Find a theme, stick with it, as Bush always says. Or Lakoff. I forget which.


Rahul Mahajan of Empire Notes measures four stories — the London bombings; the leaked (on purpose, I suspect) memo on troop withdrawal; the low practical value of G8 debt reduction; and Iraq/Iran alliances, on which he notes:

Iraqi Defense Minister Sa’adoun ad-Dulaimy visited with his Iranian counterpart, Admiral Ali Shamkhani last week; reportedly, they are working on a military cooperation agreement that will include Iranian training of the new Iraqi armed forces.


Dulaimy says the Iranians have offered of $1 billion in reconstruction aid and there is talk of building an oil pipeline between the two countries.


Says Mahajan — a thoughtful fellow I recently saw get rudely shouted down on MSNBC’s Connected — “these four pieces of news all point to the same thing”:

The developments of the last three years have seen a catastrophic decline in U.S. global hegemony. Bad enough that it has to sit by quietly while revolutions go on in Venezuela and Bolivia and Argentina defies international finance capital. Bad enough that it can no longer defend extortionate debt repayment requirements on destitute nations, a policy that required no defense ten years ago.


Worse, it has invaded Iraq and cost itself blood, treasure, and legitimacy only to find that its political weakness has forced it into allowing elections and the advent of a government that may well instead increase the power of Iran. This eventuality, anathema to the American imperium, is a very clear sign of its weakness in what we have been told is to be a new American century.

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Mr. Mahajan is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond. He appeared on Democracy Now! on June 29, 2005, following Bush’s Ft. Bragg speech. He said there wasn’t much in Bush’s speech to react to, but he had plenty to say about the situation in Iraq:

[O]n Sunday the Times of London reported that some U.S. military officers are in negotiations with some insurgent or resistance factions.

And one of the things that has gone, I think, less noticed and less reported is that at one point talk turned to the idea of the other factions turning over Zarqawi and some of his people or turning against them, and their response basically was at this point with us under attack and under occupation by the United States, we’re not going to turn against any Muslim from anywhere who has come to help us fight against our enemy.


Now, I personally don’t think that Zarqawi and factions like that that are trying to incite a Sunni-Shia civil war are actually helping the Iraqis against their enemy, but it’s perfectly understandable that in a situation where they are occupied and they see one of their primary problems as the presence of massive numbers of foreign fighters from the United States and Britain, that that is how they’re going to see Zarqawi, that there’s going to be an inability for the resistance to separate itself completely from small sectarian terrorist factions. There’s going to be an inability for the Iraqi people to try to deal with that because it’s very difficult for them to disentangle, in a sense, that these people as — disentangle them as in their minds as being their allies.


This is why – this is one of the reasons why in order to bring any kind of clarity to this situation, the United States has to withdraw. If it withdraws and part of the settlement is, in fact, that all Iraqi forces that will negotiate with each other, which includes the mainstream politicians now, it includes most of the resistance, it includes Muqtada al-Sadr, but it does not include Zarqawi and people like that. Then as the U.S. is withdrawing, and these other factions can easily come together and negotiate and agree to deal with the terrorism problem they have.

In the absence of a withdrawal, however, just the reverse dynamic happens, and more and more of the resistance factions feel as if Zarqawi is on their side. …

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