Monday, November 26, 2012

American Dreams

The problem with American involvement in distant lands was very well summarised, coincidentally, in 1960s World War II film - Judgment at Nuremberg. In the movie, Col. Lawson, playing the public prosecutor in the trial of four judges of the Third Reich remarked to Judge Hayward over drinks - 'We Americans are not cut out to be occupiers. We are new at it, and not very good at it. We like to forgive easily. We like to give the other guy a chance. That's the American way. We've got a built-in inferiority complex.' This identity crisis of the United States gets it embroiled in dilemmas time and again in its relentless pursuit of security, justice and change the world over. America is relatively new to the centuries old colonial pursuit of European powers, and has developed a warped understanding of what constitutes homeland security as well as the costs and benefits inherent in economic and political aims in foreign lands.

To fully grasp the extent of this dilemma, one must turn the pages of history and you will find that American foreign policy was an immensely successful one in so far as it remained primarily a trade policy, i.e when it focused on opening 'markets' overseas for corporations, the true American export. Both the First and Second World Wars proved to be hugely beneficial to this trade with American contribution to the rearmaments of countries, and it actually had a fantastic business model going for itself, until Pearl Harbor necessitated military involvement to exact revenge. And there has been no more brutal a revenge extracted over a treacherous enemy as America extracted over Japan. But the ensuing misplaced fears of Bolshevism running over the world, much like Nazism, sowed the seeds of the present condition of the United States, with military spending rising to illogical levels for a country relatively secure geographically from attempts at annihilation!

From a senseless bulwark development costs close to 40% of GDP in he beginning of the Cold War era, America continued to plough billions of tax dollars evey year over the next few decades to fund a security program against the veritable nuclear-armed alien invasion. No leader on Earth possibly ever harboured a belief that it would be plausible and profitable to attack a geographically secured American continent through conventional means, including Adolf Hitler, who was candid even in Mein Kampf, of the foolishness of such a misadventure. An army of madmen would sooner risk another shot at lebensraum in the East, Napoleon and Hitler's Operation Barbarossa being forgotten, than try an occupation of the American continent through military means. But by building imaginary scenarios across the world on 'threats to American interests',the Americans turned from profitable arms exporters to wannabe colonists in a post colonial world whose erstwhile rulers had already learnt their lessons and started embarking on nation rebuilding and non-militaristic domination of their spheres of influence. And quite intelligently, the Western European powers outsourced, so to speak, their military adventurism to the United States which quite foolishly took over the mantle of global papa. Cut through to the present War On Terror, a justifiable war, but undertaken on a scale that is not only unnecessary but also hopelessly counter-productive in that it ends up feeding militancy. America has spent 1.3 trillion taxpayer dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan, spending between 40 to 50 per cent of the nation's tax collections to secure a continent from thugs with AK47s and minds hypnotized to die in vain. The spending is done in so unsystematic and belligerent a manner as to render the Department of Defense's accounts 'unauditable' till 2017, and a nation higher over an already stiff fiscal cliff over which nothing awaits but death for the US and it's veritable pied pipers of Hamlin. America, and possibly, the entire world, are in the midst of a deeper recession and are more insecure today thanks to these militants, but more thanks to Washington that has made monsters of the rats hiding behind desolate mountains in Af-Pak. The American Dream is really now a Global Nightmare.

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