A more likely response would be ‘do you want the eight or twelve-year support contract with these helicopter gunships?’

It seems to me to be a pretty unrecoverable error to try and understand the world in terms of good and bad countries. If you think in those terms, there is not really a way to colour the map black and white that is significantly wronger than any other.

As someone said above, in general systems matter, not so much personalities. But the systems are made of people, and under some systems a single person, like Mugabe in Zimbabwe or Bush in the US, can count for enough to be a bit of an exception.
And systems aren’t remotely limited to national borders: the common perception that a typical western civilian is in some sense ‘more responsible’ for Guantanamo than Rwanda is utterly without valid justification.

A better question is: “what do you think about the ‘US-Iraq-world@1975’ system, in comparison to the ‘US-Iraq-world@2008’ system?”

Which works? Which could be made to work, and at what cost? Which could be improved on, and how? Is there a completely different and better way fo doing things?

Posted by lemuel pitkin

No. Of course, to a right-winger, it probably doesn’t need to be answered; it would quickly bring a wave of horror through the body of any right-winger who hears it.

Especially when the hedge fund boyz start unloading their toys to pay their bills. I feel their pain.

Er, the French cop car did indeed turn up, lights flashing, guns blazing, chartering a significant fraction of the world airfreight market in order to deploy…

If you’re talking about Camp Bondsteel, you should know that it doesn’t actually have a runway, and is thus useless from the point of view of power projection unless you want to project that power by truck. It also means that the base is supplied entirely by land (troops drive from the airhead at Able Sentry in Skopje, Macedonia).

I am also baffled as to why it should be so important to the US to put a base in Kosovo, when the US already had perfectly good bases (with runways) in Italy, Poland, Germany and Turkey. Where exactly can you reach from Kosovo that you can’t reach from there? Were they planning to threaten Bulgaria (by truck)? Was it vital to gain control over Kosovo’s lead mines?

Owning an Aston Martin is not, actually, that wildly improbable a dream.

He sees a Swedenized America bereft of private jets, million-dollar Bar Mitzvahs, trans fats, gun shows, foreclosures, and a diabetes epidemic. He sees a boring society where Lilliputians tie down the Masters of the Universe by confiscating their earnings and blocking the creation of a hereditary aristocracy. Oh the horror!

Sorry, Brownie, but this seems so ridiculous and provocative that I can’t help piling on. What do you see?

Did I miss the part where Brownie answered this question?

If there had been oil in Rwanda, we would have rolled the US cop car into there with lights flashing and guns blazing. But Brownie’s goal is not to establish any logical case, it is simply to demonstrate that the tattered cover stories for US Neo-Imperialism still conceal enough of our indecent power projection to fool most of the people most of the time. In this, he is correct.

Which might explain why I never suggested such a thing. What is truly comic is the idea that an objective reader of my comments could infer a desire to see a more militaristic and agressive U.S.

One way or another, the U.S. will no longer be the world’s wealthiest and most powerful nation at the end of this century.

Do you do lottery results, as well?

The US could have done what they did in Serbia with what, 1/5 of their current defense spending

Leaving aside the accuracy of this or what it would mean for operations elsewhere even if accurate, you kind of miss my point which was to ask how this wound up being a problem the US was (for the most part) asked to fix? It wasn’t pre-ordained that that road in Pristina would be named after Clinton and not a European leader, you know? The point is to consider why things worked out that way and not another rather than coming up with theories about how the US could still have prosecuted that war AND cut defence spending at the same time.

Mighty America seems very picky about when and where it saves the world, having skipped opportunites in Rwanda, Darfur, and New Orleans.

What’s this? Criticism for not being imperialist enough?

In the case of Rwanda, that nice Mr Clinton at least had the decency to describe US inaction in 94 as a stain on his presidency. In the case of Darfur, you’d be the first guy on the “No War in Africa” march, would you not? In the case of New Orleans, you’re just being silly.

When did you become a liberal interventionist, by the way?

Actually I would rather the world was the world’s policeman.—Hidari

Yeah, and I’d like an Aston Martin.

That is actually false, although Republicans don’t want you to know it. Yes it is true that McCain sometimes talked the talk. But when push came to shove (possibly literally) he didn’t walk the walk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/13/washington/13cnd-cong.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

‘There is nothing permanent or irreversible about any of the illiberal lurches made by the current administration.’

There wasn’t anything permanent or irreversible about the illiberal lurches made by the Nazis either. So what?

‘It’s the usual case of no-one wanting the US to act like the world’s policeman except when they want her to.’

Actually I would rather the world was the world’s policeman. Given that it ‘has to be’ an individual country (one of the many irreversible and non-voteable-on decisions that I wasn’t consulted about) why, to echo one of the posters above, does it have to be the US? Why not Sweden? Or, better still, Costa Rica?

‘Rather than scoff, you could always list the historical, global superpowers whose altruism puts the US to shame’.

Well there are many things wrong with the European Union, but it doesn’t seem to me to be obviously inferior in the ‘altruism’ stakes, and, in terms of its economic and social policies, in many respects it’s streets ahead of the US.

Incidentally, ‘liberals’ who have a bee in their bonnet about the former Yugoslavia might care to reflect that one of the many reasons the EU was not in a position to take military action against Milosevic was that in the late ‘eighties, the French and German toyed with the idea of an independent EU ‘army’: which was quickly nixed by the US. ‘Pro-war liberals’ want to have it both ways: they point out that the US is the ‘only’ power capable of doing certain military things, without pointing out that this is because the US DECIDED to become the world’s superpower, for primarily economic (i.e. ‘selfish’, not altruistic) reasons and would move heaven and earth to stop any other power threatening that hegemony. They can then justify their continued pre-eminence by pointing out that the US and only the US can take military action across the globe. Which is true, but sorta to be expected, given that anyone who threatened this pre-eminence would be nuked.

I also wish that, giving how things turned out, that ‘liberals’ would stop trumpeting the illegal invasion of Yugoslavia, and the creation of the ‘Nato bases surrounded by gangsters’ we call ‘Kosova’ as if it was some kind of triumph for democracy.

The beauty of cover stories is that they cover everything disreputable underneath. Sometimes they wear out and must be discarded, as in the case of WMD in Iraq, but fortunately they are easily replaced.