John Perry Barlow: Sympathy for Dick Cheney
In this interesting essay, John Perry Barlow examines the possibility that the U.S. government may be acting like “the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing to use” in order to scare the rest of the world into behaving.
February 25th, 2003 at 1:14 am
Gaaah…I think it’s just dressing up the old “Reagan’s Plan to End the Cold War” routine, the idea that the McCarthyist cocktail of massive military buildup and vicious proxy warfare was all part of a brilliant, ruthless scheme to destabilize the USSR.
To that, I say…produce some evidence that the United States was aware of the USSR’s imminent collapse. Of its economic troubles, its smaller-than-advertised military and nuclear arsenal, sure, but dictatorships have hung on for generations in the face of worse. I thought the USSR broke up when a loyalist coup attempt underestimated popular support for Gorbachev and suddenly backfired. Wouldn’t the coup have been more likely to have caused a return to harsher Communist rule? It would seem damned hard for the CIA to predict the historical outcome in advance.
I think that idea is attractive for the same reason denials of the Holocaust are attractive: it just feels safer to live in a world where nobody is really willing to launch MX missiles to protect the family trust fund–where that kind of stuff just doesn’t happen.
Personally, I would be overjoyed to find out that the United States has any kind of long-term strategy whatsoever, even one as bloodthirsty as the one this author proposes. Anything, as long it’s something more than making cash money for the Bush junta.