| In recent weeks, commentators from both sides of the political fence have tried to make sense of the recent London bombings. The neocons and their fellow travelers are among these. But they have another, more immediate concern. They’re eager to decouple the tragedy in England from the U.S./British occupation of Iraq. That’s because they seek to prevent further erosion of popular support for the Iraq war, which could mean the end of their imperial ambitions in the Middle East.
There’s some historical irony here, if one considers what the neocons and their allies were saying in the fall of last year. At that time of the presidential elections, über-neocon Norman Podhoretz announced in a long Commentary article (September 2004) that a reason we were in Iraq—a campaign, he argued, of World War IV—was to prevent the terror of Islamic jihadism, including from Iraq, from reaching our shores. But today, the neocons—who long argued for a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein—claim there’s no connection between the coalition’s presence in Iraq and the terror outbreak in England. “Islamist malignancy long predates Iraq,” declared Charles Krauthammer in The Wall Street Journal (July 18) “[I]t is ludicrous to try to reduce [the London bombings] to Iraq,” says Christopher Hitchens (Slate , July 7). |
That reminds me of something from back in the election....
| The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'' |
Reality is what it is, and all the wishing and hoping and praying in the world won't change it. Empires make reality? Seems that's not the case. Of course if they'd bothered to ask the Greeks, or the Italians, or the French, or the Germans, or the Brits, or Mayans, or Incans, or Aztecs, or... hell, if they'd just asked Jared Diamond about, the world would be a much better place!
I mean, c'mon... it was called "the enlightenment" for a reason!
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