Cold War II

Jeff Huber, in his Pen and Sword blog, argues that what the Republicans are doing is promoting a constant state of national emergency in order to be able to justify keeping military forces in the Middle East. He also thinks that the real fear of Cheney and his cronies is that Iran will develop a nuclear energy industry.

I don't know about that. But his over point, that what is happening is a second round of the Cold War with Russia and China. Only that this time, the Russians and the Chinese have absorbed the lessons learned from the first Cold War, which is to let the adversary spend itself into a huge hole and break its military in protracted counterinsurgencies.

(The only quibble I have is that if it wasn't for the Iraq War, we'd have just as large deficits, because Chimpy would have just given the money away to his rich buddies.)

There, he might have a point. The fiscal year 2008 military budget is somewhere north of 600 billion dollars, and that does not include a couple of hundred billion a year for the Iraq War that keeps being added in as "supplementals," which is why the Democrats can wage an ineffectual effort to end the war every few months. Chimpy couldn't be bothered to do any serious reconstruction in Afghanistan because it would "cost too much" (giving the Taliban its window of opportunity) but he could spend hundreds of billions of dollars on his war of choice with Iraq.

It very well could be that in destroying American power, the Republicans are allied with the Chinese and the Russians. Not for the same reasons, but they have the same goals, except the Republicans also have the goal of destroying American democracy.

But that's a subject for another time.