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Ken, you make a good point. Many people are
now arguing that the US has stretched itself beyond its limits and no longer
makes the kinds of things that built up a very strong economy, having forfeited
much of that to China. It's in a terrible fiscal position, having to
borrow huge amounts just to keep its government, including its military,
going. And guess who holds about twenty to thirty percent of that
debt. Why, China of course, and China could probably pull out that prop if
it felt it to be strategically necessary.
The big question is how the US allowed
itself to get that way. Bacevich says that Carter tried very hard to
persuade Americans that they had to reduce their dependence on foreign oil and
on oil in general. The public and the politicians simply wouldn't buy
it. The message was too negative for a people that had always seen
themselves as living in the land of plenty. They got rid of Carter
and brought in Reagan who had a much happier "land of plenty and infinite
opportunity" message for them. They really liked that!
Since then, however, the history of the US has
been one of drift. Americans continued to see themselves as the most
powerful economy and military on earth, but the truth of the matter was that
they were slipping. Their economic power was being eroded by China
and others and their military performances were shoddy at best.
Bacevich has nothing good to say about performances like Somalia and the Balkans
and not very much that is good to say about the first Iraq war in which the
Americans essentially let huge numbers of Saddam's soldiers get away. He
argues that the war against the Taliban may have been the right thing
to do because Osama was based there, but Iraq was a mistake. I don't
entirely buy his argument about Iraq and I don't think he
himself does. Elsewhere in the book he fully supports the
concept that Iraq was about oil, and that the Americans needed a base
in the middle of the Middle East to make sure they got the oil, but
that, blinded by the myth of their righteousness and superior power, the
Americans had no idea of the chaos they were creating by going into Iraq.
Going in may, from their standpoint, have been the right thing to do, but going
in stupid was not.
I should point out that, in criticizing the
American military performance, Bacevich is not criticizing the soldiers and
military leaders. He was a soldier himself, one who suffered the
humiliation of Vietnam. It's the political leaders that he is
faulting.
That the Americans went into Iraq stupid is
perhaps the most important point and the most frightening. A huge
network of people who do not like the Americans and their allies has built up
over the years. It's secretive and cellular and not the kind of thing you
can destroy by displays of shock and awe. Those involved know that
Americans can be stupid and vulnerable and are willing to take full
advantage of that.
Ed
P.S. I'm going to send this to the
Futurework list and to my undisclosed group. Hope that's OK with
you.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 5:50
PM
Subject: RE: Bacevich's new book
Just
thinking out loud here.... Militarization is just another way of defining
power. To my mind, power seems to flow to the country with
the largest manufacturing base, not the largest or most powerful army.
ie: the country that can produce the products the cheapest gets the
power.
England boot-started the process with the industrial revolution
(cheaper goods), but lost the power to the United States.
America continued the process with an incredible burst of productivity
over the last 200 years (ie: cheaper goods). US had the natural
advantage of abundant land and resources, coupled with an attitude of
innovation and ruthless competition. The results were marvels of
technology - the last greatest invention being the Internet, but
included cars, machinery, computers, mechanized farming, assembly line
manufacturing, etc.
Japan built its economic base as a manufacturer, a process
that has been copied by the other Asian countries. Japan's growth has
been limited in that it does not own it's own raw resources, and thus
needed to import in order to export.
And
finally we get to China. My understanding is that China
is now at 50% the economic size of the US, with the prediction that they
will match the US economy's size within 20
years. For example, 50% of all Intel processors that
are manufactured are now sold in Asia. Wall Mart has built its business
by being the lowest cost provider of imported goods manufactured
in China. Bottom line is that China currently produces cheaper
goods than anywhere else in the world.
If I
were to point to one shining example of the mess the US is about to find
itself in, I'd say that it's the loss of the manufacturing sector - the
ability to produce the cheapest goods - which if my theory is
correct will ultimately lead to a loss of power. The US currently
imports way more than it exports. With the US dependent on imported
energy, the problem is likely to get worse, not better. Not sure how
long this can continue without a major correction.
What
I can't understand is why the US is so willing to continue buying imported oil
(a scarce resource) and not invest in alternate sources of energy. For
example, not a single reactor has been built in the last 20 years. Cheap
abundand energy would mean cheaper manufactured goods, cheaper goods
means a stronger economy, and a stronger economy means continued American
domination.
