Hurrah! Washington’s
Pointless Sojourn in the Graveyard of Empires Is Finally Over
by David Stockman Posted on August 18, 2021
https://original.antiwar.com/David_Stockman/2021/08/17/hurrah-washingtons-pointless-sojourn-in-the-graveyard-of-empires-is-finally-over/
This weekend’s momentous
events cry-out for a reformulation of Ernest Hemingway’s famous five word quip
in “The Sun Also Rises”.
Per his description of the
route to bankruptcy: How did the dismal Afghan outpost of Washington’s Potemkin
Empire collapse?
“Two ways. Gradually, then
suddenly.”
Less than three months ago,
Afghanistan’s puppet President, Ashraf Ghani, inadvertently crystalized
20-years worth of lies, delusions, misdirection, and malfeasance by Imperial
Washington’s policy-makers and proconsuls in response to a question from the
press:
Q: How long can your
government last without US support?
A: Forever.
Yet by midday Sunday Ghani
had fled the presidential palace with four cars and so many pallets of
greenbacks that they could not all be stuffed into his helicopter. And, of a
sudden, there was nothing left of the Empire’s $2 trillion folly to bring
peace, democracy, Coca-Cola, long pants and coed schools to this godforsaken
expanse of the Hindu Kush.
Then again, it wasn’t just
Ghani. Just a few weeks ago, Sleepy Joe was no less sanguine about the future
than the Afghan president:
REPORTER: Is a Taliban
takeover of Afghanistan now inevitable?
THE PRESIDENT: No, it is
not.
REPORTER: Why?
THE PRESIDENT: Because you
– the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped – as well-equipped as any army
in the world – and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is
not inevitable.
Of course, Biden was
undoubtedly assured of this salutary situation by Gen. Mark Milley. The latter
is the most incompetent four-star to ever serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, a distinction for which he had plenty of competition. Yet with the
Taliban already overtaking much of the country he assured as recently as July
21 that –
“The Afghan Security Forces
have the capacity to sufficiently fight and defend their country…”
Then there was also the US
intelligence agencies, which must have been channeling Hemingway’s very words.
Just 4 days ago they estimated that Kabul could fall in 90 days and then
suddenly revised the figure to 72 hours.
But nothing could top the
blinky Washington careerist who now sits in the big chair at Foggy Bottom:
“If there is a significant
deterioration in security … I don’t think it’s going to be something that
happens from a Friday to a Monday.”
– Anthony Blinken, US
secretary of state.
Alas, it surely did. And
now the same medieval brutes who were originally recruited and trained by the
CIA in the 1980s and who ruled Afghanistan with a bloody reign of terror from
1996-2001, in fact, was in the president’s office within hours of Ghani’s flight.
Except during the interim, the Grim Reaper of War had racked up a horrendous
butchers bill:
An October 2019 reckoning
tabulated that 157,000 had been killed in the war in
Afghanistan since 2001, including –
·
Afghan security forces: 64,124;
·
Afghan civilians: 43,074;
·
Taliban fighters and other insurgents: 42,100:
·
U.S. contractors: 3,814;
·
US military personnel: 2,300:
·
NATO and coalition troops: 1,145;
·
Humanitarian aid workers: 424;
·
Journalists and media: 67
There are no mincing words
about it. All the blood, treasure, political capital, and moral authority
expended by Washington in the prosecution of the longest war in American
history was completely in vain. Full stop.
There is absolutely nothing
redeeming about it. Well, except that next time Washington announces a jolly
little war in some no count corner of the planet – it is to be devoutly hoped
that no one will come, allies will flee and the potential beneficiaries of
occupation will scream at the top of their lungs, “no mas!”
