Lucille
05-30-2014, 08:09 AM
"Wherefore by their fruits (http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+7%3A16-20&version=KJV) ye shall know them."
Death, destruction, misery, enemies, riches for the MIC, power for the Ruling Class, tyranny for us. Evil Neo-Trots can't get enough.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/constant-garden-tending-means-perpetual-war/
David Brooks seems to think that the U.S. military is the world’s weed-wacker:
Presidents assertively tended the international garden [bold mine-DL] so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.
This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending [bold mine-DL] will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies.
Using euphemisms to describe uses of force and other coercive policies that inflicted pain and death on other nations is not new, but the idea that the world is a “garden” that the U.S. has the right to “tend” through frequent violence is particularly warped. This not only minimizes the harm that interventionist policies do to the countries that they target, but it implies that the U.S. will have to be “garden-tending” with no end in sight. If the world is a garden to be “tended,” and the U.S. is supposed to be constantly tearing out weeds and pruning away undesirable growths (i.e., killing people and threatening to kill people), virtually every problem in the world becomes ours. If the U.S. is doing this even when its core interests aren’t at stake, there is no obvious limit to how many “garden-tending” interventions the U.S. will be engaged in over the coming years.
The fact that the U.S. intervened militarily once every 17 months for more than a decade should give us all pause, since this was during what the hawks liked to call the “holiday from history.” Just imagine how often and in how many places they will think to involve the U.S. in the future. “Constant garden-tending” is another way to say that the U.S. ought to be constantly engaged in military action (or the threat of military action) somewhere in the world, and that it will never be able to stop or be at peace for more than a year or two at most. That will surely lead the U.S. and many other nations into an “ungodly mess,” and we can only hope that future administrations refuse to do the “gardening” that Brooks wants.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-call-for-permawar.html
David Brooks openly calls for "constant garden-tending", or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:
As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.
This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.
This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that "the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one" has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their "democracy" is a sham.
Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. [...]
The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It's hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.
Death, destruction, misery, enemies, riches for the MIC, power for the Ruling Class, tyranny for us. Evil Neo-Trots can't get enough.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/constant-garden-tending-means-perpetual-war/
David Brooks seems to think that the U.S. military is the world’s weed-wacker:
Presidents assertively tended the international garden [bold mine-DL] so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.
This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending [bold mine-DL] will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies.
Using euphemisms to describe uses of force and other coercive policies that inflicted pain and death on other nations is not new, but the idea that the world is a “garden” that the U.S. has the right to “tend” through frequent violence is particularly warped. This not only minimizes the harm that interventionist policies do to the countries that they target, but it implies that the U.S. will have to be “garden-tending” with no end in sight. If the world is a garden to be “tended,” and the U.S. is supposed to be constantly tearing out weeds and pruning away undesirable growths (i.e., killing people and threatening to kill people), virtually every problem in the world becomes ours. If the U.S. is doing this even when its core interests aren’t at stake, there is no obvious limit to how many “garden-tending” interventions the U.S. will be engaged in over the coming years.
The fact that the U.S. intervened militarily once every 17 months for more than a decade should give us all pause, since this was during what the hawks liked to call the “holiday from history.” Just imagine how often and in how many places they will think to involve the U.S. in the future. “Constant garden-tending” is another way to say that the U.S. ought to be constantly engaged in military action (or the threat of military action) somewhere in the world, and that it will never be able to stop or be at peace for more than a year or two at most. That will surely lead the U.S. and many other nations into an “ungodly mess,” and we can only hope that future administrations refuse to do the “gardening” that Brooks wants.
http://www.voxday.blogspot.com/2014/05/a-call-for-permawar.html
David Brooks openly calls for "constant garden-tending", or in other words, an ongoing state of aggressively militaristic global policing by the United States:
As Robert Kagan shows in a brilliant essay in The New Republic, for the past 70 years, American policy makers have understood that underreach can lead to catastrophe, too. Presidents assertively tended the international garden so that small problems didn’t turn into big ones, even when core national interests were not at stake. In the 1990s, for example, President George H.W. Bush and President Clinton took military action roughly every 17 months to restrain dictators, spread democracy and preserve international norms.
This sort of forward-leaning interventionist garden-tending will be even more necessary in an age of assertive autocracies. If the U.S. restricts intervention to “core interests,” as Obama suggests, if it neglects constant garden-tending, the thugs will grab and grab and eventually there will be horrendous conflagrations. America’s assertive responses will not need to be military; they rarely will be. But they’ll need to be simple, strong acts of deterrence to preserve order.
This is insane and this is wrong. The reason that "the number of countries that moved in an autocratic direction has outnumbered those that moved in a democratic one" has been because the supposedly democratic countries have demonstrated to all and sundry that they are not democratic at all. The United States, Italy, Greece, Ukraine, Ireland, France, the UK, and above all, the European Union, have proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that their "democracy" is a sham.
Switzerland is the only genuinely democratic country in Europe. It is the only country where the will of the people can actually, at times, override the will of the government elite. The government there has voted twice to join the EU. The people voted it down twice and that is why Switzerland is not in the EU. Contrast that with, for example, the UK, where the people have never voted to join the EU and the government has repeatedly lied to them and denied them the opportunity to decide for themselves if they wish to belong to it. Or Ireland, where they voted down the Lisbon Treaty, then were forced to vote again until the will of the Irish elite had been accomplished. [...]
The concept of representative democracy has failed abysmally. It is no wonder that people are now trying other options. It's hard to believe that Brooks is crazy enough to demand the US engage in national sovereignty-violating military action twice every three years. This is the madness of the neocons reaching terminal velocity.