Kevin Phillips' new book

(Via a heads up by Stygius) Alan Brinkley reviews Kevin Phillips' new book, American Theocracy. I've always liked Phillips since reading his The Politics of Rich and Poor years ago. The Wege mentioned this also somewhere earlier, but Phillips seems to me one of the best and brightest of conservatives (and I think the left could use a similar critical figure). According to Brinkley, Phillips sees three main themes of collapse: how oil defines domestic and foreign policy for the US, the rising radical American theocracy, and the crazy accumulation of debt. Here's a review excerpt on the first of these.

...If there is a single, if implicit, theme running through the three linked essays that form this book, it is the failure of leaders to look beyond their own and the country's immediate ambitions and desires so as to plan prudently for a darkening future.

The American press in the first days of the Iraq war reported extensively on the Pentagon's failure to post American troops in front of the National Museum in Baghdad, which, as a result, was looted of many of its great archaeological treasures. Less widely reported, but to Phillips far more meaningful, was the immediate posting of troops around the Iraqi Oil Ministry, which held the maps and charts that were the key to effective oil production. Phillips fully supports an explanation of the Iraq war that the Bush administration dismisses as conspiracy theory — that its principal purpose was to secure vast oil reserves that would enable the United States to control production and to lower prices. ("Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath," an oil analyst said a couple of years ago. "You can't ask for better than that.") Terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, tyranny, democracy and other public rationales were, Phillips says, simply ruses to disguise the real motivation for the invasion...

The United States has embraced a kind of "petro-imperialism," Phillips writes, "the key aspect of which is the U.S. military's transformation into a global oil-protection force," and which "puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs."

Kos also speaks.