![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
~
How the ebb and flow of war and the tides of opinion do change! One remembers back in the early spring when even the French began to consider that President Bush may have been right in his more aggressive Middle East policy and bid to democratize and liberalize the Middle East. People spoke of an Arab spring and the flowering of democracy. They spoke of tipping points and how matters could still go either way.
That was then and this is now. Progress seems stalled, and the insurgency continues to pound relentlessly, raising to vertiginous heights the toll on lives and treasure. Any promise of a near and soft landing of our conflicts and wars with the Middle East seems at an end, so that we are back to the old and tiring reality of ceaseless war, albeit one played out more quietly in the shadows - a kind of Cold War. The tipping points seem to have fallen the wrong way.
Richard Cohen's "The Other Guy's Sacrifice" is a good indication of this change of philosophical climate, focusing more on the mortal costs of the Iraq War rather than on the promise of a new world order of true peace and progress for both East and West - a peace for the long term, in which we see happily co-existing Westerner and Muslim, Christianity and Islam, and Arab and Jew.
On a related if somewhat tangental note, Craig Whitlock has an interesting article, "Italians Detail Lavish CIA Operations," giving us some idea of the more shadowy side of the war, as our agents double-oh-seven it in Italy, living the high life undercover to capture suspected terrorists - a little high farce and drama. And on and on we go. But hasn't it always been so?
How the ebb and flow of war and the tides of opinion do change! One remembers back in the early spring when even the French began to consider that President Bush may have been right in his more aggressive Middle East policy and bid to democratize and liberalize the Middle East. People spoke of an Arab spring and the flowering of democracy. They spoke of tipping points and how matters could still go either way.
That was then and this is now. Progress seems stalled, and the insurgency continues to pound relentlessly, raising to vertiginous heights the toll on lives and treasure. Any promise of a near and soft landing of our conflicts and wars with the Middle East seems at an end, so that we are back to the old and tiring reality of ceaseless war, albeit one played out more quietly in the shadows - a kind of Cold War. The tipping points seem to have fallen the wrong way.
Richard Cohen's "The Other Guy's Sacrifice" is a good indication of this change of philosophical climate, focusing more on the mortal costs of the Iraq War rather than on the promise of a new world order of true peace and progress for both East and West - a peace for the long term, in which we see happily co-existing Westerner and Muslim, Christianity and Islam, and Arab and Jew.
On a related if somewhat tangental note, Craig Whitlock has an interesting article, "Italians Detail Lavish CIA Operations," giving us some idea of the more shadowy side of the war, as our agents double-oh-seven it in Italy, living the high life undercover to capture suspected terrorists - a little high farce and drama. And on and on we go. But hasn't it always been so?
