Interesting article by Mark Danner; Tom Engelhardt makes some opening remarks leading into it.
“Transforming the Middle East,” in Condoleezza Rice’s words, “is the only guarantee that it will no longer produce ideologies of hatred that lead men to fly airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington.”
The latter perception – that terrorism as it struck the United States arose from political factors and that it could only be confronted and defeated with a political response – strikes me as incontestable. The problem the administration faced, or rather didn’t want to face, was that the calcified order that lay at the root of the problem was the very order that, for nearly six decades, had been shaped, shepherded, and sustained by the United States.
So how, finally, do we “take stock of the War on Terror”? Let me suggest three words:
1. Fragmentation – brought about by “creative destabilization,” as we see it not only in Iraq but in Lebanon, Palestine, and elsewhere in the region.
2. Diminution – of American prestige, both military and political, and thus of American power.
3. Destruction – of the political consensus within the United States for a strong global role.Gaze for a moment at those three words and marvel at how far we have come in a half-dozen years.
