A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana

[laststeamtrain]

A Really Bad Couple of Weeks for Pax Americana

Analysis by Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Aug 23 (IPS) - Whatever hopes the George W. Bush administration may have had for using its post-9/11 "war on terror'' to impose a new Pax Americana on Eurasia, and particularly in the unruly areas between the Caucasus and the Khyber Pass, appear to have gone up in flames -- in some cases, literally -- over the past two weeks.
Not only has Russia reasserted its influence in the most emphatic way possible by invading and occupying substantial parts of Georgia after Washington's favourite Caucasian, President Mikhail Saakashvili, launched an ill-fated offensive against secessionist South Ossetians.

But bloody attacks in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, about 1,000 kms to the east also underlined the seriousness of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban insurgencies in both countries and the threats they pose to their increasingly beleaguered and befuddled U.S.-backed governments.

And while U.S. negotiators appear to have made progress in hammering out details of a bilateral military agreement that will permit U.S. combat forces to remain in Iraq at least for another year and a half, signs that the Shi'a-dominated government of President Nouri al-Maliki may be preparing to move forcefully against the U.S.-backed, predominantly Sunni ''Awakening'' movement has raised the spectre of renewed sectarian civil war.

Meanwhile, any hope of concluding a framework for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority by the time Bush leaves office less than five months from now appears to have vanished, while efforts at mobilising greater international diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran to freeze its uranium enrichment programme -- the administration's top priority before the Georgia crisis -- have stalled indefinitely, overwhelmed by the tidal wave of bad news from its neighbourhood.

''The list of foreign policy failures this week is breathtaking,'' noted a statement released Friday by the National Security Network (NSN), a mainstream group of former high-ranking officials critical of the Bush administration's more-aggressive policies. And a prominent New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, argued that the Russian move on Georgia, in particular, signaled ''the end of the Pax Americana -- the era in which the United States more or less maintained a monopoly on the use of military force.''

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http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=43647

[leveymg]

1. Soviet Union, b. 1917, d. 1991; Pax Americana, b. 1917, d. 2008.

RIP Global Empires

[bemildred]

2. Word.

The 20th century was not good for empires, and the 21st looks even worse.

[Demeter]

3. More Like a POX Americana (wholly owned subsidiary of BushCo)

[fencesitter]

4. time to increase the military budget...

stoke our war economy.