On Borrowed Time

James Wolcott (Vanity Fair writer) recently started a blog. It's a good (often very funny) read. Today's post isn't funny-


On Borrowed Time

Posted by James Wolcott

Yesterday the face of Colin Powell glared out from the front page of the Financial Times. He sounded ominous, too, announcing that with his electoral mandate, the Red King would not be trimming his sails or pulling back from his foreign policy. That he would continue to be "aggressive" in pursuing American interests.

Usually it's Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bolton or Rice or Wolfowitz who's sent out to look ominous and spew ash. Perhaps it was simply Powell's turn in the pitching rotation, or perhaps he is continuing his own policy of being a stand-up guy in public for the administration while pouring out his Qualms and Grave Reservations to Bob Woodward's tape recorder to give himself some wiggle room in the historical record.

Whatever the explanation, Powell's declaration of further independence was a double slap to European allies and others, his Expression of Steely Resolve being all the more dispiriting since Powell was the one power player they semi-respected for being on speaking terms with reality and willing to consult with others. Now he was politely slamming that door in their faces and telling them to get used to the new rugged reality.

The truth is that the US can no longer back up the big mouths of its leaders. If America chooses to go it alone in future conflicts, it'll be because it has no choice.

This is the argument made in Emmanuel Todd's After the Empire, one of the most important books of the last few years. Contrary to those Le Monde intellectuals who see the US as a super-superpower, a hyperpuissance, Todd, a French demographer and author of a book correctly foreseeing the fall of the Soviet Union, says the US has become a "big little bully" incapable of picking on anyone its own size. It makes a show of force attacking the weak--dirtpoor countries with no air defences, such as Iraq and Afghanistan--because a "show" is precisely what it is.

"These conflicts that represent little or no military risk allow the United States to be 'present' throughout the world. The United States works to maintain the illusory fiction of the world as a dangerous place in need of America's protection."

Problem is, the fiction is only fooling Americans. The rest of the world has wised up. Todd points out that Germany, Russia, France, and even Turkey declined to join our great adventure in Iraq, and guess what?--nothing happened! Apart from sappy boycotts and juvenile gestures ("freedom fries"), they went unpunished. "True power is economic power, and that is what America lacks today." (Because of our indebtedness and deficits--we're a superpower depending on the kindness of creditors.) Moreover, the smaller countries that did lend minor support in Iraq have nearly all withdrawn from the fray, or about to do so, having unheeded the warning Todd lays down in his concluding chapter:

"We should not follow America's military leaders for whom the term 'theater of operations' has ceased being a metaphor. Fighting alongside the Americans in Iraq would only amount to playing a small role in a bloody vaudeville show."

From his lips to Tony Blair's ears.

The US assault on Fallujah is a prime example of what Todd calls "theatrical micromilitarism." I mean, calling it "Operation Phantom Fury"--it's a sick joke. What's "phantom" about it? For months the US has been touting this incursion and publicly built up forces outside the city for weeks, giving the enemy plenty of time to rig explosives and/or skip town. Billing it as a "decisive battle"--another fraud. Guerrilla warfare operates on an entirely different set of rules; as has been oft pointed out, America won every major battle during Vietnam and still lost. What's unfolding is not a decisive moment but a ghastly production that trains hellfire on a symbolic target and "plays well" to American citizens as a flex of muscle, as witness the NY Post cover today of an American soldier with a cigarette dangling from his mouth with the headline "Marlboro Men Kick Butt." Civilian casualties, the destruction of homes and livelihoods, the absence of any significant capture of insurgent ringleaders, these are secondary to getting good action footage over which benedictions can be said.

Under a second Bush term, the neocons are more entrenched and missile-rattling than ever, eyeing Iran, Syria, even China. But the fist they shake at the world is a flabby one, as the world has somberly, resentfully come to recognize.

"As for George W. Bush and his neoconservative helpers, they will go down in history as the grave diggers of the American empire."

http://jameswolcott.com/