The same actual doubt has existed from the beginning: Why is the U.S. ruling class, on the whole, going along with, even vigorously supporting, this nonsense? I don't think a fully satisfactory answer to that question is available yet.
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Brendan O'Neill of the UK's Spiked Online has been saying all along that the whole enterprise is a clear indication of the drift, ennui and essential purposelessness of Western elites.
I vigorously disagreed with this opinion at first, and wrote Mr. O'Neill an email a few months before the war asking how, in the face of neocon statements, Project For A New American Century position papers and all the rest of it he could insist that these people had no purpose, no real ideas and, ultimately, no realizable goals?
He simply continued to present his case, interpreting the day's events using this notion as the analytical filter.
Now that the occupation of Iraq is a firmly established fiasco, and the Taliban are regrouping in Afghanistan (did I say regrouping? I meant regrouped and attacking) and all the rest of the grand sounding plans and empire jabbering seem like the jughead schemes I should have seen them to be all along, O'Neill's POV no longer seems off the mark.
We're so accustomed I think, to viewing our adversaries as well organized, sinister agents whose every move is well plotted, that the idea they're actually making shit up as they go along seems beyond belief. So we say that they 'planned' for chaos in Iraq or wanted the opium production in Afghanistan to be reconstituted when it may be that events have simply run away and they have no idea of how to contain what's been unleashed.
The idea that the rulers are out of ideas is intriguing and, if true, may mark this moment as the beginning of...
Who knows? I will say this though. I'm beginning to pay greater attention to the novelists like Gibson, the theorists like Zizek and others who seem to have a firmer grasp of the true wildness of our time than many pick-your-favorite-orthodoxy-bound thinkers.
DRM
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