Thanks for the Bush quote.
I was struck the other day in reading Rushdie's _The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey_ by how apropos this quote from his preface is to the situation today: "The power of super-power: first to describe a given leadership as unacceptable; then to create the circumstances in which it becomes unacceptable; and finally to obliterate the memory of its (the super-power's) own
part in the process."
I have noticed that in discussions about the invasion of Iraq that it often becomes a kind of quarrel among paradigms. There's the WWII model (Saddam as Hitler as envisioned by the Bush administration, or conversely the U.S. as the Weimar Republic in the European view) and the Vietnam model, predominantly evoked by the anti-war movement, though also a kind of counter-paradigm in the Powell war strategy. But this Rushdie quote reminded me that it seems to me Reagan Redux, that in this lineage the beginning was the U.S invasion of Panama in order to remove the nefarious drug-dealing Noriega, in the days when Nancy Reagan began the Just Say No campaign against drugs There's perhaps a difference between what's useful rhetorically and
what's useful pragmatically, and in that sense, I think the Bush administration, which is in many respects, Reagan Redux, has been operating, for all the WWII rhetoric, on the Panama model. Wasn't that also described as a decapitating strategy?
And Redux, too, with the idiotic quotes.
This is a new email address. The other one was not working!
Best,
Rebecca
Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Deborah Russell <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 03/27/03 06:22 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: BUSH For Dummies
>
> The following comment caught my attention. It appears sincere and
compassionate. Then, I remind myself, it was taken out of context.
Deborah
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..."No political cause can justify
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— G. W. Bush
(Source: The Whitehouse)
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