As to the facts on the
ground and their significance, the great Doug Bandow summarized as well as can
be done:
The speed of collapse was
shocking: the Afghan government possessed a larger military, better equipment,
training and organization, an air force with command of the skies, and popular
support, to the extent that such sentiment could be measured. Even many Afghan
skeptics like me were surprised to see provincial capitals falling like bowling
pins, with security forces surrendering en masse, sometimes without firing a
shot. Desperate measures trotted out just a few days ago – such as reviving old
ethnic militias and warlord armies – vanished as the Taliban advanced. Suddenly
Kabul was surrounded, with surrender its only realistic option. Such is what
the endless war crowd managed to achieve with 20 years, thousands of lives, and
trillions of dollars.
In this regard, the map
below is not just remarkable. It is a red hot smoking gun indictment of
Washington’s War Party – proof that it delivered exactly nothing.
At least, nothing the
Afghan people believed was worth defending. That’s because what this 37-day
transformation of the map shows is that the 300,000 man Afghan National Army
and the tens of thousands more domestic police forces stood up by Washington
consisted of little more than sunshine mercenaries – -locals collecting their
paychecks as usual in a tortured land of warlords, of which Washington was the
latest, largest, and most amply funded.
So when Sleepy Joe finally
said what had to be said – that after 20 years we’re done – -the mercenaries
and ghost battalions dropped their uniforms like a hot potato and faded into
the towns, villages, and mountain redoubts even faster than the South Vietnamese
army had done in 1975.
After all, how do you go
from 141 to 12 “government-controlled” districts in a mere five weeks unless
it’s because said government has deserted en mass?
Not surprisingly, the
bloodthirsty flotsam and jetsam of the Washington War Party is already at it –
leveling the same silly charges of capitulation and betrayal at Biden as they
did at Trump when he tried to withdraw from Syria and Obama when he properly
brought American forces home from Iraq in 2011.
But as Doug Bandow also
observed, the only real alternatives were to leave or stay forever:
Which was no choice at all.
There is no justification for America to be allied to a political corpse,
sucked dry by a corrupt and incompetent governing class, forced to fight on
behalf of those who won’t defend themselves, entangled in combat in a region of
little geopolitical importance to America, and tasked with maintaining regional
stability for the US rivals Russia and China.
As Bandow also reminds the
longest war in American history had no plausible rationale from the very
beginning. Washington did not intervene because Central Asia had strategic
relevance to America’s security. Even the eager interventionists back in 2001
did not claim that the essential purpose was to spread democracy, end
discrimination against women or to redress human rights violations.
No, the attack on
Afghanistan originated in Washington’s foolish recruitment, training, arming, and financing of the Mujahdeen back in the 1980s, and for exactly what purpose?
To punish the sclerotic Soviet regime for stumbling into the Graveyard of
Empires!
As Bandow further observed,
the brutal misanthropes who became the Taliban were actually Washington’s own
spawn – creatures of the CIA bank-rollers, Charlie Wilson’s War and all.
On the contrary, years
earlier Washington supported the Mujahedeen, who were mostly undemocratic,
misogynistic, intolerant, antediluvian, and brutal, to kill Soviet soldiers and
undermine the Evil Empire, as Ronald Reagan termed the Soviet Union. After the
latter’s withdrawal there was no reason for Washington to stick around.
After the 9/11 terrorist
attacks the Bush administration sought to destroy al-Qaeda for its attack and
punish the Taliban allegedly for hosting al-Qaeda. But as our friend Bill
Bonner cogently reminds,
Just to remind ourselves,
after 9/11, the US insisted Afghanistan turn over al-Qaeda leader Osama bin
Laden. The Taliban, then Afghanistan’s rulers, said they would turn him over if
the US produced evidence that he was guilty of masterminding the 9/11 attacks.
Otherwise, they said, it
would be an insult to Islamic justice.
The Taliban even suggested
a compromise – they would give bin Laden to a third country, where he might get
a fair trial.
Nope. The frightful crew of
neocon warmongers around Bush the Younger convinced him that a few
strategically targeted bunker busters would so rattle the motley Toyota pickup
based Taliban army that there would be no need for a deal.
