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After the British parliament put the kibosh on following the American
punishment brigade to Syria, and then NATO, and the UN wrinkled their noses
at the project, well, that pretty much left President Obama to twist slowly,
slowly in the wind — washed, rinsed, and hung out to dry. It looks like
a watershed moment in the USA’s increasingly klutzy career as the
world’s hall monitor. International power relations are suddenly in
flux. A phase change has occurred causing all that was solid a few days ago
to melt into liquid.
The Iranians are having a good laugh, for now.
Mr. Assad of Syria responded with a beaming smirk. However, any sentient
observer can see this region of the world for what it is, a political
demolition derby which, left to its own blundering devices, would blow up the
whole arena when the last player sputters to a standstill.
First of all, it seems to me that extremists
in the Republican-dominated US House of Representatives have been quietly
searching for a pretext to impeach President Obama. Committing an overt act
of war without congressional approval would have been a good case, legally,
despite the fact that executive branch war-making has been absolutely the
rule for decades in Washington. The British parliamentary move against the
avid David Cameron pretty much begged the question for American legislators.
The foggy part is whether they would actually come back to Washington from
the fried dough alleys of their state fairs and mount a “debate”
about whether it would be a good or bad thing to whack Syria for gassing more
than a thousand of its own citizens.
Lately when America mounts a high moral horse
about how other nations behave, we have gone into these places and smashed
things up, bringing much more death and destruction than we anticipated. The
hope is always that some surgical military operation can correct a political
illness, but a cruise missile is not exactly a scalpel and once the patient
is blown to pieces it is rather hard to patch up the body politic again.
You’re just left, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a lot of bloody
fragments fought over by political rats and cockroaches.
Syria is a real crossroads both for
America’s policy in the region and for its position on the world stage.
The region is in a state of destructive turmoil that is likely to lead to the
further fall of regimes and the breakup of states. Many of these states are
figment nations anyway, with boundaries drawn in the 20th century
by the winners of the two world wars. The discovery of oil from North Africa
to Iran and beyond has been catastrophic for everybody in the world, but most
vividly for the exploding populations of these mostly desert states, which
could not have supported so many people without the artificial support of
petro-money. Now, faced with the specter of peak oil production, the whole
region is flying apart from the stress of population overshoot, including
countries like Syria which never produced much oil itself.
But the drama over the trade in the oil remaining
only becomes more intense. For instance, the position of Saudi Arabia,
pretending to sit quietly on the sidelines through all this, is curious.
There are rumors, unverified, that the gas incident in Syria happened because
Saudi Arabia sent canisters of Sarin to the Syrian
rebels, who then mishandled them and gassed their own neighborhood. The
world’s recent experience with so-called “intel
reports” about weapons has made everybody skeptical of claims made by
politicians that a particular country poses a danger to others.
Otherwise, there is a whole other strategic
realm of concerns around the petro trade and its financing that is totally
off the radar screen of the mainstream media. For instance, the sometimes
erratic but brilliant blogger Jim Willie describes the larger
struggle of Russia, Iran, China, and other interested
parties to displace the US dollar dominance in oil trade — in
particular a dollar based on increasingly sketchy US Treasury bonds, which
has deformed global banking, roiled currencies, and made the settling of
international accounts problematical for everybody else in the world. The
opposition to the US, and its client / partner Saudi Arabia, the story goes,
would replace the dollar with gold-backed oil trade and a logistical
work-around based on a growing pipeline system from Iran and beyond, in Asia,
to desperate customers in Europe. The implications are a collapse of the dollar
(and the US bond market), a wedge between European and American interests,
and a dominant partnership of oil-and-gas rich Russia with China — that
is, a major power shift from west-to-east.
Who knows how much of this has informed President
Obama’s decision process. The stall in the American whack-attack
against Syria may itself be a symptom of the swirling new conditions in world
finance and power relations. In any case, a great empire — which we
have been — can’t afford to make idle threats. The outcome of the
Syria melodrama may be that the US has been knocked down a big step in its
ability to project power without terrible consequences to itself.
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