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Lorenzo's
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The Secret's Out: the US is Weak
(Michael Neumann, Counterpunch, February 28, 2003)
9-11 didn't just challenge America's hegemony; it challenged its sovereignty. Sovereignty is what defines a state, and political philosophers generally agree that it involves at least one hard-nosed requirement: a monopoly on the use of force in a geographic area. . . . Naturally the monopoly is never complete . . . The attempts to portray 9-11 as a crime which the US has inflated into a geopolitical excuse are misguided. No crime of the sort judicial systems address has ever had such stature. A few more such attacks, and you would no longer have a sovereign state. Yet thousands of intelligence chiefs and rebel leaders all over the world must have said: "Hell, I could get twenty guys together with box cutters... ." And by now, they must be pretty damn sure they could get away with it, too. 9-11 raised a faint but distinct possibility that the US might, with bad enough luck, collapse, in years rather than decades. . . . But the US can muscle its way into any oil goodies it wants without war, and it does not need to cow an Arab world already cowed almost into the ground. It doesn't need to get anything, and it won't; Iraq is a can of worms. It needs to prove something, the same thing the thug needs to prove; its ferocity and aggressiveness. Iraq is really the only place it can do this, because Saddam Hussein is the goldilocks' choice of enemies: not too powerful, like North Korea, not too weak, like Libya, but just right, and an international pariah to boot. . . . US weakness is also manifest in its strategies, or rather in the strategies it pretends to itself it is following. Whatever the administration may believe, the push against Iraq does not implement a policy of pre-emptive strikes against potential threats, because such a policy would focus on the biggest threats first, or at least on substantial ones over insubstantial ones. Iraq isn't any substantial threat to the United States. And the US, it is clear, would never dare to implement such a policy against serious potential threats, like North Korea or China. The US is too weak to do that, and it doesn't want to admit it, even to itself.Were the US to realize just how weak it is, it be scared enough to take the measures it really needs to take for its own survival. It would understand that it cannot do without genuinely useful allies--not British twits, or Israeli goons who are happy to drag America down with them. . . . The only thing that could stop anti-American terrorism would be American opposition to Israel.

posted by Lorenzo 4:55 PM