International Wisdom

A few days ago, I heard one of the best analyses of our current national and world situation ever, on NPR's Fresh Air. Terry Gross interviewed Dr. Andrew Bacevich, Professor of History and International Relations at Boston University. Go and listen to hear things you just won't hear from our politicians or on the MSM. Also, a written transcript of another interview of Bacevich with Bill Moyers is here. Bacevich is a Vietnam veteran, and his son was just killed in Iraq. Furthermore, he calls himself a 'conservative realist.' Yet his take on our foreign policy is the best I've seen recently, and it represents where I'm coming from. Here is a little sample.

"Our foreign policy is not something simply concocted by people in Washington D.C. and imposed on us. Our foreign policy is something that is concocted in Washington D.C., but it reflects the perceptions of our political elite about what we want, we the people want. And what we want, by and large - I mean, one could point to many individual exceptions - but, what we want, by and large is, we want this continuing flow of very cheap consumer goods.
We want to be able to pump gas into our cars regardless of how big they may happen to be, in order to be able to drive wherever we want to be able to drive. And we want to be able to do these things without having to think about whether or not the book's balanced at the end of the month, or the end of the fiscal year. And therefore, we want this unending line of credit.
I think one of the ways we avoid confronting our refusal to balance the books is to rely increasingly on the projection of American military power around the world to try to maintain this dysfunctional system, or set of arrangements that have evolved over the last 30 or 40 years."