To see renewed US military imperialism as a direct reflection of decline in economic power is a serious mistake. It ignores major political contradictons which were piled on top of one another to achieve economic power in the first place.
Simply because military aggression and economic decline appear "hand in hand" means nothing: in any scenario: causation, coincidence and association can all go "hand in hand". Witness the poverty of "democratic peace theory", which declares that no two democracies ever go to war with each other. It's fundamentally a mechanistic approach, which dismembers the relationships among social realities, and slaps them down on the table to study as if for an autopsy. I think the same mentality is at work here.
Completely ignored, for example, is the concrete political context of the war - where it is happening, whose interests are being advanced, who is on the receiving end, and who the ideological progenitors are. It seems that in emphasizing the systemic, and making broad analyses, economistic Marxists frown upon geopolitical analysis and contemptuously dismiss notions of what they call "cabals" - so for the war in Iraq, you'll hear terms like neoconservatism, Israel, and Zionism discussed in the hushed, frightened tones whispered by liberals.
This is a glaring error. The war in Iraq and the broader scheme to transform the ME is not about any economic decline. Rather, it is a preemptive political maneuver borne of an understanding that the old colonial arrangement buttressing US political power in the region is falling to pieces. This arrangement consisted of three components: 1) despotic puppet regimes, 2) ossified, defeated, bought-off former Arab nationalist regimes, 3) the local pit-bull responsible for smashing Arab nationalism, Israel.
The growing, festering problem with this arrangement is Israel, since it is a foreign insertion, a colonial settler-state, and therefore complicates the usual pattern of simply supporting local compradors. That is to say, while Israel was a useful military outpost in crushing Arab nationalism, it has also *aggravated* Arab resistance in the process; since socialism is discredited, the face of the resistance has become political Islam. Because Israel is not simply some puppet force, but equipped with a strong independent ideology, Zionism, it pursues its own power motives and agenda, fully aware of the indispensable niche role it has carved out for itself - exacerbating the very tensions it was supposed to quell, and thus forcing itself to become an "asset" for the US, which is more and more hated precisely because it supports Israel.
From a rational perspective there is no need at all for the US to have invaded Iraq or become doe-eyed over "democracy" ie. reshaping the political configuration in the ME. The process should have been as "painless" as what happened in L. America, with the US weaning itself off dictators and grasping onto formally democratic parties run by the elite sectors to be integrated into neoliberalism.
To wit, there are 300 million Arabs with 100% of the oil and 6 million Israelis with 0% of the oil. No rational imperialist would have decided from the outset to antagonize all the Arabs to ally itself with Israel. But since the latter was a necessity of the Cold War, Israel has since cultivated and locked its role into place through the political and institutional and financial levers of the US defense and techonological industries, Congress, and evangelist forces. Israel also taps in very effectively by cockling the hearts of old Western prejudices and activating Western guilt mechanisms: on the one hand, colonizing the frontier, controlling the natives, and killing the Muslim heathens; on the other, atoning for the sins of the Holocaust, making reparations for centuries of anti-Semitism.
So what does the artificially locked-in political paradigm dictate? The Arabs must be remolded, fragmented, smashed, redrawn in order to complement Israel's needs for expansionism. Everything has to be shaped around Israeli interests. Simply follow the politics. Take a look at the associations of the leading intellectuals who had hankered for war - all of them are tied in with Israel either militarily, financially, or politically through Likud, JINSA, DPB, or AIPAC - they are all ideological Zionists. Naturally, they did not pull a coup or act alone, but rather in concert with, other reactionary forces - but they led the charge.
And look at the results: the only player that comes away victorious from the mess in Iraq no matter what is Israel. A divided Iraq, with Israeli special forces already collaborating with the Kurds in the north. An end to the only Arab state left with any muscle that held an anti-Zionist stance. Greater suspicion thrown on two other old-time enemies, Syria and Iran, who support "terrorist" groups that have targeted Israeli, but never directly, American interests. Ditto for the Palestinians, who have studiously avoided attacking the Americans but now fall into the generalized category of ragheads which has been burned into the increasingly hateful American mind as a result of having been sucked into the vortex that is the ME conflict.
In essence, the "war on terror" is nothing but the Israelization of the imperialist dynamic - the US has been drawn into a kind of Israeli-Palestinian conflict writ large. The most beautiful part of this game is that anyone who points it out this process on the mainstream level - with the semi-exception of Michael Scheuer - is castigated as an "anti-Semite". The irony of fetishized "political correctness" must not be lost on the families of the 100,000 Iraqi "Semites" snuffed out since March 2003.