And so the most promising opportunities for a rational settlement have all passed us by. Instead of a moderate reform president and a group of nervous ayatollahs anxious to cut a deal, America now has Ahmadinejad – and the dawn of what could conceivably become an explicitly fascist regime in Iran, or at least a very close substitute for one.
The good news, such as it is, is that Ahmadinejad’s end-times ideology doesn’t seem to include any grand territorial ambitions: no “Greater Iran” (Iran is already a greater Iran), no lebensraum in the east. We also have time – time to see how things shake out, to see if the ayatollahs can hamstring their troublesome protege, to see if the democracy movement can make a political comeback. Time for Ahmadinejad to lose some of his popular shine as Iran’s internal problems worsen. Time for our own hardline warmongers to be booted out of power.
But unfortunately, our divinely ordained president may not be prepared to wait (and the last sentence of the preceding paragraph appears to be one of the reasons.) Which means at this point we probably should be worrying less about what happened in Munich in 1938, and more about what happened there in 1972, when the German police moved in and tried to disarm the terrorists.
Multiply that carnage by a thousand, or a million, and you’ve got more than a political slogan; you’ve got a war.
McJoan at Kos has posted an action item that’s worth checking out and taking a litle time to participate. It’s about how to counter these bullshit lying radio ads that the RNC has cooked up to blame the Democrats for the GOP’s attempt to turn undocumented workers into felons.
As I wrote yesterday, this is starting to gel as CW among the gasbags and the kewl kidz. I just heard William Schneider saying it as if it’s a fact. That’s not the most important thing, however. The most important thing is that the latino community not be misled. This requires a push back. The Republicans made their racist beds with Tom Tancredo and they have to wake up each morning to his creepy face across the pillow. He’s their problem, not ours.
Colonel Sam Gardiner is the retired colonel who taught at the National War College, the Air War College and the Naval Warfare College and who found more than 50 instances of demonstrably false stories planted in the press in the run up to the war, back in 2003. He was just on CNN:
CLANCY: Well, Colonel Gardiner, from what you’re saying, it would seem like military men, then, might be cautioning, don’t go ahead with this. But what are the signs that are out there right now? Is there any evidence of any movement in that direction?
GARDINER: Sure. Actually, Jim, I would say — and this may shock some — I think the decision has been made and military operations are under way.
CLANCY: Why?
GARDINER: And let me say this — I’m saying this carefully. First of all, Sy Hersh said in that article which was…
CLANCY: Yes, but that’s one unnamed source.
GARDINER: Let me check that. Not unnamed source as not being valid.
The way “The New Yorker” does it, if somebody tells Sy Hersh something, somebody else in the magazine calls them and says, “Did you tell Sy Hersh that?” That’s one point.
The secretary[sic] point is, the Iranians have been saying American military troops are in there, have been saying it for almost a year. I was in Berlin two weeks ago, sat next to the ambassador, the Iranian ambassador to the IAEA. And I said, “Hey, I hear you’re accusing Americans of being in there operating with some of the units that have shot up revolution guard units.”
He said, quite frankly, “Yes, we know they are. We’ve captured some of the units, and they’ve confessed to working with the Americans.”
The evidence is mounting that that decision has already been made, and I don’t know that the other part of that has been completed, that there has been any congressional approval to do this.
My view of the plan is, there is this period in which some kinds of ground troops will operate inside Iran, and then what we’re talking about is the second part, which is this air strike.
CLANCY: All right. You lay this whole scenario, but there are still a lot of caution flags that one would see out here.
GARDINER: Sure. True.
CLANCY: If they do decide on a military option…
GARDINER: Right?
CLANCY: … what’s the realistic chance of success? What’s your — your prognosis for that kind of reaction here?
GARDINER: Yes. Let me give you two answers to that. First of all, the chance of getting the facilities and setting back the program, I think the chances go from maybe two years to actually accelerating the program. You know, we could cause them to redouble their efforts. That’s on one side.
The other side is this sort of horizontal escalation by the Iranians.
