It’s more internal grandstanding and sabre-rattling by the chickenhawks for local consumption, tough talk around the kitchen table.

“Every 10 years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.”
Someone needs to remind them that every time they try to do this - they lose BADLY, EVERY TIME.
Seriously, think about it and rattle them off:
Korea - never actually ended and exists in a continuing stalemate
Cuba -Bay of Pigs, Nuff said
VietNam - Lost and still suffering the consequences of a misadventure that ended in 1973
Iraq - Lost
Afghanistan - In the process of losing.

The US has not actually won a conflict on their terms since the end of WWII (I dont count Grenada).

Oh on the Fonz metaphor I remember the episode when he went back to school just for a bit, and was totally neurotic about just getting a pass thinking he’d failed a test, while studious Richie, Ralph and Potsy all had a doddle. The fragile tough guy with the ego issues. Yes he was tough but all he really wanted was a 50 pass grade. Also he could do special things like make the music box play with a tap. There’s nothing novel or special about slaughtering people, it’s as old as humanity.

By the way Obama already has via military drones killed many people in his name.

“Michael Ledeen, one of the key ‘intellectuals’ (sic) behind the Bush administration…”

Greg Sheridan tells us, “Obama is going to have to do something seriously unpleasant to someone.”

Perhaps Greg would like to volunteer to have something seriously unpleasant happen to him at the hands of Obama? Since it doesn’t seem to matter to whom the unpleasant thing happens. Seems very fair to me. Let’s bankrupt him, destroy his reputation, and prevent him from ever working again, all at the hands of a capricious state. Why not.

The right wing of course as described in this article simply are not interested in observing ‘the Golden Rule’ in the ethics of international relations. This was the kind of thinking that lead to WWI and WWII, and prompted a huge amount of analysis post-WWII in philosophical circles to try to understand what was going wrong, and to form a new ethics of international and indeed interpersonal relations, with work by people such as Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib on the Habermasian ethics of communicative discourse.

Clearly the ‘intellectuals’ have never studied or considered this stuff, or choose to ignore it. If they have not studied it, and never considered this school of ethics, then they are clearly not intellectual by any definition of the word, just self-proclaimed token geniuses by the right, presumably.

In this light, the work of characters such as Tom Friedman is just a ‘feel good’ justification for performing acts and atrocities that, if we were children and the act scaled back to cruelty to a kitten or some other innocent animal, would have us soundly punished and sinbinned by our parents, acting ethically and justly. When we are adults, we can construct any manner of justification for bullyboy activities of the most shamefully geostrategic kind. The true history of the West’s and particularly US support for Saddam Hussein’s regime over a protracted period doesn’t seem to ever come out in these convenient revisionist short-term memory analyses. That Iraq of course had little or nothing to do with any acts of terror toward the US simply does not factor into the justificatory discourse. The hypocrisy of America’s longterm dealings with the Middle East for energy resources and turning a blind eye to Shariah law, patriarchy, barbaric cruelty of punishments, etc etc conveniently never gets a mention, nor the sale of biological, chemical and conventional weapons to selected clients around the world to help settle local disputes in line with America’s own interests in the regions and conveniently help settle the balance of payments against energy imports.

The questionable spirit of Anglosphere colonialism that caused the creation of the US over centuries appears to have sunk into the consciousness of the people as a permanent frontier society, including an acceptance of rough justice, occasionally getting the wrong guy, and the ends justifying the means.

In short, the right of the US and various News Ltd right wing journalists in its fraternal Anglo client states such as Australia are power-mad and morally insane. Remarks such as these really ought, as they are in present day Germany following the defeat and moral upbraiding of the Third Reich in WWII, to result in prosecution and sanctions for public incitement and the promotion of warfare, of attempting to brainwash the public into accepting morally unacceptable actions by repeating them often enough in print.

The original sentiments refracted in this piece are of course by no means the sentiments held in international relations academic circles — it’s just News Ltd-quality pablum for the masses. Dozens of easily obtained journal articles by true intellectuals and scholars say otherwise.

Further reading:
http://www.allbusiness.com/public-administration/national-security-international/1085847-1.html

http://www.meforum.org/37/the-wacky-world-of-french-intellectuals

Oh, eeeuw.