The Safety

Why are we cowards? Why do we not bat an eye at the implication that the president's most sacred duty is to ensure that no American ever dies or is ever afraid? If we were that soft, that desperate for affection and protection, what was the point of the Revolution? Let's get a grip, patriots. Freedom isn't free, but the cost is not a willingness to give up freedom; it's a willingness to defend it to the death.

Free people and brave people aren't supposed to obsess about theoretical dangers. And if this is the land of the free and the home of the brave, how is it that Habeus Corpus is debatable? How is it that the medieval act of 9/11 will plunge us into that same moral universe, where torture is a subject for polite debate on mainstream cable channels?

Freedom isn't free; that much is true, but that truism needs to be reclaimed from the proto-fascist element. We had one bad attack, which took about 12% of the American lives that were taken in that same year by other Americans, and already we torture and disappear people.

If we are willing to cede our "God given" liberties, to suspend our "unalienable rights, endowed by our Creator", after one act of violence, do we really expect to draw the line after the next attack? We've displayed our willingness to renounce what we claim to hold dear at the first sign of danger; why would we be surprised if our enemy or our government exploited that tendency?


There is a cost to freedom, and it doesn't involve sending soldiers to subjugate cesspools that no body's ever heard of; it involves a mature and sober acknowledgement that open societies are subjected to infiltration and occasional acts of espionage and terrorism. Simple as that. If you think terrorism is intolerable, move to North Korea. There's no terrorism there. If you think that's too much to give, grow the fuck up.

Beware The Corporatists

We were always on the left. In 1776, we were the very definition of the left. We were a mixture of Thomas Paine and Johnny Cash, embarrassing tyrants and sycophants with the immutable logic and dignity of our arguments. And now, we have spent so many decades protecting our left flank from a long-since vanquished demon called Bolshevism that we are blind to the demons gnawing at our right wing.

Beware of Chavez, we are told. Only an enemy would smoke a Cuban, we are told. The French are pussies, we tell ourselves. The Saudis are our friends, we are told by the very same mouths. State ownership of vital resources is totalitarianism, they say. Corporate ownership of the very same thing is liberty, they say with no embarrassment.

When a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide health care to poor women is judged to be more "anti-American" than a state that would confiscate private wealth to provide assurance that a woman will not be allowed to leave her house unless accompanied by her husband or a male relative, we know that our foreign policy is indeed very foreign to what we pretend are American "ideals".

Hitler wasn't a fascist; he was a National Socialist. And if you study his platform, sans the killing of the Jews, all Western states, including the United States, are to some degree National Socialist societies. Mussolini was the closest any person has come to fascism, and although he was a military and strategic midget, his intellect was not appreciably weaker than Lenin's; he synthesized the antithesis to Communism.

Mussolini's definition of fascism, rightly called corporatism, was the marriage of state, military, and business. What intellectually honest person could deny that all of these interests are served by war? And what emotionally honest person could call this coincidence? We have created a system that ensures war profiteering, and we feign disbelief when the inevitable becomes evitable.

I have studied quite a bit of history, and any person who understands history understands that studying history is a process of embracing ignorance; the more you learn, the more aware you are of how much else you don't know.

That being said, there are a few conclusions I have dared to reach about power. The most immutable rule is that men don't give up power; they seize power, and then eschew all the romantic rhetoric than carried them to power in the first place.

There are exceptions to the rule, however. Here are the three titans that dared not just to seize power, but to give it up: George Washington, Che Guevarra, and Mikhael Gorbachev. Regardless of how one feels about the politics of these men, they were moral giants. And they were all Leftists.

The Cold War is over; we no longer need to obsess over our left flank. Our job now is to be honest with ourselves; in the interest of "proving Communism wrong", we have flirted far too much with fascism.

The Word and The Deed

"Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time--and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes behind that vision are held.

It is not that these views are especially evil or especially erroneous. Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there have been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient--some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion.

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality. Even when issues of public policy are discussed in the outward form of an argument, often the conclusions reached are predetermined by the assumptions and definitions inherent in a particular vision of social processes.

To a remarkable extent, empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshaled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence. Momentous questions are dealt with essentially as conflicts of visions."

