I wrote that, not as a personal confession, but rather as a segue into the subject of how childish America's foreign policy often seems to be. Although I am tempermentally incapable of holding on to grudges and feuds, I am aware that there are many people in the world who remember everything. We have a foreign policy that seems to calculate advantage and success on weekly projections. Our intervention in Afghanistan is a prime example. How ironic that over twenty years later the USA has invaded Afghanistan for EXACTLY the same reasons the Soviets claimed they did!! To elevate the status of women, to liberate the masses and so on and so forth.
You claim that: "...US funding of the mujahadeen ended after the breakup up of Soviet Union...."
1.)This is a perfect example of the lack of long-range thinking in our foreign policy calculations. So the Soviet Union broke up and we took our toys (Some of them anyway; There are some rather lethal toys floating around out there in the hands of some very nasty, crabby children, I've heard.)and went home? Benazir Bhutto, when she was Prime Minister of Pakistan, asked what we thought would happen to all those young men we had trained and armed. Well? Abu What's-his-name is busy in the Phillipines blowing up human beings. Some are jihading in Kosovo helping the Albainians to clean out the few remaining Serbs from their ancestral homeland. Many are helping Chechnya kill Russians. Some are killing Christians in the Ivory Coast, the Sudan, Indonesia. Many are helping the Indians with their overpopulation problem by blowing up Indian citizens. They are helping battle the African AIDS crisis by killing Africans in Nigeria and points South. But at least we gave the Soviets one in the eye--eh?
And 2.) How on earth would you know if funding has stopped? Has a revolution taken place in Washington DC that I missed? Has the light of day been shined on the "black budget"? Is George Tenet packing his black bag and retiring to a professorship at an Ivy League college?
And 3.)It isn't true. Maybe we just changed the name. A mujahadeen by any other name; for example "freedom fighters" in Kosovo and Macedonia? How did the "blind shiek" manage to get a Visa into the United States just in time to inspire the first bombing of the World Trade Towers? Well, we'll never know because President Clinton and now President Bush seem to think that holding our National Security bureaucracies accountable for anything might hurt their self-esteem. Who are all those "Non Governmental" Organizations populated by the best sorts of Americans who are doing everything they can to aid Chechnyan and Albanian "freedom fighters"? And how did all those whom the FBI is calling "Al Quaida operatives" get into the United States? Gee, we could go on like this forever, couldn't we? Odd that these qestions never come up in Congressional oversight hearings. I watched one on C-span yesterday and I honestly thought at one point Senator Rockefeller was going to fall to his knees and start singing: "Mammy" to George Tenet.
...At least Rumsfeld did not personally villify Chirac or Schroeder as the German evironment minister did when she compared Bush to Hitler....
I never got away with that "she dit it too, only worse" argument with my mom. "Sigh". I guess I was an abused child and it has effected my thinking. I don't feel proud or secure when I hear members of our Administration engaging in international verbal food fights. I think it's unprofessional and unmanly in an era when our Nation desperately needs authentic manliness.
By the way, you'll notice that here on FreeRepublic there are many who can't get through the day without calling somebody an Nazi or Hitler himself. Perhaps the German Environment minister is a Freeper.
Excuse me. This statement is called a "gratuitous assertion" in logic. From an American understanding of WWI this statement is not only false but outrageously false.
Oh no! The more polite we're becoming, the further apart we are growing! In light of the oceans of evidence and writing on the subject of our intervention in the Great War I cannot believe that you still think Wilsonianism has anything to recommend it.
Yes, the French were out for blood. They had lost an entire generation and their country was in shambles. From a human nature standpoint this is perfectly comprehensible. The actions of Wilson on the other hand, with none of the vast French wounds to explain them if not justify them, before, during and after the conflict are appalling by any measure.
... I think almost all US mainstream academic historians would find such an assertion to be bizarre....
I think almost all US mainstream academic historians are palace eunuchs. They may gossip a bit from decade to decade or engage in a bit of palace intrigue to help wile away the boring hours in the think tank, but they would never do anything to undermine the palace system itself.
I can't begin to list all the harm Wilson--in thought, deed and action --did to Old Europe; the rise of racial identity as a determining factor in National boundaries---something unknown before Wilson's odious notions of "self-determination" (some ideas, like wine, do not travel well across the ocean.); the insistence upon "unconditional surrender"--as though the American experience in our Civil War could be tranferred across the ocean and applied to Europe; the catastrophic prolongation of the war that this insistence caused; his woeful ignorance of European history and geography--an ignorance that is STILL causing grief in places like the Balkans; His hatred of Catholicism and his determination to smash the ancient monarchial order that had brought such a high degree of civilization to many--not all, but whose civilzation can claim that?---Europeans.
