They're doing it without us

[bemildred]

The ongoing upheaval in the Arab world (and in Iran) has rendered a definitive judgment on U.S. policy over the last decade. Relying on their own resources and employing means of their own devising, the people of the Middle East intent on transforming that region have effectively consigned the entire "war on terror" to the category of strategic irrelevance.

When first conceived in the wake of 9/11, two convictions underpinned that war. According to the first, precluding further attacks on the United States meant that the Islamic world needed to change. According to the second, because Muslims were manifestly unable to change on their own, the United States needed to engineer the process, with American military might serving as catalyst. Freedom (or at least submission) would issue from the barrel of a GI's assault rifle.

In Afghanistan, then Iraq and now, of course, AfPak, U.S. efforts to promote change have achieved — at best — mixed results. Meanwhile, the costs incurred have proved painfully high. In terms of treasure expended, lives lost and moral authority squandered, Americans have paid a lot and gotten precious little in return.

---

First, when it comes to divining history's purposes and intentions, the world's only superpower is clueless. "The whole drama of history," the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once observed, "is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management." True when he wrote it more than half a century ago, the passage remains true today, notwithstanding the wonders of computers, iPhones and social networking.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bacevich-war-20110220,0,1400493.story

[xchrom]

1. recommend

[Tansy_Gold]

2. Ditto.

:hi:

[bemildred]

3. He cuts to the quick, doesn't he? nt

[madmax]

4. And doing it better

At least I'd like to think that the people will get who 'they' want and not replace one bastard, for a US hand picked bastard.

[chill_wind]

5. "In terms treasure expended, lives lost and moral authority squandered.

Americans have paid a lot and gotten precious little in return."

That is one perfect sentence. K & R.

[Tansy_Gold]

6. It's a lesson "we" should have learned over the centuries

from our own mistakes.

Even over the last 60 years, my lifetime, how many tyrants has the US government established contrary to the will of the people in the nations involved? Allende crushed to make way for Pinochet. Mossadegh assassinated and replaced with the Shah. Mubarak in Egypt. Saddam in Iraq. The list goes on and on and on.

The one "failure" is Cuba, closest to "home" and tiniest. It rankles and the embargo keeps the wound fresh and raw. Stupid, stupid, stupid. In its own way, the American Achilles' heel, because the wasted spiteful stupid focus on Cuba gave us Florida and boooosh and 9/11 and Iraq and Afghanistan and Lehman Bros and CountryWide and Madoff and Goldman Sachs and everything else.

The American psyche, so bloated on competition and the pathological need to win, cannot come to grips with Cuba, with socialism, with people of color, with equality, with democracy FFS. Because it was never "democracy" that anyone wanted to export to the Arab world, to Latin America, or anywhere else. It was an American empire cloaked in lies and platitudes and empty rhetoric. Fortunately for "them," they saw through the lies and took "us" at our word.

Good on them; shame on "us."




Tansy Gold

[Ghost Dog]

7. Bingo. Now tell me

why the Cuban revolution is considered to be such a threat to be countered by US TPTB?

[Tansy_Gold]

8. It's not a threat. Not the kind they make it out to be.

It's not a threat to "the American Dream" or "the American way of life" the way TPTB would have us believe. It's a threat to THEIR way of life, the imperial way of life.

Think Ahnuld and his contraband Cuban cigars. It's all about keepin' the brown and the black (and the yellow and the red) people from being like "us." And it's all about making sure "we" enjoy everything special that ought to be theirs. Cuban sugar. Honduran bananas. Venezuelan oil. Monroe Doctrine and all that other bull shit.

The people of Cuba had had it with Batista, and they ousted him. And they wouldn't give in to the Americans. Not even after the missile crisis. Not even after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They've paid a price for it, too, but I think they've won a huge victory.

I'm not saying Castro is/was/has been perfect. And maybe whatever the shortcomings of his regime have been are a result of a stubborn intransigence on the part of the Cuban people to keep him in power just as a thorn in the side of Washington DC. Maybe they had seen what happened to Guatemala and determined it wouldn't happen to them.

But Washington had to contain him, had to contain that socialist model of universal health care, universal education, etc., etc., etc. When they couldn't do it in Cuba, they had to do it in Chile. In Vietnam. That's why Carter's ceding of the Canal Zone back to Panama enfuriated the right wing. How dare he!

Cuba's threat is that it's not a threat; it's just a quiet peaceful example of defiance. And the powers that be can't fucking stand it.



Tansy Gold, who if she didn't have all these "possessions" would happily move to either Spain (first choice) or Cuba (second choice)