Stoopid Stuff

From the "Having the Balls to State the Obvious" Desk

Putin, issuing perhaps his harshest public rebuke of the United States, said it had "overstepped its national borders in every way" and that its plans for an anti-missile shield "could provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear era."

"Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper-use of military force in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts," Putin said in a clear allusion to the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Putin also decried what he called "greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law" and criticized "first and foremost the United States" for forcing its values on other countries.

"This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?" Putin said.

You're going to have to be pretty far gone down the path of American Exceptionalism to fail to immediately recognize the truth and accuracy of these statements. Sure, Vlad's got his own agenda, and he's not the best example of an admirable statesman. But make no mistake. Just as the American Congress and corporate lapdog press is slowly beginning to lose it's instinctive fear of the cheney administration, other national leaders of government and business are beginning to realize that it might be safe to come out and state in public what they've been saying in private for at least four years.

Under the bush/cheney cabal, America HAS become a rogue state, by any definition you'd like to use. Aggressively Attacking/Invading/Occupying sovereign nations, rattling sabers at other nations, refusing to speak diplomatically to nations with whom we have differences or grievances, attempting to impose our will in terms of what technology which nations will be allowed to develop, undercutting/abrogating treaties, utterly disregarding the will of the Unitedd Nations and acting unilaterally. There has never in history been a case where a nation with such power at it's disposal acted in such a unilateral fashion.

Perhaps this is because historically, there have always been other powerful nations to act as a check against a rogue state's worst instincts. But since the fall of the Soviet bloc, the world has been forced to depend on America acting as a force for good in the world, when there was nothing coercing her to do so. And, like a bad roll of the dice, in the 2000 elections, bush and cheney won (effectively, if not actually) and the world lost.

When they took power, bush and cheney had one huge overriding misconception that has driven them to become the latter-day stalins they have become. They believed that there were absolutely NO limits to what could be accomplished with American military power. So they felt more than empowered to use force in every situtation, they felt compelled to do so. And it turned out they were tragically wrong, not just in one but in two very significant ways. First, you cannot do effective counter-terrorism with armored brigades, artillery and air power. You do effective counter-terrorism first with effective intelligence gathering, and second, with small units of special warfare operators appearing out of nowhere to kill the people who enable, fund and create terrorism. This has the advantage of limiting both the numbers of dead and the numbers of innocents killed accidently. Worldwide, since 9/11, the dead could have numbered less than 1000, even if some were mistakes. And yet, in fairly short order it would have become very dificult to find people willing to serve in those roles. The second cheney miscalculation was that overwhelming force and firepower makes your army invulnerable. You'll notice that cheney never served in vietnam, so he had no firsthand understanding of what small-unit guerillas fighting with asymetric tactics could do to the most powerful army in the world.

Armies are for fighting armies, and the American military can defeat any military in the world in classic warfare. But when facing an insurgency with plenty of funding, a willing cadre and the support of the people, a traditional military force will find itself at a disadvantage every time. Every thing this army does to find, fix and destroy this elusive enemy only contributes to their ranks and coffers. There will never be another large army vs. army conflict, and now bush and cheney, in their childish impudence, have demonstrated for all the world to see the inherent limits to American military might. We can take a fight beyond our borders, but to stay after the fight is to bleed. And now everyone knows it.

The lesson to take away from this is not that Putin was correct. That is an indisputable truth. The key is to understand the far reaching, long term consequences of the greedy, venal, mindless and arbitrary "leadership" of the bush/cheney cabal. It's hard to even begin to grasp the costs America will be paying for generations to come, but you can be sure of one thing. When people start talking about 3000+ American dead, 1 trillion dollars burned irretrevably for no gain and a million dead in Iraq, they are only addressing the tip of the iceberg. Those dynamics which we have let loose in the field of international relations will snowball in ways we can only dimly see, and the global cost, not just economically or militarily, but in chaos and human rights and ethinc cleansing will be too high to calculate. When our grandchildren are leaders of nations, and one of them wants to commit an evil act, will they invoke the United States of America as the empowering example?

posted by mikey @ 1:47 PM