Both neoconservatives and liberals have overestimated the extent to which one nation, even a superpower with United Nations support, can re-engineer regimes.

or underestimated our own morality.

The tragic reality is that both approaches to long-distance, large-scale social engineering have failed in most cases.

Or brought our own failures there.

I am gratified to see that Mr. Etzioni's communitarian principles are restrictive in their interventionist foreign policy agendas for world superpowers like ourselves. I would add a cautionary note to Mr. Etzioni's enthusiastic embrace of Western Liberalism however. Western style countries comprise a social fabric of their own. I take issue with the view that the social fabric of advanced Liberal Democracies such as ours constitute an end-point in history. It is not clear to me that Mr. Etzioni shares this view with me. Sure we see ourselves as the "right" kind of society; the kind that it is desirable for all others to evolve into. But that is because of the basic communitarian principle that our very consciousness is determined by the enculturation we have undergone here at home.
If we take a critical look at the (ever expanding) free market consumer driven society that we live in, it is not at all certain that this is some sort of terminus. In fact it is not even sustainable in actuality on a global scale on energy requirements alone. So to Mr. Etzione, I would say : not only do other nations need to change, so do we and it is cultural imperialism ( or to put it in communitarian terms: cultural delusion) to maintain otherwise.

I think any discussion of 'regime change' or Iraq, for that matter, is complete and unmitigated horsecrap, in so many words, unless it includes a frank review and reference to the issue of the oil in the ground in that country.
Let's 'democratize' OUR country by getting the oil business out of our nations' business. If that means slapping a dollar-a-gallon 'war tax' on gasoline, then do it, but account for every single penny of that money and use it to burn off the national debt to whatever extent possible. I also think that Congress, as a body, in the spirit of recognizing that the country's gotta conserve both money and minerals these days, should voluntarily turn back 10% of their pay, as a sign of 'good faith'. If there was no oil in Iraq, in my view there would be no soldiers in Iraq. Saddam was an a-hole, but he was their a-hole. If the people that live there want democracy, they'll establish it, if they just want money, pick your own 'they', there, then this charade will continue. Guns n money...

The "Democracies" Bush created in Afghanistan and Iraq are nothing more than Potemkin Villages.

Sooo.... lesseeeee now. I think its the same old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Complete idiot gets a hold of mighty empire. Complete idiot wrecks it all in record time. Learned wise men stroke their beards and pontificate as to how it was all inevitable and any man, wise or foolish would have wound up in the same place. Complete idiot still has enough juice to turn Learned wise men into Eunuchs, so they know their place.

I dunno. I don't buy into this whole 'written on the looms of fate' sort of notion.

While I think we can all agree that the Neocon approach to power has been a dismal failure, I'd argue that other approaches used by the United States in uneven pursuit of erratic policy goals have worked remarkably well. Much better in many cases than they had a right too.

If Etzioni is arguing that the United States lacks unlimited fiat power to transform the universe. Well, no one but the neocons ever really believed that nonsense.

Over the last fifty years, the United States was amazingly successful at determining and dominating the global political agenda. Between the US and USSR they aligned global politics completely, largely suppressing or rendering irrelevant third party powers, in an arrangement principally favourable to the United States. On a variety of fronts, for better or worse, American priorities re-ordered the world to its liking, whether this resulted in the Globalization movement of the 90's, or the repressive latin American pro-US client states of the 70's and 80's.

On a diplomatic front, America's positives including interventions in the Pakistan-India War by Nixon, the Middle East Peace Treaty whose benefits everyone continues to enjoy under Carter, outlasting the Soviet Union, etc.

In terms of democratization, we've seen Democratic regimes come to power in Spain, in Portugal, throughout Latin America, in South Korea, Asia, the former Soviet Union.

America can't take all the credit for it, and its foreign policy is an inconsistent and erratic mixed bag. But certainly there's no cause for despair.

Infinite power remains beyond everyone's reach.

But that's a good thing.

On March 24, 2007 - 9:20pm Valdron said:

Sooo.... lesseeeee now. I think its the same old story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Complete idiot gets a hold of mighty empire. Complete idiot wrecks it all in record time. Learned wise men stroke their beards and pontificate as to how it was all inevitable and any man, wise or foolish would have wound up in the same place. Complete idiot still has enough juice to turn Learned wise men into Eunuchs, so they know their place.

I give that paragraph a 10.

As to the rest of the post; I don't find anything to disagree with, but any good we've done around the world since the end of WWll came at a horrific price in terms of lives and our treasury, and it continues today in Iraq.

I think to myself, why do we need a defense budget of almost half a trillion dollars. We're not going to fight WWll again; there will be no more island hopping in the Pacific, no more D Days, yet we have how many carrier battle groups, how many submarines? Why do we need to maintain so many nuclear missiles, talk about over doing it!. Why do we need an Army and the Marines Corps to be as large as they are? The Air Force that we have?

Our defense budget didn't keep us from being attacked on 9/11 and Iraq isn't showing how strong we are but how weak we are.

How often do we have to be reminded of the waste, corruption and conflict of interest in the Pentagon? The swinging door between Generals/Colonels and political appointees and the Defense industry?

From what I understand our defense budget is larger than that of the next 10 industrial nations combined, and yet most, if not all of them, have universal health care. And most, if not all, have not experienced a 9/11.

I could go on and on with this rant and yes, I know some of it may be horribly wrong or misguided, but I'll end with this.

If you give certain people in government the military we have, they chomp at the bit to use it; Vietnam, Beirut, Granada, Panama, Desert Storm, and now Iraq.