currently missing … ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’

via the recent very interesting post at newsgrist I found this text, worth a read through, ‘Bush’s Useful Idiots’ at the London Review of Books. The text is not only interesting as a reference to the 1988 ad mentions, and as well for an understanding of the American intellectual situation – it as well goes into details with the european reactions concerning latest developments .. and thus I just can suggest: follow up the links via newsgrist and read the entire article at LRB.

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

[..]

The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon – were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent.


>>> read entire article

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