As the brilliant Old European savant, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn put it:
...Thus--finally--the House of Austria went into exile, to be replaced by a simple common man from Austria, an alleged house painter, a man who drowned the world in a flood of blood and tears...
If you find the time, please read Read Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisted---From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot. No he is not a "mainstream US academic"--and thank God for that!! After reading his brilliant chapter on Woodrow Wilson I dare say you will never be able to view that man---or mainstream American academics, for that matter--the same again. It is a book that will haunt you and change you forever; something Old Europe can do to every American who opens their mind to it.
It was the voice of an Old European (speaking from the grave) that changed me when I went to school in France. One of my profs was a soixant huitard and another--of part Vietnamese extraction---a great lover of DeGaulle. The confrontations between the latter and the aging, pompous former were something to behold. It was Old Europe that liberated me intellectually from the ghetto of liberation theology, sticky, syruppy, sappy Leftism and also helped me to perceive the reality of the total triumph of Leftism in America that is masked by our "two party" system.
This is another reason I loath Rumsfeld--his crude, childish mau-mauing of Europe using the innacurate term "Old Europe". He's counting on the American weakness-of-character that despises anything old and believes that all progress is forward.
I love Old Europe. Chirac is NOT Old Europe. Now I see, in another news report, that Rep. King in New York--another one shedding the responsibilites of acting like a real man--is joining in the mosh pit with: "France is meaningless. Like, they're so yesterday, man."
This is exactly the mindset that Bloom was mourning in The Closing of the American Mind.
And Bush is just another in a long line of Wilsonian democrats-- who is going to intervene wilsonianly in a part of the world where Wilsonian utopinaism will probably mutate into something even worse than that which resulted from our meddling in Old Europe.
It is worth noting, however, that the US was called into the Serbian mess after two years of feckless peacekeeping efforts by the EU.
I realize this is a complex area that probably can't be hashed out right here. But once again you are refusing to take off your American blinders. The Europeans had proposed a cantonization plan that, although, not perfect (what is?), would have stopped the immediate bloodshed. ONCE AGAIN, in the spirit of Wilson, the United States would not tolerate that solution. Now, we have tiny bristling groups staring at each other from behind barbed wire and guarded, apparently permanently, by international troops.
The Bush I administration had explicitly decided to hand the case over to Europeans as a trail run for independent European Defense Force. It proved to be unalloyed disaster.
Compared to what? The results of the American intervention are hardly anything to point at with pride. This is another aspect of American foreign-policy utopianism which I reject. The sad fact is, sometimes groups just have to be allowed to fight it out. Sometimes somebody has to win and somebody has to lose. This may be a melancholy fact--but so is much of human nature. Imagine what would have happened if Old Europe had practiced American foreign policy on us during the Civil War!!!
...Nonsense. Bush is leading us to a better world with the US acting as a benign hegemon, "pares inter pares". The longest period of peace known to Europe was period following the end of the Napoleonic wars until the onset of WWI. The peace was enforced by the benign hegemon of that era Great Britain. ...
All I can say to this extraordinary assertion is that you and I have been reading radically different history books. The "peace" you refer to must be something like the "peace" of islam wherein natives are killed, cultures smashed, economies usurped---but it's all for the best.
The US finds itself in a similar position today as Great Britain was after the Congress of Vienna.
It sure does, And I'll see you on the other side of the barricades. I will not so easily embrace the slow suicide of the United States of America as you seem willing to do.
....In order to proper fulfill our role we need to divest ourselves of utopian notions of International Relations derived from French and British neo-marxists....
I couldn't agree more. But as you can see, my idea of divestiture and yours are very different. I'm telling you that your vision of the "benign hegemon" is blinding you to the fact that such a power is merely the flip side of the "utopian notions of neo-marxists." ( Watch as Lefties like Christopher Hitches and his ilk slowly but surely start drawing closer to American Power as the means of achieving their ends.)
Old Europe helped me to see things that I might not have been able to perceive even with a fine American education (or perhaps because of it) and for that I will always be grateful. At least I will be able to whine, piss and moan loudly, if impotently, from the sidelines as our country makes all the same mistakes we made at the turn of the 20th century. Only this time it won't be the European continent that bears the sole brunt of the disaster........