Empire Of Absurdity: Recycled Neocons, Recycled Enemies | Zero Hedge

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-19/empire-absurdity-recycled-neocons-recycled-enemies

Authored by Major Danny Sjursen (ret.) via AntiWar.com,

There are times when I wish that the United States would just drop the charade and declare itself a global empire.

As a veteran of two imperial wars, a witness to the dark underside of America’s empire-denial, I’ve grown tired of the equivocation and denials from senior policymakers. The U.S. can’t be an empire, we’re told, because – unlike the Brits and Romans – America doesn’t annex territories outright, and our school children don’t color its colonies in red-white-and-blue on cute educational maps.

But this distinction, at root, is rather superficial. Conquest, colonization, and annexation are so 19th century – Washington has moved beyond the overt and engages in the (not-so) subtle modern form of imperialism. America’s empire over the last two decades – under Democrats and Republicans – has used a range of tools: economic, military, political, to topple regimes, instigate coups, and starve "enemy" civilians. Heck, it didn’t even start with 9/11 – bullying foreigners and overturning uncooperative regimes is as American as apple pie.

Still, observing post-9/11, post-Iraq/Afghanistan defeat, Washington play imperialism these days is tragicomically absurd. The emperor has no clothes, folks. Sure, America (for a few more fleeting years) boasts the world’s dominant economy, sure its dotted the globe with a few hundred military bases, and sure it’s military still outspends the next seven competitors combined. Nonetheless, what’s remarkable, what constitutes the real story of 2019, is this: the US empire can’t seem to accomplish anything anymore, can’t seem to bend anybody to its will. It’s almost sad to watch. America, the big-hulking has-been on the block, still struts its stuff, but most of the world simply ignores it.

Make no mistake, Washington isn’t done trying; it’s happy to keep throwing good money (and blood) at bad: to the tune of a cool $6 trillion, 7,000 troop deaths, and 500,000 foreign deaths – including maybe 240,000 civilians. But what’s it all been for? The world is no safer, global terror attacks have only increased, and Uncle Sam just can’t seem to achieve any of its preferred policy goals.

Think on it for a second: Russia and Iran "won" in Syria; the Taliban and Pakistan are about ready to "win" in Afghanistan; Iran is more influential than ever in Iraq; the Houthis won’t quit in Yemen; Moscow is keeping Crimea; Libya remains unstable; North Korea ain’t giving up its nukes; and China’s power continues to grow in its version of the Caribbean – the South China Sea. No amount of American cash, no volume of our soldiers’ blood, no escalation in drone strikes or the conventional bombing of brown folks, has favorably changed the calculus in any of these regional conflicts.

What does this tell us? Quite a lot, I’d argue – but not what the neoliberal/neoconservative alliance of pundits and policymakers are selling. See for these unrepentant militarists the problem is always the same: Washington didn’t use enough force, didn’t spend enough blood and treasure. So is the solution: more defense spending, more CIA operations, more saber-rattling, and more global military interventions.

No, the inconvenient truth is as simple as it is disturbing to red-blooded patriots. To wit, the United States – or any wannabe hegemon – simply doesn’t possess the capability to shape the world in its own image. See those pesky locals – Arabs, Asians, Muslims, Slavs – don’t know what’s good for them, don’t understand that (obviously) there is a secret American zipped inside each of their very bodies, ready to burst out if given a little push!

It turns out that low-tech, cheap insurgent tactics, when combined with impassioned nationalism, can bog down the "world’s best military" indefinitely. It seems, too, that other regional heavyweights – Russia, China, Iran, North Korea – stand ready to call America’s nuclear bluff. That they know the US all-volunteer military and consumerist economy can’t ultimately absorb the potential losses a conventional war would demand. Even scarier for the military-industrial-congressional-media establishment is the logical extension of all this accumulated failure: the questionable efficacy of military force in the 21st century.

Rather than recognize the limits of American military, economic, and political power, Bush II, Obama, and now Trump, have simply dusted off the old playbook. It’s reached the level of absurdity under the unhinged regime of Mr. Trump. Proverbially blasting Springsteen’s "Glory Days," as its foreign policy soundtrack, the Donald and company have doubled down. Heck, if Washington can’t get its way in Africa, Europe, Asia, or the Mideast, well why not clamp down in our own hemisphere, our traditional sphere of influence – South and Central America.

