Bush's Tragic Legacy - How 9/11 Triggered America's Decline

[FarCenter]

The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center when Richard Armitage, at the time the US deputy secretary of state, spoke in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. "History begins today," he said.


In the coming decade, Armitage would turn out to be right -- except the politician could not have foreseen how tragic the history would be following the epochal event.

It is the history of the decline of the USA as a superpower.

Immediately before the attacks, this country was in full bloom -- like Rome at its peak, as TV host Joe Scarborough recalls today.

The Republican President George W. Bush had inherited a fat budget surplus from the Democrat Bill Clinton. In Kosovo, the US, which Madeleine Albright dubbed "the indispensable nation," had just shown the Europeans how it could resolve conflicts, even in their own backyard. Bill Gates and Microsoft were still cool.

Then came the planes, piloted by the followers of Osama bin Laden -- and for a brief moment, the superpower seemed even more powerful than ever. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat had himself photographed donating blood for the victims. Even the French all suddenly wanted to be Americans. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder promised "unlimited solidarity."

What followed was an unlimited mistake. Bin Laden had hoped to entangle the Americans in bloody wars. How well he would succeed in doing this, he probably could not have imagined himself.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,785405,00.html

[alfredo]

1. Matt Bors on bush's rubble speech

[dtexdem]

3. Yes, it's a real rubble rouser.

[alfredo]

5. Go. To. You. Room!

[WCGreen]

2. We were at the apex of our history...

A lot of stuff still needed to be done and yet it was a feel good even with the duffus in chief.

That was it.

Osama won.

[FarCenter]

4. Opinion - The Demoralized Nation

The battles waged by the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks are further proof of the fact that, on the whole, the country has fought the wrong wars in the wrong places at the wrong time ever since World War II. The Iraq war was like a last gasp. Now Obama is left to administer the twilight years of American hegemony.

Gerhard Spörl is SPIEGEL's opinion editor.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,785419,00.html

[izquierdista]

6. Rome at its peak?

I don't think so. The USA peaked in 1969, there's even a picture of spectacular achievement that sadly, cannot be replicated today:


It's fitting that America's long slide began the year Nixon was inaugurated, he was the fucker that began the Republican habit of picking the worst of two alternatives because it was "good for business". There was the possibility that Carter could halt the slide, after all, two years before he came along Congress finally figured out there was no "secret plan to end the war" and pulled the plug on Vietnam. But no, Americans wouldn't listen to Carter's sensibility on energy, and they sure were embarrassed that he "gave away" the Panama Canal. His chance to turn it around ended in the fall of 1980, when he didn't arrest the vice-Presidential candidate who was interfering with American foreign policy.

The government was able to tolerate small amounts of Republicans in government, like a sewage treatment plant can take a normal rainstorm, but 1980 was the storm that inundated the plant, and it hasn't worked right since. Clinton's administration looked phenomenal in comparison, but there was really only one thing he did right -- raise taxes to where they covered expenditures. That one right thing left a surplus at the end of his tenure that quickly burned a hole in Repub pockets. Unfortunately, his short term tax fix was more than offset by NAFTA and the end of Glass-Steagall, both of which he was behind and both of which are accelerating American decline.

Rome was rotting long before Odoacer showed up to "get government off the backs of the Romans", a line he borrowed from his elder cousin, Ronnie Reagan. Both of them arrived on the scene, surveyed the riches and invited their cronies to help themselves to the spoils. It took a long time to pick the carcass of the Western Roman Empire clean, as is currently happening with the United States. There's still a small bit of wealth that has not been sucked up by the vampire squids, and they will give the American carcass a couple of squeezes with their tentacles before they figure it is sucked dry and they move on.

[hifiguy]

7. I never thought I'd be saying this

but I think you are actually being too hard on Nixon. And I grew up hating Nixon as a matter of faith. My dad once remarked that the Trickster was "so crooked he had to be screwed into his pants" every morning and I totally agreed.

Nixon was to the left of Obama in terms of most domestic policies, and he was certainly more of a Keynesian than Obama. Nixon imposed wage/price controls, signed off on the EPA, and proposed a more progressive health care reform than the Insurance/Big Pharma Guaranteed Profits Act Obama agreed to/dreamed up. Given the Republicans that have come along since, give me a non-paranoid version of Nixon every time.

There are, doG knows, many reasons to despise Richard Nixon, but they lay with the man himself and not the quite reasonable and geographically/ideologically diverse Republican parth of his day. There were honest old-school conservatives like Barry Goldwater, moderates of the Ike stripe, and liberals like Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Chuck Percy among the Republican ranks of those years.

What doomed Carter was not his energy policy or the Panama Canal, it was the Iranian hostage crisis, which you rightly point out was manipulated by the Bush Crime Family for the benefit of the future King Ronnie the Simple.

[izquierdista]

9. Can't be too hard on Nixon

I was schooled by people who hated him since he first ran for Congress from Orange county. Tricky (as those who knew and detested him well called him) only gets points now for the things you rattled off. Back in the day, he was looking to: use WAGE/(price) controls to bash unions, pass an EPA that would shift business liability to the government, and use health care to help his buddies at Kaiser. He was well aware that the fascist state was the servant of corporations, and would always do their bidding.

I'll admit that there were reasonable Republicans back then, but Tricky was not one of them. When you look up "ratfucker" in the dictionary, there's his smiling face. The reason that "only Nixon could go to China" was because Americans wanted their lowest, most underhanded, nastiest politician they had dealing with the Chinese.

As a personal note, I was in attendance at one of the few public events Nixon and Agnew appeared at together. They were dedicating a hospital named in honor of Eisenhower, and the warmth those two exuded can only be compared to Siberia in January.

[Uncle Joe]

8. 12/12/00 triggered America's Decline, 9/11 and the aftermath were just the inevitable results.

Thanks for the thread, FarCenter.