Stability and US Policy
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from our old forum
Stability and US policy
Author: albert
Date : Nov 9, 2003 3:24 pm
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I just posted the following to Mighty Fine Words at Harry's Place.
vvvv
The important paragraph quoted from Bush's speech above is essentially the line that former CIA director James Woolsey has been pushing for years. If anything it is slightly stronger since Woolsey (leading proponent of war with Iraq) presented the catastrophic policy of consistently backing reaction in the middle east as "European" while Bush merely tries to spread the blame around by describing it as "Western".
Both speak in terms of "excusing and accommodating" tyranny rather than admitting to "promoting" it but then they would, wouldn't they?
The key point is that no US government could fail to notice how bankrupt their middle east policy was after 9/11. The main obstacle to change has been the overwhelming consensus among the US foreign policy establishment who built their whole careers on supporting reaction in the name of "stability".
There was no way the US Congress would have authorized the threat of war to disarm Saddam if they had known the real aim was a revolutionary war to modernize the middle east at a cost of years of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars. Its only now that Bush feels confident enough to openly declare the policy that has in fact been followed.
For a deeper perspective on why the US had to abandon its former policy of "stability" see Stability, America's Enemy, by Ralph Peters - a retired US army officer writing in US Army War College strategic studies journal.
I published an article, May Day - it's the festival of the distressed in "The Australian" (a mainstream national daily) last May Day explaining why this was the new US perspective and contrasting it with the miserable defence of "stability" from the pseudo-left.
Analysing this shift in US strategy from a left perspective has been the major theme of our web site, www.lastsuperpower.net. The above article is included in a collection there - Last Superpower discussions of US strategy and policy
BTW one theme I have been stressing is the comparison between Bush's approach of presenting far more limited war aims until as late as possible and Lincoln's similar strategy during the US Civil War - it only became a war against slavery when it had become pretty obvious that simply restoring the status quo was not going to work.
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Comments : thread at Harrys place
(by kerrb on 11/11/2003)
check out the thread in response to albert at Mighty Fine Words
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