President Obama and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta held a Pentagon presser today to unveil Obama's vision for a new and improved military strategy.
Call it Empire Lite. In a nutshell, the future means fewer boots and lots more drones.
There was a lot of talk about retaining the capacity to vanquish multiple aggressors at the same time. Leaving aside the fact that 1941 was the last time another country attacked the US, the tough talk seemed to ignore the last ten years of American military history.
Panetta talked as though we have stabilzed the middle east and can now shift our focus to the Asia Pacific region. The reality is that the middle east is far more volatile than it was ten years ago. The Iraq fiasco promises to be an open sore for years to come. Iran has far more influence today than it had before our meddling on both their eastern and western borders began ten years ago.
The two most stable countries in the region, Israel and Egypt, are both gradually becoming theocracies controlled by religious fanatics. The remaining stable arab dictatorships like Saudi Arabia will need American propping up until they run out of oil and we don't need them anymore. But Obama and Panetta look at this toxic stew and see stability.
Being totally delusional about the past allows them to be equally delusional about the future. Who are the multiple aggressors they plan to crush when we haven't been able to subdue the Taliban? We're going to keep China in line while a bunch of guys in sandals with fifty-year-old technology have fought us to a standstill in Afghanistan? How retarded do you have to be to believe this stuff?
It's all good news for the high-tech war profiteers though. What we've given up trying to do on the ground we're going to double down on with Predator drones and Hellfire missiles. While I guess that makes this a good news kind of day for the folks at General Atomic and Lockheed Martin, it marks another step in America's relentless march into irrelevance.
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