My assessment is — and it’s because of regime problems at home — that if we strike, they’re likely to want to blame Israel. Now that’s — because that sells well at home.
Blaming Israel means that there’s a chance that we could see Hezbollah, Hamas targeting Israel. We could very easily see this thing escalate into a broader Middle East war, particularly when you add Muslim rage.
You know, if you take the cartoon problem and multiply it times a hundred — you know, the Danish cartoons, you could see how we could end up very quickly with a very serious problem in the Middle East.
CLANCY: Former U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner. Not a very rosy outlook here. A man who thinks the decision may have already been made.
Thank you for being with us.
GARDINER: Certainly.
My tin foil hat is beeping and honking like crazy right now. These generals coming forward is huge.
I really think it’s possible that Bush and Rummy have already got a secret war going on, one that has not been revealed to congress in any form. It’s designed that way. Bush is not going to fire Rummy — he can’t. He’s already committed himself to this thing. This could be the ultimate action of the unitary executive.
It’s obvious to me that this call for Rumsfeld’s resignation by six generals is about stopping this operation in Iran first and foremost. It is not a coincidence that the first salvo came from Sy Hersh last Sunday.
The question I had to ask myself was whether it was really about the nuclear thing or something more that had the military up in arms. In reading back over Hersh’s articles of the last year or so, it became quite clear to me that this has something to do with the fact that Bush instituted the plan to invade Iran more than a year ago when he believed he had been crowned Emperor in the 2004 elections — and that the plan has gone forward without any consideration of changing circumstances on the ground in Iraq. Furthermore, the plan itself comes from the same comic book from which Rummy and Newtie cooked up their RMA fantasy about invading Iraq with only 30,000 troops, a cell phone and a toothpick.
And the beauty of it is, the clandestine operation on which it depends has been folded into the Pentagon and has no congressional oversight.
George W. Bush’s reelection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reelection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second guessing.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah – we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
Bush and Cheney may have set the policy, but it is Rumsfeld who has directed its implementation and has absorbed much of the public criticism when things went wrong whether it was prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib or lack of sufficient armor plating for G.I.s’ vehicles in Iraq. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers have called for Rumsfeld’s dismissal, and he is not widely admired inside the military. Nonetheless, his reappointment as Defense Secretary was never in doubt.
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’ it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs” the regional American military commanders-in-chief. (The Defense Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’ ” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
Bush just issued a statement of support for Rumsfeld. He is stubborn and refuses to change course, as we know. But if what Hersh reported back in 2005 is correct, Rumsfeld owns him. Back in the heady days of his 2% landslide, Bush authorized a covert war with Iran, with no congressional oversight and without even the cooperation of the CINQ’s. This makes Iran-Contra look like the Canuck letter.
These retired generals are speaking for a military establishment that has been used like monopoly money by Rummy his fellow magical thinkers (like his “advisor” Newt Gingrich) who have spent the last five years attempting to destroy the military with their useless, incompetent war planning and their surreal Toffler-esque vision of a military that doesn’t require an actual army.
I realize that the armed forces always resist change. But I think it’s fair to assume, considering the Iraq cock-up, that Rummy doesn’t know what in the hell he’s doing. The military is finally saying “enough.” We are witnessing a coup by media.
The congress has completely abdicated its oversight responsibility, the media is shallow and incompetent, our allies are considered irrelevant, the UN is being run by a nutcase even more far-out that Rummy and the wishes of the people are, as usual, not considered. It looks like the only institution in America that can bring us back from the brink of a tragic, tragic mistake is the military itself.
If these guys can’t get through, and it doesn’t appear that they will, then it’s time for some of these active duty officers to resign in protest. It would take a lot of guts, but that’s their business, right?
