>> With counterfactuals there's no point in arguing, but my guess is
>> that the outs would have also gone for creating a military
>> emergency as one of the tools available to manage the US capitalist
>> empire system at this potentially nasty stage of things.
>
> But Cheney & Co. have been gunning for Iraq, as part of a major Middle
> Eastern map rethink, for over 10 years. The timing just before the
> election is suspicious, but otherwise, this is a long-standing obsession
> of the right.
The outs have been pretty pragmatic when wagging the dog is useful. Like, Croat nationalism was totally a right - in fact nutty right - obsession until its beauties were discovered by Clinton & co. But while looking at the lovely Lieberman isn't too reassuring, it's totally arguable the outs wouldn't be quite as godawful.
BTW, Rakesh points out on page C1 of todays WSJ the current account #s show that Asian net dollar purchases have more than offset European net sales. What with Yoshies point, Doug. Can the Japanese internal state yen denominated debt be seen as growing in step with net Japanese holdings of US dollar debt? Monetarization of the dollar denominated reserves? Is it reasonable to argue that the ballooning of yen denominated internal debt is in fact a source of strength vis-a-vis the US, like the ballooning of English pound denominated internal state debt was in fact a source of strength vis-a-vis the Dutch&French from the late seventeenth century? too much Wallerstein on the mind, i guess...
john mage