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February 21, 2018
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Feb 20, 2018 TD originals
The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of U.S. Hegemony
By Paul Street
From Truthdig
Paraguayan protester dressed as "Uncle Sam" during a 2005 march in
Asuncion, Paraguay, against U.S. military forces. (Jorge Saenz / AP)
There are good reasons for any good progressive to bemoan the presence of
the childish, racist, sexist and ecocidal, right-wing plutocrat Donald Trump
in the White House. One complaint about Trump that should be held at
arm's-length by anyone on the left, however, is the charge that Trump is
contributing to the decline of U.S. global power-to the erosion of the
United States' superpower status and the emergence of a more multipolar
world.
This criticism of Trump comes from different elite corners. Last October,
the leading neoconservative foreign policy intellectual and former George W.
Bush administration adviser Eliot Cohen wrote an Atlantic magazine essay
titled "How Trump Is Ending the American Era." Cohen recounted numerous ways
in which Trump had reduced "America's standing and ability to influence
global affairs." He worried that Trump's presidency would leave "America's
position in the world stunted" and an "America lacking confidence" on the
global stage.
But it isn't just the right wing that writes and speaks in such terms about
how Trump is contributing to the decline of U.S. hegemony. A recent Time
magazine reflection by the liberal commentator Karl Vick (who wrote in
strongly supportive terms about the giant January 2017 Women's March against
Trump) frets that that Trump's "America First" and authoritarian views have
the world "looking for leadership elsewhere."
"Could this be it?" Vick asks. "Might the American Century actually clock
out at just 72 years, from 1945 to 2017? No longer than Louis XIV ruled
France? Only 36 months more than the Soviet Union lasted, after all that
bother?"
I recently reviewed a manuscript on the rise of Trump written by a
left-liberal American sociologist. Near the end of this forthcoming and
mostly excellent and instructive volume, the author finds it "worrisome"
that other nations see the U.S. "abdicating its role as the world's leading
policeman" under Trump-and that, "given what we have seen so far from the
[Trump] administration, U.S. hegemony appears to be on shakier ground than
it has been in a long time."
For the purposes of this report, I'll leave aside the matter of whether
Trump is, in fact, speeding the decline of U.S. global power (he undoubtedly
is) and how he's doing that to focus instead on a very different question:
What would be so awful about the end of "the American Era"-the seven-plus
decades of U.S. global economic and related military supremacy between 1945
and the present? Why should the world mourn the "premature" end of the
"American Century"?
It would be interesting to see a reliable opinion poll on how the
politically cognizant portion of the 94 percent of humanity that lives
outside the U.S. would feel about the end of U.S. global dominance. My guess
is that Uncle Sam's weakening would be just fine with most Earth residents
who pay attention to world events.
According to a global survey of 66,000 people conducted across 68 countries
by the Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research (WINMR) and Gallup
International at the end of 2013, Earth's people see the United States as
the leading threat to peace on the planet. The U.S. was voted top threat by
a wide margin.
There is nothing surprising about that vote for anyone who honestly examines
the history of "U.S. foreign affairs," to use a common elite euphemism for
American imperialism. Still, by far and away world history's most extensive
empire, the U.S. has at least 800 military bases spread across more than 80
foreign countries and "troops or other military personnel in about 160
foreign countries and territories." The U.S. accounts for more than 40
percent of the planet's military spending and has more than 5,500 strategic
nuclear weapons, enough to blow the world up 5 to 50 times over. Last year
it increased its "defense" (military empire) spending, which was already
three times higher than China's, and nine times higher than Russia's.
Think it's all in place to ensure peace and democracy the world over, in
accord with the standard boilerplate rhetoric of U.S. presidents, diplomats
and senators?
Do you know any other good jokes?
A Pentagon study released last summer laments the emergence of a planet on
which the U.S. no longer controls events. Titled "At Our Own Peril: DoD Risk
Assessment in a Post-Primary World," the study warns that competing powers
"seek a new distribution of power and authority commensurate with their
emergence as legitimate rivals to U.S. dominance" in an increasingly
multipolar world. China, Russia and smaller players like Iran and North
Korea have dared to "engage," the Pentagon study reports, "in a deliberate
program to demonstrate the limits of U.S. authority, reach influence and
impact." What chutzpah! This is a problem, the report argues, because the
endangered U.S.-managed world order was "favorable" to the interests of U.S.
and allied U.S. states and U.S.-based transnational corporations.
