This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: World War II
Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerumfallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.
In the ten years since the war started, a lot has happened to the U.S. The threat of terrorism which was on everybody’s minds when the war started, while still real, is no longer something which ordinary Americans think about every day. However, the added security we confront in our daily lives has become a permanent part of life in the U.S. The U.S. is moving towards surrendering its role as the global hegemon as the world seems more strongly than ever to be moving towards multi-polarity. The U.S. has also experienced the most severe economic downturn since the great depression with widespread unemployment threatening to change life in America for years to come. Not surprisingly, the political polarization and vitriol, which was already a source of great consternation in 2001, has gotten worse in the last decade.
For many years the notion that partisan politics ended at America’s shores contained a smattering of accuracy with a healthy overlay of propaganda. There have been too many exceptions over history for that phrase to contain more than a kernel of truth. Partisan disputes about entrance into World War II, Cold War strategy and the Vietnam War were just some of the times that the American political leadership was divided on key foreign policy questions during the time when this framework was allegedly at its strongest. Since the Vietnam War era, disputes over foreign policy from Central America to the Middle East have been a constant presence in our political life.
Obama’s first year in office, while far from a foreign policy failure, has not brought resolution to any of the major challenges facing the U.S. Wars continue in Afghanistan and Iraq; peace remains more elusive than ever in the Middle East; Iran is still on the brink of developing nuclear weapons; significant parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union remain concerned about renewed Russian power in that region and the global economic downturn has raised the possibility of political instability in much of the world. This was the capstone year of a decade that has included the terrorist attack on September 11th, 2001, a conflict in Iraq that has lasted considerably longer than the U.S. involvement in World War II, plummeting U.S. popularity abroad, the stalling, or even reversal, of the spread of democracy, and rising military, political and economic threats to the U.S. from Teheran to Beijing and from Moscow to Caracas.
Rudy Giuliani seems to have joined Dick Cheney among the ranks of political has beens who still think President Obama will make us more vulnerable to a terrorist attack because he prefers a more thoughtful approach to the bluster and fear tactics upon which the previous administration relied. While Giuliani's comments, specifically his arguments that, based on Obama's address to the Iranian people, "terrorists will say, we can take advantage of the guy (Obama)," and attack the US, should not be taken too seriously, they offer an interesting insight not just into a man whose moment has come and gone, but into how political epochs come and go. The ridicule which greeted Cheney's comments and the comparative silence that greeted Giuliani's indicate that the War on Terror is over. President Obama's decision to abandon the term only underscores this.