In an article about the possible revolt of the officer corps, Fred Kaplan writes this in Slate:
MacArthur’s legacy in particular has kept even the boldest generals deeply reluctant to criticize civilian leaders over the decades. Rumsfeld’s arrogance, his “casualness and swagger” as Gen. Newbold put it—which have caused so many strategic blunders, so much death and disaster—have started to tip some officers over the edge. They may prove a good influence in the short run. But if Rumsfeld resists their encroachments and fights back, the whole hierarchy of command could implode as officers feel compelled not merely to stay silent but to choose one side or the other. And if the rebel officers win, they might find they like the taste of bureaucratic victory—and feel less constrained to renew the internecine combat when other, less momentous disputes arise in the future.
Both paths are cluttered with drear and danger. Does President Bush know this is going on? If he does, he would do the nation—and the Constitution—a big favor if he launched a different sort of pre-emptive attack and got rid of Rumsfeld now.
The problem may be that Bush can’t replace the person who is running his secret war.
Oh, and get ready for the swiftboating. I can hear them revving their engines already. .
Following up on my post from yesterday about Chuck Colson’s lament that about all the aborted babies who could be working in the fields today, the indefatigable Carolyn at MakeThemAccountable reminds me that she wrote about this sometime back — and this is not just some isolated whim on Colson’s part. It seems that there are conservatives who back all kinds of family support like universal health insurance that might place them as close to the progressive camp as the conservatives — until you see what their motives are:
Does this mean that the progressive fight for economic justice now over? Can we sit back and relax?
Not exactly.
The problem is with the reasons Douthat and Salam give for making families’ lives easier. Maybe it’s idealistic, but some of us have thought the reason to encourage strong, economically secure, and loving families is because that is what is most likely to enable people to reach their human potential, and to live full and rewarding lives. Any government participation in that effort is geared toward fulfilling its obligation, stated in the preamble to the Constitution, to promote the general welfare.
Those are not the reasons these authors give. They are concerned that reduced baby production, especially the lack of “bonus babies” (presumably, more babies than the two per family most common in America today) will cause economic problems in the future. “Without a youthful population, the costs of supporting retirees are unsustainable, and the innovation and entrepreneurial zeal that make America the world’s economic leader will slowly wither.” An extra added attraction for helping families is that it will solidify Republican political dominance, these authors say.
Their ideas about how to support families are typical GOP claptrap that won’t work (they don’t have a clue about how to do anything but cut taxes and start wars) but I just love the idea that they think they can breed Republicans. My father is the most rightwing Republican in the universe.
Now it can be told: President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney based their re-election campaign on lies, damned lies and statistics.
The lies included Mr. Cheney’s assertion, more than three months after intelligence analysts determined that the famous Iraqi trailers weren’t bioweapons labs, that we were in possession of two “mobile biological facilities that can be used to produce anthrax or smallpox.”
The damned lies included Mr. Bush’s declaration, in his “Mission Accomplished” speech, that “we have removed an ally of Al Qaeda.”
The statistics included Mr. Bush’s claim, during his debates with John Kerry, that “most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans.”
Compared with the deceptions that led us to war, deceptions about taxes can seem like a minor issue. But it’s all of a piece. In fact, my early sense that we were being misled into war came mainly from the resemblance between the administration’s sales pitch for the Iraq war — with its evasions, innuendo and constantly changing rationale — and the selling of the Bush tax cuts.
Moreover, the hysterical attacks the administration and its defenders launch against anyone who tries to do the math on tax cuts suggest that this is a very sensitive topic. For example, Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa once compared people who say that 40 percent of the Bush tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent of the population to, yes, Adolf Hitler.*
And just as administration officials continued to insist that the trailers were weapons labs long after their own intelligence analysts had concluded otherwise, officials continue to claim that most of the tax cuts went to the middle class even though their own tax analysts know better.
How do I know what the administration’s tax analysts know? The facts are there, if you know how to look for them, hidden in one of the administration’s propaganda releases…
[explanation of how the “Tax Relief Kit” inadvertently demonstrates that 53% of the tax cuts went to the top 10% of the population and 32% of the tax cuts went to the top 1%]
I’m sure that this column will provoke a furious counterattack from the administration, an all-out attempt to discredit my math. Yet if I’m wrong, there’s an easy way to prove it: just release the raw data used to construct the table titled “Projected Share of Individual Income Taxes and Income in 2006.” Memo to reporters: if the administration doesn’t release those numbers, that’s in effect a confession of guilt, an implicit admission that the data contradict the administration’s spin.