So says Thomas Sowell, darling of conservative intellectuals as well as anyone who can appreciate such lucidity and humble honesty, so rare among modern American public thinkers. The above quote speaks volumes, as anyone who reads it is instantly tempted to apply its chastisements to those who disagree with them on any of a myriad of issues.

For example, many would argue that the above quote perfectly articulates how Hitler was allowed to become so powerful before finally being confronted. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and it has become conventional wisdom, especially on the right, that the failure to confront Hitler earlier resulted from wavering liberals willfully ignoring what was manifest for all to see.

This is a very selective reading of history, of course, as it ignores the unignorable fact that the populations of western Europe and the United States overwhelmingly rejected to prospect of war from 1933 through 1939 (or 1941 for the Americans). In other words, as much as Churchill or Roosevelt may have understood the threat, they governed free countries, and their vision meant nothing until their countrymen shared that vision.

The American people from 1933 through 1941 were not naive; nor were they appeasers. In actuality, they were right; they understood that the coming war would make the last one look tame by comparison and that everything, everything, must be done to avoid it. In December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States and the American people, their ire sufficiently aroused, proceeded to carry out the largest-scale slaughters of civilians in the history of the world. Such horrible deeds should have been avoided, and to the American peoples' credit, they did all they could to avoid them.

The lesson of "appeasement" has since been bandied about as evidence that the United States needed to fight all manner of impoverished and defenseless enemies before they gained sufficient strength to pose an existential threat to the United States. As Sowell reminds us above, however, these situations (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) were never assessed on their own merits; rather, they were crammed into a paradigm that has not existed since Hitler sucked on his pistol.

Facts are marshaled to support predetermined conclusions, but they are rarely allowed to sway one from a course of action he is already inclined to take. All ideological stripes are guilty of this propensity, of course, and I perceive it as becoming more entrenched by the day in our culture.

Many people currently in power are predetermined to seek confrontation with Iran. Iran is deemed to be not just irritatingly independent of American designs and dictates, but to be uniquely psychotic and evil. Indeed, the whole premise of the coming attack on that nation is that they will use nuclear weapons as soon as they have them. In other words, we must believe that Iran is suicidal. So we must kill them to keep them from killing themselves. Only those who proudly ignore evidence could embrace such an absurd predisposition.

Nonetheless, the predisposition exists. Therefore, when evidence is collected, it is only treated as authoritative if it can be twisted into buttressing this psychotic paranoia. Here's a fact: Iran has not started a war since before the United States existed. That fact does not jibe with the preconceived policy, however, so it is ignored. Iran, we are told, is incorrigibly aggressive.

Here's another fact: Iran was the mortal enemy of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Since the United States overthrew these governments, it has faced vicious insurgencies consisting, to varying extents, of the remnants of these regimes. Completely unwilling or incapable of admitting that Afghans and Iraqis might not love Americans, these insurgencies must be the work of......Iran!

Such willful disregard of history, logic, and objectively certifiable facts led America to war in Iraq, and it will lead America to war in Iran. Sowell's warning is wielded by the neo-cons to spell out the dangers of "appeasement", but never to spell our the dangers of war. War in these instances is far more dangerous than "appeasement", because there's not much danger in "appeasing" defenseless nations.

Another example: I attended a lecture by Robert Spencer as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Mr. Spencer laid out an airtight case that there are quite a few Muslims out there with universal contempt for the West's concepts of human rights and dignity, especially as applied to women. Mr. Spencer's point was that, while evil exists among and within all people, the unique thing about Islamo-fascists is that their faith is not incidental to their crimes; it is the wellspring of them.

After hearing about how homosexuals are executed in several Muslim countries for the crime of.....being homosexual, a homosexual student got up and attempted to get the speaker to acknowledge some sort of moral equivalence between the discrimination that homosexuals face in the West and that which they face in the Muslim world.

Think about that. This person was so invested in his preconceived notion of moral relativism and Western sinfulness that he was prepared to sacrifice the very idea that he had a right to be alive in the interest of making his "point". This outwardly and openly gay member of a Gay Student Alliance couldn't understand where we get the moral authority to condemn those who would kill him just for living.

