Reading notes

I love Billmon. I find his skillful and deeply informed analyses simultaneously encouraging (because clear thinking is such a rarity these days) and depressing (because clear thinking is such a rarity these days):

I think the invasion of Iraq may go down in history as one of those decisions — like Germany’s decision to back Austro-Hungary’s ultimatum to the Serbs, or the U.S. decision to cut off oil shipments to Japan unless it withdrew from China — with consequences that extend far beyond what the makers of those decisions ever expected. The neocons, who have been failing upward for the past three decades, may have finally created a mess too big to be cleaned up. …

The neocons may have screwed the pooch (to borrow a bit of pilot slang from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff) so ferociously the poor beast can’t be patched back up again. Instead of World War IV, America may find its been dragged into a Middle Eastern version of the Thirty Years War, if not the Hundred Years War. …

We seem to have reached the point where a half-baked strategy for endless war in the Middle East is actually easier to sell politically than a sensible energy policy, an end to America’s fawning subservience to worst instincts of the Israeli national security state, and a focused, relentless campaign to destroy Al Qaeda while drying up the pools of hatred in which jihad festers and grows. …

For libertarian conservatives, the great fear is of a state that gradually overwhelms and crushes human liberty. For progressives, it’s a state that ignores the needs of the weak and the powerless at home, while acting as an engine of oppression in the developing world. Thanks to the war in the Middle East, it looks like both of our worst fears could come true. Thus, the idea of a coalition of both ends against the middle.

Thanks, B. Your efforts make me smarter and, if I integrate the information well, wiser.