The US Empire is in Terminal Decline
Chris Hedges: The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan will be one more signpost of the end of the American empire
RT / 26 Jul, 2021
The US empire is in terminal decline, and heading for a dystopian future. Yet no-one – not the generals, the politicians or the fawning MSM – will be held accountable for all the military follies that herald its imminent collapse.
The debacle in Afghanistan, which will unravel into chaos with lightning speed over the next few weeks and ensure the return of the Taliban to power, is one more signpost of the end of the American empire.
The two decades of combat, the one trillion dollars we spent, the 100,000 troops deployed to subdue Afghanistan, the high-tech gadgets, artificial intelligence, cyberwarfare, Reaper drones armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, and the Global Hawk drones with high-resolution cameras, Special Operations Command composed of elite rangers, SEALs and air commandos, black sites, torture, electronic surveillance, satellites, attack aircraft, mercenary armies, infusions of millions of dollars to buy off and bribe the local elites and train an Afghan army of 350,000 that has never exhibited the will to fight, failed to defeat a guerrilla army of 60,000 that funded itself through opium production and extortion in one of the poorest countries on Earth.
Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle, or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry.
Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military in late empire becomes unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders, and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.
The human tragedy – at least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan, and 37 million have been displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria, according to the Watson Institute at Brown University – is reduced to a neglected footnote.
Nearly all the roughly 70 empires during the last four thousand years, including the Greek, Roman, Chinese, Ottoman, Habsburg, imperial German, imperial Japanese, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, and Soviet empires, collapsed in the same orgy of military folly. The Roman Republic, at its height, only lasted two centuries. We are set to disintegrate in roughly the same time. This is why, at the start of World War I in Germany, Karl Liebknecht called the German military, which imprisoned and later assassinated him, “the enemy from within.”
Mark Twain, who was a fierce opponent of the efforts to plant the seeds of empire in Cuba, the Philippines, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, wrote an imagined history of America in the twentieth century in which its “lust for conquest” had destroyed “the Great Republic … [because] trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake.”
Twain knew that foreign occupations, designed to enrich the ruling elites, use occupied populations as laboratory rats to perfect techniques of control that soon migrate back to the homeland. It was the brutal colonial policing practices in the Philippines, which included a vast spy network along with routine beatings, torture, and executions, which became the model for centralized domestic policing and intelligence gathering in the United States. Israeli’s arms, surveillance and drone industries test their products on the Palestinians.
And I will destroy your high places, and cut down your images, and cast your carcasses upon the carcasses of your idols; and My soul shall abhor you. And I will make your cities waste and bring your sanctuaries unto desolation, and I will not smell the savor of your sweet odors. Leviticus 26:30-31
It is one of the dark ironies that it was the American empire, led by Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, which spawned the mess in Afghanistan. Brzezinski oversaw a multibillion-dollar CIA covert operation to arm, train, and equip the Taliban to fight the Soviets. This clandestine effort sidelined the secular, democratic opposition and assured the ascendancy of the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with the spread of its radical Islam into Soviet Central Asia, once Soviet forces withdrew.
The American empire would, years later, find itself desperately trying to destroy its own creation. In April 2017, in a classic example of this kind of absurd blowback, the United States dropped the “mother of all bombs” – the most powerful conventional bomb in the American arsenal – on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan that the CIA had invested millions in building and fortifying.
And upon them that are left alive of you, I will send a faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies; and the sound of a shaken leaf shall chase them; and they shall flee as fleeing from a sword, and they shall fall when none pursueth. And they shall fall one upon another, as it were before a sword, when none pursueth; and ye shall have no power to stand before your enemies. And ye shall perish among the heathen, and the land of your enemies shall eat you up. And they that are left of you shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’ lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with them. Leviticus 26:36-39
Joel Huan
The Mystery of Ephraim 
Truly can we be surprised that the Governments of this world partake in contradictory operations. It is very telling about a nation’s power when they resort to funding snd aiding their supposed enemies for the great game. In regards to techniques of control why even need to control when your population is so easily distracted by trite meaningless images and catchphrases of the day, a people who posses no knowledge of history, understanding of economics, and who have never lived through a total war on their soil and yet the machine grinds on. They don’t need to perfect any techniques of control they already have.