Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> The domino theory during the Cold War was phantasmatic. The same
> fantasy of falling dominoes drives the US power elite today:
Yes & No. That 'theory' has two aspects. The aspect manifested in propaganda was not a phantasm but a simple lie, which I doubt anyone in Washington or among the media barons believed.* The other aspect of it, emphasized by Chomsky, was the deep u.s. terror of a counter-example in the Third World. (I would assume this rather than the political influence of the Gusanos in Miami is at the basis of the unrelenting u.s. undeclared war on Cuba.) And the battering of Vietnam during the war (Not since the Romans Salted the Earth was the title of one pamphlet at the time) and isolation afterwards stopped _that_ domino from falling.
But the Mideast is different. The U.S. will fight to stay there until or unless it is forced out by defeats abroad and at home. Mere public opinion or a run-of-the-mill anti-war movement will be ignored or, if it threatens, repressed. Neither I nor anyone else can either prove or disprove this now, so it is a bit pointless to debate it. I will leave it as an empirical prediction. We will know a decade or so from now.
No ruling class has ever been 100% unified. In any grouping there is almost always, as though by some statistical law, around 5% who grumble or resist. Those in the ruling class now who disagree will confine themselves to polite articles in Foreign Affairs or the op-ed pages of the major papers.
Carrol