The various analyses about the conflict and ceasefire between Russia and George continues with the thoughtful and the ridiculous, the latter emanating from the failed Bush regime and McSame who hopes to head a third Bush term and rattle sabers at Moscow.

 

In the former category there have been a number of pieces, one of the most recent from Jerome a Paris at the European Tribune (via Cursor. org) who posits that the West is bad at strategy.

 

Here are a few excerpts: "In a hard-hitting Op-Ed in this morning's Financial Times, Singapore's Kishore Mahbubani writes that The West is strategically wrong on Georgia

... most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia. America would not tolerate Russia intruding into its geopolitical sphere in Latin America. Hence Latin Americans see American double standards clearly. So do all the Muslim commentaries that note that the US invaded Iraq illegally, too. Neither India nor China is moved to protest against Russia. It shows how isolated is the western view on Georgia: that the world should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia. In reality, most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be greater.

"He extends that diagnosis to our overall approach to the world (as quoted below the fold) and makes a convincing case that the West has an incoherent strategy towards the rest of the world. I would like to suggest, however, that the current 'strategy' has a narrow rationality intimately linked to our current dysfunctional politics.

"The other thing that comes on top of that to promote aggressive internationalist policies is the "winner-take-all" nature of our current ideological paradigm. The Thatcher-Reagan revolution - all the neo-gangs thatt have come to the fore - has not just promoted greed and profit creed, they have explicitly called for the destruction of all social links ("society doesn't exist," Thatcher said famously) and for a morality that specifically states that we have what we deserve and we deserve what we have. There is an unsaid addendum: as long as you don't get caught (and everything will be done to weaken the organs that could catch you), anything goes and you can keep what you grabbed, plundered or swindled. Success is defined by how much you can accumulate, and, with increasing few restrictions along the way, that has meant an increasingly brutal arms race at the top, with everybody else as collateral damage of the plunder.

"That logic also applies to countries - see how we love our rankings, whether of companies, medals, GDP or billionaires, and "we" have to win that race too. "We" is really our elites, but too many of the rest of us are too easily suckered into these jingoistic games. And what "we" want is total dominance across all measurable fields. Thus China needs to be cut down to size. Same with Russia or, occasionally, when their more favorable numbers get too obvious, Germany or Europe."