[Peace-discuss] sad display on DN

[C. G. Estabrook]

I've just listened to a disheartening debate on Democracy Now between
Richard Perle, the chief neocon, and Paul Krugman, the fiery liberal
spirit of the NYT's op-ed page.  Perle won in a walk.  He was calm,
principled in the sense of speaking for US hegemony, and specific.  
Krugman was wooly, and his principal point was that the US *couldn't
afford* to do the things Perle and Frum propose in their book, An End to
Evil (which K. hadn't read).

P. also said he hadn't read Krugman's book, The Great Unraveling, a
defense of Clinton-era policies -- which as Paul O'Neill said accurately
enough today, weren't that different from Bush's in regard to the US
empire.

I was depressingly reminded of debates between "liberals" and
"conservatives" during the Vietnam War, when conservatives said that the
US had to use force to show that its writ would run in Asia as elsewhere
(the "domino theory"), and liberals replied that we didn't know what we
were getting into (the "quagmire theory"), we couldn't succeed, and we
couldn't afford it.  The liberals were wrong on all three points.  The
conservatives succeeded, the "threat of a good example" was avoided and
Vietnam -- begging for Nike factories -- is now thoroughly integrated into
the US-run world economy.

Only those outside the limits of allowable debate in those days (sometimes
called "radicals") were saying what the vast majority of Americans came to
believe, that the US attack on Vietnam -- killing literally millions of
people and wreaking vast ecological damage on a huge region -- was
fundamentally wrong and immoral.  For a generation liberals and
conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, and the ideological institutions
have been devoted to erasing that view from the mind of the majority.  
They have largely succeeded -- the "Vietnam Syndrome is over," said GB I
after Gulf War II -- and the revolting spectacle today confirms that the
the equally disgusting liberals and conservatives have resumed their
accustomed roles.

It got so bad that Amy Goodman had to step in and ask serious questions,
beyond Krugman's It'll-cost-too-much whine.

Read the transcript (with some creative spelling) and judge for yourself:
<http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/13/156244#transcript>.

In dismay, CGE