Five Years of
Accelerating U.S. Decline

by
BAR executive editor Glen Ford

On
March 20, 2003, the day the U.S. and its “coalition of the willing”
launched the long awaited invasion of Iraq, leftist groupings in the
United States behaved as if the last vestiges of civilization were
crumbling before their eyes, and that somehow the American anti-war
movement was singularly responsible for failing to hold back Bush’s
legions. Although it is true that U.S. peaceniks have always harbored
wildly inflated assessments of their own importance on the domestic
and world scene, it is a group flaw they share with Americans of all
political persuasions, most of whom believe themselves to be at the
center of the universe, and therefore the greatest losers or the
mightiest warriors in history, depending on which way the drama
unfolds.

“Fat,
flatulent pundits seriously contemplated whether the United States
was about to assume the global responsibilities once borne by ancient
Rome.”

So it
was natural that the anti-war “losers” and bellicose “winners”
of March 20, five years ago, were both wildly out of touch with the
probable consequences of U.S. aggression. Anti-warists seemed to
shrink into little balls of hurt and fear, as if the massive armed
assault would inevitably usher in some multi-decade U.S. Cowboy
Reich. The pro-war crowd convinced itself that nothing could stop the
U.S. military on the march. Fat, flatulent pundits seriously
contemplated whether the United States was about to assume the global
responsibilities once borne by ancient Rome – and whether that was
a good or bad thing.

Nobody,
it seemed, appeared aware of a fundamental truth known to all
professional soldiers. Few antagonists rush into war unless their own
analysis indicates that what passes for peace is even more dangerous.
Wars are initiated, in the main, by desperate men, who envision ever
more threatening scenarios mounting, one after the other, unless they
ACT to take the initiative out of fate’s hands and into their own.

The
U.S. government was terrified of allowing the status quo to continue
in the Middle East. By not decisively “winning” (as only
militaries can do), the Americans were losing…something. One would
have to deploy companies of military psychiatrists to strap down and
massively drug Bush’s entire inner war council to assemble a
picture of the nightmare scenarios that caused Washington to roll the
dice under such unfavorable circumstances. Literally no one except
Israel wanted the U.S. to succeed in a thrust that was designed to
bring U.S. forces deep into the former Soviet Central Asian
Republics. Anything less than a total victory, would be viewed as a
superpower defeat. The worst conceivable scenario – that indigenous
Iraqi forces would stop the Americans in their tracks – was so
unthinkable that the Americans refused to think about it –
guaranteeing that, over time, the U.S. would suffer a total military
and diplomatic debacle.

Here's what we wrote:

They Have Reached Too Far

Bush's Road Leads to Ruin For Himself and His Pirates

Thus,
on the early morning of March 20, 2003 as our little team at Black
Commentator published its first issue of the Iraq war, we saw clearly
that the United States, like the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote,
had just jumped off a cliff into some immeasurable canyon of doom. Here we
are all assembled, the world's people, awaiting the Pirates' lunge at
history. The Bush men have made sure we pay rapt attention to their
Big Bang, their epochal Event, after which the nature of things will
have changed unalterably to their advantage - they think. The Bush
men are certain of our collective response, convinced that once we
have witnessed The Mother of All War Shows, humanity will react
according to plan, and submit.

Bush
was already savoring the New American Century just days ago, when he
summoned his underlings from Britain and Spain to the Azores to make
yet another final pronouncement. " We
concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world,"
Bush said.

Spoken
like a King. Or The Man Who Would Be King.

Rudyard
Kipling's tale of an English colonial soldier drunk on his imagined
power over the natives is eerily appropriate. The projected fruits of
Shock and Awe - the power to pillage the world with impunity -
utterly bedazzled and blinded the perpetrators of the staged
holocaust, even before the Event itself had unfolded. In the days
between the final U.S. ultimatum and the invasion, American political
and corporate media players were visibly shaken by the clear and
unanimous world revulsion at U.S. imperiousness.

"Are
we going back to The White Man's Burden?" Arab League UN
Ambassador Yahya Mahmassani shot at CNN's startled Wolf Blitzer. "Is
this the 21st Century?" Yes, it is, and George Bush and his
armies cannot wrench away the provenance of Time to lift again the
Burden that even Kipling knew the White Man was not fit to bear.

