'US empire heading for collapse'

Senior US journalist Chris Hedges

Source: Press TV
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/156768.html


A renowned US journalist says Washington's military and economic empire could collapse at any time as it has embarked on the same course in Afghanistan as the former USSR did back in the 1980's.

"We're losing [the war in Afghanistan] in the same way the Red Army lost it," said Chris Hedges in a December 17 interview with the Raw Story.

"It's exactly the same configuration where we sort of control the urban centers where 20 percent of the population lives. The rest of the country where 80 percent of the Afghans live is either in the hands of the Taliban or disputed," he explained.

"Foreigners will not walk the streets of Kabul because of kidnapping, and journalists regularly meet Taliban officials in Kabul because the whole apparatus is so porous and corrupt," the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist said.

Hedges predicted that US President Obama's war report due later in December would "contradict not only [US] intelligence reports but everything else that is coming out of Afghanistan."

The CIA's own assessment confirmed the long-time foreign correspondent's speculation, as it came in striking contrast with Obama's report.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, however, insisted that the US controlled more territory in Afghanistan than in 2009.

Hedges also referred to what it called “a corporate coup d'?tat in slow motion" as another symptom of the US decline.

"Our public education system has been gutted. Our infrastructure is corroding and collapsing. Unless we begin to physically resist, they are going to solidify neo-feudalism in this country."

Chris Hedges, the author of Death of the Liberal Class, specializes in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.

The former New York Times journalist spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans and has reported from more than fifty countries.