I've read several news stories talking about the CIA's attempts at negotiations with the Israeli government, parallel with the US State Department's incredibly brazen charades, lies, coverups, and stonewalling. I've heard a couple times that the CIA has been actually attempting to move things back toward the status quo.
Now I see they've trotted out Obama's CIA director to go on CBS Sunday Morning to talk about Israel's terror attacks on Lebanon and directly call it terrorism. That's got to be coordinated with the current agency, and comes across as very intentional signaling. Matthew Miller is basically acting like nothing happened, while the CIA is publicly calling Israel a terrorist state.
My question is why? What are their incentives here? Are these stories just PR bullshit by the CIA? What does the CIA stand to lose in an all-out regional war, that makes them willing to go around the President and apparently make the only real efforts to negotiate?
I have a very similar "drank the kool-aid" vibes based theory, too. The current crop in charge charge had over 3 decades of post-Soviet collapse to be mediocre and actually take to heart the exceptionalism narrative and a sort of complacency that follows.
My read is this: American exceptional used to mean "if America tries it does the best" and now it means to them "America is the best and therefore doesn't have to try." A failure to adapt, as you pointed out. Without something to constantly check itself against the systems and those that control them have become calcified and lost the dynamism that they relied on to stay competitive.
This rot has set in across the board, from domestic and foreign policy, corporate practice, tech development, everything. In this case specifically, intelligence and espionage that hovers in the gray area between hard and soft power.
There is a micro development parallel that can be pointed to within the 2 dominant political parties but most clearly within the Republican party. Where previously they used AM radio types and pretended to pay homage to evangelical talking points the party is now rife with the people who came up drinking that ideological slop. They don't know or don't care that this was all a big game being played to dupe the rubes. One of the fatal flaws of cynically using something like religion as a means to power is that once the cynics die off you're stuck with True Believers replacing them.
Fuck.
It's a "fuck" for the american population who are going to see a continuous decline over the course of several decades as the empire gets mismanaged by toolbags and idiots, but for the whole world and the future of the socialist movement it's a positive one.
The monsters like Kissinger that truly knew what they were doing have been pushed out, and that is a good thing.
The problem is more for the rest of the world that the United States never stopped holding it hostage. So while the empire is behaving like a lunatic and destroying everything, the design of the empire also isolates it from the worst of their own behaviour and ensures that it takes most of the world with it, should things actually turn ugly.
This is not the picture I see. The US used to be massively more capable and massively more monstrous than it is today. Its power has diminished drastically and it only weakens further and further. The big issue is of course if it creates a nuclear war, but provided that does not happen all I see is continual decline for it and a continual weakening of its power to do anything.
Every day that passes it is only getting weaker. I am an optimist in this regard, we either die in nuclear hellfire or have a positive outlook.
lol, largely agree. You've tied together a number of comments I've made over the past few days about the assholes on capitol hill ignorantly protecting the material interests of their owners, and that the current US is basically a cargo cult of peak empire US.