Linkmeister

Cabal update

James Woolsey, one of the charter PNAC goons, (and apparently the odds-on favorite for Minister of Information in a new government of Iraq) said this at UCLA this week:

"I don't look at this as a pro-war matter at all. As far as I'm concerned, it's figuring out how to help the Arab people," Woolsey said. "The issue of democracy is also an issue of peace, and what we ought to be focusing on is helping to bring democracy to the Arab world."

[snip]

"We want you nervous. We want you to realize now, for the fourth time in a hundred years, this country and its allies are on the march and that we are on the side of those whom you -- the Mubaraks, the Saudi Royal family -- most fear: We're on the side of your own people."

I don't particularly like Mubarak's Egypt; I don't particularly like the House of Saud's Saudi Arabia. I don't like Assad's Syria; I don't like half the tin-pot dictators in Africa. That doesn't mean I think the United States of America has either the need or the right to go to war with each one of those countries to make them over into democracies.

This crowd is leading our country down roads I don't want to go, and I suspect there are a lot of people out there like me. I don't want to spend lives and fortunes in a perpetual state of war for a vague goal of "democratizing" countries. These people would do well to read some British history, particularly post-WW I histories of the Middle East. It didn't turn out well then, if A Peace to End All Peace is to be believed; I see no reason why it should be different now.