Any serious efforts to redesign the international status quo so that it
favors any other states or people is portrayed in the report as a threat to
U.S. interests. To prevent any terrible drifts of the world system away from
U.S. control, the report argues, the U.S. and its imperial partners (chiefly
its European NATO partners) must maintain and expand "unimpeded access to
the air, sea, space, cyberspace, and the electromagnetic spectrum in order
to underwrite their security and prosperity." The report recommends a
significant expansion of U.S. military power. The U.S. must maintain
"military advantage" over all other states and actors to "preserve maximum
freedom of action" and thereby "allow U.S. decision-makers the opportunity
to dictate or hold significant sway over outcomes in international
disputes," with the "implied promise of unacceptable consequences" for those
who defy U.S. wishes.
"America First" is an understatement here. The underlying premise is that
Uncle Sam owns the world and reserves the right to bomb the hell out of
anyone who doesn't agree with that (to quote President George H.W. Bush
after the first Gulf War in 1991: "What we say goes."
It's nothing new. From the start, the "American Century" had nothing to do
with advancing democracy. As numerous key U.S. planning documents reveal
over and over, the goal of that policy was to maintain and, if necessary,
install governments that "favor[ed] private investment of domestic and
foreign capital, production for export, and the right to bring profits out
of the country," according to Noam Chomsky. Given the United States'
remarkable possession of half the world's capital after World War II,
Washington elites had no doubt that U.S. investors and corporations would
profit the most. Internally, the basic selfish national and imperial
objectives were openly and candidly discussed. As the "liberal" and "dovish"
imperialist, top State Department planner, and key Cold War architect George
F. Kennan explained in "Policy Planning Study 23," a critical 1948 document:
"
We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. .
In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment.
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships
which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity. . To do so, we
will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our
attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national
objectives. . We should cease to talk about vague and . unreal objectives
such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and
democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in
straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic
slogans, the better.
The harsh necessity of abandoning "human rights" and other "sentimental" and
"unreal objectives" was especially pressing in the global South, what used
to be known as the Third World. Washington assigned the vast "undeveloped"
periphery of the world capitalist system-Africa, Latin America, Southeast
Asia and the energy-rich and thus strategically hyper-significant Middle
East-a less than flattering role. It was to "fulfill its major function as a
source of raw materials and a market" (actual State Department language) for
the great industrial (capitalist) nations (excluding socialist Russia and
its satellites, and notwithstanding the recent epic racist-fascist rampages
of industrial Germany and Japan). It was to be exploited both for the
benefit of U.S. corporations/investors and for the reconstruction of Europe
and Japan as prosperous U.S. trading and investment partners organized on
capitalist principles and hostile to the Soviet bloc.
"Democracy" was fine as a slogan and benevolent, idealistic-sounding mission
statement when it came to marketing this imperialist U.S. policy at home and
abroad. Since most people in the "third" or "developing" world had no
interest in neocolonial subordination to the rich nations and subscribed to
what U.S. intelligence officials considered the heretical "idea that
government has direct responsibility for the welfare of its people" (what
U.S. planners called "communism"), Washington's real-life commitment to
popular governance abroad was strictly qualified, to say the least.
"Democracy" was suitable to the U.S. as long as its outcomes comported with
the interests of U.S. investors/corporations and related U.S. geopolitical
objectives. It had to be abandoned, undermined and/or crushed when it
threatened those investors/corporations and the broader imperatives of
business rule to any significant degree. As President Richard Nixon's
coldblooded national security adviser Henry Kissinger explained in June
1970, three years before the U.S. sponsored a bloody fascist coup that
overthrew Chile's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador
Allende: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go
Communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."
The U.S.-sponsored coup government that murdered Allende would kill tens of
thousands of real and alleged leftists with Washington's approval. The
Yankee superpower sent some of its leading neoliberal economists and policy
advisers to help the blood-soaked Pinochet regime turn Chile into a "free
market" model and to help Chile write capitalist oligarchy into its national
constitution.
