[lbo-talk] The very worst custodians of empire

[andie nachgeborenen]

Yeah, Carrol, just like Vietnam. Ever read the
Pentagon Papers? Even they couldn't figure out why we
were in Vietnam. Iraq's a tar baby, a piece of total
idiocy. The Bushies were looking for a quick symbolic
victory, flowers for the liberators, maybe some oil
concessions (but oil can't have been the real issue
either in this or the first Gulf War because it sells
at market price no matter who nominally owns it), and
they ended up with an insurgency that they can neither
defeat nor quit fighting, one that costs at least a
billion a month, and has plunged W's popularity into
the basement, impeding his ability to further the
haute Western bourgeois (as in Southern & Southwest,
rather than the Eastern and FIRE bourgeoisie, which is
pragmatic).  If the Democrats were not so hapless they
would have broken his administration on the wheel,
hanged drawn & quartered the GOP, and march
triumphally into Congress already.

--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:


> On Jun 25, 2006, at 11:57 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
> > Looking back on the Iraq war from 10 or more years
> in the future it  
> > will
> > be obvious that it was the U.S. not the Bush
> Administration which
> > launched the war, and that it represented the best
> judgment of all
> > concerned in 'ruling-class' politics of what was
> _needed_ to preserve
> > u.s. hegemony.
> 
> How do you know this? Many, maybe even most, foreign
> policy pundits  
> would disagree.
> 
> > Blaming Bush is a version of the cult of
> personality, no more
> > intelligent, probably less intelligent, than other
> versions of that  
> > cult
> > in other times or places.
> >
> > The War makes sense from the viewpoint of u.s.
> imperialism.
> 
> Now, even, that it's turned out a disaster? One that
> no less than  
> Madeleine Albright called teh worst foreign policy
> disaster in US  
> history?
> 
> > Placing the emphasis on Bush is simply another way
> of pimping for the
> > Democratic Party and delaying the emergence of any
> real left in the  
> > u.s.
> 
> Isn't this just the negative of the impulse you're
> criticizing? Cult  
> of personality, scapegoating, etc.? What evidence do
> you have that  
> there are great untapped reservoirs of radical
> leftism lurking in the  
> US pop?
> 
> Doug
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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