Topic: Iraq
Manifest Destiny

Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News and directs its editorial content - its "slant" so to speak. But Fox News is a crude tool. Murdoch also publishes The Weekly Standard, sometimes called "the bible of the neoconservative movement." The Weekly Standard is more measured and philosophical, or theoretical, or something. It's "serious."

In The Weekly Standard you will find the two core theoreticians of the neoconservative "change the world" movement, Robert Kagan and William Kristol. These are the guys who explain what Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney are really trying to have America do in the world. You might call them apologists. Or "explainers."

Want to know what America is really trying to do in the world? Read this. It is about our new manifest destiny. To remake the world into a community of nations each of which is a secular democracy, with a deregulated totally privatized capitalist economy, few if any social programs (to require personal responsibility), friendly to multi-national corporations like Wal-Mart, Starbucks and KFC (and Exxon-Mobil and Arco and the rest), and so on.

Back in the nineteenth century we claimed it was our "manifest destiny" to increase the acreage of the nation to make it stretch from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific. And damn, that would have been easier if guys like Custer had battlefield tactical low-yield nuclear weapons, or at least cluster-bombs and Blackhawks. But no matter. We did it.

Now we have something else to spread. And spread it we must. It is our "manifest destiny" to bring Happy Meals and deregulated discount-priced sneakers to the whole world. It is. Really.

Click the link and you'll get the idea.

An Administration of One
From the December 1, 2003 issue of The Weekly Standard: Bush has made it clear that the only exit strategy from Iraq is a victory strategy, with victory defined as "democracy."
by Robert Kagan and William Kristol
12/01/2003, Volume 009, Issue 12

My impression of this:

"When George W. Bush first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that the most visionary and, yes, the wisest and most capable foreign policy-maker in the Bush administration is the president himself. Let's hope the team around him proves willing and capable of fulfilling his clear and historic grand strategy."

Okay. This starts out defensive, then gets downright odd. Wise? Some dispute there, of course. Visionary? The son of the guy who "had a problem with the vision thing" way back when? Historic and grand are nice words too. What we are doing is, I agree, historic. Grand? Hardly.

"There can no longer be any doubt that whatever Republican `realist' inclinations the president may have inherited from his father and his father's advisers when he took office, he has now abandoned that failed and narrow view and raised the torch previously held high by Ronald Reagan--and before that by John F. Kennedy and Harry Truman."

Well, maybe. Truman with Korea seemed to want to "contain" threats to our nation, to keep us safe. Kennedy seemed to reluctantly "confront" threats, as with Cuba and the damned missiles. Neither acted to overtly change other governments and change their economies and philosophies. That was all covert back then - behind the scenes. Bush just goes out and invades. He's not subtle.

"Bush has broken from the mainstream of his party and become a neoconservative in the true meaning of the term. For if there is a single principle that today divides neoconservatism from traditional American conservatism, it is the conviction that the promotion of liberal democracy abroad is both a moral imperative and a profound national interest."

Well that's the core of the matter, isn't it? We are fated to make everyone just like us. It's a moral imperative. We've got to do what we've got to do. No choice.

As to those who object? "...we are not surprised to see traditional Republican conservatives, of whom there is no more esteemed intellectual spokesman than George Will, now denouncing the supposed folly of such ambitious ventures. Nor are we surprised that in Bush's own cabinet, neither his secretary of state nor his secretary of defense shares the president's commitment to liberal democracy, either in Iraq or in the Middle East more generally. Indeed, the only thing that surprises us, a little, is the failure of American liberals--and European liberals--to embrace a cause that ought to be close to their hearts."

Now wait a second! It ought to be close to this liberal's heart to impose my views of how life ought to be lived, and thus how governments should work, on everyone, everywhere, anywhere in the world? I don't think so.

And these two conclude with this.

"Bush's great task now will be to explain his strategy to his own cabinet and commanders and insist that they begin implementing it."

Time to join the Rebel Alliance on the planet Tatooine to fight the Empire and that Death Star thingy. This is madness.