I suspect we will look back in twenty years, and say, "Ah ha! Of course this was in the cards."
Always a great pleasure to be in the company of a clairvoyant. We are on the way to a domesticated, democratic, ME, just give us a moment while we take out Iraq, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia; and, oh, yes, we are on our way to a two power world--the US and China.
Just a little bit left out of that. All the talk of the European Union as a third power bloc.
I would back up and agree with you that we are definitely in a transition zone; one that kicked in sometime well before the Berlin wall came down but for which it could be treated as a symbolic point. We have no serious idea as to where we are going.
But Clinton navigated us superbly through the part of the zone on his watch; no serious wars, try to damp down ethnic cleansing, try to negotiate around the proliferation of nuclear weapons issues.
Bush came into office with the obvious determination to stop the navigation; just take over the ship; tell everybody who was boss, none of this sharing of responsibilities; too wimpy for the macho guys. And he appointed the kind of folk who would do that. The only problem was that he definitively lacked the mandate to even take the warplanes out of the hangers. Then came 9-11. At first, he stayed in the same mode; did terrific work with the Afghan stuff including making certain we all understood the problem was not Islam; it was Al Q. But the old arrogance didn't just creep back in; it came in like a bulldozer. And now we are on the verge of paying one of the prices for it. Problem is, we have no way of knowing just what the price is. As Keller argued in this morning's Times, it's not at all likely the neocon dream of a peaceful democratic Iraq is going anywhere. Given that, we drop back to Pollack's argument, that the blowback will not be healthy thing. |
