly believed that the United States, with its staggering military advantage and lack of enemies, now had an unparalleled opportunity to control and reorganize the planet. In January 2001, they came to power under the presidency of George W. Bush, anxious for the opportunity to turn the U.S. into the kind of global dominator that would put the British and even Roman empires to shame.
Pax Americana Dreams
Stage two in the march into single-superpower delusion began on September 11, 2001, only five hours after hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 smashed into the Pentagon. It was then that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, already convinced that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, nonetheless began dreaming about completing the First Gulf War by taking out Saddam Hussein. Of Iraq, he instructed an aide to go massive
Sweep it all up. Things related and not.
And go massive he and his colleagues did, beginning the process that led to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, itself considered only a precursor to transforming the Greater Middle East into an American protectorate. From the fertile soil of 9/11 itself something of a phantasmagoric event in which Osama bin Laden and his relatively feeble organization spent a piddling $400,000-$500,000 to create the look of an apocalyptic moment sprang full-blown a sense of American global omnipotence.
It had taken a decade to mature. Now, within days of the toppling of those towers in lower Manhattan, the Bush administration was already talking about launching a war on terror, soon to become the Global War on Terror (no exaggeration intended). The CIA would label it no less grandiosly a Worldwide Attack Matrix. And none of them were kidding. Finding terror groups of various sorts in up to 80 countries, they were planning, in the phrase of the moment, to drain the swamp everywhere.
In the early Bush years, dreams of domination bred like rabbits in the hothouse of single-superpower Washington. Such grandiose thinking quickly invaded administration and Pentagon planning documents as the Bush administration prepared to prevent potentially oppositional powers or blocs of powers from arising in the foreseeable future. No one, as its top officials and their neocon supporters saw it, could stand in the way of their planetary Pax Americana.
Nor, as they invaded Afghanistan, did they have any doubt that they would soon take down Iraq. It was all going to be so easy. Such an invasion, as one supporter wrote in the Washington Post, would be a cakewalk. By the time American troops entered Iraq, the Pentagon already had plans on the drawing board to build a series of permanent bases they preferred to call them enduring camps and garrison that assumedly grateful country at the center of the planets oil lands for generations to come.
Nobody in Washington was thinking about the possibility that an American invasion might create chaos in Iraq and surrounding lands, sparking a set of Sunni-Shiite religious wars across the region. They assumed that Iran and Syria would be forced to bend their national knees to American power or that we would simply impose submission on them. (As a neoconservative quip of the moment had it, Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.) And that, of course would only be the beginning. Soon enough, no one would challenge American power. Nowhere. Never.
Much More....a Long...Long read. Scroll down at the link for the Rest of this part of his article...at:
http://my.firedoglake.com/tomengelhardt/2013/09/03/tom-engelhardt-alone-and-delusional-on-planet-earth/
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)Accepting that we are "losing"--that everything we do is ineffective or counter-productive or both--is probably beyond the capacity of the vast majority of Americans, but particularly our ruling classes in politics and the MIC.
More's the pity.
cui bono
(19,926 posts)So they don't need to "accept" defeat, they are victorious for themselves.
But yes, the vast majority of Americans won't accept it, they're too busy listening to the drumbeat.
truebluegreen
(9,033 posts)The ruling classes and the MIC just don't seem to understand that in the long run they are inextricably linked.
cui bono
(19,926 posts)yet they have grandchildren and other "loved ones" who need to live here just like the rest of us.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)of any significance and that, to all appearances, has nonetheless been fighting a permanent global war with
well, itself and appears to be losing?"
Edit:
I remember the sense of abandonment after the USSR collapsed, and being a bit stunned when I realized they intended to use what are essentailly criminal gangs (Al Qaeda, Narco Cartels, various resistance movements) as a substitute.
Edit2: and even more stunned when I realized they intended to conduct "war" on the web.
KoKo
(84,711 posts)if the "Powers that Be"...Think Tanks, Wall Street and Doctrinaire Folks who Pumped the Cold War for their Own Ends hadn't been allowed to take over.
I don't know you and perhaps you would disagree with what I say...but, from MY GENERATION it saddens me to see "What Could Have Been" and how it was all thrown away.
bemildred
(90,061 posts)I have occasionally gone on rants about it here.
(plonk)
We are the "Unseen." Truly for a long while now...if you get my drift.
I'm glad we are still around to be able to answer and to have a backlog of info that we can put forward from "Our History."
bemildred
(90,061 posts)They just cannot believe that the modern world cannot ultimately be ruled by force, it's bound to work if they just piss enough money away on it, they believe greatly in the power of money too, violence and money, it's all they know any more.
And they hate us for being right.