This is one of those long times before decision when you rush headlong towards the time which will matter; a long twilight moment, and as in a long dive even though you are rushing with great velocity it seems as if you’re just hanging in air. It’s not the election, which is already won for Kerry, which will be the time of decision. The time I speak of is the first few months of a Kerry administration. It is then that Kerry will decide on a new direction for America and it is then that America’s fate – and that of the world, will be determined.
Melodramatic? Not at all. Kerry will inherit a host of problems that if not dealt with effectively could either destroy or cripple America. The most obvious is what we call terrorism, but which is more than that – a giant game of Empire with oil and nuclear weapons as the prizes. From Afghanistan to Morocco, but centering in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (not in Iraq or Afghanistan) this game will determine who controls the most important resource in the world. Oil. And the US isn’t winning this war, it’s losing it. Saudi Arabia is increasingly unstable; it’s armed forces are unreliable; it’s strongest allies are ideologically wedded to the House of Saud’s greatest enemy and it’s greatest resource (oil) is exposed to strikes whenever it’s opponents choose.
[...]
And then we come to the third of our triumvirate of challenges – the worst problem that Kerry will face, by far. His own countrymen. Great nations rarely fall to outside forces until they have already rotted from within. The US is deep into that rot and is verging on ungovernable. The first two problems are dire – but there are ways each of them can be dealt with, not ways that will be easy but ways that will require great work and fortitude from America and it’s people. They are tasks that the Americans of the Greatest Generation and the Lost would have faced and overcome. It’s not clear that they are tasks the current generations are willing to even face squarely
The US is a country which has 40% of it’s voting population who would vote for Bush no matter what his failures, no matter what his crimes. It is a country where it is considered acceptable to publish screeds calling for the wholesale murder of one group of political opinion – “Liberals”. It is a nation where the professional military votes overwhelmingly for one of two political parties and where that professional military feels estranged and contemptuous of the civilian world. It is a nation where one side considers no tactic too base, too contemptible to use in the service of defeating evil. Evil – meaning it’s political opponents: Liberals, those who stand against all that is good in America, those who plan to destroy the US and the Constitution. Against such evil people, such…Liberals… there can be no quarter and no compromise, only a bitter struggle to the end: the end being the complete destruction of one side or another.
| 