In any event, we now know
that Bin Laden and his small band of Arab fighters fled Afghanistan via their
custom built escape routes to the Pakistan border almost immediately after
their nearly fatal encounters with the US Air Force and a small group of
special forces at Tora Bora in December 2001. After that, there was no reason
to drop a single bomb on Afghanistan.
The fact is, as
reprehensible and medieval as they may have been, and presumably still are, the
Taliban never threatened to attack America, did not have an expansionist agenda
and could not have carried one out in a million years from the backs of their
Toyota pickups, anyway. And if brutalization of their own people is a valid
basis for Washington’s intervention, the only case you can make for its war on
Afghanistan is that the latter starts with an “A” and is presumably just the
first on this list of dozens and dozens of such regimes that dot the planet.
As for the canard that the
occupation of Afghanistan was necessary to deprive terrorists of a base, you
have to marvel at what passes for thinking in the Imperial City. The planet is
festooned with hell holes which can provide sanctuary to evildoers, but the
irony is that the US Air Force has left nothing to chance: The destroyed cities
and towns rippling with human misery and economic want that were continuously fostered
by its lethal ministrations for years in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya etc.
provided all the sanctuary and all the motivations of revenge that real
terrorists could have possibly dreamed of.
Moreover, Washington’s
unforgivable sin wasn’t just the upwards of $1.2 trillion spent directly
prosecuting a pointless war over the course of two decades. Or the fact that it
resulted in more than 775,000 US troops being deployed to Afghanistan, many of
them multiple times – 2,300 of whom died there and 20,589 of whom were wounded
in action and remain wards of the state to this day.
No, Washington also
allocated more than $133 billion to so-called nation-building efforts. And
that’s more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of
Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II!
Yet as one acerbic critic
noted,
Washington officials tried
to create – from scratch – a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their
own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed
to tribalism, monarchism, communism, and Islamic law.
In this regard, in December
2019 the Washington Post published “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of
the War”. It was based on extensive reports by the Office of the Special
Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), an agency created by
Congress in 2008 to investigate waste and fraud in the war zone. These reports
and the Washington Post investigation document in chapter and verse the
unspeakable corruption and waste which dogged every aspect of this two-decade
long disaster.
One unidentified
contractor, for instance, told government interviewers he was expected to dole
out $3 million daily for projects in a single Afghan district roughly the size
of a US county. He once asked a visiting congressman whether the lawmaker could
responsibly spend that kind of money back home:
He said hell no. “Well,
sir, that’s what you just obligated us to spend and I’m doing it for
communities that live in mud huts with no windows.”
Year after year, the US
generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central
plank of their strategy, which was to train a robust Afghan army and national
police force that could defend the country without foreign help.
In the Lessons Learned
interviews, however, US military trainers described the Afghan security forces
as incompetent, unmotivated, and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan
commanders of pocketing salaries – paid by US taxpayers – for tens of thousands
of “ghost soldiers.”
A US military officer
estimated that one-third of police recruits were “drug addicts or Taliban”. Yet
another called them “stealing fools” who looted so much fuel from US bases that
they perpetually smelled of gasoline.
And it’s not as if this
kind of knowledge remained bottled up in the Afghan mountains. In fact, Douglas
Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war
czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government
interviewers in 2015:
We were devoid of a
fundamental understanding of Afghanistan – we didn’t know what we were
doing….What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of
what we were undertaking.
Likewise, another military
investigator, Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency
adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told the government
interviewers.
Surveys, for instance, were
totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and
we became a self-licking ice cream cone.
Pictured below are the Four
Stooges – General David Petraeus, General Mike Mullen, former General and VA
head Eric Shinseki and Defense Secy Robert Gates – who advised Obama back in
2009 that a “surge” of forces in Afghanistan would be just as successful (sic!)
as it had been in Iraq.
Of course, you could
multiply these four by countless more before and since. Yet you would likely
find that about the only high-level official whoever told the truth out loud
about the ongoing Afghan fiasco, General Michael Flynn, so thoroughly earned
the contempt of the Imperial City that they had him bound and quartered and run
out of town on a rail to the big house within weeks of being appointed as the
Donald’s top national security advisor.
