Misleading the Blundering Giant

"Design'd for great exploits; if I must dye
Betray'd, Captiv'd, and both my Eyes put out,
Made of my Enemies the scorn and gaze;"
--John Milton,"Samson Agoniste"

There is an inevitability about declining empire--it trudges on, blind to its fall from grace as it brays and bullies towards its ignominious end. For a time it was fashionable for our neocons to speak of the "Axis of Evil" as if the chickenhawks who dreamed up the specter of an American Colossus lording over the entire chaotic world could ever share company with the notion of Good. Though they stand humbled, cast low by their own hubris, their influence remains, too ingrained in the Washington mindset to be destroyed and unwilling to go quietly or die.

One wonders when the favored serfs, by which I mean we, the American taxpayers, will wake up to the point of understanding that every dime spent for the Pentagon's Brobdingnagian appetite leaves us that much closer to the poorhouse and the country's early grave. It should not require us to possess Obama's intelligence to comprehend that a military fight over finite resources plays a joke on the victor. Yet rather than marshal our positive influence towards developing a sensible plan aimed at adapting for the "New Energy" paradigm our new President remains content to hide behind the stale old rhetoric that gave us Bush's pointless "War On Terror".

"O impotence of mind in body strong!
But what is strength without a double share
Of wisdom?"

One wonders if there is a law in Washington against imagination. It is not for lack of functioning minds that ever since Truman and the 60's run-amok CIA, U.S. foreign policy has lurched from crisis to disaster. Rather it is the unfailing presumption that when all is said and done "Might makes Right" that preempts fresh thinking. In its place we are forced into the kind of costly and ultimately self-destructive adventures ongoing in the Congo and the blood-drenched streets of Gaza. Power is of vastly more enduring effect when its deployment results in earning more friends (see the Marshall Plan otherwise known as the European Recovery Program). Just ask Napoleon or Hitler if you doubt that is true.

Wall Street Robs Us Blind but Chavez' Socialism Is Our Direst Enemy?

According to our new Deputy Secretary of State, James Steinberg: "For too long, we have ceded the playing field to Chavez whose actions and vision for the region do not serve his citizens or people throughout Latin America. We intend to play a more active role in Latin America with a positive approach that avoids giving undue prominence to President Chavez' theatrical attempts to dominant the regional agenda.

"It remains to be seen whether there is any tangible sign that Venezuela actually wants an improved relationship with the United States... Chávez's actions do not serve his citizens or people throughout Latin America."

Reading that one can only assume that Washington experts are solely informed by their collegial propaganda. Apart from the deceased Saddam Hussein no political figure has been slandered by the Washington establishment more than Hugo Chavez. As Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval expose in their paper for the Center for Economic Research the conclusions about Venezuela under Chavez in the March issue of Foreign Affairs border on the delusional.

In truth what Steinberg wants to say but is not saying is that Chavez is standing in the way of the so called "Free Trade Zone" that the continent's former colonialists and their corporate allies would like to see made permanent across Latin America. Never mind that by opposing and ignoring the poor the global capitalists, forced to pay exorbitant retainers to their hired mercenaries and political stooges, have the financial markets on the verge of ruin, in their grab for short term gain they are alienating their own future consumers.

It is not surprising that Steinberg, another former Clintonista, was an original signatory to the PNAC. According to the Wall Street Journal, Steinberg, along with Daniel Kurtzer and Dennis Ross, were among the principal authors of Barack Obama's address on the Middle East to AIPAC in June 2008, which was viewed as the Democratic nominee's most expansive on international affairs. Worse, it should be noted that Steinberg also spoke approvingly of the Bush Doctrine and even argued it should be expanded:

"When states fail to meet their responsibilities, the international community will need to step in. Diplomacy and economic pressure are frequently sufficient to do the job. But there will be times when limited military action will be the only effective way to obviate an imminent threat – before, say, a state produces enough fissile material to make nuclear weapons or before terrorists are fully able to hatch their plots. One problem with the Bush doctrine, then, is not that it is overly reliant on preventive force but that it too narrowly conceives of its use, primarily to deal with terrorism and to remove threatening regimes."

Clearly Mr. Steinberg, and by extension our 44th President pays no heed to Bush's critics. Yet as policy experts such as Andrew Bacevich, professor of international relations at Boston University, are at bones to point out, the notion that continue doing "business as usual" is itself the problem. "the best way to try and preserve the American way of life is actually to change the American way of life, rather than fancying that through the exercise of hard power we can change the world to accommodate the the American way of life."

"Nothing of all these evils hath befallen me
But justly; I myself have brought them on;"

So the diminished captive giant blunders on, swinging his club at the dung flies swarming his shaven head. We can but hope that, short of a true and conscious change, he discovers his soul must serve Good in the end.