How the most powerful nation disabled itself -- US: security’s bottom line

[FarCenter]

Just 15 numbers tell the history of the past seven years, in which a once wealthy and relatively secure nation near-bankrupted itself, pursued chimeras and funded chaos-causing wars that left it poorer and less safe then ever before.

By Tom Engelhardt, Le Monde diplomatique

Once upon a time, I studied the Chinese martial art of tai chi, until I realised I would never locate my “chi”. At that point I threw in the towel and took up western exercise. Still, the principle behind tai chi stayed with me, that you could multiply the force of an act by giving way before the force of others; that a smaller person could use the strength of a bigger one against him. Now, jump to 11 September 2001 and its aftermath, and you know the tai chi version of history from there. Think of it as a grim cosmic joke that the 9/11 attacks, as apocalyptic as they looked, were anything but. The true disasters followed and the wounds were largely self-inflicted, as the most militarily powerful nation on the planet used its own force to disable itself.

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When the history of this era is finally written, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so stupidly and profligately as to send the planet’s sole superpower into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favour of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist. In the meantime, consider the following list – 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the tai chi principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George Bush entered the Oval Office:

536,000,000,000: the number of dollars the Pentagon is requesting for the 2009 military budget.

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1,390,000: the number of subprime foreclosures over the next two years, as estimated by Credit Suisse analysts.

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1,000,000: the number of “missions” or “sorties” the US air force proudly claims to have flown in the Global War on Terror since 9/11, about 353,000 of them in what it still likes to call Operation Iraqi Freedom.

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509,000: the number of names found in 2007 on a “terrorist watch list” compiled by the FBI.

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300,000: the number of American troops who now suffer from major depression or post-traumatic stress, according to a recent RAND study.

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51,000: the number of post-surge Iraqi prisoners held in American and Iraqi jails at the end of 2007.

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5,700: the number of trailers in New Orleans, issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency as temporary housing after Hurricane Katrina, still occupied by people who lost their homes in the storm almost three years ago.

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658: the number of suicide bombings worldwide last year, including 542 in Afghanistan and Iraq, more than double the number in any of the past 25 years (3).

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511: the number of applicants convicted of felony crimes, including burglary, grand larceny, and aggravated assault, who were accepted into the US army in 2007, more than double the 249 accepted in 2006.

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132: the number of dollars it took to buy a barrel of crude oil on the international market towards the end of May

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82: the percentage of Americans who think “things in this country have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track”, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

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40: the percentage loss “on a trade-weighted basis” in the value of the dollar since 2001.

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37: the number of countries that have experienced protests or riots in recent months due to soaring food prices, a global crisis of insecurity that caught the Bush administration completely unprepared.

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0: the number of terrorist attacks by al-Qaida or similar groups inside the United States since 11 September 2001.

So consider the homeland secure. Mission accomplished.

One last figure, representative of the ultimate insecurity that, by conscious omission as well as commission, the Bush administration has left a harried future to deal with. That number is 387. Scientists at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii have just released new information on carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, in the atmosphere, and it’s at a record high of 387 parts per million, “up almost 40% since the industrial revolution and the highest for at least the last 650,000 years”. Its rate of increase is on the rise as well. Behind all these figures lurks a potential world of insecurity with which this country has not yet come to grips.

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The original article has much more information and should be read!

http://mondediplo.com/2008/06/06ussecurity