Last week, the Bush administration put on a carnival that mourned the passing of the New American Century, celebrated the sixth anniversary of our national state of emergency and ushered in the institutionalization of the Next World Order. Dubya-Week began last Monday (D-Day) at 1230 pm eastern time (H-Hour) with testimony before Congress by General David Petraeus (our latter-day Lawrence of Arabia) and Ambassador Ryan Crocker (the second coming of Studebaker Hoch).
The week climaxed in an Ides of September address to the nation in which Mr. Bush announced a troop reduction that’s actually a renewal of the so-called “surge” and an “enduring relationship” with Iraq that’s really a treaty except that it doesn’t need to be ratified by the Senate. What Mr. Bush didn’t tell us Thursday night was that on Wednesday he’d signed an executive order that extends the state of national emergency we’ve been living under since September 14, 2001, and that Congress didn’t even blink when he told them about it, much less “meet to consider a vote on a joint resolution to determine whether that emergency shall be terminated” like federal law requires them to.
Well, all that is probably okay. By now we’re used to Mr. Bush blowing feathers up our skirts about Iraq, and treating the Constitution like a roll of Charmin, and ignoring Congress and Congress letting him get away with it. And in all candor, most Americans will likely get used to the world order Bush has given them, because the first half of this century promises to be a repeat of the last half of the previous one.
Brave New World Order
A new world order began when Mr. Gorbachev brought down the Berlin Wall and the United States became the planet’s sole superpower. The next world order started about the time a U.S. Army psychological operations unit staged the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in Baghdad. Subsequent events revealed America’s Achilles heel–the military might that brought the U.S. to global dominance is no longer capable of decisively achieving its foreign policy aims.
Nonetheless, the aim of the Iraq invasion did not and has not changed. In his newly released memoir titled The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World , former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan writes, “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows–the Iraq war is largely about oil.” That isn’t exactly hot-off-the-presses news, though. Even the most cursory look at the paper trail of the infamous neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century clearly reveals that the Iraq invasion’s purpose was to establish a military base of operations in the center of the Middle East from which America could control the region’s oil flow–and ultimately the global energy industry–for virtual perpetuity. That things didn’t quite go as planned gave our old Cold War nemeses, Russia and China, the table stake they needed get back in the power politics game. By now, Russia and China have taken on junior partners like Iran and Venezuela to form an ad hoc “axis of energy,” one that can present serious competition to the U.S. for the role of world power broker. And make no mistake–the coin of political power in the post-modern world is the kind of power that lights and heats homes and runs industry and moves things from place to place.
Thus it is that Iran’s fledgling nuclear industry presents such a threat to American hegemony. The possibility that they might produce a fistful of atom bombs is little more than a mosquito bite in the grand scheme of strategic irritants. Pakistan already has nukes. Its government is as precarious as any in the region, and if there were ever a place where terrorists could go to beg, borrow or steal nukes for themselves, Pakistan would be it.
No, the thing about Iran’s nuclear program that keeps Dick Cheney and his big oil pals awake at night is the specter that it could evolve into a world-class nuclear energy industry. That would put its senior partners Russia and China in the catbird’s seat for dictating when and how the world transitions from a petroleum-centric energy market to a nuclear/alternative fuel market.
Without control of the energy game, America’s bag of national power tricks is pretty much empty. Our military, at least the way we now equip and utilize it, has the effectiveness of a scattergun; if it hits the target we had in mind, it’s pretty much by accident.
Cold War II
In 2006, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that America is engaged in World War III. It’s more accurate to say, though, that we’ve embarked upon a second Cold War with Russia and China. The threat from radical Islam is genuine enough, but our so-called Global War on Terror mainly provides a geographic venue for proxy struggles, and the portrayal of jihadi terrorists as the number one threat to America is mostly Islamo-fabulism.
It appears, unfortunately, that our adversaries learned more from the Cold War I than we did. We broke the Soviet Union’s bank by seducing it into an arms race it could not win. Now, neither Russia nor China has any interest in repeating that mistake. Sure, either or both of them will, from time to time, make a big show of selling weapons to a client state or of executing a “surge” in its own military budget, but that’s primarily to goad us into staying in an arms race with ourselves. (We spend more money on defense than the rest of the world combined, and the rest of the world has no interest in playing “catch up” with us.)
The other big lesson from Cold War I was to let the other guy commit his military to dirty little third world wars and to let the third worlders do your dirty work for you. Again, it’s a lesson the Russians and Chinese learned and we didn’t. Thus it is that the longer we stay encumbered in Iraq the more we play into the strategies of both the Islamo-fabulists and the neo-commies, and the further we fall into their trap, the longer it will take us to wiggle free from it. We may never escape at all.
That, my friends, is the “long war” the Pentagon is preparing for: A low-level struggle against countless amorphous foes over equally amorphous objectives for an amorphously defined duration during which America maintains a state of national emergency.
