A winning strategy • 17 January 2008 • The SnowBlog

A winning strategy

           I'm beginning to think that there is only one way out of the madness of the phony War on Terror and that's for America and Britain to lose their power in the world. And the initial indications are promising. America has done everything it possibly could to bankrupt itself and it's finally working. The Bush administration worked hard to reduce tax revenue while massively increasing spending. They put as much of that money as possible into attacking other nations and scaring their own. They undermined their own manufacturing base with trade agreements designed to send jobs abroad where they'd be performed at slave wages. Like governments before them, they noticed their nation's dependence on oil and worried about it. Then they did their best to gut any attempts at energy self-sufficiency while simultaneously starting a war in the heart of the biggest oil producing region on Earth. If overspending and undertaxing wasn't enough to bankrupt America, then maybe pushing up the price of the fuel it runs on would do the trick. The whole enterprise has been funded by borrowing ludicrous sums at unsustainably low interest rates - and just to guarantee disaster, all of that money has come from overseas rather than from its own people - who have likewise been encouraged to spend every cent they can get their hands on and to borrow, borrow, borrow more. America taught Bin Laden's people how to fight a guerilla war against a superpower just in time to become his next target . They encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack his neighbours and supplied him with arms to do so, until he picked one they didn't approve of.  They overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran so that fifty years later they could threaten to attack the region in the name of peace. They've rigged elections, propped up dictators, invaded sovereign countries, bombed civilians, armed terrorists, angered the world and spent all of their money. In my view, the best thing that America could do is to stop frantically poking hornet's nests all over the world. And just like every other country with power (or in the UK's case, close to friend's with power) that decision is never taken voluntarily. The only way for America and the UK to give up their bullying is to become incapable of it. That will be President Bush's legacy: the humbling of America. When the U.S. is no longer a threat, it will no longer be a target either. The War on Terror will have been won - and all it took was the looting of a nation and the ruining of its good name. 
Rob