No
one can predict the specific ways in which nations and movements will
resist Bush's aggression against civilization. What is certain is
that the Pirates have succeeded in arraying important sectors of
every other nation on the planet in opposition to Washington's
hegemony. Bush has made the name that is our patrimony - "America"
- a curse on the lips of much of the world.

If
Shock and Awe is essentially a horrific psychological warfare
exercise - and it is - the assault on humanity's collective
sensibilities has already had disastrous, unintended effects.

Although
they are incapable of realizing it, the Bush men have revealed
themselves to the world - the audience for Shock and Awe - as
grotesquely ugly, brutish, irredeemably repugnant human beings whose
touch must be avoided under all circumstances. Every plan and project
of individuals and nations will be shaped by having witnessed a
racist America raining fire on a weaker people - and reveling in the
crime.

Bush's
plan for world domination was doomed before
the burning, blasting, thundering, screaming display. The Pirates
have accelerated the processes of their own ruin.

As
we wrote in the March
6, 2003
issue of Black Commentator

The
impending war against Iraq is an oil currency
war, a preemptive strike against the euro's potential to challenge
the U.S. dollar as the sole denominator of petroleum purchases. By
seizing the Iraqi oil fields and positioning itself to do the same in
Saudi Arabia, Iran and throughout the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea
and South Asia, the U.S. can stop the euro cold and rule as
its own OPEC, awesomely
armed and dreadfully dangerous. The dollar will remain supreme,
backed by the oil reserves of the globe.”

That
was the plan. However, as the world watched the U.S. morph into its
predatory essence month by month, a collective, global withdrawal
from America became apparent. Clyde V. Prestowitz Jr., president of
the Economic Strategy Institute and author of the forthcoming book
"Rogue Nation," describes the phenomenon.

Over
the past year, private foreign investment in the United States has
fallen dramatically. It has been partially offset by increased buying
of U.S. Treasury notes by Asian governments. But, at the same time,
some governments like Russia have also begun to shift some of their
reserve currency holdings from dollars to euros. As a result, we have
seen the dollar fall in value against the euro by about 25 percent.
That kind of a decline occurs when foreigners decide to put their
money someplace other than the United States.

War
is the great and terrible engine of history. Bush and his Pirates
hope to employ that engine to harness Time and cheat the laws of
political economy, to leapfrog over the contradictions of their
parasitical existence into a new epoch of their own imagining.

Instead,
they have lunged into the abyss, from which no one will extricate
them, for they will be hated much more than feared.

In
attempting to break humanity's will to resist, the Bush pirates have
reached too far.

Five Years
Later

By any
measurement, the United States has declined beyond imagining, since
March 20, 2003. The Bush Pirates have, indeed, vastly “accelerated
the processes of their own ruin.” The objective conditions for
continued western imperialist rule have damn near disappeared. And
yet only a few months ago, the Bush regime was set to roll the dice
one again in the Middle East, this time with an attack on Iran under
conditions infinitely less favorable to the U.S. than the face-off
with Iraq five years before. Only a veritable mutiny by Pentagon
generals and professional intelligence agents prevented Bush from
making another date with apocalypse.

Humanity
is at greatest danger when the old regime feels its power to be
slipping away. The rich are
different from the rest of us. Most of us simply want to live decent
lives. But for the super-rich, loss of decisive power over the bulk
of humanity amounts to social death. As they view the world, one
either rules, or dies.

“Only a veritable mutiny
by Pentagon generals and professional intelligence agents prevented
Bush from making another date with apocalypse.”

Bush
and his Pirates can no longer hope to successfully employ the engines
of war to “harness Time and cheat the laws of political economy.”
But they can commit suicide. The time to fear the generals is not
when they swagger and pound their chests. It’s when they start
pissing their pants for no damn good reason but the horror film
rolling in their heads.

The world is closer than it has ever
been to an epic of global cooperation. It is now generally understood
by ever larger masses of people that absent a regime of routine
planetary collaboration, civilization is doomed. Most leaders of the
nations of the world are also aware that the transition from half a
millennium of European capitalist domination to something resembling
a global family of nations may be the most dangerous phase humanity
has ever encountered.

That is because the destroyers of
civilizations are at their most murderous when their own mortality
can no longer be avoided. Washington is full of such creatures. We
must find ways to confine them, or they will try to kill us all.

BAR
Executive editor Glen Ford can be reached at
Glen.Ford(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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