“I Want To Teach the World To Sing
in Perfect Hegemony”
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At the Boston Review, Stephen Kinzer interviews Andrew Bacevich on the mess in the Middle East and how it got way. Bacevich argues convincingly that it’s all about the oil, complicated by hubris and misunderstanding, in short, a desire to be God Emperors of Dunes.
A snippet:
AB: The rationales were becoming more diffuse. Yes, oil remained a core interest—not only oil to be consumed at home but also oil to fuel the rest of the industrialized world, meaning many of our allies. But by this stage, there is something else: an effort, however ill-considered and lacking in specificity, to capitalize on the end of the Cold War, claiming the mantle of sole superpower, with U.S. military supremacy the ultimate manifestation of that status. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, the United States attempted to assert hegemony over a large part of the Islamic world. Again, there was no master plan. It was haphazard. It was arrogant. It was undertaken without any appreciation for the complexities involved or for what exertions hegemony would actually require.
Read the rest.
