The march of folly picks up speed
by digby
Remember when certain Evuntheliberal New Republic writers panicked and decided that things were going so wrong in Iraq that we needed to reinstall Saddam Hussein? Good times. Well, get a load of this headline:
They used to at least have the decency to call it "American hegemony" and the "Pax Americana" and go on about democracy like they cared. In this article Kaplan explains that the Post WWI order in the region is falling apart because the strongmen have all been deposed, the US hasn't stepped up in the role as it should have (and the wogs are incapable of ruling themselves, of course.) So there's nothing left to do:
A new American president in 2017 may seek to reinstate Western imperial influence — calling it by another name, of course. But he or she will be constrained by the very collapse of central authority across the Middle East that began with the fall of Saddam Hussein and continued through the post-Arab Spring years. Strong Arab dictatorships across the region were convenient to American interests, since they provided a single address in each country for America to go to in the event of regional crises. But now there is much less of that. In several countries, there is simply no one in charge to whom we can bring our concerns. Chaos is not only a security and humanitarian problem, but a severe impediment to American power projection.
Thus, the near-term and perhaps middle-term future of the Middle East will likely be grim. The Sunni Islamic State will now fight Iran’s Shiite militias, just as Saddam’s Sunni Iraq fought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Shiite Iran in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran War. That war, going on as long as it did, represented in part the deliberate decision of the Reagan administration not to intervene — another example of weak imperial authority, though a successful one, since it allowed Reagan to concentrate on Europe and help end the Cold War.
Back then it was states at war; now it is sub-states. Imperialism bestowed order, however retrograde it may have been. The challenge now is less to establish democracy than to reestablish order. For without order, there is no freedom for anyone.
Great. Look for the GOP candidates to start foaming at the mouth on the campaign trail. Which one do you suppose will adopt this as their manifesto?
