The problem in reaching the top is that anyone who gets there will soon discover that all roads from there on will lead downhill. The United States sat alone on the top after the fall of communism in 1991, and after the U.S economic boom in the nineteen nineties with Bill Clinton in the White House. Then came George W. Bush and political, military, economic and moral collapse came with him, and so far, Barack Obama has not succeeded in reversing this trend. Obama's campaign slogan was ‘Yes We Can'. A few days ago, I read reviews of three new American political books that occupied a full page in the Financial Times, under the title of ‘No, We Can't'. Political and military decline began with the occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, which took place in response to the terrorist attacks that struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001. While the whole world stood by the United States against terror, it soon discovered that there is a wing in the U.S. administration – represented by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – that seeks to impose an American Empire on the world, and not just punish Al-Qaeda's terrorists and their abettors the Taliban, and also a Likudnik wing that works for the interests of Israel alone. The decline then accelerated with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, where it soon became established that the Bush administration had deliberately falsified information on an alleged military nuclear program pursued by Saddam Hussein and on possible ties between his regime and Al-Qaeda. On May the first, 2003, George W. Bush declared from the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, “Mission Accomplished”. However, this was followed by limited resistance in Iraq, and a massive wave of terror that broke the back of the American military adventure in Iraq in 2004, 2005 and 2006. While the declared policy of the U.S. administration had been ‘regime change', i.e. overthrowing the regimes of Syria and Iran in particular, the U.S now acts like the losing gambler who wants to win ‘back his money then stop'. The United States ended up handing over influence in Iraq to Iran, which Saddam Hussein had defeated with U.S. assistance in the first Gulf War in the eighties, putting an end to Iran's plans of exporting the revolution. In other words, the Bush administration won the war in Afghanistan then lost it, and lost the war in Iraq, despite the Surge, and began to pull out its troops there, leaving the country wide open to Iranian influence despite the current hostility with Tehran over its nuclear program. Meanwhile, economic decline can be dated back to September 2008 with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which unleashed a financial crisis in the United States that has since spread to the rest of the world. However, this cannot be taken in isolation from military adventures which include the losing War on Terror, as terror only increased after this war. It is said that numbers do not lie. According to the ones I know, Clinton left George W. Bush a surplus of one trillion dollars, which the incompetent president managed to quickly turn into a one trillion dollar deficit, as he fought in Afghanistan and Iraq with funds he borrowed from China. Today, the deficit amounts to 12 trillion dollars, including 1.3 trillion that were spent in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; this is while military spending this decade reached 5.7 trillion dollars. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military budget was supposed to be shrunk gradually. However, after a token reduction in the budget, it started to climb again, and each military budget this decade set a new record relative to previous ones. While the numbers and figures that I present to the readers are official American numbers, I maintain that they are ‘camouflaged' numbers, since much of U.S. military spending is often included under other items. For instance, I believe that the Department of Homeland Security, which was created following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, to be part and parcel of American military expenditures along with 16 other U.S. intelligence agencies. Furthermore, U.S military adventurism, failure and the subsequent decline cannot be taken in isolation from Israeli influence on U.S. policies either. The Likudniks in the Bush administration, the Israel lobby and the members of both houses of Congress whose allegiances were bought by the lobby have sought under the pretext of terrorism to implement an American policy that sabotages U.S. interests all around the world and benefit no one except Israel. As a result, the country which was the symbol of freedom and human rights became the most hated country around the world, and its image today is best reflected in the video footage distributed by WikiLeaks in 2007, which showed the ‘liberating' U.S. soldiers killing civilians and journalists in Iraq. In the United States, there is constant talk about American exceptionalism, and America's right to lead the world because it is better or greater than others, and because it is a force for good. I recently noticed that Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, former governors of Alaska, Massachusetts, and Arkansas respectively, all alluded to this American exceptionalism, in the course of their bids for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential elections, and were followed in that by other potential candidates. What I know is that a woman who says repeatedly that she is a lady, is not a lady at all. [email protected]