Enter the lunacy of the current Venezuela controversy. Trump’s team saw a golden opportunity in this socialist, backwater petrostate. Surely here, in nearby Monroe Doctrine country, Uncle Sam could get his way, topple the Maduro regime, and coronate the insurgent (though questionably legitimate) Juan Guaido. It’s early 20th century Yankee imperialism reborn. Everything seemed perfect. Trump could recall the specter of America’s tried and true enemy – "evil" socialism – cynically (and absurdly) equating Venezuelan populism with some absurd Cold-War-era existential threat to the nation. The idea that Venezuela presents a challenge on the scale of Soviet Russia is actually farcical. What’s more, and this is my favorite bit of irrationality, we were all recently treated to a game of "I know you are but what am I?" from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who (with a straight face) claimed Cuba, tiny island Cuba, was the real "imperialist" in Venezuela.

Next, in a move reminiscent of some sort of macabre 1980’s theme party, Trump resuscitated Elliot Abrams – you know, the convicted felon of Iran-Contra infamy, to serve as Washington’s special envoy to embattled Venezuela. Who better to act as "fair arbiter" in that country than a war-criminal with the blood of a few hundred thousand Central Americans (remember the Contras?!?) on his hands back in the the good old (Reagan) days.

Despite all this: America’s military threats, bellicose speechifying, brutal sanctions, and Cold War-style conflict-framing, the incumbent Maduro seems firmly in control. This isn’t to say that Venezuelans don’t have genuine grievances with the Maduro government (they do), but for now at least, it appears the military is staying loyal to the president, Russia/China are filling in the humanitarian aid gaps, and Uncle Sam is about to chalk up another loss on the world scene. Ultimately, whatever the outcome, the crisis will only end with a Venezuelan solution.

America’s impotence would almost be sad to watch, if, and only if, it wasn’t all so tragic for the Venezuelan people.

So Trump and his recycled neocons will continue to rant and rave and threaten Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba, and so on and so forth. America will still flex its aging, sagging muscles – a reflexive habit at this point.

Only now it’ll seem sad. Because no one is paying attention anymore.

The opposite of love is isn’t hate – it’s indifference.

* * *

Danny Sjursen is a retired US Army officer and regular contributor to Antiwar.comHe served combat tours with reconnaissance units in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at his alma mater, West Point. He is the author of a memoir and critical analysis of the Iraq War, Ghostriders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge. Follow him on Twitter at @SkepticalVet.

Comments

48 minutes ago

Even the Evangelicals are learning that Trump Admin is Zionist and they are working for Israel’s benefits. And Zionism in American Christians “Evangelicals” is the highest level!

"Is Israel Planning to Seize the Middle East?”: https://youtu.be/qdX6KQb45yo

"Jerusalem, the Eternal City: Is Scripture being Twisted to Say that the City is Eternal?”: https://youtu.be/LwcHMJGf65I

57 minutes ago

The ex-major under-estimates those sections of US society which benefit from every war, regardless of the outcome on the battlefields.

Think military industrial complex, oil companies, bankers, media goliaths for starters.

Peace is anathema to the benefactors of a war economy and their tentacles have captured the culture.

29 minutes ago

The Major knows who benefits from war, he is no fool.
59 minutes ago
(Edited)

and when the trillions of dollars which America has secretly paid in hush money - in this case, to call off the dogs of domestic terrorism that could easily destroy America's power grid - become worthless? The Iranian mullahs are smiling now. If they stop smiling at the same time that the dollar tanks, stock up on Matzo balls, if you don't have any yet.
1 hour ago

Trump had me at Syria and he’s losing me with Venezuela....... I can’t be the only one.

If Barack Obama and Micheal adopted a boy it’s possible that boy would look a lot like Juan Guaido!
1 hour ago

You can't bully nations into adopting your ways. We were far more influential when we led by example.
1 hour ago

Who are the neoconservatives?

Third, unlike evangelical Christians who openly proclaim their unifying religious principles, neoconservatives do not display their Judaism. Whether they’d been Marxists or not, they appear mostly non-religious. It is well-know that their major influence is the philosophy of Leo Stauss, so much so that they are sometimes referred to as “the straussians”; Norman Podhoretz and his son John, Irving Kristol and his son William, Donald Kagan and his son Robert, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky, to name just a few, all expressed their debt to Strauss. Leo Strauss, born to a family of German Orthodox Jews, was both pupil and collaborator of political theorist Carl Schmitt, himself a specialist of Thomas Hobbes and advocate of a “political theology” by which the State must appropriate the attributes of God. Schmitt was an admirer of Mussolini, and the legal counsel of the Third Reich. After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, it was Schmitt who provided the legal framework that justified the suspension of citizen rights and the establishment of the dictatorship. It was also Schmitt, in 1934, who personally obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation a grant for Leo Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in London and Paris, and then finally end up teaching in Chicago.