"Since 1945, by deed and by example," the great Australian author,
commentator and filmmaker John Pilger wrote nearly nine years ago: "The U.S.
has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, crushed some 30
liberation movements and supported tyrannies from Egypt to Guatemala (see
William Blum's histories). Bombing is apple pie." Along the way, Washington
has crassly interfered in elections in dozens of "sovereign" nations,
something curious to note in light of current liberal U.S. outrage over real
or alleged Russian interference in "our" supposedly democratic electoral
process in 2016. Uncle Sam also has bombed civilians in 30 countries,
attempted to assassinate foreign leaders and deployed chemical and
biological weapons.
If we "consider only Latin America since the 1950s," writes the sociologist
Howard Waitzkin:
"
[T]he United States has used direct military invasion or has supported
military coups to overthrow elected governments in Guatemala, the Dominican
Republic, Chile, Haiti, Grenada, and Panama. In addition, the United States
has intervened with military action to suppress revolutionary movements in
El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Bolivia. More recently . the United States has
spent tax dollars to finance and help organize opposition groups and media
in Honduras, Paraguay, and Brazil, leading to congressional impeachments of
democratically elected presidents. Hillary Clinton presided over these
efforts as Secretary of State in the Obama administration, which pursued the
same pattern of destabilization in Venezuela, Ecuador, Argentina, Chile, and
Bolivia.
The death count resulting from "American Era" U.S. foreign policy runs well
into the many millions, including possibly as many as 5 million Indochinese
killed by Uncle Sam and his agents and allies between 1962 and 1975. The
flat-out barbarism of the American war on Vietnam is widely documented on
record. The infamous My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, when U.S. Army
soldiers slaughtered more than 350 unarmed civilians-including terrified
women holding babies in their arms-in South Vietnam was no isolated incident
in the U.S. "crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (Noam Chomsky's phrase at the
time). U.S. Army Col. Oran Henderson, who was charged with covering up the
massacre, candidly told reporters that "every unit of brigade size has its
My Lai hidden somewhere."
It is difficult, sometimes, to wrap one's mind around the extent of the
savagery Uncle Sam has unleashed on the world to advance and maintain its
global supremacy. In the early 1950s, the Harry Truman administration
responded to an early challenge to U.S. power in Northern Korea with a
practically genocidal three-year bombing campaign that was described in
soul-numbing terms by the Washington Post years ago:
"
The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless, even by the assessment of
America's own leaders. 'Over a period of three years or so, we killed
off-what-20 percent of the population,' Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, head of
the Strategic Air Command during the Korean War, told the Office of Air
Force History in 1984. Dean Rusk, a supporter of the war and later Secretary
of State, said the United States bombed 'everything that moved in North
Korea, every brick standing on top of another.' After running low on urban
targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the
later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops . [T]he U.S.
dropped 635,000 tons of explosives on North Korea, including 32,557 tons of
napalm, an incendiary liquid that can clear forested areas and cause
devastating burns to human skin.
Gee, why does North Korea fear and hate Uncle Sam?
This ferocious bombardment, which killed 2 million or more civilians, began
five years after Truman arch-criminally and unnecessarily ordered the atom
bombing of hundreds of thousands pf civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to
warn the Soviet Union to stay out of Japan and Western Europe.
Some benevolent "world policeman."
The ferocity of U.S. foreign policy in "America Era" did not always require
direct U.S. military intervention. Take Indonesia and Chile, for two
examples from the "Golden Age" height of the "American Century." In
Indonesia, the U.S.-backed dictator Suharto killed millions of his subjects,
targeting communist sympathizers, ethnic Chinese and alleged leftists. A
senior CIA operations officer in the 1960s later described Suharto's 1965-66
U.S.-assisted coup as s "the model operation" for the U.S.-backed coup that
eliminated the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende,
seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist
plot to murder Chilean military leaders," the officer wrote, "[just like]
what happened in Indonesia in 1965."
As John Pilger noted 10 years ago, "the U.S. embassy in Jakarta supplied
Suharto with a 'zap list' of Indonesian Communist party members and crossed
off the names when they were killed or captured. . The deal was that
Indonesia under Suharto would offer up what Richard Nixon had called 'the
richest hoard of natural resources, the greatest prize in south-east Asia.'
"
"No single American action in the period after 1945," wrote the historian
Gabriel Kolko, "was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried
to initiate [Suharto's] massacre."
