The Lost Hegemon
reviewed by David Ray Griffin
The Lost Hegemon:
Whom the Gods Would Destroy
Book Review by
David Ray Griffin
F. William Engdahl,
who is well known for books and articles in geopolitics, has recently published
a book entitled The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods Would Destroy. The
subtitle refers to a dictum by Euripides, “Those whom the Gods wish to destroy
they first make mad.”
This book describes
how the U.S. has been going mad since the fall of the Soviet Union, thereby
destroying itself. The madness involves the method through which the United
States tried to prevent the loss of its global hegemony. Engdahl writes
that the method was based on a scheme devised by Zbigniew Brzezinski,
while he was serving as President Jimmy Carter’s national security
advisor.
The scheme was to
destroy the Soviet Union’s economy by luring it into an unwinnable war in
Afghanistan. The method for doing this was for Osama bin Laden, working for the
CIA, to invite fundamentalist Muslims in Saudi Arabia and other countries to
Afghanistan, where the U.S. military would arm and train them (Operation
Cyclone). Engdahl believes that the weakening of its economy led to
the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over. How would the
United States respond?
Its policy, said
Engdahl, “might have encouraged real, peaceful development of nations in a
climate of peace and cooperation. . . . That cooperation could have included
China and Russia instead of encirclement, confrontation, chaos, and war.”
However, the U.S. chose to use its position as the sole remaining superpower to
try to become the first global empire in history.
Seeing that Operation
Cyclone had worked so well, Washington decided to redeploy the CIA’s Arab
Afghans, or Mujahideen, “to further destabilize Russian influence over the
post-Soviet European space.” The first major battles were in Chechnya, where
they were to sabotage Russian oil pipeline routes, and Yugoslavia, where they
were used to start the Bosnian war in order to break up the country.
The central focus was on Russia, because U.S. strategists, obsessed with maintaining “American primacy,” saw Russia as the country most likely to be able to challenge that primacy – as argued in Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard.
The central focus was on Russia, because U.S. strategists, obsessed with maintaining “American primacy,” saw Russia as the country most likely to be able to challenge that primacy – as argued in Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard.
In any case, thanks
to the success of its terrorist projects, leaders in Washington became
“convinced that they had discovered the ideal instrument for making terror
anywhere in the world to advance their agenda of global hegemony.”
The next major
chapter in this story was 9/11. Engdahl does not accept any of the major
theories: the official account, which “became less and less credible the more
that serious people investigate; the view that Cheney and his neocon war hawks
masterminded the event to create a “new Pearl Harbor”; and the idea that 9/11
was orchestrated by Israel. But Engdahl does not suggest an alternative
hypothesis. He does hold, however, that the U.S., Israeli, and Saudi
governments were “clearly prepared to use the deed to advance [their] own
ends.”
Engdahl is also clear
that 9/11 has been immensely important, for at least two reasons. First, by
virtue of blaming 9/11 on bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, America had a
“new ‘enemy image’ to replace the old Soviet communism.” Second, the announced
“War on Terror” was really, as General Wesley Clark said, “a War on
Islam.”
That this was the
nature of the War on Terror from the start is supported by something else Clark
said – that a memo from Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld indicated that the
Pentagon was planning to “destroy the governments in seven [Muslim] countries
in five years,” starting with Iraq. Obviously the timeline did not work out.
But the U.S. government did not reject the list. Indeed, under the Obama
administration, it targeted two other countries on the list, Libya and Syria –
with neocons fervently trying to find an excuse to attack a third, Iran.
Engdahl’s book
discusses an enormous number of facts and ideas that I have not treated. Rather
than trying, I will instead summarize some of his main conclusions:
“The Washington tactic of using political fundamentalist Islam to secure a revitalized American global hegemony,” said Engdahl, “was failing everywhere.”
“The Washington tactic of using political fundamentalist Islam to secure a revitalized American global hegemony,” said Engdahl, “was failing everywhere.”
The reason for the
failures, he said, was the lack of intelligent leaders in Washington. Real
intelligence in politics is the ability to see connections that are not
necessarily obvious, such as the ability to see “the
interconnectedness of all life, all peoples, and all wars.” It is the
recognition that “when you unleash a destructive force in one place, it affects
all mankind destructively, including those who unleash it.”
The CIA and the
military industrial and political complex falsely “believed they could
weaponize violent Jihadist Islam . . . as their killing machine without any
unintended consequence.”
Because of the
repeated failures of this approach, American Oligarchs “were becoming
desperate. In their growing desperation, they threatened a new world
war” in the thermo-nuclear era. Literally, as Euripides said, “Those
whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.”
David Ray Griffin is
professor emeritus, Claremont Graduate University. His forthcoming book is Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World .
/https://www.niagarafallsreview.ca/content/dam/thestar/news/canada/2021/09/25/huawei-executive-meng-wanzhou-receives-warm-welcome-upon-return-to-china/_1_meng_wanzhou_2.jpg)
