The late great American Empire

It’s going to get real ugly inside America as the whole economy and society become unglued after the military fails to seize much-needed foreign oil

by Kevin Potvin <kpotvin@republic-news.org>

Soon the American War will go internal. Already early signs have appeared: the blame for what went wrong in the latest, and perhaps the greatest, of that nation’s many military misadventures, currently playing out in Iraq, is starting to be passed around inside American society.

Up till now, blame floated around officialdom only. The White House blamed the myriad intelligence agencies for bad information about Iraq. Those agencies, most notably the CIA, have intimated it was pressure from the White House that twisted cautionary assertions into statements of fact about the threat of weapons of mass destruction. The Democrats in Congress blamed neocon infiltrators in the Republican Party for misleading the President into war in the Middle East. Republicans in Congress have blamed Democrats for letting down America’s guard in the 90s. And on and on that mostly irrelevant blame game has gone.

But lately, blame and its stickiness has spilled over into general American society. Conservative talk radio hosts point to the loss of resolve in the American public during the Vietnam debacle as the main reason for the collapse of the military effort there. It is said that the nation’s enemies suspect Americans don’t have the stomach for high rates of casualties in wars, and as a result, those enemies believe that by inflicting those high rates, Americans will pressure their leaders to withdraw the military. The conservative talk radio shows argue that the resolve of Americans themselves, even in the face of high casualties, is a crucial tactical element in the American military arsenal. They therefore make the case that anyone who advocates the abandoning of the military misadventure is aiding and abetting the enemy’s cause—is in fact the enemy himself. Thus has the war come home.

But of course, reality is neither as American officialdom of all stripes has it, nor the no less whacky world of American talk radio throughout its whole (admittedly narrow) spectrum. The cause of the looming catastrophe for American forces in Iraq is nothing as complicated as all that. It is simply a case of a powerful nation lunging for the resources of another, and failing to deploy the level of military prowess necessary to achieve it. America will lose the war for the very same and banal reason that all aggressors who lost their wars have: critical miscalculations were made in the planning stages. Usually with such monumental consequences as the fall of empires, one searches for causes equally grand. But a grand cause isn’t always necessary: a faulty rubber “O” ring the size of a golf ball crashed the whole Space Shuttle program. A simple mistake about how the Iraqi Republican Red Guard would react to an invasion is all it has taken to lead the bulk of US forces into a classic, but this time nation-wide, ambush.

There is no blame to pass around. The US economy, since the depletion of key domestic resources in the effort to win World War II, has depended upon an expensive and widely-dispersed military force to help US companies locate, secure, and ship back to American manufacturing plants the key resources of other nations. Oil is the primary key resource, and beginning in 1970, the US has depended more and more upon oil resources not located under American soil.

Highly industrialized European economies and rapidly industrializing Asian economies also depend on the same oil resources located in the same foreign countries, mostly those located around the Persian Gulf. Not all those economies are going to get all the oil their domestic industries require. Until recently, the US would have been able to win its oil based on being able to bid the highest. But the surprising and stellar rise of the Chinese and Indian economies has raised the spectre of America losing bidding wars for oil supply contracts. That would spell the shut-down of key US industries, making it even harder for the US to win future bidding wars for other oil supply contracts.

It was therefore inevitable that the US would deploy its strong military instead of its wobbly economic power to secure the much-needed, and increasingly contested, foreign oil. All the rest—the claims of wishing to end Saddam Hussein’s brutality to his own people and the wish to spread democracy in the Middle East, like the false threats of weapons of mass destruction and the misrepresentations of Iraq’s recent martial history—is all irrelevant clatter forming at most a footnote in the future histories to be written about this period.

The simple, although far from easily digestible, fact is that America could not make a winning bid for oil supplies, tried to grab them, and lost again, and now faces the prospect of decline, either slowly and under control, or rapidly through a severe collapse. Without oil supply contracts, American companies will close; layoffs will besiege the American heartland; the entire public sector from the federal government to state administrations and to municipalities, will starve for lack of tax revenue. American society, crucially held together by public taxing and spending on anything from police departments, to courts and jails, to fire departments, to road, rail, and shipping infrastructure, to schools, hospitals, and all other institutions, will dry up.

Much of this is already happening. It must happen—no arguments about the resilient US economy able to withstand any storm and reinvent itself ever takes into account the two new facts of lack of sure access to adequate oil, and lack of economic or military prowess to secure it. America has always had both options; today it has, for the first time in its history, neither.

There are two ways the nation might manage its now inevitable decline. One way, by controlling the fall, requires that the citizenry be widely informed by its media about what has happened, to have all possible options explained by its leadership, and to be consulted on its choices through sound democratic processes. But today, America’s media is famous for underreporting reality, its leadership is incapable of forming options much less explaining them, and the state of democracy in America is precariously weak.

It is instructive to note that the collapse of US military power is blamed by popular conservative spokespeople on so-called “elites” at what are pejoratively referred to as “liberal” colleges and the “liberal” media. The definition of an “elite” seems to be anyone who points out the reality of what has happened to the US military in Iraq—namely, the fact that it was ambushed and will now be defeated.

This same process will therefore likely play out in the much larger collapse of America itself. Anyone who, for instance, points out that the country is coming apart, will be labeled as an out-of-touch elitist. When evidence of collapse mounts, those who make note of it by way of warning or preparation will be blamed for having caused it, just as today those who speak of military defeat in Iraq are said to be causing it by their very talk of the subject.

Finally, just as the road to Baghdad will become ugly as remaining US forces there bolt for the exits in a mass frenetic rush, the whole of America will become so much more ugly as the whole society makes its frenetic dash up, down and all around when the walls they built themselves close in.

And of course, there is the Patriot Act parts I and II, secret prisons, military tribunals, renderings, torture chambers and so much else the government of the US and the nation’s true elites now have at their disposal for when the collapse comes and that vast swath of middle America wakes up to its barren reality. Plus, there are now over one million veterans of brutal, ugly and illegal war languishing in American towns and cities, highly trained in the use of powerful firearms, many seriously traumatized by their experience overseas, and many more still either resentful of their plight or resentful of those who they think caused it.

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