roachboy

that the present administration entered with and maintains a particular understanding of how milItary action and economic interests are intertwined seems to me fairly evident--they obvious did not invent this intertwining--every administration in recent times has had strategic agendas that were rooted in the same understanding of the relation between these sectors--but none of them (except perhaps reagan, whose administration did not precede the bush people into the annals of the heroically incompetent as a function of the absurd official targets--grenada etc.--and the cold war idicoy behind their unofficial targets--nicaragua in particular---and of the time-frame they took up--and of the choices that were available to them, etc.)

i dont think you can understand the present iraq fiasco in other terms--incapable of imagining ideological orientation in a context of the diminishing centrality of nation-states, the bush folk threw the dice in iraq and attempted to situate the u.s.as military hegemon on top of the networks of multilateral agreements that had been shaping the processes grouped together as "globalizing capitalism." form a conservative viewpoint, this move made sense in political terms at least--given that the whole of conservative ideology relies upon the nation-state, which acts as the premise from which their arguments operate--a defunctionalization of the nation-state would mean, first and before anything else, the collapse of conservative ideology in its present form.
so the bush folk acted from political self-interest, but not for the reasons that they said.
and they fucked it up.
the effects of this fuck up will play out over a longer time-frame than has the iraq war---i am not sure how it will work itself out, but it is clear to me that the "strategy" (in quotes deservedly) of the bush people has failed miserably.

this was not a matter of principle, nor was it a function of any Big Dynamic that determines how history plays out--it was a function of incompetence and nothing else.

given that currency values are functions of currency trading (a transnational game, but shh...dont tell conservatives that--they prefer to pretend that nation-states run the show...) is among the effects generated by this incompetence. i would expect that if the americans were to wake up and toss the present conservative ideology and its representatives back into the ash-heap that currency markets would respond in kind. i dont see the u.s.as the Business Too Big to be Allowed to Fail at this point.

particular choices engender larger effects--for convenience, the patterns formed by these effects, around and by them, within and against them, at some point get labelled processes and so it goes. historians like to talk about processes--in doing that they eliminate contingency, accident, etc. and make the results of wobbly trajectories plotted out by actual human beings in real time into causal patterns. they like to link patterns and talk about cycles. they seem to like the idea of cycles. they imagine cycles are explanatory. there are many many conceptual problems with this--but no matter, really, not in a message board format.

the reason i mention this is the recurrent recourse to an arbitrarily cast "history" in the threads above--the claims rooted in this "history"--nations have always done x--mean nothing whatsoever--they are little more than reassuring fables folk adopt for themselves in order to enable them to pretend that there is Order in the social-historical, forces that elude individual comprehension that play out across time and which can be invoked--meaninglessly outside of a therapeutic narrative--to justify or explain a particular way of seeing political options that would be unjustifiable ethically, politically, rationally any other way.

i think the last paragraph of the greider article worth isolating:

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite