> Instead of running ahead of the White House and baying corporate press to
> not only denounce the criminal violence waged by these theocratic
> gangsters, but to demand their destruction
It's not this simple. There was sufficient cause, considering all the evidence, for the UN to intervene in a situation where a multinational terrorist gang had hijacked an entire country (a dismal first in the annals of world history -- previous monsters, like the Khmer Rouge, were strictly national terrorists). This didn't happen, mostly because the US is run by an asinine oiligarchy with a current account deficit for a brain, so we had this fucked-up situation of hunting a bunch of Al Capones with B-52s, when a battalion of Swiss reservists with stapleguns could've gotten the job done. On some level, the Regency must know how weak its geopolitical position is, which is why it has to bluster and threaten everyone in sight.
Fortunately, our friendly neighborhood Uebermacht, the European Union, has decided to put its foot/pseudopod/tentacles down and restore a semblance of sanity to the Central Asian periphery, so anything the US Left did at that point was, um, academic.
I think Max is right about Palestine, though. That's where the interests of the EU and the US most directly collide: US elites want endless slaughter, like a Western movie which never ends, in order to prove to itself that there's still a frontier to conquer, while the EU wants a reasonably prosperous semiperiphery it can sell machine-tools to. If the Regency even *thinks* about taking out Baghdad, the EU would pull the plug on US capital markets -- which may happen anyway, of course. Declining metropoles never have any good options; rising metropoles never have any bad choices.
-- Dennis