Two years and three months after the Chilean coup, Suharto received a green
light from Kissinger and the Gerald Ford White House to invade the small
island nation of East Timor. With Washington's approval and backing,
Indonesia carried out genocidal massacres and mass rapes and killed at least
100,000 of the island's residents.
Among the countless episodes of mass-murderous U.S. savagery in the oil-rich
Middle East over the last generation, few can match for the barbarous
ferocity of the "Highway of Death," where the "global policeman's" forces
massacred tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops retreating from
Kuwait on Feb. 26 and 27, 1991. Journalist Joyce Chediac testified that:
"
U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and
at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. 'It was
like shooting fish in a barrel,' said one U.S. pilot. On the sixty miles of
coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched
skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun . for 60
miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered,
every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No
survivors are known or likely. . 'Even in Vietnam I didn't see anything like
this. It's pathetic,' said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. .
U.S. pilots took whatever bombs happened to be close to the flight deck,
from cluster bombs to 500-pound bombs. . U.S. forces continued to drop bombs
on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the
inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air
controllers feared midair collisions. . The victims were not offering
resistance. . [I]t was simply a one-sided massacre of tens of thousands of
people who had no ability to fight back or defend.
The victims' crime was having been conscripted into an army controlled by a
dictator perceived as a threat to U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil.
President George H.W. Bush welcomed the so-called Persian Gulf War as an
opportunity to demonstrate America's unrivaled power and new freedom of
action in the post-Cold War world, where the Soviet Union could no longer
deter Washington. Bush also heralded the "war" (really a one-sided imperial
assault) as marking the end of the "Vietnam Syndrome," the reigning
political culture's curious term for U.S. citizens' reluctance to commit
U.S. troops to murderous imperial mayhem.
As Noam Chomsky observed in 1992, reflecting on U.S. efforts to maximize
suffering in Vietnam by blocking economic and humanitarian assistance to the
nation it had devastated: "No degree of cruelty is too great for Washington
sadists."
But Uncle Sam was only getting warmed up building his Iraqi body count in
early 1991. Five years later, Bill Clinton's U.S. Secretary of State
Madeline Albright told CBS News' Leslie Stahl that the death of 500,000
Iraqi children due to U.S.-led economic sanctions imposed after the first
"Persian Gulf War" (a curious term for a one-sided U.S. assault) was a
"price . worth paying" for the advancement of inherently noble U.S. goals.
"The United States," Secretary Albright explained three years later, "is
good. We try to do our best everywhere."
In the years following the collapse of the counter-hegemonic Soviet empire,
however, American neoliberal intellectuals like Thomas Friedman-an advocate
of the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia-felt free to openly state that the
real purpose of U.S. foreign policy was to underwrite the profits of
U.S.-centered global capitalism. "The hidden hand of the market," Friedman
famously wrote in The New York Times Magazine in March 1999, as U.S. bombs
and missiles exploded in Serbia, "will never work without a hidden fist.
McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the
F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's
technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine
Corps."
In a foreign policy speech Sen. Barack Obama gave to the Chicago Council of
Global Affairs on the eve of announcing his candidacy for the U.S.
presidency in the fall of 2006, Obama had the audacity to say the following
in support of his claim that U.S. citizens supported "victory" in Iraq: "The
American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their
sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah."
It was a spine-chilling selection of locales. In 2004, the ill-fated city
was the site of colossal U.S. war atrocities, crimes including the
indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting even of
ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city by
the U.S. military in April and November. By one account, "Incoherent
Empire," Michael Mann wrote:
"
The U.S. launched two bursts of ferocious assault on the city, in April and
November of 2004 . [using] devastating firepower from a distance which
minimizes U.S. casualties. In April . military commanders claimed to have
precisely targeted . insurgent forces, yet the local hospitals reported that
many or most of the casualties were civilians, often women, children, and
the elderly. [reflecting an] intention to kill civilians generally. . In
November . [U.S.] aerial assault destroyed the only hospital in insurgent
territory to ensure that this time no one would be able to document civilian
casualties. U.S. forces then went through the city, virtually destroying it.
Afterwards, Fallujah looked like the city of Grozny in Chechnya after
Putin's Russian troops had razed it to the ground.
