In August 2010, when President Obama announced to much fanfare: “Consistent with our agreement with the Iraqi government, all of our troops will be out of Iraq by the end of next year,” did anyone really believe him?
Earlier this month, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates visited Iraq and raised the possibility of U.S. troops staying in Iraq beyond the agreed withdrawal date of 31 December, 2011.
Now, there has been talk of extending the U.S. military presense in Afghanistan beyond the pullout deadline. Here’s an excerpt of a New York Times article:
Talks on U.S. Presence in Afghanistan After Pullout Unnerve Region
First, American officials were talking about July 2011 as the date to begin the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then, the Americans and their NATO allies began to talk about transition, gradually handing over control of the war to the Afghans until finally pulling out in 2014. Now, however, the talk is all about what happens after 2014.
Afghanistan and the United States are in the midst of negotiating what they are calling a Strategic Partnership Declaration for beyond 2014.
Critics, including many of Afghanistan’s neighbors, call it the Permanent Bases Agreement — or, in a more cynical vein, Great Game 3.0, drawing a comparison with the ill-fated British and Russian rivalry in the region during the 19th and 20th centuries.
As Ann Wright reported after her last trip to Afghanistan on a peace delegation, the rapid and widespread construction of military bases in Afghanistan did not indicate a plan to withdraw, but rather a plan for a long term military occupation via a type of permanent bases agreement.
As Tom Engelhardt writes in Tom Dispatch “Sleepwalking into the Imperial Dark
What It Feels Like When a Superpower Runs Off the Tracks” these developments are symptomatic of America’s deep denial of its empire. He wonders what it must have felt like to be a citizen of an empire in decline:
at some point it must have seemed at least a little like this — truly strange, like watching a machine losing its parts. It must have seemed as odd and unnerving as it does now to see a formerly mighty power enter a state of semi-paralysis at home even as it staggers on blindly with its war-making abroad.
He concludes:
A post-imperial U.S. could, of course, be open to all sorts of possibilities for change that might be exciting indeed.
Right now, though, it doesn’t feel that way, does it? It makes me wonder: Could this be how it’s always felt inside a great imperial power on the downhill slide? Could this be what it’s like to watch, paralyzed, as a country on autopilot begins to come apart at the seams while still proclaiming itself “the greatest nation on Earth”?
I don’t know. But I do know one thing: this can’t end well.
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