Re: Attn: Laurie and Angela

On Mon, 18 Feb 2008 07:58:50 -0600, gumboman <dontemailme@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:23:41 -0600, gumboman <dontemailme@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



Do you think Obama would be much different than Bill Clinton when it
comes to Israel?



Here you go, this guy lays it out pretty well. I'm not sure how
Hillary's 'peace with honor' dialogue gets implemented in these
conditions and if, god forbid, McCain gets elected, there has to be at
least one Rethug/neocon who has passed Econ 101 and can explain some
of the basics to him.

No matter who gets elected though the relationship is going to change
since the US has to do something to try to break out of this trap
we're in. I seriously doubt we could go another eight years on the
same borrow/spend cycle without ever more drastic economic
repercussions.

Regarding the article on Bush I. I never thought that affected junior.
I think he was simply assimilated into the neocon universe after
watching too many Rambo movies. Then he appointed all those
revisionists who didn't really understand what Vietnam was all about
and from there his actions were pretty predictable. I've got a feeling
that, down the road, history isn't going to be much kinder to Sharon
than it will be to the smirk.

Speaking of the smirk, did you see how irritated he was when the
Congress wouldn't give his telecom friends immunity? I wonder if the
Democrats plan to keep it up or eventually give in. If they keep it up
and start explaining all the lawbreaking that went on I think that
lowers the chances even more of McCain getting elected but who knows
if the Democrats are that smart.

You know, one of the benefits of free trade is supposed to be that it
fosters economic interdependence, which in turn is supposed to promote
peace. But economic interdependence with those Arabs who control all
that oil is treated like some kind of curse. Evidently, if we didn't
need that oil they have, we could kick out what few stops there are
and really treat them like ***.

9/11 burst the bubble that the US can act with impunity in other parts
of the world and not experience any consequences at home. I suspect
that part of the rationale for going to war with Iraq was to try to
put the genie back in the bottle and show those Arabs that we can
treat them with impunity, and no one can stop us.

Jerry




JH


February 18, 2008
Can the US Brace Its Fall?

by Jim Lobe

"Is the American era over?" That was the big question that launched a
lengthy analysis by veteran international affairs reporter James
Kitfield in the influential National Journal last May. Significantly,
the article ? which featured interviews with an all-star cast of
former top U.S. policymakers ? was titled "The Decline Begins."

Nine months later, the notion that Washington has entered a "New
American Century" ? a phrase used by the nationalist and
neoconservative unilateralists who championed the Iraq war ? in which
the U.S. can do whatever it wants, where it wants, and when it wants,
without consulting anyone else, seems largely to have gone the way of
the dodo bird.

"We are in a multipolar world," Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a
Washington Post columnist recently in what has to be considered the
ultimate heresy to pro-war hawks led by the likes of Vice President
*** Cheney and Gates' predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.

Indeed, last month's image of President George W. Bush imploring King
Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to boost the
battered U.S. economy helped bring home the notion that the commander
in chief's word no longer serves as an imperial command.

"It's affected our families. Paying more for gasoline hurts some of
the American families," Bush told reporters just before his meeting
with the king. After the meeting Saudi Arabia's oil minister made
clear that Riyadh would increase production only "when the market
justifies it" and not before.

Almost as pathetic in their own way were the recent exhortations by
Gates ? the steward of a military establishment that spends more money
each year than the combined defense budgets of all of the world's
other nations ? for Washington's NATO allies to contribute 7,000 more
troops to help U.S. forces pacify Afghanistan six years after Rumsfeld
and his neoconservative advisers contemptuously spurned their offers
of help.

That the response Gates received was not much more favorable than that
delivered by Saudi Arabia's oil minister to Bush's entreaties spoke
volumes not only about the way that his administration has both
misunderstood and mishandled its "global war on terror," but, more
ominously, about the weakness and fragility of the alliance which
Washington led to victory against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

The last time that policy circles buzzed about Washington's "decline"
came during the waning years of the Cold War, when Yale Professor Paul
Kennedy published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. The study
argued that the U.S. was falling into a familiar historical pattern
where the combination of huge military budgets and ever larger
deficits led inevitably to the kind of "imperial overstretch" that
transformed once-mighty empires into shadows of their former selves.

