Road to Empire Darkening, Narrowing

The cosmic clock of history is ticking on how long the USA can continue to stubbornly follow its imperial policy in Iraq. The road under that policy's wheels is paved with what were once seen as good intensions. Now events have trumped policy.

Maybe you once thought it was a good idea to up and depose a dictator halfway around the world, to look for his supposedly hidden weapons, and to replace him with an invented-out-of-thin-air democracy. However, no matter what you might have once believed about the honesty of the invasion of Iraq's planners, that was then. Get over it.

Today, William F. Buckley is on target with his observation: "Our mission has failed because Iraqi animosities have proved uncontainable by an invading army of 130,000 Americans."

Yes, events that we here in Virginia strain to understand are now driving the bus in Iraq. America's wishful ability -- with its empire-building policy, and its military might -- to influence the moves of the runaway bus is fast fading out of the picture. Hey! poor old Uncle Sam isn't even on the bus, anymore, he's running along beside.

If you're old enough to remember, don't you have that Vietnam-era sense of dread that news of what’s actually happening over there, trouble-wise, is being systematically minimized by official sources? So, I wonder how long we truly have before the irritant of America's ongoing occupation of Iraq splatters the conflict across borders into a regional religious war -- Sunnis vs. Shi'ites.

Meanwhile, I have no trouble picturing the last American helicopters taking off, with disposable people clinging on... and dropping off. How long does America have to get its military forces out of Iraq before it's way too late?

Justin Raimondo, writing for Ether Zone, opines on all that with his "On the Road to Empire":

“As Iraq descends into chaos and the nascent Iraqi state implodes even before it is born, support for a continued U.S. military presence in the region is plummeting: a new poll shows a whopping 62 percent of Americans think the war is going badly, up from 54 percent just last month. The really shocking news for the administration, however, is that a Zogby poll, conducted in cooperation with Le Moyne College, shows 72 percent of U.S. troops serving in Iraq believe we ought to get out by the end of the year...”