> Huh? Bush did more to damage the U.S. empire than a generation of anti-
> imperialists could manage. Obama is now busily repairing that damage.
What repair job? Show me one metric where Obama has turned around the United States of Securitized Assets to any significant degree, except maybe marketing (the phenomenon of, "I'm not George Bush"). In a multipolar world, no brand name can survive solely on buzz alone, you have to back it up with performance, and the US has very little to deliver anymore. This is painfully obvious in things like the Senator from MBNA's recent foray into Central Asia:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8165617.stm
It's not that Team Obama is trying to irritate Bearzilla -- they are indeed serious about the whole re-set thing and are backing off from the various neocon proxy wars on Russia. The problem is that the Dems are captives of imperial orthodoxy, and still operate within the framework of late Soviet bloc thinking, which comes down to (1) handing over tons of military equipment to an obedient proxy army, or (2) not doing so. Clearly, Biden told Saakashvili he was getting nothing. Just as clearly, the US has no strategy to deal with the multipolar world.
-- DRR