Do we wonder why we are always trying to be the big dogs on the planet?

American Hegemony Is Not Guaranteed
by Paul Craig RobertsExactly as the British press predicted, last week's congressional testimony by Gen. David Petraeus and Green Zone administrator Ryan Crocker set the propaganda stage for a Bush regime attack on Iran. On April 10 Robert H. Reid of AP News reported: "The top U.S. commander has shifted the focus from al-Qaeda to Iranian-backed 'special groups' as the main threat. … The shift was articulated by Gen. Petraeus who told Congress that 'unchecked, the special groups pose the greatest long-term threat to the viability of a democratic Iraq.'"
According to the neocon propaganda, the "special groups" (have you ever heard of them before?) are breakaway elements of Sadr's militia.
Nonsensical on its face, the Petraeus/Crocker testimony is just another mask in the macabre theater of lies that the Bush regime has told in order to justify its wars of naked aggression against Muslims.
Fact #1: Sadr is not allied with Iran. He speaks with an Iraqi voice and has his militia under orders to stand down from conflict. The Badr militia is the Shi'ite militia that is allied with Iran. Why did the U.S. and its Iraqi puppet Maliki attack Sadr's militia and not the Badr militia or the breakaway elements of Sadr's militia that allegedly now operate as gangs?
Fact #2: The Shi'ite militias and the Sunni insurgents are armed with weapons available from the unsecured weapon stockpiles of Saddam Hussein's army. If Iran were arming Iraqis, the Iraqi insurgents and militias would have armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades and surface-to-air missiles. These two weapons would neutralize the U.S. advantage by enabling Iraqis to destroy U.S. helicopter gunships, aircraft, and tanks. The Iraqis cannot mass their forces as they have no weapons against U.S. air power. To destroy U.S. tanks, Iraqis have to guess the roads U.S. vehicles will travel and bury bombs constructed from artillery shells. The inability to directly attack armor and to defend against air attack denies offensive capability to Iraqis.
If the Iranians desired to arm Iraqis, they obviously would provide these two weapons that would change the course of the war.
Just as the Bush regime lied to Americans and the UN about why Iraq was attacked, hiding the real agenda behind false claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to al-Qaeda, the Bush regime is now lying about why it needs to attack Iran. Could anyone possibly believe that Iran is so desirous of having its beautiful country bombed and its nuclear energy program destroyed that Iran would invite an attack by fighting a "proxy war" against the U.S. in Iraq?
That the Bush regime would tell such a blatant lie shows that the regime has no respect for the intelligence of the American public and no respect for the integrity of the U.S. media.
And why should it? The public and media have fallen for every lie the Bush regime has told.
The moral hypocrisy of U.S. politicians is unrivaled. McCain says that if he were president he would not attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics because China has killed and injured 100 Tibetans who protested Tibet's occupation by China. Meanwhile the Iraqi toll of the American occupation is one million dead and four million displaced. That comes to 20 percent of the Iraqi population. At what point does the U.S. occupation of Iraq graduate from a war crime to genocide?
Not to be outdone by McCain's hypocrisy, Bush declared: "The message to the Iranians is: we will bring you to justice if you continue to try to infiltrate, send your agents or send surrogates to bring harm to our troops and/or the Iraqi citizens."
Consider our "Christian" president's position: It is perfectly appropriate for the U.S. to bomb and to invade countries and to send its agents and surrogates to harm Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Serbians, and whomever, but resistance to American aggression is the mark of terrorism, and any country that aids America's victims is at war with America.
The three-week "cakewalk" war that would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues is now into its sixth year. According to Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz, the cost of the war to Americans is between three and five trillion dollars. Five trillion dollars equals the entire U.S. personal and corporate income tax revenues for two years.
Of what benefit is this enormous expenditure to America? The price of oil and gasoline in U.S. dollars has tripled, the price of gold has quadrupled, and the dollar has declined sharply against other currencies. The national debt has rapidly mounted. America's reputation is in tatters.
The Bush regime's coming attack on Iran will widen the war dramatically and escalate the costs.
Not content with war with Iran, Republican presidential candidate John McCain in a speech written for him by neocon warmonger Robert Kagan promises to confront both Russia and China.
Three questions present themselves:
(1) Will our foreign creditors – principally China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia – finance a third monstrous Bush regime war crime?
(2) Will Iran sit on its hands and wait on the American bombs to fall?
(3) Will Russia and China passively wait to be confronted by the warmonger McCain?
Should a country that is overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan be preparing to attack yet a third country, while threatening to interfere in the affairs of two large nuclear powers? What sort of political leadership seeks to initiate conflict in so many unpromising directions?
With Iran, Russia, China, and North Korea threatened by American hegemonic belligerence, it is not difficult to imagine a scenario that would terminate all pretense of American power: For example, instead of waiting to be attacked, Iran uses its Chinese and Russian anti-ship missiles, against which the U.S. reportedly has poor means of defense, and sinks every ship in the American carrier strike forces that have been foolishly massed in the Persian Gulf, simultaneously taking out the Saudi oil fields and the Green Zone in Baghdad, the headquarters of the U.S. occupation. Shi'ite militias break the U.S. supply lines from Kuwait, and Iranian troops destroy the dispersed U.S. forces in Iraq before they can be concentrated to battle strength.
Simultaneously, North Korea crosses the demilitarized zone and takes South Korea, China seizes Taiwan and dumps a trillion dollars of U.S. Treasury bonds on the market. Russia goes on full nuclear alert and cuts off all natural gas to Europe.
What would the Bush regime do? Wet its pants? Push the button and end the world?
If America really had dangerous enemies, surely the enemies would collude to take advantage of a dramatically overextended delusional regime that, blinded by its own arrogance and hubris, issues gratuitous threats and lives by Mao's doctrine that power comes out of the barrel ofa gun.
There are other less dramatic scenarios. Why does the U.S. assume that only it can initiate aggression, boycotts, freezes on financial assets of other countries, and bans on foreign banks from participation in the international banking system? If the rest of the world were to tire of American aggression or to develop a moral conscience, it would be easy to organize a boycott of America and to ban U.S. banks from participating in the international banking system. Such a boycott would be especially effective at the present time with the balance sheets of U.S. banks impaired by subprime derivatives and the U.S. government dependent on foreign loans in order to finance its day-to-day activities.
Sooner or later it will occur to other countries that putting up with America is a habit that they don't need to continue.
Does America really need more political leadership that leads in such unpromising directions?

