by Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch
"On the brief occasions when the president now appears in the Rose Garden to "comfort" or "reassure" a shock-and-awed nation, you can almost hear those legions of ducks quacking lamely in the background. Once upon a time, George W. Bush, along with his top officials and advisers, hoped to preside over a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana – a legacy for the generations. More recently, their highest hope seems to have been to slip out of town in January before the you-know-what hits the fan. No such luck......
In these last years, the Bush administration's deepest fundamentalist faith – its cultish belief in the efficacy of military force above all else – has proven an empty vessel. With its "military strengths beyond challenge" all-too-effectively challenged, Bush's second-term officials are finally returning to some of the most boringly traditional methods of diplomacy and negotiation – under far more extreme circumstances and from a far weaker position – while their former neocon supporters scream bloody murder from right-wing think tanks in Washington and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "Having bent the knee to North Korea," former UN ambassador John Bolton wrote recently in that paper, "Secretary [of State] Rice appears primed to do the same with Iran, despite that regime's egregious and extensive involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program."
And they do have a point. This administration does now seem to be on bended knee to the world.
As with Pandora's Box, however, what the Bush administration unleashed cannot simply be taken back. A new administration will not only inherit an arc of instability that is truly aflame, but the paradigm, still remarkably unexamined, of a Global War on Terror. Now, there is a disaster-in-the-making for you. "
TomDispatch
"On the brief occasions when the president now appears in the Rose Garden to "comfort" or "reassure" a shock-and-awed nation, you can almost hear those legions of ducks quacking lamely in the background. Once upon a time, George W. Bush, along with his top officials and advisers, hoped to preside over a global Pax Americana and a domestic Pax Republicana – a legacy for the generations. More recently, their highest hope seems to have been to slip out of town in January before the you-know-what hits the fan. No such luck......
In these last years, the Bush administration's deepest fundamentalist faith – its cultish belief in the efficacy of military force above all else – has proven an empty vessel. With its "military strengths beyond challenge" all-too-effectively challenged, Bush's second-term officials are finally returning to some of the most boringly traditional methods of diplomacy and negotiation – under far more extreme circumstances and from a far weaker position – while their former neocon supporters scream bloody murder from right-wing think tanks in Washington and the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. "Having bent the knee to North Korea," former UN ambassador John Bolton wrote recently in that paper, "Secretary [of State] Rice appears primed to do the same with Iran, despite that regime's egregious and extensive involvement in terrorism and the acceleration of its nuclear program."
And they do have a point. This administration does now seem to be on bended knee to the world.
As with Pandora's Box, however, what the Bush administration unleashed cannot simply be taken back. A new administration will not only inherit an arc of instability that is truly aflame, but the paradigm, still remarkably unexamined, of a Global War on Terror. Now, there is a disaster-in-the-making for you. "
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