The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle
Commentary on the Flux of Events
Last night President Bush climaxed a week of national bucking-up with a rough outline for American military action and the ultimatum to Afghanistan, the poorest and wretchedest country in Asia. It appears pretty certain that we are going into their mountain redoubt and try to kick their scrawny asses. I give Bush a B for awkward delivery but an A for straight talk. Whether it is possible to kick Afghanistan's ass is a pretty ripe question.
The conventional wisdom reverberating around the media-waves says that Afghanistan has historically defeated three empires: First Alexander the Great, then the British, finally the Soviet Union. The truth, I reckon, is not so cut-and-dried. Alexander's empire was already ridiculously hyper-extended by the time he got to central Asia. Just how do you suppose he was going to administrate all that territory from back home in the Mediterranean?
We've heard many recitations of Kipling's poem about the poor redcoats slaughtered by merciless Afghani warriors this past week, but the truth is that England essentially remained in control there until the Raj was disbanded after World War II, when a bankrupted England lost its capacity for farflung colonial administration.. The Soviets were defeated by a.) their own demoralized system and the demoralized army that was propping it up, combined with b.) the forbidding Afghan terrain, and c.) ridiculous political goals.
This is not to say that America will have a satisfactory outcome in Afghanistan, but if our goals are limited to putting the chief operators of Taliban out of business, and running Osama Bin Laden into a rathole, we may succeed. It remains to be seen whether even the slightest aggression on America's part arouses a greater trans-national Jihad against us. I think it will. Despite this week's tireless diplomacy by Secretary of State Powell, the truth remains that a lot of ordinary people in that part of the world hate us rabidly.
I believe the US will go after Iraq next, perhaps even at the same time -- using Afghanistan as a diversion. Whether you believe we have a score to settle with Sadaam Hussein, or not, there remains the problem of his biological-and-nuclear weapons stockpiles, and I would be very surprised if US authorities were not terribly anxious to get them out of his hands.
Under the circumstances, events may easily ramp out of control. If the Saudi kingdom crumbles, we will have a very hard time controlling the infrastructure of oil there -- the wellheads, pipelines, and terminal facilities. There will certainly be no shortage of saboteurs, and there are not enough American soldiers to guard it all, let alone control the territory of the whole Arabian peninsula. Got knows where that may lead, but most likely to badly disrupted world oil markets.
Alan Greenspan made a great effort yesterday to declare that the American economy is undergirded by deep essential soundness, but this is complete bullshit. Our economy has been based on creating suburban sprawl and then furnishing it, and without regular absolutely dependable supplies of very cheap oil, that particular game is over. Of course, we could generate a hell of a lot of internal economic activity by retrofitting the everyday environment for a new post-cheap-oil economy -- for instance, restoring all those railroad networks between cities 500 miles apart -- but we're more apt to be stuck in the psychology of previous investment, the mindset that we're entitled to a drive-in utopia no matter what eventsin reality dictate. And then we'll be set for a fight here at home over the table scraps of the 20th century.