There are two excellent pieces on CiF today. Former MP, David Marquand, gives the best summary yet of the shortcomings and missed opportunities of the Age of Blair, and Geoffrey Wheatcroft discusses the coming ‘Perfect Storm’ that will bring the final collapse of Neoconservatism.
David Marquand: Blair’s moral interventionism has often been compared to Gladstone’s, and there is something in it. Blair’s blazing attacks on the evils perpetrated in Kosovo were reminiscent of Gladstone’s famous philippics against the Ottoman empire’s Bulgarian horrors; and Gladstone’s insistence that civilised countries enjoyed a “moral right of interference” when others transgressed the norms of civilised behaviour can plausibly be seen as the intellectual progenitor of Blair’s doctrine of the “international community”.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Along with the collapse of Bush’s authority, all these episodes are connected to the great disaster in Iraq. And all illustrate the hubristic, impenitent arrogance of the people who have been guiding America’s destiny - as well as ours, alas - for the past six years. What one senses so acutely are the conditions building for a political perfect storm, which will engulf and destroy the whole neoconservative project.
Recommended.
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The “political storm, which will engulf and destroy the whole neoconservative project” will also “engulf and destroy” many of us…
“International finance” and “Globalization” is run by those who have master-minded the “neoconservative project”.
If they go down, they will undoubtedly bring us down with them.
The ‘forces of reaction’ are already flexing their muscles - why else, for example, are interest rates rocketing, thus crippling many of us into further debt ?
Inflation ? Don’t you believe it.
NeoCons swept away? If only - but I fear Richard is right; they still have plenty of staying [or at least clinging-on] power.
It’s important to realise that those who really set the interest rates - to control inflation for example - are also those who create inflation (and more besides).
It’s also important to realise that those delegated to set interest rates (eg Bank of England) are ‘light years away’ from those who have to pay (eg mortgages).
Mortgages are for ‘other people’ - not them. What some of these people earn in a day would pay off my mortgage thrice over.
They really do live in another world - and have not the slightest interest in those whose homes get re-possessed - suicides, marriage break-ups etc - as a direct result of their decisions.