posted March 23, 2003 at 11:13 AM MDTHarper's Magazine: The Road to Babylon - Searching for targets in Iraq, an excellent backgrounder on the swirl of US politics that surrounds this adventure, begins with this foundation:
"Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens' attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II's of England via the Armada, Germany's twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan's bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity."
On the broader front, the deificiation of Bush will increase as the tensions grow ... self-loathing is on the rise among the Canadian right wing, the instructive notion being that to chose international law over loyalty to US authority is, well, disloyalty ... and we all know that deserves and indeed requires punishment.
I will suggest this as the litmus test for fascism: that reasoned dissent is seen as nothing but betrayal of a cowardly type.
In the context of perhaps the finest effort ever by diplomats, with unprecedented open-ness and transparency, the Western Oligarchic Taliban have proclaimed their logic, and to question that is evidence. In its rudest form, the dynamics of world polity have been reduced to a bar-room brawl.
