"President George W Bush has conjured up the undead. . . "

[donsu]

"President George W Bush has conjured up the undead in the form of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group and new defense secretary Robert M Gates. Like all ghosts, they are condemned to reenact the delinquencies of their past lives, and just as they got it hopelessly wrong about the Soviet Union, they will do the same about Iran."


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page.html


http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HK14Ak01.html



Halloween came late in Washington

Every so often I visit the family crypt of the Wittelsbacher dynasty in Munich's Frauenkirche, to make sure that the former kings of Bavaria are still there. They give every appearance of being dead, but deceased undesirables have a way of showing up at inconvenient moments - for example, former US secretary of state James Baker III. Like King Saul conjuring the spirit of the prophet Samuel, President George W Bush has conjured the undead of his father's administration, namely the Baker-Hamilton "Iraq Study Group". Samuel's ghost told Saul in effect (I Kings 28), "You're toast," and the unfortunate president will hear the same message from his new defense secretary, Robert M Gates, and the rest of his fellow spooks.

The sina qua non of a ghost is that it is condemned for eternity to reenact the delinquencies of its past life. That is just what we should expect from Robert Gates. As chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Soviet desk during the early 1980s, Gates shared the consensus academic view that the Soviet economy was strong and stable. A prosperous Russia, he reckoned, would respond rationally to management by carrot and stick. Fortunately for the United States, then-CIA director William Casey recruited outsiders such as journalist Herbert E Meyer, and listened to them rather than to Gates. <1>

-snip-

Why can't the "realists" make sense of reality, even when it clamps its jaws firmly upon their posteriors? Why is it that the king's magicians never seem to be able to read the fiery script on the wall? Belshazzar's magi could not read the words "Mene, mene, tekel, uparsin"; the king of Babylon had to call in an outside consultant, namely Daniel. By then it was too late.

The answer to the conundrum is that knowledge is existential. That is, we cannot easily imagine a world in which we will not exist because the world has no use for us. Self-styled power brokers of the James Baker ilk have no place in the world when power asserts itself in its naked form and there is nothing more to broker. The realists fancy themselves the general managers in a world of hierarchy, status and security. Replace these with insecurity and chaos, and there no longer is any need for such people.

-snip-

The ghosts of defunct European monarchies mingle with the shades of failed policy in Washington. Who you gonna call? Not the neo-conservatives, whose effort to turn the sow's ear of Middle Eastern politics into the silk purse of democracy has not a shred of credibility remaining. The Reagan administration did not win the Cold War by proposing regime change in Moscow, but by humiliating Russian power to the point that its will to fight evaporated. There is no one to interpret the fiery letters on the wall. For the past five years I have counseled the United States to learn to live with the chaos that it can do nothing to prevent. No matter: Americans will learn, late and at cost, the way they always do.
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