The U.S. withdrawal from Iraq marks the end America’s great expectations

From the Washington Post, historian, West Point grad, and a Vietnam veteran who retired with the rank of colonel, Andrew Bacevich, on the meaning of the Iraq withdrawal:

Launched in 2003 amid assurances of a rapid victory, the war is ending nearly nine years later with the United States settling for considerably less. Undertaken to demonstrate our supremacy, the war has instead revealed the stark limits of American power. It has laid waste to the post-Cold War era of great expectations once thought to define the future.

And

Back in 1945, the United States had accrued vast stores of moral and political capital. Thanks to Iraq, those stores are now all but depleted.

After Iraq, the future no longer bears the label “Made in the USA.” In places such as China, alternatives to liberal democracy stubbornly persist and show no signs of flagging. Where demands for democracy sound the loudest — as in the Arab world — the outcome may not favor liberal values. Across Asia, Africa and Latin America, the American model, today damaged and more than slightly tarnished, is only one among several.

Confidence that globalization will (or should) define the economic future has taken a nose dive. While we’ve been making war, rising economic powers have been making hay, frequently at American expense. At home, meanwhile, deference to the market has produced corruption, recklessness and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Furthermore, even if globalization works for the some, it’s by no means certain that it works for the many — a point to which Occupy Wall Street protesters insist on calling attention and one that political leaders ignore at their peril.

Only in the realm of military power has American dominance remained unquestioned, as politicians and generals constantly assert. Yet after years of fighting in Iraq, and with the Afghan war and other “overseas contingency operations” continuing, the value of that claim is fading. No doubt U.S. forces have matchless combat capabilities. Yet the sad fact is that they cannot be relied upon to win. Merely avoiding defeat has become a staggeringly expensive proposition.

More here.

I've been following Bacevich for a couple of years now, and, as tickled as I am that he, a conservative, comes to many of the same conclusions I reach as a liberal, what's important about his writing is that he has one of the more compelling arguments out there right now about the state of our nation.

In brief, Bacevich's overall argument, in his books and essays, asserts that post Cold War triumphalism allowed capitalism to run wild, morphing what Bacevich calls the "production economy," which made the US economically powerful for decades, into a "consumption economy," which is all about credit and financial maneuvering: this transition has, in effect, hollowed out our domestic economic infrastructure, dissolving jobs and prosperity alike for most of the nation, while enriching the connected few. Meanwhile, vague fears that America is no longer relevant on the world stage have prompted the ruling class to look to the still strong military as a substitute for our former economic might.

The meaning of Iraq is that the military is not a substitute for economic might. Indeed, trillions of dollars later, such aggressive adventures are the exact opposite of a substitute for economic might.

So America is an empire in steep decline. The only real question for our future is how we're going to handle it. Will we admit our situation and intelligently plan for a soft landing that puts us as a nation in the best position possible given the circumstances? Or will we continue to delude ourselves that we're the greatest nation ever, fucking ourselves over, again and again, trying to prove it? There's a lot more than dignity on the line here.

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