Posted on 11/03/2009 8:34:55 PM PST by BGHater
Former president George W Bush thought that the United States could turn Kabul into Peoria, the archetypal American city in the state of Illinois. President Barack Obama thinks that Kabul is just as good as Peoria. America has shed idealist delusion - that imposing the outward form of democracy in Iraq or Afghanistan would implant its content - in favor of an even stranger delusion, which refuses "to elevate one nation or group of people over another", as Obama told the United Nations on September 23.
It was mad to believe that America could remake the world in its own image. Given that more than half the world's languages will go extinct for lack of interest during the present century, it is even madder to turn foreign policy into an affirmative action program for disadvantaged cultures.
But those are the idiot twins of American idealism: either one size fits all, or size doesn't matter. I do not propose to draw a moral equivalence between presidents Bush and Obama: Bush wanted to elevate American power and Obama wants to diminish it. Bush had better motives, but he was no less destructive of American influence.
Where are the realists? Self-styled realists, to be sure, idle at every corner on K Street. Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the enemies of the so-called Israel lobby, claim to be realists. Why, they ask, should America ally with Israel, a land of seven million people, and offend a billion and a third Muslims, some of whom are sitting on a great deal of the world's oil? Why not force Israel to accept a peace on Arab terms, namely a return to the 1967 borders and the division of Jerusalem? Why can't we be rational and sensible and sophisticated like our European allies?
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Because we're decent. Genocide has never been popular with Americans.
Much food for thought....my gut rection is that he is right, which makes both presidents Bush and Obama wrong in some key aspects of their policies.
But President Bush loves America.
I don't believe that. But clearly he knew having toppled the Talibs we could not leave a vacuum. Their "democracy" doesn't have to look like our democracy but we can not and dare not leave a vacuum. We must leave a force there that is relatively humane and capable of keeping the worst of the Talibs at bay. Thats what we've been working on the last several years. Hopefully the new president will allow that work to go forward.
So at least in the first paragraph Spengler has drawn a rather false equivalence between O and GW.
Unremarkably, in the Asia Times, it was a letter of appeasment for the Asiatic powers, China, and Russia. Communism promotes worldwide revolution. Communists and their derivatives like Putin will never be friends of free Democratic Capitalist Countries. Hence while Communism morphs into Facism, and Islaamists are enabled to Jihad, the West has no choice but to fight, and undermine them.
If we don’t, they will destroy us and turn us into Lands of perpetual Obamerism.
Both of course, are wrong. US foreign welfare, as domestic welfare, is not the answer, and will only result in more American deaths and the US poorer.
In any case, we dare not leave a vacuum or we'll be back and next time the cost may be much higher.
Goldman should get a clue from NeoCon Wolfowitz and start praising Realists Zbig and Scowcroft.
Or Goldman should try what NeoCon Kaplan did, get a fellowship at the Realist think tank Baker Institute. Imagine that, neocons working for that Joooooo hater James Baker.
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