SISYFUS AGAIN?

We hardly made it up the lowest reaches of the hill. Is it possible to slide back down into the Bush/Cheney abyss, or even lower?

In the NY Times (3/17/14), David Sanger musters the arguments of John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Condoleezza Rice and the neocon pundits in and around the Administration itself: ‘we have a foreign policy disaster because Obama has made the US look weak, because of the reluctance to throw American military power into Syria, against Iran, and now into Ukraine against Russia.’

Echoes of the “news” stories by Times reporters Michael Gordon and Judith Miller leading up to the Iraq War — the neocons never quit pushing confrontation rather than diplomacy, promoting force and conflict, disrupting all efforts to find common grounds on any difficult problem. For them, the Cold War can’t be put to rest because the impossible dream remains: a US constructed “world order”, an “American Century”.

The fact is that every world power — Russia under Putin, or Britain under Thatcher, or the USA whether under Reagan or Obama — acts without anyone’s permission when it deems its “vital interests” directly challenged. Extreme nationalism is a plague whether it presents itself under Russian or Ukrainian banners or as the conceit of “American Exceptionalism”.

Neocons to the contrary, repeated failures at terrible cost have convinced most people that war, cold as well as hot, only makes matters more impossible. What a tragedy if barely begun efforts at negotiating some of the most difficult international problems were to be sabotaged in favor of a renewed Cold War!

I try not to let the voice of Cassandra take over my expectations. But there it is. Unbelievable. The wreckers who presided over economic collapse and disastrous wars have succeeded in making a shambles of even meager efforts at reform. Now the havoc they have wrought actually gives them the hope that they may soon take over the Senate as well as the House…. and what comes next?