Gene Coyle
Carrol Cox wrote:
Eugene Coyle wrote:I say stupid in the following sense: The US has adopted the same strategy as has Israel -- massive retaliation for everything. It is clear that Israel's strategy cannot bring it peace. Nor can the US. There is already only limited geography where US tourists can freely venture, and that geography is going to shrink. And of course it will blowback to this continent. And the stupid response is even more massive retaliation -- never mind who or what the target. And then, ... , followed by more massive retaliation. Fortress America is a stupid strategy, never mind anything else to say about it.Viewed abstractly, from outside history, "their" strategy has been stupid for 500 years, and "Massive retaliation for everything" describes the crushing of rebellions in the english countryside in the 16th century, the long massacre of the 18th century described by Linebaugh, the incredibly expensive conquest and repression of India over several centuries, the long blood repression in England in the early 19th century culminating in the suppression of the Chartists, Leopold, u.s. slavery, on and on and on. It was all incredibly irrational, destructive, and horrrible -- and it worked. Joan Robninson and others demonstrated fairly conclusively that Luxemburg's technical economics in _The Accumulation of Capital_ were erroneous, but Luxemburg's insight, that capitalism had to expand endlessly or collapse was correct. Those who want to call the Bush administration and its DP supporters stupid need to explain by what alternative strategy u.s. capital can keep maintain u.s. (against EU, China, Japan) control of mideastern oil. The strategy may ruinously fail -- I hope so. But no one has suggested a better one. In fact all the criticism of it that gets published is by marginal left critics who want it to fail, and who would oppose any alternative strategy with the same goals. There was a similar fatal fall in the hippy critique of the Vietnam War as expressed in the slogan, "Give peace a chance" -- which assumed shared goals but alternative strategies. As it turned out, peace did achieve the same original goal, the immiseration of the Vietnamese people, but only after the tremendous destructiveness of many years of warfare. Carrol
