It's clear that, ever since the US military got tied down in Iraq, a campaign against Iran _rapidly escalated_, with cooperation of Democrats, which is the opposite of what you would expect, if the power elite and ruling class were divided and demoralized.
On 10/2/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 1, 2006, at 9:18 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> > Yoshie writes:
> >
> >> But they are all external constraints, which don't equal a major
> >> division in the US power elite and ruling class.
> > ========================
> > And yet you say the Iranian and Nicaraguan Revolutions did provoke
> > such a split in the US ruling class. I don't it recall the elite
> > and the American people being as agonized or as divided then as
> > they are now over the war in Iraq. This is the biggest foreign
> > policy crisis the US has experienced since Vietnam
>
> No kidding. Madeleine Albright, who's hardly a radical, describes the
> invasion of Iraq as the biggest foreign policy disaster in U.S.
> history. The Woodward book also suggests a major division. But the
> anxious sorts don't have much of a political vehicle to work with.
You ever remember what Republicans were saying about the Clinton venture in Yugoslavia?
<blockquote>"President Clinton is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
-Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA)
Bombing a sovereign nation for ill-defined reasons with vague objectives undermines the American stature in the world. The international respect and trust for America has diminished every time we casually let the bombs fly."
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
"Once the bombing commenced, I think then Milosevic unleashed his forces, and then that's when the slaughtering and the massive ethnic cleansing really started"
-Senator Don Nickles (R-OK)
"Clinton's bombing campaign has caused all of these problems to explode"
-Representative Tom Delay (R-TX)
"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning...I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
-Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)
"You think Vietnam was bad? Vietnam is nothing next to Kosovo."
-Tony Snow, Fox News 3/24/99
"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years"
-Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
"I'm on the Senate Intelligence Committee, so you can trust me and believe me when I say we're running out of cruise missles. I can't tell you exactly how many we have left, for security reasons, but we're almost out of cruise missles."
-Senator Inhofe (R-OK)
"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
-Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99
"America has no vital interest in whose flag flies over Kosovo's capital, and no right to attack and kill Serb soldiers fighting on their own soil to preserve the territorial integrity of their own country"
-Pat Buchanan (R)
"These international war criminals were led by Gen. Wesley Clark ... who clicked his shiny heels for the commander-in-grief, Bill Clinton."
-Michael Savage
"This has been an unmitigated disaster ... Ask the Chinese embassy. Ask all the people in Belgrade that we've killed. Ask the refugees that we've killed. Ask the people in nursing homes. Ask the people in hospitals."
-Representative Joe Scarborough (R-FL)
"It is a remarkable spectacle to see the Clinton Administration and NATO taking over from the Soviet Union the role of sponsoring "wars of national liberation."
-Representative Helen Chenoweth (R-ID)
"By the order to launch air strikes against Serbia, NATO and President Clinton have entered uncharted territory in mankind's history. Not even Hitler's grab of the Sudetenland in the 1930s, which eventually led to WW II, ranks as a comparable travesty. For, there are no American interests whatsoever that the NATO bombing will either help, or protect; only needless risks to which it exposes the American soldiers and assets, not to mention the victims on the ground in Serbia."
-Bob Djurdjevic, founder of Truth in Media </blockquote>
The above and more have been collected at <http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/18/161016/461>.
Seriously, attacks on the White House largely motivated by partisan politics that do not result in policy change can't amount to a major division in the US power elite and ruling class (unless the words "major" and "division" have already been as cheapened as fascism and anti-Semitism by reckless political discourse).
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>