no, not made up, am prepared for the drama to go from tepidly alarming to shout and scream critical :0)
in the meantime, stratfor sounds a bit less bullish ...
and should its suspicions come true, then death chant for the dollar, and when so, taxes go up, by interest rate, by inflation, by confiscation, and even by taxation
Geopolitical Diary: Washington's Loss of Control
It has been six years since Sept. 11, 2001. We have written an enormous amount on it and the events that came after. It would appear that there is nothing left to be said. But the truth is that Sept. 11 is a date that resonates. Its vibrations continue, and they continue to have unexpected consequences.
Gen. David Petraeus gave his testimony this week. Whatever one thinks of his views, it would have been a far-fetched idea, on Sept. 10, 2001, to imagine an Army general appearing before Congress, making the argument that the war in Iraq is not lost, but that given more time, it might be possible to achieve a degree of success.
That is what we mean by "resonates." Again, without judging the wisdom of the decisions involved, 9/11 caused U.S. forces to go to war in Afghanistan -- the last place that anyone, on Sept. 10, would have expected American troops to be fighting. The al Qaeda attack caused the United States to go to war in Iraq, where it encountered the last thing it expected: a well-armed and capable insurgency prepared to fight toe-to-toe with the Americans. The events of 9/11 took an American president who had a very different idea of what his presidency would look like, and made him redefine that presidency in a matter of hours. Whatever George W. Bush wanted his presidency to be, it became something very different on 9/11.
In thinking about 9/11, one thought keeps coming to mind: a loss of control. On that date, everything went out of control and in a very real sense, it has not yet come back into control. The president's instincts -- to increase the power of the government and strike out at the jihadists in order to reduce risk -- did not strike us as unreasonable at the time, nor does it seem unreasonable even in retrospect. What strikes us as most interesting is how the situation, taken as a whole, has not come under control in spite of Bush's best efforts.
This isn't to say that some things aren't in greater control than they were. John Kerry ran his presidential campaign asking if Americans are safer today than they were before 9/11. Oddly enough -- and who knew it at the time? -- the answer to the question is "yes," in the simple sense that there have been no further attacks against the United States. But if we ask a different question -- whether the United States is more in control than it was then -- a different answer has to be given.
If we look at the situation as a whole, the thing that has been lost is control. The United States does not have Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar. If we are to believe recent statements, the United States does not have control of the threat from al Qaeda. American troops are not in control of Afghanistan. They are not in control of Iraq. The United States does not seem to be able to get control of Iran. The Russians are no longer under Washington's control as they were in 2001. The Chinese are not more in control. Even Venezuela, Bolivia and Mexico are less under the control of the United States. The paradox of 9/11 is that the United States responded by trying to take control of the situation in a decisive way -- and the more decisively Washington tries to control the situation, the less controlled it becomes.
These ruminations are not intended to be an argument for "soft power," to argue that the way to have defeated al Qaeda was to have tried to understand their grievances and have a dialogue. It is simply to note that in the six years since 9/11, the single, remarkable thing about the world is that the United States, dedicated to bringing the situation under control, not only has failed to do so, but also is finding that more things are out of control than before.
It is easy to blame the president for this, and much blame does go to him. It happened on his watch and it is hard to argue that his choices were the wisest possible. But we do doubt that if Al Gore had become president, the world would look all that much different today. Al Qaeda achieved something it didn't perhaps intend or envision: It set in motion processes that reduced American control not only in the Muslim world, but in other places as well.
Petraeus made a plea for time to bring control to Iraq. Perhaps Washington can achieve that. We doubt it, but he may be right. But the real issue is broader: The United States must decide whether it wants to assert its control globally. Six years later, the question is not whether Americans feel safer, but whether they can regain control -- and perhaps, whether they want to.
We think they should want to and we think they can, but we also think Iraq is a small subset of a broader problem. Washington's control is slipping everywhere. It needs to make a decision on whether it wants to regain control of Iraq -- or of the world over which it once had much greater control than today.
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