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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: stockman_scott who wrote (162250)	5/17/2005 9:59:43 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Actually, the main theme of this article has been known for quite some time to those who wanted to see. Orwell did not invent the "Minstery of Truth" purely out of his imagination; he observed the historians who were selling their services to the president. Just the same, the article is a good read. The more subtle message from the article seems to be rise of colonialism. This time around it is suppose to be a better behaving version the burden of white man. How short sighted to think that it was only Hitler who ruined the party and that (with the demise of USSR) there is nothing to stand on the way to the punch bowl!!! What is not discussed is a worldwide threat similar to that of Germany in the 1930s: certainly the greatest threat in the lifetime of most people. This is not news. Consider the unreported demise of the "war on terror". In his inaugural speech in January, Bush pointedly said not a word about that which he had made his signature. No terrorism. No Osama. No Iraq. No axis of evil. Instead, he warned that America’s new targets were those living in “whole regions of the world” which "simmer in resentment and tyranny" and where "violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended powers, and raise a mortal threat." The monumental paranoia is almost beside the point. Bush was lowering the threshold. The American military can go anywhere, attack anything, use any kind of weapon in pursuit of is latest, most dangerous illusion: the "simmering resentment" and the "gathering violence." Unreported is the military coup that has taken place in America; the Pentagon and its civilian militarists now control "policy". Diplomacy is "finished... dead", as one of them put it. Andrew Bacevich, soldier, conservative and professor of American military strategy at Boston University, says that Bush has "committed the United States to waging an open-ended war on a global scale". Britain, with its profound understanding of imperialism, is a pioneer of this new danger. In 1998, the Blair government's Strategic Defence Review stated that the country's military priority would be "force projection" and that "in the post-cold war world we must be prepared to go the crisis rather than have the crisis come to us". In 2002, Geoff Hoon became the first defence secretary to declare that British nuclear weapons could be used against non-nuclear nations. In December 2003, a defence white paper, Delivering Security in a Changing World, called for "expeditionary operations" in "a range of environments across the world". Military force was no longer "a separate element in crisis resolution". Almost a third of public spending on research now goes to the military: far more than is spent on the National Health Service. Some people never learn. May be Blair and Bush should listen to Robert McNamara Message 21329501 He knows a thing or two about war and colonialism. BTW, if the disillusionment trend keeps up, we may end up with a situation where only 10% of the population find a candidate who represents them and vote. Then we can truly have a government of the elite by the elite and for the elite...there should be a law on the absolute minimum of votes you can have before you resume office! Blair, having won his "historic" third term, ought to be "humble". It is truly humbling that only 20 per cent of eligible voters voted for him, the lowest figure in modern times