...
then again, a weaker America may not be that bad a thing.
Only problem is that the universe abhors a vacuum. What sorts of bizarre
behavior can we expect when China starts to flex its muscle? First signs
of things to come is China buying up resource companies on the cheap (and thus
reducing global supply of resources). Next will be the problems of
securing a stable source of oil in a world market of reduced supply. Can
see the day where China will start exporting it's own corporate culture
into the world, with their own set of corporate agendas.
...
may we live in interesting times.
Got
to get back to work.
I've just finished reading Andrew Bacevich's
latest book, "The New American Militarism" (well, mostly finished. I
skipped quite a bit of it.) Bacevich is professor of
international relations at Boston University. He's a graduate of
the U. S. Military Academy and has a Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History
from Princeton University. He is a veteran of the Vietnam
war.
I'm not going to go into the book in detail
at this point, but I would suggest that it is well worth reading. One
of Bacevich's strongest and most compelling points is that the "War on
Terror" isn't really that at all, it's "World War IV", IV because WWIII was
the Cold War that ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Moreover,
he argues, WWIV did not begin with 9/11 but in 1980 with the Carter
Doctrine, in which President Carter in essence stated that an attempt by any
outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region would be regarded
as an assault on the vital interests of the US, and would be repelled
by any means necessary, including military force. Bacevich argues that
from then to the present day, this doctrine has remained
sacrosanct. Why was it promulgated? Carter had previously
valiantly tried to persuade the US to cut back on the consumption of its
vital energy resources and rely less on the importation of oil from the
Middle East, but to no avail. Not even the oil shocks of the 1970s had
much of an impact. The Middle East would remain a primary source, so
Americans had better make sure that it continued to serve their
needs.
Since the Carter Doctrine, there has been a
lot of positioning of American troops and interests in and around the Middle
East. The people of the Middle East have not been happy about this,
nor about the way their leaders, the Saudis for example and Saddam for a
time, played ball with the Americans. Out of this came people like Bin
Laden, the bombing of barracks and embassies and ultimately 9/11.
Allies of the US, Australians in Bali and most recently Londoners, have also
suffered from the long, ongoing game of murderous tit-for-tat. That it
will not end as easily as the Americans, with their sense of superiority and
overwhelming fire-power, thought, is evident from the continuing and
deepening quagmire in Iraq.
Much of Bacevich's book is taken up with how
various interests contributed to the moulding of the US into a modern
military state. The military had been thoroughly humiliated in
Vietnam. It had not had the support it needed to win decisive
victories, and what it might have accomplished was overruled by civilians in
Washington who knew very little about the situation in the field. It
felt that it had to pull itself out from under civilian control and build up
its resources and know-how. Another major player, the
evangelical religious right saw the America of the sixties and
seventies as being in a state of moral decay and saw something very positive
in military order. Evangelicals believed that God favoured the US and
had in fact created the US to show the world the way. Many believed
that Armageddon was coming, and did whatever they could to hasten the final
conflict and the return of Christ. Another group, boffins in
think-tanks, played important roles in advising the US government on
military strategy and weaponry. "Shock and Awe" came out of
this.
One thing Bacevich does well is help us to
understand the role of a group we talk about, write about, think about, but
really know very little about - the "neocons". He gives them a Chapter
in which he not only names them but, point by point, tells us what they have
been promoting and what influence on policy and the public mind they've
had. Their ideas are essentially uncompromising. America, with
its goodness and wealth, is a nation under perpetual siege. There is
no point to negotiating with the enemy, as liberals are wont to do.
The enemy must be stared down or knocked down. It's all rather scary
total us versus them stuff, with no shades of grey between. What is
even scarier is that their influence has been, and continues, to be
huge.
I won't go on. Read the book. As
in any book of its kind, some parts are much more interesting than
others. The final chapter is a true dud! In it, Bacevich argues
that Americans can get out of the mess they're in by following their
Constitution step by step. Would that it were that easy! My
guess is that, having written a lot of very good chapters, Bacevich didn't
know how to pull it all together at the end. Besides, he was probably
tired.
Ed
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