an observation

Submitted by Peter Herz (United States), Feb 18, 2012 at 22:44

George H.W. Bush was also the last US President to have served in World War II. Coming from an elite family, that experience doubtlessly instilled a deeply-seated hope that strong international institutions could prevent such a conflagration from happening again. Having seen the Soviet Bloc collapse and the existential threat it posed to the West fail, he thought he could make the UN "work" in an internationally beneficial way that it manifestly could not when the shadow of Stalin was over it. While I believe that the elder Mr. Bush may have been mistaken in this belief, I see nothing sinister in his intentions.

Perhaps both Bush administrations were aided and abetted by the neo-conservative vision, in which a group of ex-Trotskyites (who, I will note, tried to be sincerely repentant) unfortunately transformed a chiliastic totalitarian socialist vision into a chiliastic faith in representative/parliamentary/consensual government. I share their belief that representative/parliamentary/consensual government is far better than other kinds that have been tried, so I will not see them as a band of sinister "insiders", either.

A more realistic policy would be for the USA to remember that M'Shiach's name is Yeshua (I am a Christian), not Uncle Sam; and that this sorry world will always see nation rising against nation. The New World Order of free market globalization shows signs of tottering; the democratic socialist alternative is shaking in the continent of its birth; a Chinese economist has warned his government that every province of that country is a "Greece" when he thought nobody else was listening. The elder Mr. Bush's vision will soon be as irrelevant to a world in which history goes on as Wilson's was by 1936 and Franklin Roosevelt's was by scarcely a year after his death in 1945.

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