Of course, the results were
always the same. The internal violence never stopped and the territory, which
was never a nation but only a battleground for a changing mix of ethnic
factions and tribal warlords, remained mired in chaos. The outcome during the
first six months this year, in fact, was par for the course that had held sway
ever since the Afghan Surge came a cropper a decade ago.
Needless to say, the
Afghanistan fiasco is not an aberration – some kind of star-crossed one-off
which unfolded far away from the mainstream of US foreign policy. To the
contrary, Afghanistan is the distilled essence of Imperial Washington’s conceit
that the peace of the planet depends upon its self-conferred role as the
“indispensable nation” and the overseer of the internal governance and the
external relations of the greater part of mankind.
Pursuant to this conceit,
Washington foolishly believed that after uprooting the Taliban rulers in 2001
that it could will into being a national unity government. A simulacrum of the
latter, in fact, was anointed from among the anti-Taliban tribes, factions,
warlords, soldiers of fortune, thieves, and opportunists who gathered at the
Hotel Petersberg in Bonn Germany during December 2001.
But that dubious gathering
surely guaranteed the fiasco which ensured, culminating in this weekend’s
resounding rebuke of Washington’s imperial pretensions.
The thing is, Afghanistan
never was a real nation, and there was not a snowballs’ chance in the hot place
that Washington’s suits and uniforms, bedecked with limitless greenbacks and
weapons of terror, could ever organize a functioning country there, let along a
peaceful democracy.
Indeed, the region’s
serpentine ethnic and tribal stew was well described it in a study published by
the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Even a few excerpts from the study
tell you all you need to know as why nation-building in the Hindu Kush was one
the most absurd missions ever undertaken by Washington’s interventionist
apparatchiks.
Like in the case of the
misbegotten Sikes-Picot boundaries drawn in 1916 to create European style
polities of Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, where no such nations actually existed,
the borders of modern Afghanistan reflect the dead hand of the British foreign
office from the 1890s.
Afghanistan’s national
anthem recognizes 14 ethnic groups among the country’s 27 million people:
Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Balochis, Turkmens, Nooristanis, Pamiris,
Arabs, Gujars, Brahuis, Qizilbash, Aimaq, and Pashai. Few groups are indigenous
to Afghanistan; most of the larger ones have significantly greater populations
in neighboring countries. Governing a viable state with these demographics has
always been a core challenge.
Today’s group relations and
aspirations were shaped and greatly influenced during the emergence of modern
Afghanistan during the reign of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901). The Pashtuns
lost their overwhelming majority at that time, because the Amir ceded
the majority Pashtun population and their territories to British India, under
the Durand Line treaty agreement of 1893. But his consolidation of a
centralized state, pacification of the Hazarajat, and resettlement of the Pashtuns
into ethnically mixed northern regions established Pashtun domination in
Afghanistan. Still, it was (non-Pashtun) Dari–speakers, Tajiks, and Qizilbash in
particular, who practically ran the administration through domination of the
bureaucracy……
The relative political
freedoms granted under the 1964 Constitution allowed the formation of leftist
and Islamist groups. At the same time, ethnicity played a more prominent role
in political alignments. Setam-e Milli (National Oppression) emerged as a decidedly anti-Pashtun organization whose focus was the overthrow what they
described as the Pashtun dominance of Afghanistan. On the other hand, Afghan
Millat, a Pashtun nationalist political party, advocated greater Pashtunization
of Afghanistan and even aspired to unite all Pashtuns. Many leaders of the two
major factions of the (communist) Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan
(PDPA) also supported such views.
The April 27, 1978
communist military coup, called the Saur Revolution by its instigators, marked
the end of Durrani dynasty and opened the political arena to all aspirants. The
Pashtun-dominated Khalq faction attempted to break down the dominance of Dari
by focusing on language and cultural policy. The regime recognized Uzbeki,
Turkmeni, Balochi, and Nooristani as official languages and promoted Pashtun
culture.