This would be the equivalent of an American Jew in the 1940's being denied access to a private golf club and saying, "well I might as well live in Nazi Germany". After this gay man insulted gay people everywhere by his conduct, a middle-aged Arab man came to the mic and berated the speaker for implying that it was wrong to execute homosexuals. God had forbidden sodomy, he said, and homosexuals deserved death for their conduct.

Was this man drowned out in boos and jeers, berated as the provincial and hateful bigot that he so clearly was? No. Why? Because he was an Arab. And Arabs of course, in the worldview of the young gay man and the student audience at large, are oppressed by the powerful, so all of their sins are somehow the fault of the West and, in any case, we have no moral authority to critique their "customs" or "culture".

Try telling a neo-con that Iraq posed no conceivable threat to the United States in 2003 and that the invasion was manifestly illegal. Try telling a big-government liberal that welfare has destroyed the black family. Try discussing Victorian literature with a brick wall.

These anecdotes should make it clear to use that this mentality is poisoning out minds and our country. There are millions of Americans who would find fault in George W. Bush or Bill Clinton if one of them cured cancer. Millions. There are millions more who have their mind made up, our current president included, and go through life seeking out reinforcing "facts" from the growing ranks of the equally incurious, the auto-lobotomized masses, where free speech is only free because it isn't worth anything anymore.

Why War Won't Work

Amid all the loose talk of how Iraq is the new Vietnam, we need only look at recent history and a few hundred miles to the east of Baghdad to realize that Iraq is in fact the new Afghanistan. Afghanistan, of course, is still Afghanistan as well, which is bad enough. The truly intriguing parallel for the American war in Iraq is the Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Like the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Americans in Iraq encountered little effective resistance during their initial invasion and their drive to the capital. They then declared their mission to be accomplished and set about initiating a political process that would safeguard the interests of the invading power. They left years later humiliated, bloodied, bankrupted, their acts of "liberation" having served only to spawn innumerable new enemies.

Despite what militarists perennially claim, war empowers none; it merely grants the more temporally powerful actor a euphemistic and tendentiously temporary illusion of power. Modern mechanized armies allowed the superpowers to thrust deeply into their defenseless prey's territory, but they simultaneously created a dependence on supply lines which snaked through terrain whose residents were as hostile as the natural environment itself.

To invade a country with a modern army is to create an instant and total dependence on roads, airfields, and communications networks. All of these are weaknesses for the "powerful", who realize once they reach their destination, be it Baghdad or Kabul, that they really have no power at all, as their entire enterprise can be derailed by relatively small bands of bandits.

The superpowers were able to control most major cities (the Americans in Iraq were rarely able to accomplish even that), but in the countryside all the armor in the world could not conceal their vulnerability. They controlled only what their weapons could destroy, but every time something was destroyed, new enemies were created. Therefore, their weapons were useless.

The way to defeat big weapons is not through ever bigger weapons, but through little war (guerrilla being Spanish for "little war"). For some reason, despite all its vaunted "rationality", this elemental truth is something that most of the global north never grasped (I am tempted to say "the West", but the Soviets fell into the same trap).

In both countries, the superpowers repeatedly explained how their armies could never be defeated in battle. And, just as sure, they blamed the guerrillas for not lining up in uniform before the tanks and gunships of the invaders. The USSR and the USA would have won these wars if their enemies had fought according to superpower doctrine. But, unfortunately for the superpowers, poor nations are neither disproportionately stupid nor disproportionately suicidal.

For years, the superpowers floundered in Afghanistan and Iraq, insisting that it had won every tactical battle, slaughtering at will an enemy with precisely zero airplanes or helicopters, but never winning. Large weapons are of no use against little warriors, and a guerrilla can run away quicker than a tank can turn its massive turrets to fire a body-sized bullet at him.

In both countries, the superpowers maintained a level of approximately 140,000 soldiers for years. The superpowers could not use their most destructive weapons (nuclear) because one can not control what one has totally destroyed. Even lesser weapons (by their standards) such as heavy bombers, tanks, and artillery were totally useless against small groups of guerrillas.

In fact, these weapons were worse than useless; they were counterproductive, since their use resulted in the deaths of innocents, which swelled the guerrillas' ranks. This did not stop the "rational" armies from using overwhelming force, of course.

