[Peace-discuss] American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed

[Brussel Morton K.]

  April 14, 2008
American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed
by Paul Craig Roberts

Exactly as the British press predicted, last week's congressional  
testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Green Zone administrator Ryan  
Crocker set the propaganda stage for a Bush regime attack on Iran. On  
April 10 Robert H. Reid of AP News reported: "The top U.S. commander  
has shifted the focus from al-Qaeda to Iranian-backed 'special  
groups' as the main threat. … The shift was articulated by Gen.  
Petraeus who told Congress that 'unchecked, the special groups pose  
the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.'"

According to the neocon propaganda, the "special groups" (have you  
ever heard of them before?) are breakaway elements of Sadr's militia.

Nonsensical on its face, the Petraeus/Crocker testimony is just  
another mask in the macabre theater of lies that the Bush regime has  
told in order to justify its wars of naked aggression against Muslims.

Fact #1: Sadr is not allied with Iran. He speaks with an Iraqi voice  
and has his militia under orders to stand down from conflict. The  
Badr militia is the Shi'ite militia that is allied with Iran. Why did  
the U.S. and its Iraqi puppet Maliki attack Sadr's militia and not  
the Badr militia or the breakaway elements of Sadr's militia that  
allegedly now operate as gangs?

Fact #2: The Shi'ite militias and the Sunni insurgents are armed with  
weapons available from the unsecured weapon stockpiles of Saddam  
Hussein's army. If Iran were arming Iraqis, the Iraqi insurgents and  
militias would have armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades and  
surface-to-air missiles. These two weapons would neutralize the U.S.  
advantage by enabling Iraqis to destroy U.S. helicopter gunships,  
aircraft, and tanks. The Iraqis cannot mass their forces as they have  
no weapons against U.S. air power. To destroy U.S. tanks, Iraqis have  
to guess the roads U.S. vehicles will travel and bury bombs  
constructed from artillery shells. The inability to directly attack  
armor and to defend against air attack denies offensive capability to  
Iraqis.

If the Iranians desired to arm Iraqis, they obviously would provide  
these two weapons that would change the course of the war.

Just as the Bush regime lied to Americans and the UN about why Iraq  
was attacked, hiding the real agenda behind false claims that Saddam  
Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaeda,  
the Bush regime is now lying about why it needs to attack Iran. Could  
anyone possibly believe that Iran is so desirous of having its  
beautiful country bombed and its nuclear energy program destroyed  
that Iran would invite an attack by fighting a "proxy war" against  
the U.S. in Iraq?

That the Bush regime would tell such a blatant lie shows that the  
regime has no respect for the intelligence of the American public and  
no respect for the integrity of the U.S. media.

And why should it? The public and media have fallen for every lie the  
Bush regime has told.

The moral hypocrisy of U.S. politicians is unrivaled. McCain says  
that if he were president he would not attend the opening ceremony of  
the Beijing Olympics because China has killed and injured 100  
Tibetans who protested Tibet's occupation by China. Meanwhile the  
Iraqi toll of the American occupation is one million dead and four  
million displaced. That comes to 20 percent of the Iraqi population.  
At what point does the U.S. occupation of Iraq graduate from a war  
crime to genocide?

Not to be outdone by McCain's hypocrisy, Bush declared: "The message  
to the Iranians is: we will bring you to justice if you continue to  
try to infiltrate, send your agents or send surrogates to bring harm  
to our troops and/or the Iraqi citizens."

Consider our "Christian" president's position: It is perfectly  
appropriate for the U.S. to bomb and to invade countries and to send  
its agents and surrogates to harm Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Serbians,  
and whomever, but resistance to American aggression is the mark of  
terrorism, and any country that aids America's victims is at war with  
America.

The three-week "cakewalk" war that would be paid for by Iraqi oil  
revenues is now into its sixth year. According to Nobel economist  
Joseph Stiglitz, the cost of the war to Americans is between three  
and five trillion dollars. Five trillion dollars equals the entire  
U.S. personal and corporate income tax revenues for two years.

Of what benefit is this enormous expenditure to America? The price of  
oil and gasoline in U.S. dollars has tripled, the price of gold has  
quadrupled, and the dollar has declined sharply against other  
currencies. The national debt has rapidly mounted. America's  
reputation is in tatters.

The Bush regime's coming attack on Iran will widen the war  
dramatically and escalate the costs.

Not content with war with Iran, Republican presidential candidate  
John McCain in a speech written for him by neocon warmonger Robert  
Kagan promises to confront both Russia and China.

Three questions present themselves:

(1) Will our foreign creditors – principally China, Japan, and Saudi  
Arabia – finance a third monstrous Bush regime war crime?

(2) Will Iran sit on its hands and wait on the American bombs to fall?

(3) Will Russia and China passively wait to be confronted by the  
warmonger McCain?

Should a country that is overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan be  
preparing to attack yet a third country, while threatening to  
interfere in the affairs of two large nuclear powers? What sort of  
political leadership seeks to initiate conflict in so many  
unpromising directions?

With Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea threatened by American  
hegemonic belligerence, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario  
that would terminate all pretense of American power: For example,  
instead of waiting to be attacked, Iran uses its Chinese and Russian  
anti-ship missiles, against which the U.S. reportedly has poor means  
of defense, and sinks every ship in the American carrier strike  
forces that have been foolishly massed in the Persian Gulf,  
simultaneously taking out the Saudi oil fields and the Green Zone in  
Baghdad, the headquarters of the U.S. occupation. Shi'ite militias  
break the U.S. supply lines from Kuwait, and Iranian troops destroy  
the dispersed U.S. forces in Iraq before they can be concentrated to  
battle strength.

Simultaneously, North Korea crosses the demilitarized zone and takes  
South Korea, China seizes Taiwan and dumps a trillion dollars of U.S.  
Treasury bonds on the market. Russia goes on full nuclear alert and  
cuts off all natural gas to Europe.

What would the Bush regime do? Wet its pants? Push the button and end  
the world?

If America really had dangerous enemies, surely the enemies would  
collude to take advantage of a dramatically overextended delusional  
regime that, blinded by its own arrogance and hubris, issues  
gratuitous threats and lives by Mao's doctrine that power comes out  
of the barrel of a gun.

There are other less dramatic scenarios. Why does the U.S. assume  
that only it can initiate aggression, boycotts, freezes on financial  
assets of other countries, and bans on foreign banks from  
participation in the international banking system? If the rest of the  
world were to tire of American aggression or to develop a moral  
conscience, it would be easy to organize a boycott of America and to  
ban U.S. banks from participating in the international banking  
system. Such a boycott would be especially effective at the present  
time with the balance sheets of U.S. banks impaired by subprime  
derivatives and the U.S. government dependent on foreign loans in  
order to finance its day-to-day activities.

Sooner or later it will occur to other countries that putting up with  
America is a habit that they don't need to continue.

Does America really need more political leadership that leads in such  
unpromising directions?

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