Tag: Imperial Hubris

From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses

Guest Post by Batiushka

From Imperial Failures to Imperial Excuses

The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest….Instead of enquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted for so long. – History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbon

Introduction: Imperial Failures

Empires in terminal decline, like the American today, go from one usually military disaster to another. ‘Might is Right’, is the old dictum they wrongly believe in. It happened to the Roman, as described above. It happened to the British, starting with the Boer War, then the bankrupting Pyrrhic victories in two World Wars and ending with the Suez humiliation in 1956. And the French with their World Wars and Indo-China and then Algerian debacle. It happened to the Soviet Empire in Afghanistan, though its failure was more about its failure to deliver on its promises to consumers because it could not finance debt like Western countries. Imperial failure is always a frightening phenomenon.

After catastrophic failures in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, the US Empire has now chosen to bet everything on someone else’s country in Europe. This is the big one, not a war against sandal-wearing tribesmen, but against a Superpower with a professional army and the best rocket artillery, drones and hypersonic missiles in the world. This was is in the south-western borderland backwaters of Russia, called the Ukraine. Having lost its attempt to occupy the naval port of Sevastopol in the Crimea and so control the Black Sea, the US aggressor-state has turned the Ukraine into yet another failed attempt to try and impose its global hegemony. At present, attention is focused on a town called Bakhmut in south-eastern Ukraine.

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DANCING ON THE CRUMBLING PRECIPICE

Dancing on the crumbling precipice
The rocks are coming loose just at the edge
Are we laughing? Are we crying?
Are we drowning? Are we dead?
Or is it all a dream?

The bombs are getting closer everyday
“That can never happen here” we used to say
Have these wars come to our doorstep?
Has this moment finally come?
Or is it all a dream?

Rise Against – The Violence

This recent song by Rise Against, inspired by the turmoil since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, captures the feeling of angst and uncertainty engulfing the world today. This Fourth Turning is entering its most violent stage, where blood will be spilled in vast quantities as an epic conflict between good and evil plays out across the globe. Eighty years ago, the bloodiest conflict in human history began, as the social mood turned dark and compromise was no longer a viable option.

It wasn’t a coincidence World War II began exactly eighty years after the onset of the American Civil War, which began as compromisers died off and hearts hardened on both sides. We are now eighty years gone since the outset of World War II and a global mood of impending doom overshadows our daily lives. The inevitability of conflict, domestically and internationally, eclipses all efforts to bridge the ideological differences of competing interests around the world. The cycles of history will not be denied and this Fourth Turning will play out as those before, with clear victors and clear losers.

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A Book For Our Time, A Time That Perhaps Has Run Its Course

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

American post-WW 2 supremacy, writes Andrei Martyanov in his book, Losing Military Supremacy just published by Clarity Press, has been destroyed by America’s narcissism. https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Military-Supremacy-American-Strategic/dp/0998694754/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535577199&sr=1-1&keywords=andrei+martyanov

The arrogant hubris of American exceptionalism and the myths that sustain it are subjected to devastating analysis in this long overdue book. Martyanov has no patience with American strategic thinkers, Russian experts, American war myths, and General George S. Patton. No nation has ever assembled a greater collection of ignorant fools than the US and trusted them with the leadership of the country.

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The United States of Hubris

Guest Post by Antonius Aquinas

hubris of empire

If anyone should have any questions about whether the United States of America is not the most aggressive, warlike, and terroristic nation on the face of the earth, its latest proposed action against the supposed rogue state of North Korea should allay any such doubts.

Last week, the US circulated a draft resolution which it intends to present to the UN Security Council that would give the American Navy and Air Force the power to interdict North Korean ships at sea to determine if they were transporting “weaponry material” or fuel and that US forces would be given “the right” to use “all necessary measures” to “enforce compliance.”*

Not surprisingly, Nikky Haley, the blood-thirsty and incompetent American Ambassador to the UN, has enthusiastically backed the resolution, utterly clueless of its ramifications if passed, the most horrific of which would be the igniting of WWIII.  Trump’s selection of the neocon mouthpiece as UN Ambassador has been a disaster on several fronts: first, it was an early and quite telling sell out of his political base whom he promised an American First foreign policy of less belligerency and intervention.  Second, Haley had no foreign policy experience and has made a fool of herself internationally on more than one occasion with her inane statements.

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Michael Scheuer: Why Bin Laden Was Reading My Book ‘Imperial Hubris’

Guest Post by Adam Dick
From Sky News to CNN, media are asking Michael Scheuer why Osama bin Laden would have a copy of Scheuer’s book Imperial Hubris. The question arose because Scheuer’s book is included in a list of books seized in a 2011 US military raid on bin Laden’s dwelling in Abottabad, Pakistan. The list was released Wednesday by the United States Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In an interview with host J.D. Hayworth on Newsmax TV, Scheuer, who published Imperial Hubris anonymously while working at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), provides a particularly enlightening answer to the media’s persistent question.After deflecting Hayworth’s suggestion that bin Laden might have had a copy of Imperial Hubris because the book contains some positive comments regarding the al Qaeda leader’s bearing and capabilities, Scheuer offers instead the following reasons:

What attracted him to my book was that I had listened to what he had said for a better part of six years, and I correlated what his organization did in response to what he said they were going to do, and that was a very high correlation.

The second thing I believe that attracted him is that I wrote very clearly — and I would write it again today — that the war we’re fighting has nothing to do with women’s rights; it has nothing to do with democracy or elections or liberty or freedom, at least from the perspective of the people that declared war on us. They wouldn’t have that stuff in their own country. But what they hate of the United States is not even the American people; they hate the American government because of its interventionist policies in the Middle East, and that’s been borne out completely by all of the documents that have been released by the government since that raid. There’s not a word about the Americans are debauched, they’re sick on pornography, the women wear short skirts — none of the stuff that Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama and Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton have told the American people.

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