No Hope Here, Move Along

Mikhail Gorbachev weighs in on the current state of the world here.

"When the cold war ended, avenues opened up for progress toward a better world. Major powers, particularly the United States, the Soviet Union and China, were working constructively together in the United Nations security council. International conflicts, including those in Angola, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Cambodia, were brought to an end. Nuclear and conventional arms control agreements were concluded, and democratic changes were under way in dozens of countries in Asia, Latin America and central and eastern Europe.

The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed in 1990, marked the beginning of a process that was expected to lead to a new, peaceful and democratic world order. But the movement in that direction soon stalled. The break-up of the Soviet Union was followed by changes in the political elites of the United States and other countries. The Charter of Paris was forgotten. Instead of moving towards a new security architecture, it was decided to rely on the tools inherited from the cold war. The United States - and the west as a whole - succumbed to the "winner's complex"."

The comments the piece has attracted so far are interesting only insofar as they are an almost perfect reflection of the near complete deficiency of scruples the Iraq quagmire has created amongst supporters and opponents alike.

The deficiency of scruples is also reflected in the BBC Newsnight report that they have seen a copy of an unsigned 2003 letter reportedly sent from Tehran to the US State Department and believed by State to be genuine. In it Tehran allegedly proposes several avenues toward a lessening of hostilities and tensions in the Middle East. But according to Lawrence Wilkerson, once the letter reached the White House, the "we don't talk with evil" paradigm asserted it's right to inflict destruction in the name of a corrupt good.

I want to believe Wilkerson because, like the rejected prospective juror in the Libby case I fall into the camp of those who are "completely without objectivity" and think that "there is nothing they (Bush administration officials) could say or do that would make me think anything positive about them."

But Wilkerson too is only asserting and alleging. Unsigned letters are no more a smoking gun than is a satellite shot of an unidentified truck in a desert.

But where we live in now is a scruples deficient world of assertion, allegation and insinuation.

Things have indeed fallen apart; the centre has indeed not held;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

W. B. Yeats rough beast no longer slouches but stands upright and marches, Christian, Jew and Muslim soldier alike, as to war.