> >In short - western imperialists won. Period. Their victory is total:
> >military, economic, social and cultural. All we can do here is to turn off
> >the lights, go home and tell your children that once upon a time there was
> >a dream of a better and more just society - or get drunk if there are no
> >children on board. Predictable - yet fuckingly depressing.
> >
> >wojtek
I'm not actually sure this is true. Iraq, Bosnian airstrikes, and the Somalian invasion were all "successes" in the US's drive to replace the cold war with a souped-up US hegemony, each one freer and freer of multilateral institutions, and more and more strongly supported by allies. And this was in the face of many heady post-cold war dreams, all of which which the US saw off. (Remember the plan to have armed forces under the aegis of the UN? Neither does anybody else.) The US spent all that political capital on this mission. And if Milosevic had buckled in a week, it would have finalized the deal. Everyone would have thought this was the ideal marriage of efficiency and the intoxicating rush of moral certainty.
But as it is, I'm not sure we haven't scared everybody a bit too much and unified both our allies and our enemies against this souped-up hegemony idea. Right this moment, they're all in too deep, they all have to claim victory for an agreement they could have gotten without a single bomb being dropped or a single Kosovar displaced. But once this experience is digested, I'm not sure it isn't going to turn out to be an inflection point, where US hegemony reached its post-cold-war apogee and then overreached. It is possible that Europe is going to wake up from this and decide, for various reasons, that that discarded plan about the beefing up the OSCE and the WEU was a good idea after all. And that they and the Russians and Chinese are going to start opposing US adventures more on principle -- perhaps starting in Iraq. At the very least, that next time NATO wants to act out of area, the other members will find themselves involuntarily asking about the downsides and the possible complications, rather than just expecting instant success like they did this time. And at the most, everyone's reactive resistance to our unilateralism will revive the multilateralism the US thought it had seen off.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
"I'm an optimist because it's intellectually more challenging" __________________________________________________________________________