What was actually achieved by the use of overpowering conventional forces? The Soviets got to Kabul. The Americans got to Baghdad. There, they became the proud owners of chaos. Their weapons were useless, and their fundamental weakness was laid bare for the world to see. Put simply, what can be achieved by war is not worth fighting for, and what is worth fighting for can not be achieved by war.

The irrationality of force, and specifically of large scale destruction, applies to nuclear weapons just the same as standing armies. We have seen that nuclear weapons did precisely no good for the "powerful" in Afghanistan or Iraq. In addition, they were utterly useless in preventing the dissolution of the USSR itself.

The stance of the "rational" powers regarding nuclear weapons would be comedic if it were not so manifestly tragic. As we can see in the present hysteria over Iran, our 30,000 fussion weapon arsenal is a "stabilizing" force governed by "responsible" men. Iran's 1 fission weapon, of course, would represent a "destabilizing" force governed by "irresponsible" men. Ah yes, the insatiably bloodthirsty Persians, who have not launched a war since the foundation of the United States.

It is necessary, for the "rational" paradigm to conceal its decrepit intellectual foundations, to pretend that a single Iranian bomb is a greater threat than the 50,000 bombs held by the United States and Russia. One Iranian bomb could destroy Tel Aviv, they say, as if 50,000 bombs, rational or not, could not destroy every living organism on the Earth.

The myth, of course, is suspended on a thread of racism which begs the listener to believe that certain countries are so eminently level-headed that they should be allowed the authority to end life on earth, while other countries are so inherently psychotic that they must not be allowed to deter foreign invasion.

Iran, of course, is not rational (rational being defined by, for, and of the West). "Rational" countries squander blood and treasure on ultimately useless military machinery, which they insist on using anyway in the commission of aggression against defenseless enemies. Underpinning this propensity for violence is the capability to destroy all that ever was.

"Irrational" countries invest their comparatively puny treasure in"defense". "Irrational" nations define "defense" as "defense". "Rational" countries, such as our, define "defense" as "the ability to incinerate all of God's creation".

So, the good news is that war is unnecessary and counterproductive in today's world. The bad news is that the ones with all the weapons will be the last to realize this.

Read This

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/Al_Gore's_Inaugural_Address.html

Control

The ultimate tragedy of the Iraq War, at least for those who are still alive, is that the United States and could have been rid of Saddam Hussein in 1991 with no economic investment, no major military commitment, and without the undying enmity and hatred that it has engendered due to the 2003 invasion. The United States passed on this golden opportunity, however, because of one illusory and self-defeating obsession: control.


In March of 1991, Saddam Hussein was on the ropes. The American-led coalition had mauled his armies, eviscerated his infrastructure, and made it clear to his subjects that his delusions of grandeur had set their country back by a half century. Emboldened by the exhortations of George H.W. Bush, they revolted against the Ba'athist regime.


You don't hear much about it these days, but the twin insurgencies of 1991 (Kurdish and Shi'ite) gained control, albeit briefly, of all of Iraq except for Baghdad and the Sunni triangle. Saddam was finished, and he knew it. Unless...unless he was allowed to crush the rebellions with massive, indiscriminate, Saddam-ish levels of violence visited over 80% of his country.

Normally, this would not have been a difficult thing for Saddam to conceive or to execute, but in March of 1991, there was a mitigating factor. Actually, there were 500,000 mitigating factors. American soldiers. In Iraq.


The half a million Americans sent to drive Saddam from Kuwait were in the south of Iraq following their victory, and thousands of them witnessed the slaughter of Shi'ite rebels. The United States could have had its regime change in 1991 with minimal cost. Americans were then in a physical, moral, legal, political, and logistical position to ensure the demise of Saddam Hussein at very low cost.


A direct entry into the fight would not have been necessary. An invasion and occupation of Baghdad would not have been necessary. All it would have taken would have been for the Americans to ban Saddam Hussein's government from flying helicopters. Hussein was banned from flying planes in the ceasefire agreement. The helicopter loophole was allowed, so the story goes, to facilitate travel for the government to more readily rebuild its shattered country. What the helicopters were used for in practice was to slaughter tens of thousands of the 80% of Iraqis who rose up against their government.


If Americans had banned the use of helicopters by the Ba'athists, one of two things would have happened. The first possibility is that the Ba'athists would have been defeated by the insurgency, as they would have been deprived of their one remaining way to project power over their brutalized nation.

