Fish in a barrel...

   

s l o w l y they catch on….

 I’ve come to the conclusion that we are not going to get the votes in September to force a wind-down of the war in Iraq. This is mainly because Gen. Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker are going to give an upbeat report that will assert that the surge is working well enough to justify its continuance. But it is also because the Democrats have powerful disincentives to making a big enough stink to force a change.

or give the appearance of catching on…

 The Democrats are enjoying a huge surge in fundraising and party-identification. The election of ’08 is setting up to be an historical blowout. I just doubt they are willing to rock the boat while they have such smooth sailing.

If they are going to do anything crazy it will be related to Gonzales and the Department of Justice. The war? I am not seeing it.

… not that it matters.

The Democrats plan to use the likes of Murphy, Joe Sestak, Webb and others to sell war continuation… furtherance of war.  War forever.  Pity the little retail politickers cannot see themselves selling war as they sell the Democrats.

Frankly, willful blind ignorance is heinous.  Despicable too.

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I made it to Asia Times yesterday, for the first time in a couple weeks.  It is packed…

One thing I landed on was part three of an extended look at how Germany is being brought around, albeit slowly, to the USA! USA! War Agenda.

 PART 1: Readiness for endless war

 PART 2: Everything is broken

 PART 3: Hail to the chief, or else

Here is a snip from Part 1:

[S]ince Angela Merkel’s visit to Washington (as the conservative opposition leader) on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, to denounce then-chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s decision to oppose the war, the return to US good graces was not only the main conservative foreign-policy project; it turned rapidly into the supreme project of the German political class – including the Social Democrats.

Merkel became the chancellor-to-go-to, the most trusted European interlocutor for the US political class to work jointly and determinedly to harden US global hegemony against the consequences of America’s Iraq-inflicted weakness – this not only in the wider Middle East but also, and especially, with regard to Russia and China, the Bush administration’s original enemy of choice before the “birth pangs of a new Middle East” consumed so much of its political capital.

Overcoming the domestic constraints on its ability to use the German army more extensively for “humanitarian interventions”, for the defense of “Western civilization” against Islamist terrorism, is an important, though not the most important, part of the Merkel government’s “the West united behind the US” policy. Notwithstanding the absence of public debate on its strategic implications – eg, of the US (and Israeli) doctrine of preventive war, the abolition of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s geographical restrictions, the mission of “securing access to raw materials” – the rejection on general principles of a more activist military role by a majority of Germans has not (yet) been overcome.

This has far-reaching consequences: it has, in a significant way, rebooted German elite attitudes and expectations toward the EU, and toward Germany’s relationship with France. The public discourse about foreign policy as well as the underlying elite mindset is changing – from “responsibly conservative” to the channeling of the demons Hannah Arendt dealt with in her search for the origins of 20th-century disorder: (British) imperialism, Western militarism and racism. And since the majority of Germans is (again) far behind the curve of elite opinion, the efforts of “re-educating” them (as Der Spiegel recently demanded again) are as consistently strident as they are mythologizing.

There is that glib line, read it and weep.  Hard to avoid reading it with anything but dread.  Eye and knocking heart, as Auden said…

Do I know how it turns out?  I surely do not.  But little feels good or right.

Nothing feels decent, I know that much.

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