The Coming Implosion of the American Empire
02/23/04: (LewRockwell.com) The American Empire is
scheduled to depart from Iraq in June. The unofficial word is out
in Washington: Karl Rove has told President Bush that the body
count, however much reduced by strange definitions of what
constitutes a battlefield death, is going to cost him the
election if it continues through the summer. Dutifully, the
Commander-in-Chief has announced a June deadline for the transfer
of Iraq's sovereignty to "the Iraqis," meaning whichever remnants
of the coalition of the suppressed will still officially deal
with him on his terms.
If you want a mental image of what is taking place in the White
House today, picture Dorothy and her three companions walking
through the forest of Oz. They are chanting, over and over,
"Shi'ites and Sunnis and Kurds."
The United States government started a pre-emptory war last year.
Patriotic couch potatoes marveled at televised shock and awe:
flash, boom, smoke. "Wow! Neat! Cool!" President Bush, Sr., said
in 1991, "This shall not stand." That is what his son said about
the Baghdad skyline. But Americans are now being asked to pick up
the pieces, or at least to pay Halliburton to pick up the pieces.
Karl Rove has heard the rumblings. The departure date is now
set.
Of course, all of the troops will not depart. Reserves are being
called up to serve as car-bomb fodder. But, officially, the
United States will become an invited observer, probably sharing
authority with the United Nations. (This assumes — safely
— that no elections will be held prior to June 30;
otherwise, the United States will be asked to leave on July 1.).
That will please liberals, who will chant, "Bush should have done
it this way from the beginning." Meanwhile, conservatives will
conveniently overlook the fact that (1) the U.S. military is in
retreat mode and (2) the Administration had to beg the United
Nations Organization to come to Iraq and bail out Mr. Bush
politically. Rush Limbaugh will not remind his listeners of this
embarrassing fact. He will not sing the praises of "those
courageous and dedicated representatives of the United Nations,
the world's legitimizer of last resort." He will, instead, do his
Winston Smith imitation, for which he is deservedly famous.
Americans thoroughly enjoy seeing American troops bang heads
around the world, but only on these assumptions: (1) the victims
can't or won't fight back; (2) the military's adventures do not
visibly tap into Americans' pocketbooks; (3) our troops can pull
out at any time without visibly putting their tails between their
legs. When there are helicopter retreats from Saigon, American
voters react in a hostile fashion. Americans like war, but they
like it cheap.
The war in Iraq has been costly in every sense, yet Americans
still are paying higher prices at the gasoline pump. The price of
oil has risen. The flow of oil out of Iraq today barely trickles.
The pipelines cannot be defended by our troops. They are being
blown up, although the media rarely report this. The Iraq
adventure has now become a vast foreign aid program, and
Americans do not like foreign aid programs. The do not like to
share the wealth. They want to get their hands on the wealth
confiscated politically from their neighbors. They resent foreign
interlopers who tap into the flow of stolen goods.
When the regular troops pull out, news from Iraq will peter out,
just as Iraqi oil has. There will be stories of this or that car
bombing, this or that assassination, this or that break-off
tribe. But Iraq will become Afghanistan in the perception of most
Americans: out of sight, out of mind. If you want it packaged in
a convenient slogan, however incorrect politically, I suggest
this one: "When wogs are killing only wogs, the West loses
interest."
This will mark the reversal of the American empire. It has taken
a long time.
"WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION"
George W. Bush invoked weapons of mass destruction, just as
Lyndon Johnson invoked the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It was never
quite clear exactly what had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin, but
it is clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq. Johnson was never successfully exposed publicly as a liar
regarding the Gulf of Tonkin. Bush has been exposed, and will
continue to be exposed, as either completely misled or a liar,
either a nincompoop or a deceiver. He is never going to get back
his image as a reliable leader in a time of war, which is the
only positive image he ever enjoyed, brief as it was. He will be
on the defensive from now on. The phrase, "weapons of mass
destruction," will be pinned on his backside the same way "trust
me" was pinned on Carter, "read my lips: no new taxes" was pinned
on Bush's father, and "I feel your pain" was pinned on Clinton,
barely leaving enough room for "I did not have sex with that
woman."
It will become extremely difficult from now on for any American
President to invoke a looming military threat in order to justify
military intervention by the United States. Clearly, President
Bush will never be able to do this again, but I think it goes
beyond him. His enduring legacy will be the conversion of
"weapons of mass destruction" into the equivalent of Neville
Chamberlain's "peace in our time." The phrase will become a
laughingstock. Every President from now on who attempts to
justify anything comparable to the Iraq war will be greeted with
Congressional hoots of "weapons of mass destruction." Any
Congressman with an eye to being re-elected
Iraq is a sandy quagmire, just as the war's critics predicted it
would be. It is Vietnam without a comparable body count. It is a
continuing disaster, and as soon as the troops leave,
[. . .]
Our troops won a minor battle in March, 2003.
CONCLUSION
The contraction of the American empire will begin in June. It has
already lost considerable legitimacy in the eyes of the voters,
not because of some great alteration of their principles, but
because we are being car-bombed out of the place. The oil is not
flowing. Sand isn't worth the price.
This will be an historic event. Historians will be able to
establish a date on which to hang their narratives. Historians
will do anything to find such a dated event. December 7, 1941
marks the beginning of the empire in the textbooks, although the
Spanish-American
War was the more obvious birthplace, assuming
that the Louisiana Purchase wasn't — a major assumption.
But Pearl Harbor gets all the attention because of the unarguable
transformation of American foreign policy that it produced.
Sporadic intervention prior to Pearl Harbor became permanent
intervention after.
The troops' departure from Iraq will mark the day that Johnny
comes marching home. There will be no parades, any more than
there were when Israeli troops pulled out of Lebanon.
The implosion of the American empire is about to begin —
not just the military one but also the commercial one. An empire
that can no longer afford to keep its troops on active duty in
occupied areas is not a good credit risk.
Gary North [garynorth@garynorth.com] is the author of Mises on Money.
