The Iraq war is costing us

This is the whole point of this blog. The era of the US as a hyper-hegemon is over, and it is absolutely critical that the focus be on shrewd leadership during this period of global readjustment.

That's why I'm so hard on the Bush administration, not because they have shown corruption and rank incompetence, our country has survived bad leadership before, but because their incompetence has interfered with the most important transition our country has faced since the Civil war.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States needs to show greater moral and economic leadership if it wants to be an influence in the developing world amid the rise of emerging powers like China, former World Bank head and Citigroup advisor James Wolfensohn said on Thursday.......

He said he recently traveled to Africa where increased Chinese business interests were evident, illustrating the Asian powers' economic push into developing economies.

"There is a changing balance of which we are now seeing the beginnings of," Wolfensohn said. "It's not just us rich people sitting in fancy hotels in the United States. We're seeing the beginnings of an emergence of a different perception."

Wolfensohn was speaking specifically about poverty and development issues, but the core is the same. The Bush administration has focused their interests on the violent imposition of will upon Muslim countries of the middle east which is at best a temporary solution, while ignoring long term development in the second and third world of Asia, South America, and Africa.

The US empire is at the point where it's protectorates are starting to "rebel" against policy. The options are to attempt to renegotiate the relationship or to try to maintain the status quo through military, diplomatic, or economic "force."

If you look at the history of empire, this is a critical stage in downfall. It is the very attempts to use force to dominate that creates the openings for the secondary power to ascend, while overstressing the dominant country through wars, debt, and overextension.

(And, yes, I agree that during WWII and leading into the positioning of the Cold War was also a critical period, but as the US was ascendant at the time, mistakes were more readily covered.)