What happened to America ? The Culture Wars happened. Guantanamo George called it ' the War on Terror ' but it was-and is- a war between Western and Middle Eastern cultures which began in earnest with the creation of the synthetic State of Israel in the heart of the Islamic world. You might put it down to oil, you might put it down to strategic interests or even the scrabble for votes in US of AIPAC presidential elections. Whatever reason you'd like to offer for America's blanket support for Zionism the fact remains that it is unacceptable to the Islamic world- and there are well over 1.3 billion muslims worldwide, 23% of the world's population Now, all these , supposedly primitive , muslims were supposed to cower before the West's industrial and military might and grow to enjoy being subjugated whilst criminal Western industrialists raped their countries. That hasn't happened. They have , generally speaking, refused the yoke and fought back in a number of ways. What was supposed to be a swamping of ethnic cutures by a wave of technological imperialism has turned into a war- a culture war. And the West isn't winning it, despite its military advantages. In an effort to shore up its support for continued aggression in the Culture Wars- and it was indisputably the West that started them- our governments have begun to view us, the citizenry, as collaborators with viewpoints other than their own. We citizens don't want the horrors of physical war nor the domestic poverty which accompanies military spending on an incomprehensible scale. We are well aware that the military and the government blamed us for their defeat in Vietnam. ' We never lost the war' they say. ' The pacifists gave it away '. So, in their efforts to perpetuate the Culture Wars- which we, the citizenry , know full well cannot actually be won- our governments are employing surveillance and repressive legislation against.........us. If, in fact, it is us who are the enemies of our governments then what are our repressive governments to us ?
You can surely call it west vs East. The Arab countries are only part of the agression. And thats just the beginning...i cant wait to see what laws they have in store for 2030))
A very insightful post, imo. Particularly pertinent was your highlighting of the limitations of US power. The war on terror has created the paranoia associated with the notion of the enemy within akin to the Cold War McCarthy period. Central to this, as you correctly alluded to, were the arguments that underscored the strategic debates relating to the Bush Doctrine. It is, for example, striking how the neoconservatives' vocabularly of the time was full of terms - 'containment', deterrence, 'preventative war', 'rollback' - that actually date back to the Cold War period.
In answering your question "What happened to America?", I think that the shift towards America's increasing international isolation- which is what your question implies - began during Clinton's second administration, which, paradoxically, is regarded by many with nostalgia as a beacon of multilateralism. On the other hand, as far as the Republican critics of Clinton were concerned, the notion of America's increasing isolationism under his leadership, was regarded as the epitome of 'wishful liberalism'. This attitude was summed up by Samuel Huntington who wrote a piece to that effect which appeared in March 1999. Under GW Bush, the American shift towards unilateralism became radicalized encompassing a grand strategy that has at its centerpoint the quest for an eternal war.
The US considers itself as at war with terror, dealing with an enemy with an obscured face, and they always fought in the dark undiscernable sometimes from international eyes. In war the most coveted is always to get that vantage point, and cripple the enemy unabling them to do some damage.
The much stated 'war on terror' is nevertheless a euphemism - a convenient catch-all - that illustrates the drift towards the radicalization of the use of carefully dosed applications of force began by Clinton as highlighted previously. Bush merely took Clinton's uniliateral approach one stage further by rejecting Brzezinski's strategy of coalition-building as a means of maintaining American primacy. The administrations attitude to Nato was symptomatic of the shift involved. On the 12th of September 2001, the North Atlantic Council invoked, for the first time in its history, Article 5 of the 1949 treaty establishing Nato and declared that the attacks on the US were attacks on all the alliance's member states. Bush pocketed this declaration of solidarity along with a UNSC resolution, but the Pentagon didn't bother to use Nato in its war against Afghanistan. Nato, which barely two years prior had been Washington's preferred instrument of intervention in the Balkans, was now treated with the same contempt that had become habitual in American dealings with the UN. The Bush administrations preference for unilateral military action supported by what Rumsfld called 'coalitions of the willing' reflected the symbolic blow that American power had suffered on September 11. The truth is, Bush used the 'war on terrorism' to justify a much more aggressive geopolitical strategy than his predecessor, deploying military power to eliminate some threats and intimidate everyone else. At its roots, the Bush strategy was not a response to the September 11 attacks. n a revealing passage, Rice put it like this: "An earthquake the magnitude of 9/11 can shift the tectonic plates of international politics. The international system has been in flux since the collapse of Soviet power. Now it is possible - indeed probable - that that transition is coming to an end. If that is right......then this is a period not just of grave danger, but of enormous opportunity. America must take advantage of these opportunities" www.whitehouse.gov Rice said "she had called together the senior staff people of the National Security Council and asked them to think seriously about "how do you capitalize on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American doctrine, and shape the world after September 11th. www.newyorker.com So 9/11 wasn't just a disaster but an opportunity to "shift the tectonic plates of international politics" in a way that the Truman administration did in the late 1940s.
It is a smoke screen they are more likely look to crack down on their citizens , this comes just after an anti-propaganda law was shot down. You know "Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia " .
