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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (9981)	5/5/2004 4:31:42 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

Re: he is not my president Well, you repress and overlook the fact that the US President is but one gear within the "gear train" of the US power structure... He is not the all-powerful master of US policy who can rock the boat on his whim. I guess the Prez is much more of an arbitrator between imperious and sometimes conflicting powerhouses within the US power structure: the Pentagon, the CIA, Wall Street, the farmers, the Israeli lobby, Christian conservatives, etc. Hence it's the nexus of US policy as a whole that you should blame for the reckless Iraq war --not just the frontman in the White House... In a flash of insight, I found out that the US is actually as divided and fragmented as Europe... Of course, the faults that rip across the US fabric don't partition compact nation-states like in Europe. Americans boast that they all make up one big, united if diverse family --with one language, one mainstream Christian culture, and one federal bureaucracy-- and, accordingly, they scoff at the welter of European countries who must spend about $600 million a year on translation paperwork alone and whose dissensions were pathetically exposed during the Iraq crisis... However, the US polity is also fraught with ideological and cultural fractures, particularly that delineating the "fundagelical" constituency ()... I suspect that is the little dirty secret that flaws the US "monolith"... The Bible Belt has not dispelled its secessionist fancies altogether. Somehow, those arch-conservative bigots from Texas, Alabama,... share more in common with Poland's Catholic peasantry than with their fellow countrymen in, say, California. So I would venture to claim that waging war in Iraq might be the price (the US has) to pay to stave off the ideological breakup of America (). Gus () Message 20086091 (*) See Kratman's novel, A State of Disobedience*: Message 19658251