"Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain 'removal' by strip-mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight."
What sticks in my craw is the imbalance between US policy (and policy apologetics, e.g. Max Boot) between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If my view, both governments are odious and repressive, especially to their own people, but both are key regional players that the US needs to hold its nose and deal with. There needn’t be any illusions about what were doing, but we should at least dispense with the horsepuckery about standing up to tyrants and defending democracy. The US does no such thing and never has, arguably with the exception of Eastern Europe historically.
In fact, I’d almost buy Max Boot’s realist arguments as sincere, though not necessarily would I agree with them —I use similar ones to support the JCPOA. But then on Iran or Ukraine, the realism is gone and its all ideological horsepuckery again. It’s fundamentally unserious and incoherent.
"Violence, in short, is the norm of our economic life and our national security. The line that connects the bombing of a civilian population to the mountain 'removal' by strip-mining to the gullied and poisoned field to the clear-cut watershed to the tortured prisoner seems to run pretty straight."
-Wendell Berry from "The Way of Ignorance"
Max Boot would gladly fellate MBS and then Adolf Hitler, if that were the price for the war on Iran that Boot so desperately craves.
The irony is that that Biden is offering the Saudi tyrants everything they want, but is getting practically nothing in return.
What sticks in my craw is the imbalance between US policy (and policy apologetics, e.g. Max Boot) between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If my view, both governments are odious and repressive, especially to their own people, but both are key regional players that the US needs to hold its nose and deal with. There needn’t be any illusions about what were doing, but we should at least dispense with the horsepuckery about standing up to tyrants and defending democracy. The US does no such thing and never has, arguably with the exception of Eastern Europe historically.
In fact, I’d almost buy Max Boot’s realist arguments as sincere, though not necessarily would I agree with them —I use similar ones to support the JCPOA. But then on Iran or Ukraine, the realism is gone and its all ideological horsepuckery again. It’s fundamentally unserious and incoherent.
"But he made the trains run on time."