On the Verge of Collapse [View All]

[IndianaGreen]

Published on Monday, June 21, 2010 by the Boston Globe

On the Verge of Collapse

by James Carroll

‘IT WASN'T Sen. McCain's question,'' General David Petraeus said. "I just got dehydrated.'' The head of US Central Command was accounting for the fact that, moments before, while testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had briefly passed out. Senator McCain's undisguised skepticism about what he was hearing of the American war in Afghanistan was not the problem. It was explained that Petraeus had not had breakfast. One sensed, even through the televised news reports, a rare spirit of unanimity in the political hearing room - a feeling of embarrassment for the general that led the chairman to immediately adjourn the session.

On the same day, the heads of five oil companies appeared before a House committee looking into the Gulf of Mexico oil catastrophe. The business executives were subject to angry interrogation by members of Congress. That all five companies depended on the same "cookie cutter'' emergency back-up plan for deep water drilling showed that the notorious incompetence of BP is the industry standard. Not embarrassment here, but anger. About the most that could be said for the oil company chiefs was that no one fainted.

The two Washington hearings captured the widespread American mood of exhaustion and dread. The nation has been drastically confronted with its impotence on multiple fronts - the stark inability to keep the near ocean from becoming a dead sea or to protect its coastline from being poisoned; the stubborn refusal of the Afghanistan war (like the Afghan leader Hamid Karzai) to follow Washington's orders; the growing sense that the main outcome of the American effort in Iraq is the empowerment of Iran. When President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office he was focused on the oil spill, but the limits of his practical ability to influence essential matters were broadly apparent.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/06/21