Today's must read is Jonathan's Schell's piece appearing at TomDispatch. It's as good a summary as I've come across outlining the way a particular brand of power-corrupted thinking leads to tragedy:
Of far greater importance was what happened to two kinds of war that had historically been the most important -- wars of imperial conquest and general, great-power wars, such as the First and Second World Wars. During the twentieth century the first kind had become hopeless "quagmires," owing to the aroused will of local peoples everywhere who, collectively, had put an end to the age of imperialism. The second were made unfightable and unwinnable by the nuclear revolution. It was these two limitations on the usefulness of military force, one acting at the base of the international system, the other at its apex, that delimited the superiority of the superpower. (The paradox of impotent omnipotence was even more pronounced for the other superpower, the Soviet Union, which actually disappeared.)
Very possibly, the United States, with all its resources, would have been the sort of globe-straddling empire that Joseph McCarthy wanted it to be had it risen to pre-eminence in an earlier age. It was the peculiar trajectory of the United States, born in opposition to empire, to wind up making its own bid for empire only after the age of imperialism was over. Though it's hard to shed a tear, you might say that there was a certain unfairness in America's timing. All the ingredients of past empires were there -- the wealth, the weapons, the power, hard and soft. Only the century was wrong. The United States was not, could not be, and cannot now be a new Rome, much less greater than Rome, because it cannot do what Rome did. It cannot, in a post-imperial age, conquer other countries and lastingly absorb them into a great empire; it cannot, in the nuclear age, not even today, fight and win wars against its chief global rivals, who still, after all, possess nuclear arsenals.
Even tiny, piteous, brutalized, famine-ridden North Korea, more a cult than a country, can deter the United States with its puny putative arsenal. The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else -- if conceived in terms of military force -- has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force -- and the fool of history.
The point is that the militarist neo-con mentality is obsolete and must be discredited for the foolishness that it is. The Democrats won't do this, because they fear the GOP "official megaphone" blaring their stating the obvious truth as "weakness":
All over the world, autocratic-minded rulers, from Italy's former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to Russia's President Vladimir Putin, have learned that de facto control of the political content of television is perhaps the most important lever of power in our day. They have learned that it does not matter politically if 15% or even 25% of the public is well informed as long the majority remains in the dark. The problem has not been censorship but something very nearly censorship's opposite: the deafening noise of the official megaphone and its echoes -- not the suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a narrow circle, but a profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but too much. If you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock concert, you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.
Whoever controls the megaphone controls the conventional wisdom about what makes sense. As a result foolishness too easily becomes the conventional wisdom, and so-called moderates like Beinart, Clinton, and Lieberman, insofar as they buy into this conventional wisdom as defined by the militarists, stake out the middle ground in foolishness. Our tragedy, and the world's, is that America has been given over to a cult of "strong and wrong." It's time to understand the real world in which we're living and to develop prudent, well-thought out policies to deal with its biggest and most intractable problems and threats. Why is it that I doubt that I'll see such a shift in my lifetime?