In a comment on Booman’s recent post regarding Iraq’s apparent success in rebuilding its oil industry after the U.S. lay waste to the entire society (Casual Observation), boran 2 asked the magic question:
So is this finally mission accomplished?
I started a reply and it grew.
Read on if you are interested.
This type of mission is never accomplished, boran2. It’s not really about “oil,” it’s about power and domination. Oil is just a tool in that quest. There were massive wars of domination before oil and there will be massive wars of domination after oil. The only way to stop such actions as far as a power like the U.S. is concerned is to become independent of all foreign entanglements.
Throughout most of the history of the world such a position was impossible for any country because rivals could surround a nation and power was pretty well geographically controlled…hostile armies within striking distance were a real threat to any country, so empires arose with the express purpose of defending the home country from attack by the creation of buffer states. Then the luxury of power became addictive and those empires expanded until they became too big to sustain in terms of logistics and manpower and they fell to newer powers. That is no longer the case in the modern world. Empires are still a threat to smaller, relatively weak countries but superpowers like the U.S., Russia and China have such long-strike and intelligence gathering capabilities that they are virtually impregnable to real, physical invasion. A nation as gifted as the United States…gifted in terms of national resources and also gifted with a broadly varied population and thus a workforce that could (if educated and employed intelligently) accomplish almost any goal set before it…could change that paradigm.
But it hasn’t.
Not yet it hasn’t, anyway. Instead of doing that it has continued to clomp, clomp, clomp along in the great game of empire that has existed since history began. A signal facet of that great game is the fact that every empire eventually falls of its own greed-created karma. Every one. We could be the first one to voluntarily pull back from that game. People here mock me because I support the Paulist movement, but they are the only people of national stature who are advocating such a position. Are some of their other ideas at the very least risky? Yes, I believe that they might be, but this one overriding idea makes the other risks acceptable.
Ron Paul:
Q-When would you bring the troops home?
A-As soon as the ships could get there.
A truly revolutionary idea in the history of empire. Massive changes on every level of the system would be the inevitable result of such an action. Could many of “the troops” then be dismissed? No. Unemployment figures would go through the roof. The economy would collapse due to that unemployment plus the hit that the segment of the corporate sector serving the military would take. There would have to be other uses found for that manpower and knowhow.
What uses?
Let me see…
How about securing the borders from drug smuggling and repairing the rapidly collapsing physical infrastructure?
How about making FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency) actually functional instead of the disaster that it proved itself to be in the Katrina emergency?
How about staffing the Department of Homeland Security with well trained operatives instead of the minimum wage monkeys that work for it now?
How about a “Peace Corps” kind of movement that treats our own areas that have third world kinds of problems? Appalachia, the inner cities, etc.
How about supporting the educational system with people who have been well trained to do highly technical operations?
How about building a rail system that would seriously lessen the nation’s dependence of foreign oil?
I mean…it’s not as if the country doesn’t have serious needs that an already highly trained workforce could be used to solve.
But NOOOOOoooo…it’s lockstep responses to every event that threatens the empire’s militarily enforced global trade/oil hegemony.
Iraq
Afghanistan
Pakistan
Iran
Syria
North Korea
The Ukraine
Militant Muslim movements all over the globe.
And the hits just keep on coming.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED”, he said.
Eleven years ago.
I call bullshit!!!
It is never accomplished as far as empire is concerned.
Never.
Solution?
Stop being an empire.
Duh.
Rand Paul for president on that one idea alone.
The rest of what the Pauls say?
Trial by democracy.
By democracy!!!
As Ron Paul once answered to a question regarding whether relatively unregulated capitalism would work: “I don’t know. It’s never been tried.”
Neither has relatively uncontrolled democracy been tried.
Not really.
What we have now is a sham of democracy, a fix game run by big money for its own profit and nothing more.
Let’s see.
I dare ya.
Let’s see what happens.
Could it be much worse than what is happening now?
I think not.
Let us pray.
And then go out and try something entirely new.
Later…
AG
