billmon has yet another excellent piece. this time he lays bare the us's coldwar system of "imperialism by remote control". he argues that we can't forget 9/11 because it is exactly that system, and americans' indifference to it, that caused 9/11.
Posted by drewish at March 7, 2004 12:41 PMWhat's most needed is for the American people to understand that the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.
To be completely blunt about it: The USA simply cannot fuck with rest of the world with impunity any more. There's now a very real, and potentially huge, price to be paid for playing the role of global cop (or global empire) while indulging in an essentially isolationist mindset at home. Little items like America's dependence on foreign oil, or its lockjawed support for the state of Israel, or the arrogance and corruption of the IMF, or the relentless drive to open up foreign markets to international trade and capital (what conservative scholar Andrew Bacevich calls the "ideology of openness") -- these all have consequences that extend way beyond the small coterie of intellectuals and interest groups that have traditionally dominated the U.S. foreign policy debate.
Ever since the end of the Vietnam War -- and even more, since the end of the Soviet Union -- there's been an unstated assumption in the American political sphere that U.S. interests abroad (whether geopolitical or economic or both) could be protected and advanced at relatively minimal cost to, or involvement by, the American people. A small, professional, high-tech military, heavily geared towards special forces and the application of air power, would permit narrowly targeted military interventions in the peripheral world, without the need for a large citizen army. A cadre of diplomats and technocrats would concentrate on opening economic doors -- and making sure they stayed open. Wall Street and the multinationals would provide the financial muscle, and supervise the care and feeding of local elites, while the intelligence agencies watched for any signs of a political backlash against the globalization agenda. Terrorism, if it was conceived as a threat, was seen as a threat from the left, motivated by economic or political grievances.
If all else failed, there were always those special forces.
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