tom moody
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This
Financial Times essay by Michael Lind argues that the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan have damaged not just the neoconservative cause of establishing
military hegemony democracy in the Middle East but also the neoliberal (or "liberal hawk") mission of using the US military to intervene wherever there is injustice in the world. Lind is writing as one who supported our bombing in the Balkans and now worries that Abu Ghraib and other revelations have damaged the US's "moral authority," upon which the neoliberal project is dependent. But was raining destruction on Belgrade--a kind of test run for "shock and awe"--really the "moral" way to resolve the Balkan conflict(s)? A large commitment of US ground forces might have prevented loss of life in Bosnia and Kosovo, but the American public would never have stood for it. Bombing was do-gooding on the cheap, except it wasn't that cheap. Pessimistically, I'd say it'll take more than losing our moral authority in the eyes of the world to break our bombing addiction. After all, we've bombed
21 countries since Nagasaki! (Warning: new age music on that last link.) Is it useful to go through that list and say, "this one was OK, this was a humanitarian bombing"? It's the same military industrial complex doing the work and reaping the profit.
jimpunk at 544x378 WebTV remixed my atom .gif, so I re-remixed it.
UPDATE: A couple more iterations are in the comments.