And what about the people Senator Grassley compared to Hitler, those who say that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans will receive 40 percent of the tax cuts? Although the “Tax Relief Kit” asserts that “nearly all of the tax cut provisions” are already in effect, that’s not true: one crucial piece of the Bush tax cuts, elimination of the estate tax, hasn’t taken effect yet. Since only estates bigger than $2 million, or $4 million for a married couple, face taxation, the great bulk of the gains from estate tax repeal will go to the wealthiest 1 percent. This will raise their share of the overall tax cuts to, you guessed it, about 40 percent.
Again, the point isn’t merely that the Bush administration has squandered the budget surplus it inherited on tax cuts for the wealthy. It’s the fact that the administration has spent its entire term in office lying about the nature of those tax cuts. And all the world now knows what I suspected from the start: an administration that lies about taxes will also lie about other, graver matters.
“I am sure voters will get their fill of statistics claiming that the Bush tax cut hands out 40 percent of the benefit to the top 1 percent of the taxpayers. This is not merely misleading, it is outright false. Some folks must be under the impression that as long as something is repeated often enough, it will become true. That was how Adolf Hitler got to the top.
It’s no longer surprising to read these scummy lies from Republicans, but nevertheless it never fails to induce a state of sheer awe and wonder at the audacity of it all.
In this post about the developing generation gap between Boomers and Millenials (which is child’s play compared to the generation gap between boomers and the greatest generation — now that was real hell) I read that boomers “express greater concern than any other generational grouping with virtually every specific issue examined in the survey” and “have substantially more negative and pessimistic perceptions of the political process than any other generational grouping.” Evidently, boomers are also “uptight, crazy, and reactionary, featuring rightwing views on ‘lifestyle issues and crime’ and, generally speaking, ‘are often characterized by taking strong, relatively extreme positions on issues.'”
Yglesias says this means we should chill. He’s probably right. We’ve always taken strong, relatively extreme positions on issues. I used to think that was a function of being young, but I guess we are just extreme by nature.
However, I might also suggest that the fact that we are all in our mid forties to early 60’s means we are taking care of both the elderly (who are living to amazing old age) and the young (who stay young a lot longer than they used to) while looking at a scary old age that some factions of the government are actively trying to fuck with, and who may very well succeed.
The younger cohort, like me, looks at greatly reduced opportunity in a shrinking job market that is unkind to older workers. Many cling to their pathetic jobs with their brittle fingernails for fear of having to pony up many thousands of dollars in health care premiums if they lose it (and having to take a shit job at Walmart when nobody will hire them at their formerly decent wage.) Health is becoming a big issue for us — the system is quite inconveniently breaking down just as we enter our unhealthy years. This economy feels very unstable and if you are over 50 you know you will not be able to make it all back if it goes.
We are feeling a little bit stressed.
And as for our pessimistic view of politics, whether we are on the right (and refuse to admit it) or on the left (and are all to aware of it) we have all watched our government take us into two useless wars, first killing large numbers of us and now threatening to kill large numbers of our kids and grandkids for no good reason. A number of our big political heroes were literally gunned down. We have lived through a bunch of presidencies now, including Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush. One ended with assasination; one ended ignominiously through a total lack of support for his war from his own party; three of them featured major corruption and/or national security scandals, one of whom resigned in disgrace; one was a non-stop soap opera that ended in impeachment; the latest may be the biggest failure of all. All of them were tumultuous and ultimately disillusioning for a generation that grew up in America’s most confident and hopeful era after America’s triumph of World War II.
We’d have to be delusional not to be negative and pessimistic about the political process after all that.