The second is that the Ba'athists would have ignored the ban, being fully aware that to give up their helicopters would be to give up their power. In this scenario, if one knows anything about American weaponry, those gunships could have been shot out of the sky from miles away without Americans being in the line of fire, therefore assuring the success of the insurgents with no American blood being spilt.

Instead, the Bush 41 administration opted to allow the massacres to be carried out, literally in full view of heavily armed American soldiers in many cases. Of all the crimes that Bush 43 catalogued in enumerating his faux justifications to break every international law on the books, this was the bloodiest: the Ba'athist regime killed between 100,000 and 300,000 Kurds and Shi'ites in early 1991 when, as opposed to Hussein's other crimes, the United States could have reached out and stopped him.

Why? Why did the United States not allow Iraqis to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a goal which the United States clearly endorsed, to say the least, a dozen years later? Why did the United States allow Saddam Hussein to commit his greatest crime right in front of American soldiers? The answer, sad and simple to say, is control.

The American policy was that, while it would be great to be rid of Saddam Hussein, it would be a disaster if Iraqis were liberate themselves. No, only Americans could liberate the Iraqis. Since liberating the Iraqis in 1991 would have cost a great deal of American blood (because Hussein actually had WMD at that time), the Iraqis would have to wait until the Americans were ready.

It did not matter that Iraqis were willing to give their lives to liberate themselves, nor did it matter that they had already wrested control of most of Iraq from the dictator; what mattered, all that mattered to the Americans, was that an indigenous revolution like the one killed in its crib in 1991 would not have been under total American control. And that, of course, was unacceptable.

And what has been the cost of this insistence on total control? Well, the "realists" among us need not worry ourselves about the quarter million Iraqis slaughtered in a month after taking George H.W. Bush seriously when he called on the Iraqi people to overthrow Hussein to stop the bloodshed of the Gulf War. After all, we didn't kill all those people; Saddam Hussein did. And it gave us pretty good propaganda to use against him twelve years later.

And the "realists" could also brush aside the 500,000 deaths during the 1990's that resulted directly from the embargo on medical and water purification technology entering Iraq. After all, those deaths were "collateral damage" in the effort to "contain" Saddam Hussein, who, of course, was only still in power because the United States had allowed him to crush the insurgents of 1991.

So far, we're up to about 750,000 civilian dead in the interest of avoiding an "unpredictable" regime in Baghdad in 1991. That's more than the American dead of World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Put together. And they were all civilians.

In 2003 the United States decided, twelve years after the Iraqi people had, that it was time for the Iraqi people to be "liberated". That liberation has cost one million lives since the American invasion. Millions more have fled Iraq. If you look at the population of Iraq in 1991 and the population of Iraq now, nearly a third are dead or driven out of their country. That's the equivalent of 100 million of Americans. All for control. If this is control, pray tell, what does chaos look like?

The irony is that, as it turns out, the United States was not exactly able to "control" the situation after it "liberated" the people who were deemed too "unpredictable" to liberate themselves when they had the chance. The last five years are the story of how, in retrospect, we may have wanted to allow the insurgents to win in 1991.

There would have been chaos and bloodshed, yes, but does anybody really believe that a third of the country would have been killed or exiled? That thousands of American soldiers would die? That a trillion American dollars would be spent? That the United States would be reviled around the world? That whatever regime took hold in 1991 would have refused to sell us oil? That they would have drank it instead?

Put plainly, does anyone really think the Iraqis are better off having been "liberated" by us than they would have been had they been allowed to "liberate" themselves twelve years ago?

This is what the desire for control reaps. We insisted in doing it our way, and we are totally unable to control the situation we have created. We create a paradigm where Iraq is our problem, where we cannot allow an "unpredictable" situation there, where the Iraqi people must not be allowed to liberate themselves and where their deaths, all million and more of them, are erased as being born of noble intention, while Saddam's victims, far fewer than ours, serve to justify our own killing.

The Ashes

American exceptionalism had to die somewhere, and how fitting it is that it should breathe its last breath where civilization breathed its first. The sands of Mesopotamia, and the fertile terrain between its twin rivers, saw the rise of law, writing, and the concept of citizenship. Millenia later, it is the witness to the terminal decline of the nation that was meant to most perfectly crystallize the fundamentals of civilization and of liberty.

