The double suicide bomb in Baghdad that killed more than 150 today is ominous. It shows how shallow is the claim that the insurgency has been pacified, or that Bush’s surge has worked, or that the Afghan police and military will soon be able to operate the security system effectively without the Americans. It shows that the insurgents can still pick targets at will , even next to the Green Zone, and that if US troops withdrew it is still very likely that the situation would degenerate quickly into a lengthy, bloody and inconclusive civil war. Above all it shows the limits of American power. Six years on not only does the occupation remain unstable, but any idea that Iraq is largely settled and the focus can now safely switch on Afghanistan is exposed as illusory. The objectives of the US invasion of Iraq – to seize control of Middle East oil and to establish a military platform to dominate the whole region – have evaporated in the teeth of a long-drawn-out and determined insurgency. The US, still by far the mightiest military power on the planet, is now pinioned between two unwinnable wars with an unsustainable toll in resources, casualties and growing domestic political unpopularity. Yet the significance of this turning point goes wider still.

What we are wirnessing is the relative decline of American military power. Despite having by far the largest nuclear and conventional arms inventory in the world and an annual defence budget well in excess of half a trillion dollars, the US lost the war in Vietnam by 1975 (even with half a million US troops in the field), it was forced out of the Lebanon in 1983, it was unable to secure Somalia in 1994, and is now facing a long-drawn-out impasse in Iraq and ultimate defeat in Afghanistan. It is true that in situations of conventional warfare – evicting the Iraqi Revolutionary Guard from Kuwait in 1991 and dislodging the Serbs from Bosnia and Croatia in 1998 – the superiority of American military hardware proved decisive. But against internal insurgencies, suicide bombings, and improvised explosive devices (roadside mines and bombs), the US has been unable to prevail.
This slide in American hegemony has been reinforced, militarily, by the quiet but steady expansion of Russian and Chinese stockpiles and, economically, by the international credit crunch and the collapse of Wall Street-driven neoliberal capitalism and the fading writ of the Washington Consensus. America will remain a key global player for some decades yet, but the days of its unchallenged supremacy 1945-2007 and of its neo-conservative unilateralism are over. It is surely one of the great ironies of international politics that a unique US leader like Barak Obama, who realises better than most the limitations of American power and who is striving to create a new more sustainable consensus in a multi-polar world, should now be so hobbled by the unbridled extremism of the Bus ancien regime.

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