But such policies were
reversed to the advantage of non-Pashtun groups after the December 1979 Soviet
invasion, which brought the Parcham faction into power. During the reign of
Parcham leader Babrak Karmal, Dari was promoted at the expense of Pashto as his
regime increased the non-Pashtun representation within the military and the
bureaucracy. Ethnicity also emerged as a factor of unity and division among the
armed Islamist opposition to the regime. In Pakistan, Pashtun Islamists firmly
controlled the resistance leadership while Iran supported the pre-dominantly
Hazara Shi’a groups. In that atmosphere of internal fragmentation and external
interference, President Najibullah’s efforts at intra-Afghan reconciliation
failed.
Najibullah’s downfall
heralded the beginning of a messy civil war and the complete dismantling of
Afghan state institutions. An alliance of non-Pashtun Parchami officials with
the Tajik leader Ahmad Shah Massoud ensured the demise of his regime, which was
considerably weakened by the defection of Pashtun military officers after the
Soviet army withdrew in early 1989. The Pashtuns lost influence and suffered
perhaps the sharpest decline in their influence in this period.
Still, the Afghan state’s
demise proved disastrous for all Afghan civilians irrespective of their
ethnicity and political affiliation. The mujahedin regime was a mirage
consisting of shifting alliances and conspiracies. While it claimed to be the
protector of its members’ various ethnicities, the leaders were amenable to
external pressures and battlefield compulsions. Their struggle ultimately
centered on individual survival and power grabs while often using ethnicity as
a convenient cover and a powerful mobilizing tool. Their main achievement until
the emergence of the Taliban in late 1994 was to plunge Afghanistan deep into
civil war and anarchy.
The Taliban raison d’être
was to end the anarchy. But when they took on powerful non-Pashtun warlords and
militias, some Afghan and international observers tended to describe them as
“Pashtun nationalists” who wanted to revive a centralized Pashtun-dominated
state in Afghanistan. In fact, one of the first Taliban acts after capturing
Kabul in September 1996 was to kill Najibullah and hang his corpse on public
display.
However, the Taliban failed
to please any segment of Afghan society after capturing Kabul in September
1996. Their rigid policies never won them overwhelming public support among the
Pashtuns. The Taliban were opposed to all Pashtun political elites in the
regimes preceding them. They opposed the nationalist mainstream of the old
royalist regime and, unlike the communists, had no worldly focus on material
development as a means of radical progress.
Many Pashtun mujahedin
commanders fought against the Taliban for years. In fact, many Kandahari
mujahedin joined Herati Tajik (sometimes he is also identified as Farsiwan)
warlord, Ismail Khan, to fight the Taliban. Senior Pashtun commanders from
southern and eastern Afghanistan allied themselves with Ahmed Shah Massoud
during the Taliban’s stint in power. Many Pashtun mujahedin commanders retained
their status only by joining the Taliban.
Although the majority of
the Taliban came from the southern Pashtun tribal confederacies of the Ghilzai
and the Durrani, engaging in traditional tribal politics remained anathema to
them. Many Taliban networks were organized on the notion of andewali (Pashto
for friendship) and some of these networks manifested tribal solidarity. While
they were seen as adhering to Pashtunwali by outsider observers, the Taliban
opposed important aspects of local narkhs, or customary law, in various Pashtun
regions. Their central objectives, to which they strongly adhered, were to
implement Islamic Shari’ah law and bring their own vision of peace to
Afghanistan.
At the dawn of the 21st
century, the conflict in Afghanistan was seen above all as an ethnic struggle.
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were seen as bankrolling a Pashtun takeover of the
country by supporting the Taliban. On the other hand, Iran, Russia, some
Central Asian states and India supported the essentially non-Pashtun Northern
Alliance, to prevent a complete Taliban victory when the fundamentalist militia
already controlled more than 90 percent of Afghanistan’s territory.