The "global policeman's" deployment of radioactive ordnance (depleted
uranium) in Fallujah created an epidemic of infant mortality, birth defects,
leukemia and cancer there.
Fallujah was just one especially graphic episode in a broader arch-criminal
invasion that led to the premature deaths of at least 1 million Iraqi
civilians and left Iraq as what Tom Engelhardt called "a disaster zone on a
catastrophic scale hard to match in recent memory." It reflected the same
callous mindset behind the Pentagon's early computer program name for
ordinary Iraqis certain to be killed in the 2003 invasion: "bug-splat."
Uncle Sam's petro-imperial occupation led to the death of at least 1 million
Iraqi "bugs" (human beings). According to the respected journalist Nir Rosen
in December 2007, "Iraq has been killed. . [T]he American occupation has
been more disastrous than that of the Mongols who sacked Baghdad in the
thirteenth century."
Along with death came the ruthless and racist torture. In an essay titled "I
Helped Create ISIS," Vincent Emanuele, a former U.S. Marine, recalled his
enlistment in an operation that gave him nightmares more than a decade
later:
"
I think about the hundreds of prisoners we took captive and tortured in
makeshift detention facilities. . I vividly remember the marines telling me
about punching, slapping, kicking, elbowing, kneeing and head-butting
Iraqis. I remember the tales of sexual torture: forcing Iraqi men to perform
sexual acts on each other while marines held knives against their testicles,
sometimes sodomizing them with batons. . [T]hose of us in infantry units .
round[ed] up Iraqis during night raids, zip-tying their hands, black-bagging
their heads and throwing them in the back of HUMVEEs and trucks while their
wives and kids collapsed to their knees and wailed. . Some of them would
hold hands while marines would butt-stroke the prisoners in the face. .
[W]hen they were released, we would drive them from the FOB (Forward
Operating Base) to the middle of the desert and release them several miles
from their homes. . After we cut their zip-ties and took the black bags off
their heads, several of our more deranged marines would fire rounds from
their AR-15s into their air or ground, scaring the recently released
captives. Always for laughs. Most Iraqis would run, still crying from their
long ordeal.
The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh told the ACLU about the existence
of classified Pentagon evidence files containing films of U.S-"global
policeman" soldiers sodomizing Iraqi boys in front of their mothers behind
the walls of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. "You haven't begun to see [all
the] . evil, horrible things done [by U.S. soldiers] to children of women
prisoners, as the cameras run," Hersh told an audience in Chicago in the
summer of 2014.
It isn't just Iraq where Washington has wreaked sheer mass murderous havoc
in the Middle East, always a region of prime strategic significance to the
U.S. thanks to its massive petroleum resources. In a recent Truthdig
reflection on Syria, historian Dan Lazare reminds us that:
"
[Syrian President Assad's] Baathist crimes pale in comparison to those of
the U.S., which since the 1970s has invested trillions in militarizing the
Persian Gulf and arming the ultra-reactionary petro-monarchies that are now
tearing the region apart. The U.S. has provided Saudi Arabia with crucial
assistance in its war on Yemen, it has cheered on the Saudi blockade of
Qatar, and it has stood by while the Saudis and United Arab Emirates send in
troops to crush democratic protests in neighboring Bahrain. In Syria,
Washington has worked hand in glove with Riyadh to organize and finance a
Wahhabist holy war that has reduced a once thriving country to ruin.
Chomsky has called Barack Obama's targeted drone assassination program "the
most extensive global terrorism campaign the world has yet seen." The
program "officially is aimed at killing people who the administration
believes might someday intend to harm the U.S. and killing anyone else who
happens to be nearby." As Chomsky adds, "It is also a terrorism generating
campaign-that is well understood by people in high places. When you murder
somebody in a Yemen village, and maybe a couple of other people who are
standing there, the chances are pretty high that others will want to take
revenge."
"We lead the world," presidential candidate Obama explained, "in battling
immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good. . America is the last, best
hope of earth."
Obama elaborated in his first inaugural address. "Our security," the
president said, "emanates from the justness of our cause; the force of our
example; the tempering qualities of humility and restraint"-a fascinating
commentary on Fallujah, Hiroshima, the U.S. crucifixion of Southeast Asia,
the "Highway of Death" and more.
