Letters to the Editor
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Delusional?
To call our foreign policy delusional, I think we have to make an assumption about its intentions. Our foreign policy is dishonorable, in that its overriding aim is to acquire control over the resources that belong to others. It is disingenuous, in so far as it pursues that end cloaked in a thousand lies and contradictions. But to call it delusional, we have to give it credit for a good intention, and blame it for failing to achieve that intention, due to broken logic and hallucinations etc. The fact is, it may be working very well, in light of what its agents hope to achieve. That being, I assume, a position of dominion and control, based on uncompromising force. The staggering incoherence of the logic, the expressed motivations, and so on, serves very well to obscure, and thereby enable, a perfectly clear, rational, and practical agenda. That agenda is, essentially, pre-political conquest, masked by blather. The more maddening and improbable the blather, the better. The U.S. was created by conquest, and has grown fat through continuing conquest. The methods have shifted this way and that over the centuries, but the basic practice of economic exploitation backed by force has never ceased. As citizens we know, at some level, that this is what sustains us, and so the growing material insecurity of the erstwhile middle class becomes a mandate to pillage. I believe that our elected leaders are doing their level-headed best to keep us fat. The strategy may fail, of course. But to adopt a different one would be to invent a new United States. In jettisoning our Constitution, we are confirming that the true foundation of this country and its wealth is not law, but its absence. That is the bedrock "America" that the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive have united to defend. If Clinton is elected, it will be because enough of us trust her to pursue the same ends, but with gloves on, and a nicer smile. We are unhappy with our war in Iraq because it isn't looking like a successful raid. We are directing our hopes and fears towards Iran, because we really need a successful raid somewhere. That's what we do.