DAVID STOCKMAN ON IMPERIAL WASHINGTON - THE NEW GLOBAL MENACE. 

By Tyler Durden - David Stockman - APR 11, 2023 .

There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington —  not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or the rubble of what remains of Raqqa. Imperial Washington has become a global menace owing to what didn’t happen in 1991 (when the USSR collapsed). 

At that crucial inflection point, Bush the Elder should have declared “mission accomplished” and parachuted intothe great Ramstein Air Base in Germany to begin the demobilization of America’s war machine.

And that tells you all you need to know about why Washington is ensnared in its Forever Wars and is the very reason there is still no peace on earth.

Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991, Washington opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George H. W. Bush’s petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.

We will momentarily get to the 52-year-old error that holds that the Persian Gulf is an American lake and that the answer to high oil prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet.

Suffice it to say here that the answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices —  a truth driven home in spades by the oil busts of 2009, 2015 and 2020, and the fact the real price of oil today (2022 $) is no higher than it was in the mid-1970s.

But first it is well to remember that in 1991 there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield, MA, Lincoln, NE, or Spokane, WA, when the Cold War ended.

The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it with a GDP about the size of Philadelphia.

And China’s GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia’s. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the People’s Bank of China’s printing press, which would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient Chinese threat to national security was never in the cards.

The First Gulf war — A Catastrophic Error

Confronted with the greatest opportunity for global peace in nearly a century, George H. W. Bush did not hesitate: Upon the advice of his retainers, he immediately elected the path of war in the Persian Gulf.

This endeavor was hatched by Henry Kissinger’s economically illiterate protégés at the National Security Council and Bush’s Texas oilman, Secretary of State James Baker. 

They falsely claimed that the will-o’-the-wisp of “oil security” was at stake and 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the sands of Arabia.

That was a catastrophic error and not only because the presence of “crusader” boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended the CIA-recruited and trained mujahideen of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when the Soviet Union collapsed.

The CNN-glorified war games in the Gulf during early 1991 also further empowered another group of unemployed crusaders. 

Namely, the neocon national-security fanatics who had misled Ronald Reagan into a massive military buildup to thwart what they claimed to be an ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear-war-winning capabilities and global conquest.

So when the defense budget went from $134 billion in 1980 to $304 billion in 1989, this unprecedented 130% peacetime rise (+50% in inflation-adjusted dollars) went overwhelmingly to the building of a globe-spanning conventional forces armada that was utterly unneeded in a world with or without the Soviet Union.

Accordingly, everything on land, sea and air was upgraded and expanded. 

This included the 600-ship Navy and 12 carrier battle groups; massive upgrades of the fleet of M1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles; and endless procurement of cruise missiles, fixed wing planes, rotary aircraft, air-and sea-lift capacity, surveillance and electronic warfare capacity and a black budget so large as to dwarf anything that had gone before.

In a word, the misguided Reagan defense buildup enabled the invasions and occupations that commenced almost instantly after the Soviet demise. 

That is to say, the neocon defense buildup of the 1980s fathered the “Forever Wars” of the 1990s and beyond.

Absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who had pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. 

They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiescence in their horrific rule in any event.

But with the USAF functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell had been opened wide, unnecessarily.

In any event, bombing did not defeat ISIS; it just temporarily made more of them.

Ironically, what did extinguish the Islamic State was the Assad military, the Russian air force invited into Syria by its official government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. It was they who settled an ancient quarrel that had never been any of America’s business.

But Imperial Washington was so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it could not see the obvious. Accordingly, 31 years after the Cold War ended and several years after Syria and friends extinguished the Islamic State, Washington has learned no lessons.

The American Imperium still stalks the planet for new monsters to destroy — presently in the precincts of Russian-speaking eastern and southern Ukraine that are utterly irrelevant to America’s peace and security.

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