Kennedy's theory, however, did not anticipate the sudden collapse of
the Soviet Union, an earth-shaking event that, combined with
Washington's decisive victory in the first Gulf War, left the U.S. as
the world's undisputed "hyperpower." This status was celebrated by
neoconservatives like Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer
who, at the time, coined the phrase, "The Unipolar Moment." The status
was also reflected in the Pentagon's draft 1992 Defense Planning
Guidance (DPG), which, in turn, became the inspiration for the Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 and Bush's first National
Security Strategy (NSS) released six months before the Iraq invasion.

At the time, Kennedy himself suggested that Washington may have
somehow escaped the laws of history, noting that the sheer size of the
U.S. economy, and its technological prowess and military dominance,
were unprecedented. "I've gone back in history and never seen anything
like it," he exclaimed at one seminar.

"People are now coming out of the closet on the word 'empire,'"
exulted Krauthammer. "The fact is no country has been as dominant
culturally, economically, technologically, and militarily in the
history of the world since the Roman Empire."

What a difference five years and an invasion and bungled occupation of
Iraq make! References to the Roman Empire at this point are more
likely to refer to its decline than to its power ? an observation
confirmed even by Donald Kagan, a dean of neoconservatism and
Kennedy's colleague at Yale, whose sons, Robert and Frederick, have
been champions of the Bush Doctrine and the Iraq War.

"I've argued that not since the Roman Empire has anyone had such
extraordinary power as the United States after the Cold War," Kagan
told Kitfield. "But all of the elements of our strength are now being
challenged, and it's perfectly possible that we are seeing a relative
decline in U.S. power that will prove lasting."

Indeed, that possibility has been transformed into a probability, if
not a certainty, by a growing number of policy analysts who see major
structural shifts in the distribution of global power ? both "hard"
and "soft" ? none of which are likely to lead to the maintenance, let
alone the enhancement, of Washington's post-Cold War dominance.

Not only have both Iraq and Afghanistan shown the world the limits of
U.S. military power, but they are also exacting an increasingly
fearsome toll on Washington's ability to wage war.

Despite gains in the security situation in Iraq over the past year,
top Pentagon brass and independent experts are warning that the
current pace of deployments is creating a "hollow force" both in terms
of personnel and equipment. In an echo of Kennedy 20 years ago,
"overstretched" is the adjective most frequently associated with the
U.S. military.

Just as Kennedy had warned against the deadly long-term impact on
empires of budgetary deficits, the Bush years have seen an explosion
not just of government debt ? currently more than $9 trillion ? but
also of trade and balance-of-payments deficits. Much of this is due to
the high price of oil and gas imports ? which a growing number of
experts now believe has become a permanent fixture of the
international economy.

The results of the evolving global economy include a much-weakened
dollar and increased reliance by both the U.S. government and U.S.
business on foreign creditors. Among these creditors are
state-controlled agencies (or sovereign wealth funds) some of which ?
notably those of China, Russia, and oil-exporting Gulf states ? are
not enthralled, to say the least, with Krauthammer's unipolar vision.

If, for commercial or political reasons, any of these creditors
decided to dump their hundreds of billions of dollars of
dollar-denominated assets ? or in the case of key energy exporters,
for example, to price their commodities in a currency other than the
dollar ? the economic impact would be "grave," according to Charles
Freeman, retired U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Freeman's point was
echoed for the first time last week in the U.S. intelligence
community's annual review of the major global threats facing the
nation.

The possibility that some combination of those creditors, whose own
commercial ties have been growing at an accelerating rate, could
decide to act in concert in order to constrain Washington's freedom of
action ? in Central Asia or Iran, for example ? is the emerging
nightmare of U.S. policymakers.

Some analysts, including the director of the Geopolitics of Energy
Initiative of the New America Foundation (NAF), Flynt Leverett,
profess to see the emergence of a potential counterweight to U.S.
power ? one, significantly, that does not depend on the cooperation of
Washington's Western allies.

"A 'community' of largely non-democratic manufacturing powers and
energy exporters is already laying the groundwork for real strategic
collaboration, aimed at limiting America's ability to carry out [its]
hegemonic agendas," Leverett, who served in the National Security
Council under Bill Clinton and Bush, wrote recently in the National
Interest journal published by the Nixon Center.

As a result, the degree to which Washington can slow its decline and
preserve its primacy will depend increasingly on its willingness to
suppress its unilateralist reflexes and "to take account of the
perceptions and interests of others in its foreign-policy
decision-making," according to Leverett.


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