They've established the new "blood clot" inside the beltway, according to Lawrence Kaplan. As entrenched in the Bush Whitehouse as they are in the Kerry campaign, in spite of the President's rhetoric, what they favor is a return to the same "stability politics" that not only allowed Saddam to come to power, but supported him after he had. The "New Realism" isn't really different from the "Old Realism," except that it's even less tuned to the era we actually live in, or the threats we really face. These guys would install a new Saddam, spit on their hands, and seal the deal. And even though the President still says the right words, the conviction is sounding a little hollow.
Excerpt:
The absence of civil society, the weakness of independent media outlets, the weakness of secular opposition parties--all these things underpin the truth that, as Bush said in a recent speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, "as long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready to export."This is more than conjecture. A recent study by Princeton's Alan Krueger and Czech scholar Jitka Maleckova analyzed data on terrorist attacks and measured it against the characteristics of the terrorists' countries of origin. The study found that "the only variable that was consistently associated with the number of terrorists was the Freedom House index of political rights and civil liberties. Countries with more freedom were less likely to be the birthplace of international terrorists."
So, as voters are we being denied a real choice? Have we been sidelined by the so-called "experts," and if so what's to be done? There are battles inside the beltway, it seems, that will determine our fate and the fate of Iraq... and they have little to do even with the rather illusory conflict between left and right. I have always maintained that party is irrelevant, and have chosen to support Bush based on his public stance. But that also means that if the strategy of democratization is no longer really supported by this Administration then I have absolutely no allegience to them.
It appears that we all may have been hoodwinked, and that the only viable strategy for building a counter-wave to Totalitarianism 3.0 has been abandoned by those who only saw that option as temorarily expedient anyway. Of course, it could be just the opposite. It could be the case that "realism" is seen as temporarily expedient, and things will change after the election. But if that's actually not the case, and realism really is the new orthodoxy, then I think I might be inclined to join a third party movement, and wait until the time is ripe to supplant the current Whigs of both obsolete parties, who simply can't acquire the moral clarity to perceive Totalitarianism (the modern manifestation of slavery) as the essential problem.
Posted by Demosophist at June 15, 2004 01:45 AM | TrackBack