Friday, September 20, 2002

PERMALINK

Biggest kid on the block It's certainly a fine thing that the U.S. government is finally rewriting its global political and military strategy to take into account the fact that the Cold War is over. (The document's full text is here.) There are some things to applaud in this document. But David Sanger's Times story highlights this statement: "The president has no intention of allowing any foreign power to catch up with the huge lead the United States has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago." Flash forward to 100 or 500 years from now, when some future Edward Gibbon is composing his massive "Decline and Fall of the American Empire," and marks this moment as the zenith of American power, and the start of its downfall. Our leaders seem to be committing themselves at once to a military policy that brooks no challenge and commits us to outspend any challenger -- and to an economic policy that inequitably but massively cuts government revenue. This is how empires are unmade. comment [] 11:36:23 AM | permalink

Know thine enemy In Slate, Michael Kinsley makes a cogent, and characteristically pragmatic, argument against Bush's war-on-terrorism rhetoric. If you just keep repeating that your enemy is "evil," and don't explore his motivations, you're going to do a lousy job of preventing other enemies from proliferating. Meanwhile, in Salon Premium, Josh Marshall explores the quandary Bush administration hawks find themselves in now that the president has chosen to work through the U.N. and its resolutions. Latest twist: Rewrite Bush's speech. "Maybe the president said that the issue was making Saddam live up to the resolutions, but in fact whether he does or not is really beside the point, because the real point is that Saddam can't be trusted and must be ousted." comment [] 11:36:02 AM | permalink