The end of the American Empire: All that's left is timid little men pretending to be good

By Thomas Fleming

Last updated at 8:15 PM on 26th October 2011

Thomas Fleming is editor of the American monthly, Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture

Eight years ago when George Bush and his advisers decided to invade Iraq, the only moral or legal justification they could dream up was Saddam Hussein's alleged possession of 'weapons of mass destruction.'  At the time, I derided this claim, in print and on radio and television.

I do not know whether anyone in the administration actually believed the lies that Colin Powell told the United Nations.  President Bush, probably, believed anything his father's friends, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld told him.  Powell himself says he was misinformed. 

Frankly, if I, without any particular information, knew he was wrong, he had no excuse for his mistake.  Besides, since much of Saddam's stock of WMD's had been given to him by our own government, we were hardly in a position to complain.

Impressionable: President Bush probably believed anything his father's friends, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld told him

As for Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their underlings and advisors -men like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz - truth hardly ever enters into any question.  Although uneducated men, they all, at some point in their lives, ran across Sir Henry Wotton's famous definition of the ambassador as an 'honest gentleman sent to lie abroad for his country'  and adopted it as a personal motto, albeit with two little changes:  None is an honest gentleman, and the lies they tell, while they may benefit themselves, their party, or some other paymaster, are only accidentally in the interest of the United States.

After I made my ritual denunciations of the invasion, a talkshow host or editor would inevitably ask, 'What should we do?  What's our strategy.'  I always gave the same reply:  Declare victory today and then get out.  

Yes, we shall lose, because this war is unwinnable - neither Bush nor Obama has ever taken the trouble to define what victory would look like - but better to admit defeat before we suffers thousands of casualties.

Bush and his chums: None is an honest gentleman

Thousands of casualties later, Obama has decided to cut and run, leaving our supposed allies in the lurch and telling the entire world that the United States cannot keep promises or carry out its commitments.  At least some good, then, is coming out of this debacle. Most of the allies we deserted--Vietnam's President Diem, the Shah of Iran, the Somozas in Nicaragua-cannot be interviewed, but it would  be amusing to hear what Hosni Mubarak has to say about this.  

In the early phase of the war, the Bush administration talked grandly of fighting Al-Quaeda in Iraq so that we would not have to fight them in the United States.  But it was the US invasion that brought Al-Quaeda into Iraq.  Applying Bush's logic to Britain, we should invade Britain, attack Muslims in London, to lure Al-Quaeda into a war on British soil.  

We have better grounds for invading the UK, which really does possess weapons of mass destruction, a thought that keeps me up at night, when I think of the men nominally in charge of the British government.  Tony Blair is as frightening as Bill Clinton, David Cameron almost as inept as George Bush.  Worse, both have been willing to do their American masters' bidding.  The reason debate on Europe was utterly pointless.  The British should not be pulling out of the EU but breaking the shackles that bind them to the United States and its failed imperialism.

'Tony Blair is as frightening as Bill Clinton, David Cameron almost as inept as George Bush'

As the war went on, we learned that it was about democracy, which we were determined to impose on the Iraqis, whether they wanted it or not.  Since absolutely no one in my country can define democracy, this was rather an open-ended goal.

Hillary Clinton has been claiming that one main point of all our Middle Eastern strategies is to liberate women. As one by one, the victims of our strategy adopt sharia law, Muslim women are being restored to the servile condition they have endured for over a thousand years. Hillary has some explaining to do in Tunisia.

If we had to go in, we should have got out as quickly as possible. If we had to stay, we should have contrived to stage-manage at least the illusion of victory. As it is, Obama has adopted the worst possible approach. 

Explanation: Hillary Clinton has been claiming that one main point of all our Middle Eastern strategies is to liberate women

At least, when Henry Kissinger was selling out our South Vietnamese allies, he and his fellow Nobel laureate Le Duc Tho lied to the world about the peace that had been cooked up between the United States and North Vietnam.  What followed was a bloodbath and a general sense that the United States was in decline.  Kissinger and Richard Nixon, howeverm were celebrated as great Machiavellians, as indeed they were.

With the departure of Rumsfeld and Cheney from the political scene, we have no more Machiavellians, only timid little men pretending to be good when they are merely too weak to be seriously evil.  Vladimir Putin and Hu Jintao are even now figuring out how to divide up the spoils of the American Empire.

Read Thomas Fleming's RightMinds blog here