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"I suppose I always knew America would eventually break the planet, like some ghastly, hyperactive toddler that gets hold of a mobile phone and then smashes it repeatedly against the edge of a table". Quote from british journalist.

banana,banana,banana

DAMN! I honestly just read this entire thing and it makes so much damn sense, kinda smart but scary when the iraqis plan out where to lay their buried bombs!! Awesome, Awesome post Medicineman!!! Id write more but im just in awe lol

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My Outdoor Tips/Tricks Guide
http://www.rollitup.org/outdoor-grow...ps-tricks.html

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"I suppose I always knew America would eventually break the planet, like some ghastly, hyperactive toddler that gets hold of a mobile phone and then smashes it repeatedly against the edge of a table". Quote from british journalist.

Hell yea, no doubt about that...Truth can be a very scary thing

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My Outdoor Tips/Tricks Guide
http://www.rollitup.org/outdoor-grow...ps-tricks.html

Excellent article ... and very sobering.

Vi

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Damned right I'm an equal opportunity offender, I'm a Conservative!

Here's another one ... same author:



Hegemony Everywhere But At Home

By Paul Craig Roberts

What explains the fantastic amount of resources that Americans have thrown into combating a nonexistent Muslim threat to the United States, while acquiescing to decades-long encroachment by illegal aliens?

According to economic and budgetary experts, the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq will cost Americans in excess of $3 trillion. And that might only be the beginning. Currently, the US military is violating Pakistan’s sovereignty by conducting military strikes within Pakistan’s borders, and the political regime in Washington, pushed by its Israeli overlord, has been preparing the American people for an attack on Iran.