The thinking of Leo Strauss is difficult to capture, and certainly beyond the purview of this work. Moreover, Strauss is often elliptic because he believes that Truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds. For this reason, Strauss rarely speaks in his own name, but rather expressed himself as a commentator on classical authors, in whom he discovers many of his own thoughts. Moreover, much like his disciples Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1988) and Samuel Huntington, he is careful to clothe his most radical ideas in ostensibly humanist principles. Despite the apparent difficulty, three basic ideas can easily be extracted from his political philosophy, no different from Schmitt. First, nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for government and governance. Second, national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions that the State has a duty to disseminate. Third, to be effective, any national myth must be based on a clear distinction between good and evil; it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation. As recognized by Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt in an article “Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence” (1999), for Strauss, “deception is the norm in political life” – the rule they applied to fabricating the lie of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein when working inside the Office of Special Plans.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article178638.html

1 hour ago

The (((Office of Special Plans))) Lie Factory

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/01/lie-factory/
1 hour ago

SYRIA PULLOUT: Neocons, Cent-com and the Greater IsraelProject

Cent-Com, Neo-Cons, And The Syrian Permutation

http://themillenniumreport.com/2019/01/syria-pullout-neocons-cent-com-and-the-greater-israel-project/
1 hour ago

GREATER ISRAEL: THE ODED YINON PLAN

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_2049
1 hour ago

http://www.unz.com/kbarrett/ilhan-omars-tropes-are-true/

https://www.takimag.com/article/truth-or-trope/

http://www.unz.com/kbarrett/sorry-ilhan-jews-have-hypnotized-the-world/

AIPAC Is Coming to Town - Again! And the Israelis are having an election

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/aipac-is-coming-to-town-again/
1 hour ago

Jack is one of the truth tellers on this forum, along with brazen heist, ***** pleaze, bee master, omega man and The manj,

there are a few more who can see beyond the matrix, the rest are caught up in tribal/left right/libconsrv/ swirling vortex of Neocon Necromancy.
56 minutes ago
(Edited)

I agree with you about Jack, ***** please, bee master, dog fish… :)
1 hour ago

Neocons are fair game, like deer and elk.
49 minutes ago

And rats.

2 hours ago

Bringing traitors to justice would be a fine ending for this empire.
1 hour ago

Or a fine beginning.
2 hours ago

well said
2 hours ago

The solutions are not all as black and white and easy to solve as this guy says. But I have to admit that the old ways don't work like they used to. I am disappointed but not surprised that Trump seems captured by the neo-con foreign policy. That is not going to be his natural innovative strong point. Still rather him than the alternatives on the left. He's better on domestic.

The war people are deeply, deeply rooted. Tons of facts show that JFK had enormous difficulties with "his own people." They did an end run around him to pull the plug on Diem. No doubt this kind of thing has happened with prezzes since. The State / Defense / CIA administrative state and the defense industry are embedded in the governmental machinery. You know, we have no idea of what the president's "advisers" are telling him. In Trumpworld he's used to being able to execute his policies easily. In FuckedupGovtWorld it doesn't work that way, for better or for worse.
2 hours ago

Antiwar? **** you and your antiwar site!

If we don't send our dogs out to fight for bones in a ZERO sum game -- guess what --- you and your cushy ******* life goes full Somalia.... because the Russians and the Chinese and everyone else will rush in the rip hunks of meat off ...

While we sit watching and singing Koombaya and Imagine.... then they will come and rip hunks of meat off of each of us....

I know in advance that you are going to downvote me because you are a combination of retarded and stupid.