I’d also point out that as much as everyone may want us to chill, we boomers are all entering the period of life in which voters typically begin to turn out to vote with a vengeance. We have huge numbers and we are shortly going to be concentrating almost exclusively on our aches and pains,the early bird special at Dennys — and politics. Hoo boy. Like every other period in our lives, for good and ill, boomers are going to dominate until the day we die. We can’t help it.
Blame the greatest generation. That’s what we always did.
Here’s an interesting new argument about abortion and immigration from Chuck Colson, via Media Matters:
But what’s the root of the problem? Why do we have a shortage of workers? Aha, that’s the unspeakable “A” word that the elite dread the most: abortion. The reason we must allow millions of illegal aliens in to fill these jobs is because we have murdered a generation that would otherwise be filling them: 40 million sacrificed since 1973 to the god of self-fulfillment. And Americans are barely maintaining a replacement-level birthrate of 2.1 children per woman.
Remember the compassionate stuff that the abortionists used to tell us: “We are just preventing these poor kids from growing up in deprived, impoverished circumstances”? Hah! False. What happens is that others come in from abroad to live in those deprived, difficult, and impoverished circumstances and at great public cost.
I don’t get this logic. Assuming that anyone ever actually said this about abortion preventing kids from growing up in deprived circumstances, I doubt the meaning was that by having abortions, poverty would disappear. It was that some women would not be bringing unwanted children into poverty. What am I missing? How does that fact that “aliens” live in poverty make that statement false?
And is Colson really saying that we need to up the replacement-level birthrate in order to fill these low paying unskilled jobs that force people to live in deprived, impoverished circumstances? Doesn’t that evoke unpleasant associations with orphan trains and breeding bonded or slave labor? Creepy.
Besides, I thought the illegal immigration problem was that the 12 million illegal immigrants were taking jobs from Americans who are already here. If we had 40 million more Americans competing for all those low-paying, unskilled jobs, the unemployment rate would be in the stratosphere and we’d be in economic meltdown.
Or perhaps Colson is suggesting that these tens of millions of poverty stricken Americans would be even more exploited than the “aliens” are now, with no rights, no legal protections and below minimum wage, off-the-books jobs. That would solve the illegal immigration problem, all right. Why didn’t someone think of that before? (Oh that’s right, they did. Back in the good old days the Republicans want to take us back to — before we had labor laws.)
Like I said, a very creepy argument that leads to some very disturbing conclusions.
This is worthy of some serious push back from the blogosphere. For the past couple of days, the GOP has been circulating the fact that the Democrats refused to let the Republicans in the House strip their bill of the parts making illegal immigration a felony. This has been greeted with some “analysis” on the part of the media that the Democrats are just as hypocritical as the Republicans on the issue of immigration. The GOP is reportedly running ads on spanish language media saying Democrats voted for the bill to make illegal immigration a felony.
But that is misleading. Nathan Newman goes to the congressional record and finds out what the real argument on the House floor was when the amendment came up:
Mr. Chairman, under current law, illegal entry into the United States makes an alien subject to a Federal criminal misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 6 months in prison…
In the base bill, the maximum penalty for illegal entry was increased to a year and a day, and the same penalty was set for unlawful presence, to make the enhancements for these offenses consistent with the other penalty enhancements of the bill.
The administration subsequently requested the penalty for these crimes be lowered to 6 months. Making the first offense a felony, as the base bill would do, would require a grand jury indictment, a trial before a district court judge and a jury trial.
Also because it is a felony, the defendant would be able to get a lawyer at public expense if the defendant could not afford the lawyer. These requirements would mean that the government would seldom if ever actually use the new penalties. By leaving these offenses as misdemeanors, more prosecutions are likely to be brought against those aliens whose cases merit criminal prosecution.
For this reason, the amendment returns the sentence for illegal entry to its current 6 months and sets the penalty for unlawful presence at the same level.
The Republican argument was that they wanted to make it a felony, but because it would enable the defendants to have a jury trial and have access to a lawyer, they were afraid that it would cost too much. They argued that they would get far more prosecutions against the “aliens” if they kept it at the misdemeanor level.