Afghanistan attracted
unprecedented international attention after the September 11, 2001 attacks in
New York and Washington. A swift American–led military victory routed the
Taliban and a much slower – and flawed – political intervention focused on
delivering a “broad-based and multi-ethnic” government. Hamid Karzai, a Durrani
Pashtun leader from Kandahar was picked to lead the first transitional
administration.
The 30-member cabinet he
led included 11 Pashtuns, 8 Tajiks, 5 Hazaras, 3 Uzbeks, and 3 members of other
ethnic minorities. The Taliban were then considered to be a spent force and
were not even invited to the UN-brokered meeting in Bonn Germany, which
delivered the interim administration and a roadmap for the country’s political
reconstruction. The key flaw in the arrangement was that it prioritized the
resolution of the ethnicized Afghan conflict. In reality, that ethnicization
did not filter down to the masses.
Most, if not all, Afghans
simply wanted security, good governance, basic services, and transitional
justice. However, the provision of these fundamental demands was relegated to
secondary significance.
Alas, they still do.
However, far be it from the
purported party of small government and a constitutional Republic, aka the GOP,
to recognize the futility, illegality, and costly malefactions of Washington’s
failed adventure in the godforsaken redoubts of the Hindu Kush.
Here is just a sample of
what these meatheads had to say over the weekend, and the proof that the only
thing possibly stupider than Imperial Washington is its Republican branch:
This is President Biden’s
Saigon moment,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said on CBS’s
“Face the Nation.”
Biden is “gonna have blood on
his hands” over the withdrawal of U.S. troops and subsequent
swift takeover by the Taliban……They totally blew this one. They completely
underestimated the strength of the Taliban,” said McCaul, the top-ranking
Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse (R) lambasted the “Trump-Biden doctrine
of weakness” that he said had been created by the foreign
policies of both administrations, which he said “deliberately decided to lose”
the conflict in Afghanistan.
But it was the present day the face of the warmongering Cheney Clan, Rep. Liz Cheney, who reminded that it is
owing to Washington’s neocon contaminated bipartisan duopoly that something as
outrageously grotesque as America’s 20-year oppression and near-genocide in
Afghanistan could actually happen in a nation founded on the principle of commerce
with all nations and interference in the internal affairs of none:
“……the Trump/Biden calamity
unfolding in Afghanistan began with the Trump administration negotiating with
terrorists and pretending they were partners for peace and is ending with
American surrender as Biden abandons the country to our terrorist enemies.”
“Surrender” in a country
that did not request Washington’s intervention and for which there was not an
iota of national safety and security at stake?
Indeed, in rebuke to Lynn
Cheney’s hegemonic prattle, what better occasion to be reminded of the words of
John Quincy Adams. They were issued nearly 200 years ago, but are as apt today
as ever before:
What has America done for
the benefit of mankind? Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice
which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the
inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of
government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among
them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of
honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.
She has uniformly spoken
among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language
of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights. She has, in the lapse
of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the
independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.
She has abstained from
interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for
principles to which she clings…..
Wherever the standard of
freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart,
her benedictions, and her prayers are. But she goes not abroad, in search
of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher of the freedom and independence
of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
She will commend the
general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of
her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners
than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would
involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest
and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the
colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of
her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the
dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….
We leave the final epitaph
to Bill Bonner, who has spent as many
years observing Imperial Washington’s follies as has your editor, and to a more
lyrical effect:
And then on Sunday, like
the other great empires before it, it came to the end of the road.
The puppet government in
Kabul, set up by the US government, fled on helicopters… an eerie reminder of
the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Afghanistan is known as the
“graveyard of empires.” And we doubt this episode will be an exception.
The British left
Afghanistan in 1919, after 80 years of frustrating warfare. Less than 20 years
later, the British empire was, essentially, finished.
The Soviet Union gave up
trying to pacify Afghanistan in 1988; two years later, the Soviet Union
collapsed.
And now, it’s America’s
turn.
David Stockman was a
two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of
Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White
House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three
books, The Triumph of
Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation:
The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on
the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder
of David Stockman’s
Contra Corner and David Stockman’s
Bubble Finance Trader.
