pounds / shillings / dollars / cents

As he so often is, Glenn Greenwald is bang on the money here:

The Number One Rule of the bi-partisan Foreign Policy Community is that America has the right to invade and attack other countries at will because American power is inherently good and our role in the world is to rule it though the use of superior military force. Paying homage to that imperialistic orthodoxy is a non-negotiable pre-requisite to maintaining Good Standing and Seriousness Credentials within the Foreign Policy Community.

Conversely, one who denies that premise reveals oneself to be deeply unserious and unworthy of meaningful discourse.

I guess, like so many of us outside the USA, I look and wonder at what I see is a problem that stems from the most basic flaw in the American political psyche...a self belief in a righteous global destiny that it is inevitably on the side of good.

That belief, and the way it drove the USA may have benefited the world for large parts of the last century, but has became increasingly corrupted from the 1960s onwards, reaching it's nadir today when, despite that continuing self belief, its rarely shared by the populace of we perceived vassal states.

I guess the Romans thought the same thing, I know the French, Spanish and British did in their imperial periods.

175 people were blown up in Iraq yesterday.....

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