Which war you ask?

 This piece tracks with what I’ve been able to read in other places too.

I’m disturbed by mainstream media reports (not just Fox news) that want to portray this as “the terrorists winning…” so somehow we need to… like we did before. ugh. Fear is so wonderfully effective in the American media market place when advertising dollars are in play.

Obama has been less imperial than GWB of course. It seems that we’re watching the continued demise of colonialism. Colonially imposed nation states dissolve as empires not longer care enough to enforce them. It seems the Kurds are hoping their long patience pays off here, to the dismay of Iran and Turkey. You’ve got the US left willing to let the killfest continue as long as there isn’t any more blood on our hands and the libertarians in their mix of isolationism and “let people do what hey want to…” philosophy leaving the Imperial NeoCons out in the cold. They really hated that we didn’t “keep” Iraq after we “paid for it” when the fiction of “welcomed as liberators” melted like an ice cube in Fallujah. Their narrative has worn thin and they don’t have many friends for a “coalition of the willing”.

The US has the powerful man’s moral dilemma. Why do we lament our passivity in Africa (while still remaining passive) in their killfests while we throw up our hands with “not my problem” in the Middle East? We still dream ourselves to be gods in Africa while we learned in HD clarity that what we could and couldn’t do in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Deeper narratives rumble along. Does technological disruption undermine the monopoly of violence that has supported the nation state model in the West? Americans blithely celebrate their “right to bear arms” while being horrified as the fruits of this supposed right play out in Shia, Sunni and Kurdish hands. Ah the delicious ironies of old Tom Jefferson.

The old powers of religion and kinship seem to rule in other places while the west lacks the means or the will to continue to impose its brand of reality upon them.

We never do really know the future. pvk