Monday, October 02, 2017

Editorial: The falling empire

Pentagon: US servicemember in coalition fighting ISIS was killed Sunday in Iraq when a IED struck a coalition vehicle.



Another US death in the never-ending Iraq War.

When does it end?

When the US government finally installs the 'right' government?

They keep installing prime ministers but they don't 'take.'

And they won't 'take' because the Iraqi people will not accept these lackeys to the US -- all, so far, cowards who fled Iraq decades ago -- as their own leaders.

But still the nonsense continues.

The government won't tell you how this all ends but Chris Hedges (ICH) does:


Empires in decay embrace an almost willful suicide. Blinded by their hubris and unable to face the reality of their diminishing power, they retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with unilateral threats and the blunt instrument of war.
This collective self-delusion saw the United States make the greatest strategic blunder in its history, one that sounded the death knell of the empire—the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. The architects of the war in the George W. Bush White House, and the array of useful idiots in the press and academia who were cheerleaders for it, knew very little about the countries being invaded, were stunningly naive about the effects of industrial warfare and were blindsided by the ferocious blowback. They stated, and probably believed, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, although they had no valid evidence to support this claim. They insisted that democracy would be implanted in Baghdad and spread across the Middle East. They assured the public that U.S. troops would be greeted by grateful Iraqis and Afghans as liberators. They promised that oil revenues would cover the cost of reconstruction. They insisted that the bold and quick military strike—“shock and awe”—would restore American hegemony in the region and dominance in the world. It did the opposite. As Zbigniew Brzezinski noted, this “unilateral war of choice against Iraq precipitated a widespread delegitimation of U.S. foreign policy.”

Historians of empire call these military fiascos, a feature of all late empires, examples of “micro-militarism.” The Athenians engaged in micro-militarism when during the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) they invaded Sicily, suffering the loss of 200 ships and thousands of soldiers and triggering revolts throughout the empire. Britain did so in 1956 when it attacked Egypt in a dispute over the nationalization of the Suez Canal and then quickly had to withdraw in humiliation, empowering a string of Arab nationalist leaders such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and dooming British rule over the nation’s few remaining colonies. Neither of these empires recovered.




War Whore Ken Burns is currently lying at length in his PBS mockumentary supposedly about Vietnam.  And lies is all they have to offer as they try to pretend like no one would have ever thought these wars would maim and kill, let alone drag on.

The corrupt wars are the result of the corrupt government.













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