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Post# of 481987
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StephanieVanbryce

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StephanieVanbryce

Re: chunga1 post# 49298

Sunday, 11/04/2007 10:40:51 PM

Sunday, November 04, 2007 10:40:51 PM

Post# of 481987
The Badass Karma of George & Co.

It is the law of unintended consequences, or unexpected 180s, or grand paradoxes, or just plain karma, if you like. But whatever you choose to call it, every passing day corroborates the thesis that Bush-Cheney's nearly exclusive reliance on hard-power muscularity has doomed the United States to the status of a whimpering beggar, of a global laughingstock, of a besieged bad boy, of an overstretched and impotent giant.

If fear, as opposed to respect, was what the Machiavellian duo had in mind, they're coming up stupendously short.

China has us by the financial short ones; the Russian bear is seeing U.S.-cultivated opportunities everywhere; the Middle East speaks for itself; Latin America is toasting rabidly antiAmerican but effective demagogues; Europe is little more than puzzled by, and barely tolerant of, our bad-boy immaturity; and large swaths of Africa remain defiantly adrift in unaligned turmoil.

We are, simply put, increasingly an international joke. Still dangerous and unpredictable, of course, but more in the sense of an untrained monkey with a machine gun. The monkey, however, is about out of bullets -- and the world knows it.

The latest to embrace the joy of Bush-Cheney's imperial impotence is that sterling ally and irrepressible dictator, Generalissimo and Presidente Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan. Our friendship in the vast currency of military hardware has indeed kept him propped up, but that friendship was also about to bring him down. We took the world's extraordinary good will of the post-9/11 period and promptly launched a religio-ideological assault on it, and fewer Middle East populations took kindly to our rudeness than that of Pakistan's. All of which, to understate matters, has put the general at risk.

So Pervez had a choice: continue kissing the imperially befuddled who fed him and maintain the illusion of righteous democrat as actual democracy proceeded to string him up; or tell the Bushies to shove off, knowing they could do no such thing in all their splendiferous frailty.

Naturally it wasn't much of a choice. One's hanging in the public square isn't normally a dictator's preferred course.

It was the behind-the-scenes contours of Bush-Cheney's mighty powerlessness, however, that made Musharraf's actions yesterday so intriguing, and telling.

The administration frantically begged and coerced and cajoled the little dictator not to do what he did. The Bushies were everywhere in and around Islamabad, like a jilted lover, calling and dropping by to plead for one more shot at the old romance.

Closest was "Adm. William J. Fallon, the senior American military commander in the Middle East," reported the New York Times, who "told General Musharraf and his top generals ... on Friday that he would put [his $10 billion in] aid at risk if he seized emergency powers." The admiral's looming threat struck such terror in the heart of Musharraf, 24 hours later he seized emergency powers.


Condi was in the neighborhood, and she too had pleaded with Pervez. But after his rejection she was reduced to bawling about how "highly regrettable" the whole break-up thing was.

But not to worry, is Musharraf's attitude. He'll always have Bill and Condi and Dick and George, because he has them all by the balls.

For Musharraf's is one of those tolerable, lovably huggable nuclear-armed regimes, no matter how intolerably Musharraf acts. Whether good boy or bad, he's pretty much all we've got -- considering we've alienated everyone else.

Thus the Bush administration is "stuck in wait-and-see mode, with limited options and a lack of clarity about the way forward.... Inside the White House the hope is that the state of emergency will be short-lived and that General Musharraf will fulfill his promise to abandon his post as Army chief of staff and hold elections by Jan. 15."

Good luck with that.

But "hope" isn't policy. It is, rather, the pathetic manifestation of a United States as the most gossamer of paper tigers -- the once-baddest bully on the block, inexorably reduced by overexertion to sniveling impotence.

I, for one, choose to call it karma.

http://pmcarpenter.blogs.com/p_m_carpenters_commentary/2007/11/the-badass-karm.html
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