Pakistan: The War Party's New Frontier

The more things change…

By Justin Raimondo

""What a world! What a world!" That's what the Wicked Witch of the West exclaimed as she melted in one of the final scenes of The Wizard of Oz, and today her plaintive cry seems the only possible reaction to the headlines reporting trouble every which way: Pakistan about to explode, the Taliban retaking Afghanistan, Iran spreading its influence deep into "liberated" Iraq, and a new cold war brewing in the steppes of the Caucasus. From Eastern Europe to the Far Eastern reaches of Central Asia, a storm is gathering. Whoever is president in 2009 is going to be facing some of the most dangerous crises since the Great War, when a single shot fired in Sarajevo sparked a global conflagration, giving rise to two world wars and the bloodiest century in the history of mankind......

Pakistan looks to be the War Party's new frontier. Now there's a phrase we haven't heard for a while, until very recently. It was first utilized by the administration of John F. Kennedy to prettify his program of statism at home and war abroad. Obama is often likened to Kennedy, in his youthful attractiveness and promise of "change" – but I'm afraid that, in the realm of foreign policy, there will be no new frontiers for the Obama administration, only old ones that have long since been explored and mapped. Which only goes to show, once again, the veracity of that old truism: the more things change, the more they remain the same. "