Meanwhile, Southern California has been lost to Mexico, and Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico are not far behind. Indeed, there are now large Mexican communities almost everywhere in the United States.

How in the face of the facts did the American political mind get focused on a fabricated threat half a world away while being blinded to the cultural loss of vast chunks of US territory? Is the "war on terror" a distraction from the silent invasion that is transforming the US?

In Los Angeles County, 5.1 million people speak English; 3.9 million speak Spanish. Forty percent of all workers in Los Angeles County are illegals working for cash. Two-thirds of births in Los Angeles County are to illegal Mexicans.

Some people accept what they regard as the inevitable return of the southwest to the peoples from whom white immigrants stole it. But what this argument leaves unexplained is why the US government is so much more determined to impose its hegemony abroad than within its own borders?

In the United States, internal security is focused entirely on the airports. It is American citizens who are accosted, strip-searched and abused. The airport security Gestapo are proud that there have been "only" 110,000 complaints from mistreated airline passengers.

Airport security claims to have "screened" two billion airline passengers, but the US government cannot keep one to two million illegals from crossing illegally into the US each year.

Neoconservative propagandists and their dupes exclaim: "We have to fight them over them before they come over here." But between the US and Muslim countries there are many national borders and wide oceans.

Moreover, no Muslim organizations exist that lay claim to territory within the 50 US states.

There are organizations of Mexicans that claim the US southwest. Shall we invade Mexico to keep them from coming here?

The mindlessness of those who say "we have to fight them over there" is apparent. The American invasion of Iraq has displaced millions of Iraqis, many of whom will find their way "over here." Without the invasion of Iraq, hardly any would have found their way "over here."

I sometimes wonder if Americans have enough sense to justify their continued existence as an independent country.

Americans have proven themselves to be incapable of dealing with any threat unless it can be hyped as a terrorist one.

If the loss during the Bush regime of three million US manufacturing jobs were attributed to terrorism, Americans would get riled up.

If the inability of American college graduates to find jobs in the technical and scientific areas in which they are educated was the consequence of a terrorist plot, outraged Americans would demand action.

If the erosion of US civil liberties were due to an Osama bin Laden plot, something would be done about it.

As it is, no real American problem can be faced, because the neoconservatives and the interest groups that they serve have Americans bamboozled about the "terrorist threat" from people in distant lands, who had rather fight one another, and who have no way of reaching Americans except through the troops that we place on their territory or as displaced persons on US immigrant visas.

While the Empire seeks hegemony over distant lands, it is losing its hegemony within its own borders. But before we get all worked up over it, does anyone think the Mexicans would produce worse political leadership than what we have now?

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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Damned right I'm an equal opportunity offender, I'm a Conservative!

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"I suppose I always knew America would eventually break the planet, like some ghastly, hyperactive toddler that gets hold of a mobile phone and then smashes it repeatedly against the edge of a table". Quote from british journalist.

Well, I must admit ... I've been a fan of Roberts for a long time. I've subscribed to this magazine for years:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/

Its one of my very favorite publications and I look forward to it each month. I never throw them away because the articles are so good they can be read over and over for content and research. Paul Craig Roberts is one of the regular contributors.

Check the magazine out, Med. Even subscribe to it. If you read it on a regular basis, you and I will most likely move onto common political ground.

Vi

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Damned right I'm an equal opportunity offender, I'm a Conservative!

With all my charity work, I can hardly afford to subscribe to any more magazines. If I get any further into politics my head will probably explode, the seamaidens best hope. I actually do have a life outside RIU, and reading political garbage on a regular basis does not compute. In fact reading period tires my eyes with these no line bifocals. The next pair of glasses I get, On my medical plan, will be for computer and reading. then I may take up reading again. I love these no line bifocals but reading is a chore.

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"I suppose I always knew America would eventually break the planet, like some ghastly, hyperactive toddler that gets hold of a mobile phone and then smashes it repeatedly against the edge of a table". Quote from british journalist.