Tom Engelhardt: Why the troops are coming home

[unhappycamper]

Why the troops are coming home
By Tom Engelhardt
Sep 24, 2010

~snip~

In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll in which 61% of Americans interviewed considered "things in the nation" to be "on the wrong track," 66% did "not feel confident that life for our children's generation will be better than it has been for us." (Seven percent were "not sure" and only 27% "felt confident.") But here was the polling question you're least likely to see discussed in your local newspaper or by Washington-based pundits: "Do you think America is in a state of decline, or do you feel that this is not the case?" Sixty-five percent of respondents chose as their answer: "in a state of decline."

Meanwhile, Afghan war commander General David Petraeus was interviewed last week by Martha Raddatz of ABC News. Asked whether the American war in Afghanistan, almost a decade old, was finally on the right counter-insurgency track and could go on for another nine or 10 years, Petraeus agreed that we were just at the beginning of the process, that the "clock" was only now ticking, and that we needed "realistic expectations" about what could happen and how fast. "Progress" in Afghanistan, he commented, was often so slow that it could feel like "watching grass grow or paint dry."

Now, I'm not a betting man, but I'd head for Vegas tomorrow and put my money down against the general and on Americans generally when it comes to assessing the future. I'd put money on the fact that the United States is indeed "in a state of decline" and I'd make a wager at odds that US troops won't be in Afghanistan in nine or ten years. And I'd venture to suggest as well that the two bets would be intimately connected, and that the American people understand at a visceral level far more than Washington cares to know about our real situation in the world. And I'd put my money on one more thing: however lousy it may feel, it's not all bad news, not by a long shot.

~snip~

Here's a simple reality: the US is an imperial power in decline - and not just the sort of decline which is going to affect your children or grandchildren someday. We're talking about massive unemployment that's going nowhere and an economy which shows no sign of ever returning good jobs to this country on a significant scale, even if "good times" do come back sooner or later. We're talking about an aging, fraying infrastructure - with its collapsing bridges and exploding gas pipelines -that a little cosmetic surgery isn't going to help.

And whatever the underlying historical trends, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and company accelerated this process immeasurably. You can thank their two mad wars, their all-planet-all-the-time global "war on terror", their dumping of almost unlimited taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon and war planning for the distant future, and their scheme to privatize the military and mind-meld it with a small group of crony capitalist privateers, not to speak of ramping up an already impressively over-muscled national security state into a national state of fear, while leaving the financial community to turn the country into a giant, mortgaged Ponzi scheme.

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