What a sad indictment of our nation that as soon as we had the material wealth to pursue the illusion of domination, we lept at it. This is not an indictment only of our morality and our sanity, but also of our intelligence, since no prior empire had as extensive a list of examples that should have dissuaded us from pursuing this ruinous course.

How delusional we have proven to be. We reject the notion that we have anything in common with prior empires, and in so doing only quicken our own demise. Prior empires, we tell ourselves, sought aggrandizement, material gain and prestige through aggression and intimidation. We on the other hand, are the paragons of benevolence, the crystallization of virtue. We invade to aid, we kill to uplift, we destroy to empower.

So deluded is our zeitgeist that we lack the ability to honestly assess our self-interest. The basis of our wealth and power is oil. If we were denied oil, our economy would crash and our armies would idle. Yet we cannot even bring ourselves to admit that we need oil and that we are prepared to kill to ensure that this precious commodity is supplied to us by people that we can come to some sort of accommodation with.

Since we could not come to an accommodation with Saddam Hussein, we overthrew him. Both the American government and the American people, however, were constitutionally incapable of admitting a rather unembarassing truth: oil is our lifeblood, and we'll kill to secure it. Instead, we told ourselves and the world that we ignored the UN to save the UN, that we destroyed Iraq to save Iraq, that we sacrificed our soldiers on the altar of liberty for all and for the right, over all, to define others' liberty for ourselves.

A more honest empire would have secured the oil fields and left, lacking the inclination to dictate to the Iraqis or the self-importance to convince itself that this was a worthy endeavor. It would not have spent 400 million dollars a day to ensure "freedom" to anyone, as if anyone could be made free by an occupation army and a torrential influx of foreign currency.

So deep runs the delusion that to admit to it is to admit to "defeat". This despite the fact that the obvious goal of the war, securing oil supplies, was achieved before the war even started, which could lead one to conclude that the war was unnecessary. Since we can not leave Iraq until we pacify Iraq, and since we can not pacify Iraq, we can never leave Iraq.

We justify this masochism in a manner that must surely ring bizarre to every other country on earth and that would surely seem just as self-destructive to every past empire. We tell ourselves, or at least a great many of us do, that we must "support the troops" because they are dying (but mostly killing) "for us". The first step on the path to sanity is to reject this notion out of hand.

American soldiers are not killing and dying in Iraq for "us", unless "us" is the board of Exxon or Halliburton. And that is no Marxist critique; objectively speaking, the Iraq War is the biggest financial fraud ever perpetrated on the American people. American soldiers are likewise not fighting for everyday citizens such as myself. They are not, to paraphrase the infantile twerps whose radio shows reach tens of millions "fighting for my freedoms".

Am I more free than I was before the invasion of Iraq? I certainly don't feel more free. Was Saddam Hussein poised to send his fedayeen to shut down newspapers in the United States and to infiltrate police forces with officers who would search homes and cars without probable cause? Anyone who finds fit to utter such nonsense has it incumbent upon them to explain how American soldiers in Iraq are fighting for "my freedom."

American soldiers are not making me "safer". They are not protecting my "way of life". They are not fighting for my "freedom". They are fighting for an illusion, they are killing for a reputation that does not deserve to be defended. They have kidnapped Iraq, and now they have killed it. Good intentions, which never really existed anyway, are no defense. Any crime carried out in the commission of a kidnapping aggravates that crime; it does not excuse it.

The lives of empire do not follow arcs, with equal inclines and declines. Empires, rather, fall with remarkable rapidity. If I could invent a time machine, I'd go back to 1983 and bet every "expert" in the world that the Soviet Union would not exist in 10 years. The American decline will be just as sudden, just as unforeseen by "experts", and just as terminal.

The tragedy is that it did not need to be this way. Uniquely endowed among all empires, the United States enjoys unparalleled wealth and might, a homeland physically invulnerable to conventional attack, and a continent full of temperate agricultural zones and indigenous industry.

And we have forsaken it all. For what? For cheaper can openers from China and for a war of aggression that has killed a million and that will kill a million more before we admit that we may have reason for pause.