Now, we know that they were having second thoughts about this provision, probably doing some polling that it would inflame the latino community. And Democrats certainly did want to hang this bill around the GOP’s neck and succeeded in doing so. But the Republicans’ stated reasons for trying to withdraw it were hardly because it was wrong to use such harsh methods, only that it would cost too much and would allow the “aliens” to have a lawyer and a fair trial. The Republican party, as we know, is very much against that fundamental American principle these days. They know who’s guilty and they don’t need no stinkin’ judges or juries telling them otherwise. (Unless you’re one of the legions of Republican criminal suspects, that is.)
It would be very helpful if the Democrats got this out to the spanish language media too. This idea that the Democrats were the ones who voted against removing the felon language is becoming CW. There is no reason for them to take a hit with the latino community about this when we know that they were not really in favor of the felon language. As Nathan Newman says:
This is a bow to the impossibility of revving up millions of criminal trials, but it’s all about how to most effectively criminalize undocumented workers.
And by the way, isn’t it interesting that the Bush administration didn’t exactly put its foot down either. All it did was request that the penalty for the convicted felon be lowered to six months. And here I thought old George was such a big latino lover.
Thank you Matt Yglesias for reminding everyone that this push for Iran is part and parcel of neocon ideology and not just some reflex of George W. Bush’s messianic impulses.
… there’s a widespread view on the American right that it’s always a mistake to reach diplomatic agreements with “evil” regimes. There’s also a widespread view on the American right that, contra the examples of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, nuclear deterrence won’t work against “crazy” leaders. At the intersection of those two opinions is the conclusion that we ought to be very, very, very, very willing to use unilateral preventative military force against countries that have nuclear weapons programs or that we merely vaguely suspect of having nuclear weapons programs. Both of those ideas are foolish and dangerously wrong, but they’re also widespread — not private oddball notions of Bush’s. If liberals want to push this country’s foreign policy in a better direction over the next five-to-ten years, we need to attack the whole network of ideas (including a non-trivial number of ideas whose origins are inside the Democratic coalition) that gave us the Iraq War and that threaten to give us the Iran War.
There has been a substantial amount of brainwashing done on the American public that needs to be immediately countered. These ideas have been floated in the media as American policy for years now. It doesn’t sound in the least bit jarring or inappropriate to many of the public. After all, Bush’s biggest applause line — and one that every American probably heard hundreds of times — of the last campaign was:
Do I forget the lessons of September the 11th and trust a madman, or do I take action to defend this country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time
Iran is a member of the axis ‘o evil. It is, therefore, already presumed to be batshit crazy and the new president has certainly helped with his holocaust denial and loony rhetoric. It will not be that difficult for Bush and his minions to transfer their earlier madman images to Iran.
The idealistic portion of the neocon fantasy has probably been discredited: creating democracy from the ground up through unilateral invasion and occupation is now seen as a non-starter by everyone but George W. Bush. But the dark side of the PNAC wet dream is alive and well. They are still convinced that there is only one way for America to maintain its hegemony (and by God it must be maintained) and that is for it to militarily dominate the world. Furthermore, they believe that they must constantly demonstrate American military might to sustain the world’s belief in its overwhelming power. After out little boo-boo in Iraq, it may now be important to these people that we demonstrate our awesome, unmatched air power. Eventually a little nuke action might be necessary too. The only way to protect America from the boogeyman is to prove over and over again that we are willing and eager to use force.
We may very well have a president named John McCain after 2008, or some other Republican with a chip on his shoulder. They don’t have to be card carrying neocons to buy into this notion. The Bush administration is still busily dismantling the post WWII system and Pax Americana, so far, is the only thing ready to take its place.
Democrats have a lot of good ideas, but until they develop a cogent narrative to counter the dominant neocon story, we are going to be in danger of this “madman” rhetoric rearing its ugly head every time the Republicans need a little boost in the polls or feel it’s time to show some muscle and remind everyone who’s in charge. Is there anyone besides the brunch bunch at AEI who thinks that’s going to keep this country safe?