Talk about dystopia. Orwell and Huxley would be impressed.
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Related articles by Jeff Huber:
In an Arms Race with Ourselves
Wars and Empires
The Next World Order Series
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Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Read his commentaries at Pen and Sword, ePluribus and Military.com. Jeff’s novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books, ISBN: 9781601640192) will be available March 1, 2008.
It’s not Bush’s New World Order it’s the Illuminati’s New World Order.
Ah, and you missed one of the pivotal points, 1993 and NAFTA, the start of exporting all of American industry.
We are a superpower? Techno-military wise maybe but we no longer lead in any other area of human endeavor.
“We are a superpower? Techno-military wise maybe but we no longer lead in any other area of human endeavor.”
Precisely. And the techno-military game is over, which leaves us sans a paddle.
…the US may not have the engineering workforce and scientific know-how to maintain a techno-military edge over Russia and China. We can thank the rise of religious fundamentalism and decreasing separation of church and state for that.
The other extremely wise lesson that Russia and China appear to have learned is that of asymmetric warfare. They both seem to have realized that the highest returns for their defense spending will be realized in the field of missile technology.
Recent examples of this are Russia’s fearsome anti-ship missiles and China’s demonstration of its ground-based anti-satellite capability. At this moment I bet both nations are hard at work perfecting an anti-aircraft missile truly capable of threatening all the high-performance aircraft in our inventory. Something that will be as fierce as the SA-6 was during the Vietnam era.
Makes sense to me. It’s been clear from the start that Cheney had his eyes on China, which is one reason why he pooh-poohed the Al Qaida threat. Naturally, the faux real-politik that makes military control of the Middle East the key to everything came out of the right-thinking establishment, who didn’t learn history or economics. Given what’s happened, it’s probably best for us and the rest of the world if the United States lose Cold War II — as long as it stays cold. We’ve worn out are welcome for having crapped on the world’s doorstep.
And if we don’t lose, here is the likely outcome, more of the same death and destruction. I had no idea about this number of deaths, let alone the casualities in Iraq. Just received:
Dear Supporter of a Just Foreign Policy,
Last week, the scale of the tragic Iraqi death toll was confirmed by the prestigious British polling firm Opinion Research Business, ORB. In August, ORB conducted a poll of Iraqis. Their results indicated that 1.2 million Iraqis had died as a result of the conflict. Like our conclusion last month that over a million Iraqis had been killed, their results were largely ignored in the U.S., with the notable exception of an article in the Los Angeles Times.
Yesterday, we issued a press release to underscore the striking agreement between the two independent studies. Not surprisingly, we received little positive response. But we were particularly shocked by the reaction of an editor at a major U.S. daily: the Cleveland Plain Dealer. We want to ask you to help us respond.
ORB is not left-wing or anti-war. Their clients include the Bank of Scotland, the Conservative Party (which supports the war in Iraq), and Morgan Stanley. Their chairman has worked with Margaret Thatcher, Boris Yeltsin, and Ronald Reagan. But here is how the Plain Dealer’s Deputy Editorial Director Kevin O’Brien responded to our release:
So one group with an ax to grind comes out with an estimate, based on an extrapolation favorable to its political position. Then another group with the very same ax to grind comes out with an estimate, also based on an extrapolation favorable to its political position. And, lo and behold, both of those politically interested groups estimate the same thing. And then they call that happy little coincidence “confirmation.”
Please remove me from your mailing list and spare me your transparent propaganda.
After we pointed out ORB’s credentials, he replied, Even assuming the best of credentials and the most scientific of intentions, the fact remains that nothing your advocacy group or their polling firm is doing or has done can confirm any death toll. Estimation is not confirmation. Extrapolation is not confirmation.
Thus, O’Brien dismisses even the possibility of discovering the human cost of this war, a war he has made clear in his columns that he supports. We need to challenge this contemptuous rejection of bad news about the war.
Can you write to O’Brien, the Reader Representative and the Editorial Director at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and ask them to let their readers know about these two studies on Iraqi deaths?
http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq/dealplainly.html
lt should be noted that in spite of the aggressive, positive spin put on Betraeus’ testimony…not under oath btw…by the msm and pundits far and wide, the public has not been swayed:
The brave new world/next world order looks a lot the the same dismal state of affairs we’re already mired in.
lTMF’sA
It’s about time Americans caught on. It’s only been almost five years now.
Hit the nail on tha head. Also note that it could also then afford to turn off tha spigot.
“No, the thing about Iran’s nuclear program that keeps Dick Cheney and his big oil pals awake at night is the specter that it could evolve into a world-class nuclear energy industry. That would put its senior partners Russia and China in the catbird’s seat for dictating when and how the world transitions from a petroleum-centric energy market to a nuclear/alternative fuel market. “