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February 27, 2003
Barlow on Cheney - The Wackjob Empire
Ahh. I do love being right. John Perry Barlow writes:
Veteran Washington Post columnist Mary McGrory accompanied me on one of my futile visits to his office, where she spent better than an hour listening to us argue about ³circular errors probable² and ³MIRV decoys² and the other niceties of nuclear nightmare. When we were leaving, she, who had seen a lot of politicians in her long day, turned to me and said, ³I think your guy Cheney is the most dangerous person Iıve ever seen up here.² At that point, I agreed with her. What I was not thinking about, however, was the technique I once used to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho. Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over. As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of Big Stategic Thinkers were doing, if one imagined the Soviet Union as a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision of implacable, irrational, lethality that the Soviet leaders would decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation. It worked. While I think that rock nı roll and the systemic failures of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism as did Dickıs mad gamble, I have to confess that, by 1990, he didnıt look quite so nuts to me after all. The MX, along with Star Wars and Reaganıs terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging psychological rather than nuclear warfare.Iım starting to wonder if were arenıt watching something like the same strategy again. In other words, itıs possible Cheney and company are actually bluffing.This time, instead of trying to terrify the Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If Iım right about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any more than the MX missile did.
First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into voluntarily turning his country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that, they want to convince the Iraqi people that itıs safer to attempt his overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground troops.
Posted by mbowen at February 27, 2003 08:23 AM
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