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American Empire Produces 11 Global Winners -- Hint: They Aren't the Good Guys
Predicting the fortunes of Osama bin Laden, China, Pakistan and Israel.November 4, 2010
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Doesn’t it strike you as odd, though, that this mania for handicapping remains so parochially electoral? After all, it could be applied to so many things, including the state of the world at large as seen from Washington. So consider this my one-man tip sheet on what you could think of as the global midterms, focused on prospective winners and losers, as well as those “on the cusp,” including crucial countries and key personalities.
Prospective Winners
Osama bin Laden: Who woulda thunk it? More than nine years after 9/11, Osama bin Laden and his number two compadre, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be alive, well, and living comfortably in the Pakistani borderlands with not a cave in sight, according to the best guesstimate of a “NATO official who has day-to-day responsibility for the war in Afghanistan.” With the globe’s “sole superpower” eternally on his trail -- admittedly, the Bush administration took a few years off from the “hunt” to crash and burn in Iraq -- he’s a prospective global winner just for staying alive. But before we close the books on him, he gets extra points for a singular accomplishment: with modest funds and a few thousand ragtag masked recruits, swinging on monkey bars and clambering over obstacles in “camps” in Afghanistan, he managed to lure the United States into two financially disastrous, inconclusive wars, one in its eighth year, the other in its tenth. To give credit where it’s due, he had help from the Bush administration with its dominatrix-like global fantasies. Still, it’s not often that someone can make his dreams your nightmares on such a scale.
The Taliban: - snip -
If, more than nine years later, the Taliban -- the Taliban! -- is attracting groups that theoretically loath it, have few cultural affinities with it, and long fought or opposed it, then you know that the American campaign in Afghanistan has hit its nadir. Thanks to us and our man in Kabul, the Taliban is increasingly the fallback position, the lesser of two disasters, for Afghan nationalists. This helps explain why more than $27 billion dollars in American training funds hasn’t produced an Afghan military or police force capable of or willing to fight, while Taliban guerrillas, lacking such aid, fight fiercely anyway.
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China: Here’s the bad news when it comes to China -- a weak third quarter dropped the growth rate of its gross domestic product to 9.6%. Yep, you read that right: only 9.6% (down from 10.3% in the second quarter). For comparison, the U.S rate of growth leaped from 1.7% in the second quarter to 2.3% in the third quarter, with some experts predicting no growth or even shrinkage by year’s end. Make no mistake, China has its lurking problems, including an overheating urban real-estate market verging on bubbledom (which, post-2008, should cause any leadership to shudder) and tens of millions of peasants left in dismal poverty in the long decades when “to get rich” was “glorious.” Still, the country has managed to pass Japan for number-two-global-economic-power status, to corner a startling range of future global energy reserves so that its economy can drink deep for decades to come, and to forge a front-running position in various renewable-energy fields. Its leaders have accomplished all this thanks to economic muscle, diplomacy, and cash (think: bribes) without sending its soldiers abroad or fighting a war (or even a skirmish) overseas. They have even learned how to be thoroughly belligerent while relying only on economic power. Check out, for instance, the over-the-top way they crushed Japan in a recent stand-off over a Chinese trawler captain in Japanese custody, wielding only the threat to withhold rare earth metals (necessary to various advanced industrial processes), 95%-97% of which are, at the moment, produced by China. We’re definitely talking global winner here.
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Prospective Losers- snip -
Barack Obama Company: He had the numbers (in the polls and in Congress) and the popularity in early 2009. He could have done almost anything. But first, in the key areas of foreign and economic policy, he surrounded himself with the old crew, the deadest of heads, and the stalest Washington thinking around. While this was presented as an Ivy League fest of the best and the brightest, so far their track record shows them to be politically dumb and dumber. They missed out on jobs (about as simple and basic as you can get), and took a dismal year of review to double down twice on a war from hell. Now, the president stands a reasonable chance in 2012 of turning over to a new (possibly far more dismal) administration an even more disastrous Afghan War, an unfinished Iraq crisis, a Guantanamo still unclosed, “don’t ask, don’t tell” still in place (who says the coming Congress will care to do Obama’s bidding on this one, now that he’s bypassed the courts), and a jobless nonrecovery or worse -- and that’s just to start down the path of DisObamapointment.
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