Within less than half a year of his inauguration, Obama's rapidly
accumulating record of atrocities in the Muslim world would include the
bombing of the Afghan village of Bola Boluk. Ninety-three of the dead
villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives in Bola Boluk were children. "In a
phone call played on a loudspeaker on Wednesday to outraged members of the
Afghan Parliament," the New York Times reported, "the governor of Farah
Province . said that as many as 130 civilians had been killed." According to
one Afghan legislator and eyewitness, "the villagers bought two tractor
trailers full of pieces of human bodies to his office to prove the
casualties that had occurred. Everyone at the governor's cried, watching
that shocking scene." The administration refused to issue an apology or to
acknowledge the "global policeman's" responsibility.
By telling and sickening contrast, Obama had just offered a full apology and
fired a White House official because that official had scared New Yorkers
with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that
reminded people of 9/11. The disparity was extraordinary: Frightening New
Yorkers led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White
House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians did not require any
apology.
Reflecting on such atrocities the following December, an Afghan villager was
moved to comment as follows: "Peace prize? He's a killer. . Obama has only
brought war to our country." The man spoke from the village of Armal, where
a crowd of 100 gathered around the bodies of 12 people, one family from a
single home. The 12 were killed, witnesses reported, by U.S. Special Forces
during a late-night raid.
Obama was only warming up his "killer" powers. He would join with France and
other NATO powers in the imperial decimation of Libya, which killed more
than 25,000 civilians and unleashed mass carnage in North Africa. The
U.S.-led assault on Libya was a disaster for black Africans and sparked the
biggest refugee crisis since World War II.
Two years before the war on Libya, the Obama administration helped install a
murderous right-wing coup regime in Honduras. Thousands of civilians and
activists have been murdered by that regime.
The clumsy and stupid Trump has taken the imperial baton from the elegant
and silver-tongued "imperial grandmaster" Obama, keeping the superpower's
vast global military machine set on kill. As Newsweek reported last fall, in
a news item that went far below the national news radar screen in the age of
the endless insane Trump clown show:
"
According to research from the nonprofit monitoring group Airwars . through
the first seven months of the Trump administration, coalition air strikes
have killed between 2,800 and 4,500 civilians. . Researchers also point to
another stunning trend-the 'frequent killing of entire families in likely
coalition airstrikes.' In May, for example, such actions led to the deaths
of at least 57 women and 52 children in Iraq and Syria. . In Afghanistan,
the U.N. reports a 67 percent increase in civilian deaths from U.S.
airstrikes in the first six months of 2017 compared to the first half of
2016.
That Trump murders with less sophistication, outward moral restraint and
credible claim to embody enlightened Western values and multilateral
commitment than Obama did is perhaps preferable to some degree. It is better
for empire to be exposed in its full and ugly nakedness, to speed its
overdue demise.
The U.S. is not just the top menace only to peace on Earth. It is also the
leading threat to personal privacy (as was made clearer than ever by the
Edward Snowden revelations), to democracy (the U.S. funds and equips
repressive regimes around the world) and to a livable global natural
environment (thanks in no small part to its role as headquarters of global
greenhouse gassing and petro-capitalist climate denial).
The world can be forgiven, perhaps, if it does not join Eliot Cohen and Karl
Vick in bemoaning the end of the "American Era," whatever Trump's
contribution to that decline, which was well underway before he entered the
Oval Office.
Ordinary Americans, too, can find reasons to welcome the decline of the
American empire. As Chomsky noted in the late 1960s: "The costs of empire
are in general distributed over the society as a whole, while its profits
revert to a few within."
The Pentagon system functions as a great form of domestic corporate welfare
for high-tech "defense" (empire) firms like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and
Raytheon-this while it steals trillions of dollars that might otherwise meet
social and environmental needs at home and abroad. It is a significant mode
of upward wealth distribution within "the homeland."
The biggest costs have fallen on the many millions killed and maimed by the
U.S. military and allied and proxy forces in the last seven decades and
before. The victims include the many U.S. military veterans who have killed
themselves, many of them haunted by their own participation in sadistic
attacks and torture on defenseless people at the distant command of
sociopathic imperial masters determined to enforce U.S. hegemony by any and
all means deemed necessary.
Paul Street
