The president announced a manpower increase for the conflict in Afghanistan of 30,000 additional soldiers. One of the backdrops for this was explained in ‘Nincompoops Running Amok’ and McChrystal Does a Paulson. While the United Arab Emirates ponders how to bailout the fiasco in Dubai, our own domestic bailout machine works overtime pumping huge good resources after bad.
So much for the “fierce urgency of now.”
Nobody learns anything, The Dubai bail takes place alongside the experiment in Afghanistan bail. The critical reasoning that orbits US Middle East strategy a is a repeat of he Vietnam critical reasoning process. To leave Afghanistan sans ‘winning’ is to ‘lose’. Losing to Afghans is losing to terrorism. Nobody knows what winning means. Nobody can see the end. Prestige, more than actual costs, matter.
The ‘imagination’ control is disabled, the outcome of this adventure is maddeningly certain. The Afghans have been fighting each other and various neighbors for centuries. Not us: the US will be forced to leave the Middle East by economic necessity. The wars are imposing breaking costs on the United States, we have so much more to lose than our adversaries.
Gate crashers can gain entrance to the White House, but nobody can who carries a calculator.
Everywhere is now applied the defective ‘Key Man strategy’, that allows for no dominoes to fall. Yet, fall they do; bailouts simply postpone the inevitable. With so many key men at risk and the establishment adding more, the endeavor is a fantasy akin to bailing a hole in a lake.
In Afghanistan, another optional liability accrues to the American cultural and economic balance sheet; another massively expensive ‘choice’. The process is ‘death by a thousand cuts’, perhaps the last is the deepest, but there will certainly be more.
How many more cuts, how many more liabilities can be thus accrued? That more people are starting to ask the question by itself sketches outlines of the likely answer. The citizens of Afghanistan will take back their own country and the consequences will be unpleasant. The same process will then take place here. The establishment repeatedly engages asymmetry yet refuses to invest against asymmetric risks. Moral hazard becomes a stairway to heaven or a bottomless pit. Without some middle ground, we wind up in the Ironic Universe: whatever outcome is most destructive to the greatest number becomes the most likely. In Afghanistan, the US can only gain a ‘Fake Win’ or will lose to some drug dealing religious fundamentalists! This isn’t life, it’s an episode from Monty Python!
Nobody learns anything, not from history, not from business, not even from TV: $100 million or so in gold or cash in a Swiss account in 2002 would have Saddam allowing US petroleum interests full access to his country. Americans would have gained respect for maintaining the social order among thieves. Instead of being occupiers, Americans would be ‘respected guests’, the providers of backsheesh. An alive Saddam would be the magnet for Iraqi ire rather than the Great Satan. Ironically, the US ultimately was reduced by circumstances to paying bribes to the Sunni ‘enemy’ – as a means to avert an out-and-out military defeat on the ground. Sometimes it’s best to outwit an adversary rather than to overcome him by force. The US never learns this, or learns too late, or complains about the lesson like the slow child in class. America now abhors the sensible approach even though it invented and institutionalized it! Embraced by its citizens – albeit belatedly and not in entirety – the establishment repudiates good sense and relies on inertia and the weight of vested interests instead. America wobbles in and out of the world’s consciousness as the wayward prodigal son; half Santa Clause, half werewolf. This perception is not because the US is too powerful but because it is operationally inept.
No wonder the 21st century is China’s for the taking!
While the US has mired itself at the edge of the void for no particular reason, bankrupting itself in the process, the Chinese are using US dollars to buy oil- and other resources where ever they can. The Chinese strategy has so far avoided any post- twentieth century colonialism issues that have stuck like glue traps to US foreign policy.
Instead, the US makes one foolish mistake after another. Unfortunately, the means to continue to do so are running out along with time.