29th Apr 2004
Zbig Thinker on Bush, War, America
I heard a great interview this morning on WNYC, host Brian Lehrer interviewing
Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor under Carter. He’s got a new book out, with a hell of a subtitle: The Choice: Global Domination or Global Leadership
That really struck me: we are not leaders in the world anymore. Leaders lead by example. We are little more, under Bush, anyway, than stupid bullies, pushing our weight around without thinking what is really in our best interest, much less anyone else’s. I was thinking about that — imagine having the U.S. for your boss. Where is the carrot? It’s all stick. We’d be the kind of boss all your colleagues would despise behind his back.
I’m up late and just now heard the interview repeated on WNYC, and I took some quick notes this time. Not necessarily an exact trascripts, but here are some fairly approximate paraphrases:
Terrorists are not our enemy. That’s a false premise. The IRA in Northern Ireland are not our enemy. The ETA is Basque Spain are not our enemies. Our enemies are radical Islamic terrorists, and most of them are coming from the Middle East.
[I think it was he whom I heard this moring also say something along these lines: “Terrorism is just a tactical form of warfare, it is not an enemy in itself. It is as if during World War II, we had not declared Hitler as the enemy but instead we declared that our enemy was the blitzkrieg.” I didn’t actually hear him say that again now in the rebroadcast, but I wasn’t paying close attention when it started this time. Anyway, I think it’s a brilliant insight, whoever said it.] …
You don’t plan a Democracy with bayonets. It has never been done that way anywhere else before….
I don’t think the people fighting us in Iraq are terrorists. That’s nonsense. Increasingly they’re nationalists, and that’s terrible….
[Stabilizing the world] by leadership is much more effective. If we try to do it by dominating, we’ll find ourself increasingly issolated…. We have never been as issolated and distrusted in the world as we are today, and we have to ask ourselves why.
It’s a short interview, 10 minutes. I’d highly recommend listening to the audio file online.
No tags for this post
“You don’t plan a Democracy with bayonets. It has never been done that way anywhere else before….”
Hey, what would you call the American Revolution and the French Revolution to name two?
Although I understand our commitment to the area, the terrorist were well on their way to our elimination before Bush.
Bush has taken the fight to the enemy instead of waiting for it to strike us again. The previous administrations did their best to “stabilize” the region through diplomacy, but that failed.
Ignoring any problem is NOT the solution.
Like it or not, this world is not about ideology, but about business and the economies of the most developed nations.
As long as American citizen demand cheap energy without seriously demonstating their devotion to alternative energy sources, then we’ll continue to have a strong-arm policy in the middle east.
Consider the possibility of a democratic middle east. I know the intelligencia of those affected countries would love to see it, however, we are dealing with a mostly illeterate enemy that has bought into the great Muslim marketing plan of martyrdom’s payment of 40 virgins. Who wouldn’t love that, but that idea is for the idiots — certainly not their leaders.
You don’t see Osama strapping a bomb to his bod for heaven and 40 virgins. Why not? Because that’s not for him to believe — it’s for the uneducated minons.
I honestly believe that if it were possible to get all of our interest out of the middle east and put more of our money into our problems, we’d be the better for it.
We’ll see that when pigs fly because US & world businesses (which bring you cheap products that you demand or the leading party is out of a job) is so deeply dependent on oil, will not allow that.
So, like the sheep we are, we’ll continue to vote in those leaders that shall continue to disappoint — be it Republican or Democrat.