Re: Overthrow Hussein?

We'll see.  I have to say that the reaction by US allies, GB above all, to
overthrowing the Taliban was far more supportive than I imagined it would
be, just as it was against Iraq under Bush Sr.  So, we'll see.

As for the decline of US hegemony and dementia, I think the rules of
capitalism and leadership have changed, that dementia, like fascism, is in
order because it creates order and chaos out of systemic chaos.  Hegemons as
we knew them are a thing of the past.  It seems that we're moving into a
decentered empire (from the view of the hegemony-chaos cycle) in which, in
the initial phases, the US acts as a strong arm-man pushing through a new
geoculture to replace the Cold War and the failing geoculture of national
development, a geoculture of real violence that justifies
corporate-neoliberal globalization in the guise of world peace.  It may all
fall apart and we may not move fully into this nascent world-system/empire.
But the logic of this systemic demise is not the logic of capitalism as we
knew it. That logic -- largely a state-enterprise logic of territorialism --
ended in 1945-50 with US hegemony, with Bretton Woods, the UN, and the Cold
War.  Since then we've been in a logic of transition, i.e. discernable
patterns of systemic change.  I think we're now in the second and more
turbulent, post-Cold War, corporate globalization phase of this transition.

- Elson

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Threehegemons@aol.com [mailto:Threehegemons@aol.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2002 1:01 PM
> To: boles@svsu.edu; wsn@csf.colorado.edu
> Subject: Re: Overthrow Hussein?
>
>
> Overthrowing Hussein is not a sign of weakness or strength
> (nobody doubts the US has enough military strength to take him
> out, although what then?).  Its more a sign of dementia.  As
> Thomas Friedman noted today:
>
> "it is really reassuring to see how warmly Europeans have
> embraced President Bush's formulation that an "axis of evil"
> threatens world peace. There's only one small problem. President
> Bush thinks the axis of evil is Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and
> the Europeans think it's Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Condi Rice."
>
> This does not sound like a formula for starting up an effecient
> protection racket.  Right now there are no real alternatives to
> US leadership, but I suspect plenty of people are doing some
> thinking.  Screw Argentina, bomb Iraq, wed oneself to Israel's
> agenda re: Iran--this is not the plan of a leader.
>
> Steven Sherman
>