And none of this will register on your feeble mind:

Wisdom - The Way The World Works

The luckiest, fittest, smartest, with the capability for ruthlessness survive – always have – always will

Resources are finite and therefore ownership is a zero sum game

The strong always take from the weak – if they do not then that is a sign of weakness and a competitor will take from the weak and will usurp the formerly strong dropping them into weakling status

Humans tend to group by clan or on a broader basis by nationality (strength in numbers bonded by culture) and they compete with others for resources

Competition always exists (I want it all!) but it becomes fiercer when resources are not sufficient to support competing clans or nations

Tribal societies understand these dynamics because they cannot go to the grocery store for their food – so they are intimately aware of the daily battle to feed themselves and the competition for scare land and resources

Modern affluent societies do not recognize this dynamic because for them resources are not scarce – they have more than enough.

One of the main reasons that resources are not scarce in affluent societies is because they won the battle of the fittest (I would argue that luck is the precursor to all other advantages – affluent societies did not get that way because they started out smarter --- rather they were lucky – and they parlayed that luck into advances in technology… including better war machines)

As we have observed throughout history the strong always trample the weak. Always. History has always been a battle to take more in the zero sum game. The goal is to take all if possible (if you end up in the gutter eating grass the response has been – better you than me – because I know you’d do the same to me)

And history demonstrates that the weak – given the opportunity – would turn the tables on the strong in a heartbeat. If they could they would beat the strong into submission and leave them bleeding in the streets and starving. As we see empire after empire after empire gets overthrown and a new power takes over. Was the US happy to share with Russia and vice versa? What about France and England? Nope. They wanted it all.

Many of us (including me) in the cushy western world appear not to understand what a villager in Somalia does – that our cushy lives are only possible because our leaders have recognized that the world is not a fair place --- Koobaya Syndrome has no place in this world --- Koombaya will get you a bullet in the back --- or a one way trip to the slum.

Religious movements have attempted to change the course of human nature --- telling us to share and get along --- they have failed 100% - as expected. By rights we should be living in communes --- Jesus was a communist was he not? We all know that this would never work. Because we want more. We want it all.

But in spite of our hypocrisy, we still have this mythical belief that mankind is capable of good – that we make mistakes along the way (a few genocides here, a few there... in order to steal the resources of an entire content so we can live the lives we live) --- ultimately we believe we are flawed but decent. We are not. Absolutely not.

But our leaders --- who see through this matrix of ******** --- realize that our cushy lives are based on us getting as much of the zero sum game as possible. That if they gave in to this wishy washy Koombaya BS we would all be living like Somalians.

Of course they cannot tell us what I am explaining here --- that we must act ruthlessly because if we don’t someone else will --- and that will be the end of our cushy lives. Because we are ‘moral’ --- we believe we are decent – that if we could all get along and share and sing Koombaya the world would be wonderful. We do not accept their evil premises.

So they must lie to us. They must use propaganda to get us onside when they commit their acts of ruthlessness.

They cannot say: we are going to invade Iraq to ensure their oil is available so as to keep BAU operating (BAU which is our platform for global domination). The masses would rise against that making things difficult for the PTB who are only trying their best to ensure the hypocrites have their cushy lives and 3 buck gas (and of course so that the PTB continue to be able to afford their caviar and champagne) …. Because they know if the hypocrites had to pay more or took at lifestyle hit – they’d be seriously pissed off (and nobody wants to be a Somalian)

Which raises the question --- are we fools for attacking the PTB when they attempt to throw out Putin and put in a stooge who will be willing to screw the Russian people so that we can continue to live large? When we know full well that Putin would do the same to us --- and if not him someone more ruthless would come along and we’d be Somalians.

Should we be protesting and making it more difficult for our leaders to make sure we get to continue to lead our cushy lives? Or should we be following the example of the Spartans https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZeYVIWz99I

In a nutshell are our interests as part of the western culture not completely in line with those of our leaders – i.e. if they fail we fail – if they succeed we succeed.

Lee Kuan Yew is famous for saying ‘yes I will eat very well but if I do so will you’ Why bite the hand that whips the weak to make sure you eat well.... If you bite it too hard it cannot whip the weak --- making you the weak --- meaning you get to feel the whip….

Nation… clan … individual…. The zero sum game plays out amongst nations first … but as resources become more scarce the battle comes closer to home with clans battling for what remains…. Eventually it is brother against brother ….

As the PTB run out of outsiders to whip and rob…. They turn on their own…. As we are seeing they have no problem with destroying the middle class because it means more for them… and when the weak rise against them they have no problem at all deploying the violent tactics that they have used against the weak across the world who have attempted to resist them

Eventually of course they will turn against each other…. Henry Kissinger and Maddy Albright bashing each other over the head with hammers fighting over a can of spam – how precious!