My Other Blog & Comments

News and Information Feed

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Cheney epitomizes modern statist-liberal and capitalist global social engineering pathology

From:
Blair: Cheney Wanted Wider Wars

(The New American) -- by Jack Kenny --

Whatever else may be said about Richard B. "Deadeye Dick" Cheney, the first Vice President since Aaron Burr ever to personally shoot a man, it may at least be said that while his eyesight and aim may be poor, his vision is not narrow.

At least it was not when he was Vice President and was heavily involved in the planning and waging of war in the Middle East. In his new book, A Journey: My Political Life, Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair recalls that Cheney wanted the the United States to go to war not only with Afghanistan and Iraq, but with a number of other countries in the Middle East, as he believed the world must be "made anew."

"He would have worked through the whole lot, Iraq, Syria, Iran, dealing with all their surrogates in the course of it — Hezbollah, Hamas, etc.," Blair wrote. "In other words, [Cheney] thought the world had to be made anew, and that after 11 September, it had to be done by force and with urgency. So he was for hard, hard power. No ifs, no buts, no maybes."

It is hard to suppress a gasp at the audacity of such a scheme to employ the military might of the world's reigning superpower that the world be "made anew." Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Thomas Paine's statement, "We have it in our power to begin the world again." We don't. And it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to come up with a more dangerous and more profoundly anti-conservative slogan.
"Over the years," wrote journalist and author Robert Parry in his Monday column on the Consortium News website, "there have been indications of this larger neoconservative strategy to attack America's — and Israel's — 'enemies' starting with Iraq and then moving on to Syria and Iran, but rarely has this more expansive plan for regional war been shared explicitly with the American public." Indeed, as Parry noted, the neo-con "joke" after the invasion of Iraq was, "Real Men Go to Tehran." Blair, who took a lot of political heat as Prime Minister for supporting the U.S. position on Iraq and bringing the United Kingdom into the coalition against Iraq, appears sympathetic to the Cheney agenda.

"I did not think [Cheney's position] was as fantastical as conventional wisdom opined," Blair wrote. "It is one struggle. Our enemy has an ideology. It does threaten us. The ultimate answer is in the spread of democracy and freedom. It is even possible to conceive of this, in different language, as being a progressive position, certainly where removing someone like Saddam was concerned."
One might wonder how supposedly sophisticated and intelligent statesmen keep offering "the spread of democracy and freedom" as the panacea for the world's ills. Is there any indication that countries are more or less peaceful to the extent that they more or less democratic? Did not the framers of our own Constitutional Republic warn us in The Federalist Papers that democracies end in chaos, bloodshed, and tyranny? Did not the election we championed in Palestine a few years ago result in the election of the Hamas Party? Where did we get the idea that democracy will make people less warlike? Has Great Britain been a peaceful nation? Are we?...MORE...LINK

1 comment:

Chris said...

Cheney should be in prison serving a sentence for 15 to life. He is a man that believes in empire that will threaten the republica.