America's Benevolent Imperium

Many of you Ron Paul lovers who would apparently be OK with forcing women to give birth and the return of Jim Crow, must not remember the 2000 election, wherein a bunch of people (in Florida, especially, who said Dems and Rethugs are the same) voted for Nader in 2000, and we got Dick Cheney's foreign policy for 8 years. Well, please note the the neo-cons love Mitt Romney, who shares their sick vision, and they hate Obama for reducing the American footprint on the neck of the world. So, if you're in a swing state, please vote for Obama in November, or we go back to Dick Cheney's foreign policy of putting trillion dollar wars on the credit card because, as Dick put it, "deficits don't matter." Here's Kevin Drum on the continued whining of the neo-cons.--SS

America's Benevolent Imperium:

John Hannah, late of Dick Cheney's office, thinks that Barack Obama is a wuss:

[In the Middle East] concerns run deep over the administration's lack of strategic vision, its instinct for retreat and its complicity in the unraveling of a benevolent imperium that has for decades underwritten the region's security.

....No good can come from the perception of the United States in retreat, a willing accomplice in the dismantling of a regional order — Pax Americana — that has been the linchpin of Mideast security for decades. It's a dangerously corrosive narrative, one that left unchecked will breed uncertainty, instability and even war. Disabusing friend and foe alike of its accuracy should be a top priority for Obama.

I don't have a ton to say about this. Hannah is mostly upset that (a) we apparently don't plan to bomb Iran back into the stone age, and (b) we've been reluctant to do....something....to protects the interests of various Mideast thugs who happen to have been allied with America from time to time. Overall, in fact, his bill of particulars against Obama is surprisingly weak, just a couple of barely on-point quotes plus the fact that Obama is withdrawing from Iraq (a George Bush policy, though he doesn't mention this), he hasn't solved the Israel-Palestine problem yet (what a shocker), and he's failed to bomb Iran (another George Bush policy, which Hannah has been upset about for years). All that's missing is a tossed-off reference to the Obama Apology Tour™. Yawn.

No, the only interesting part of the whole piece is Hannah's obvious comfort with the idea of a "benevolent imperium" and a "Pax Americana." Plainly he doesn't think he needs to hide his preferences behind euphemisms and shilly-shallying. American ought to be the puppet master that pulls the strings in the Middle East, and that's the end of it. Anyone got a problem with that?