There Is No Plan

BadBob of Planned Obsolescence very kindly pointed me in the direction of a fascinating Michael Ignatieff piece in the NYT in 2003, just before the outbreak of the Iraq war, which suggests that America needs to accept and embrace its role as the driving force of a new, more benevolent, but necessarily imperial agenda.

Ignatieff’s article presages some of the key points of our neo-liberal discussion, seeing it through the prism of Bush’s – then nascent – conversion to neo-conservative thinking, in the wake of 9/11 and the run-up to his disastrous war in Iraq. More to come on this.

there's no place like home

History has a habit of surprising us. Rarely, have so many disparate causalities clashed so profoundly, so quickly, as they are now. The world is at a crossroads for a multitude of reasons, and stepping into the gauntlet to face it all is President Barack Obama.

Elected, in the eyes of many, as an agent of change, it’s beginning to seem hard to believe that he can still be that agent. It’s as if all the stirring rhetoric for which he has become quickly famous will soon be lost in an almost janitorial drudgery of merely cleaning up the mess that is the modern world. The dream of change that he offered us was not a matter of damage limitation, but on just about all fronts, both at home and abroad this is what Obama is presented with. But looking back to our past might once again provide us with the path to the future. Read the rest of this entry »