Moscow delenda est

The news of the last week has been full and strange, and by the time the weekend rolled around I began to feel that we'd slipped past the farce and into more upsetting territory. Oh how we laughed at Vladimir and Estragon. Then suddenly how we pity them. Then suddenly how we pity ourselves.

Condoleeza Rice, who comports herself with the bland self-disregard of a junky cultist, eyes forever fixed on a point just beyond whatever or whomever she's looking at, is "in the Middle East," proposing that the Palestinians accept a "temporary state" or a "state with temporary borders." That the American solution to this admittedly intractable problem is based on the Kashmiri model should tell you all you need to know. Matthew Yglesias calls it another Cololnel Kurtz moment for Team Exterminate-the-Brutes, and seems ready to accept that madness without method is a method in and of itself.

Our soldiers are kidnapping Iranians in Iraq, to the tune of "Iranians must stop meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation." It's a little late for us to begin preaching the George Washington gospel, but I suppose if gentlemen like Ted Haggard can preach damnation and screw gay hustlers on the side, the United States can crusade around the world toppling governments and undermining elections which results it doesn't like while simultaneously demanding isolationism of everyone else. Iran, of course, shares a border with its bloody, chaotic neighbor. Hey, didn't we just cheer Ethiopia for crossing the border to put Somalia right? Hey, who cares?! A lot of people think that our provocations toward Iran are meant to spark some retaliatory incident that will provide a pretext for a bombing campaign, and there's probably some truth to that. But if there's one thing I've learned to accept in these last six miserable years, it's that our lords and ladies in Washington, for all their essential, inherent, fundamental mendacity, actually do believe whatever bullshit is coming out of their mouths at any given time. What was once is no longer. No need for transcendental meditation: politics does what would otherwise require a lifetime of rigorous mindfulness, or a whole sheet of really good acid: eliminates all externality and sets its participants up in an eternal now. Or, as I once said of Andrew Sullivan, who likewise exists pastless and futureless in the realm of pure being, "wherever he goes, there he is."

Still, the dauphin and his court have lifted the usual American incoherence to a special artistry. We behaved badly during the cold war, fucked up miserably in South America, supported nasty dictators here, undermined legitimate elections there, but in pursuit, at least, of a grand goal. Not freedom or democracy, of course. But beating the Soviets, at least. Beating the Ruskies. There are moral components to each particular action we took in those sixty years, but overall we fought, as any powerful nation fights, to top our rival. Reagan got to grin and gesticulate as the wall fell. Vladimir Putin now pisses on our Moscow delenda est parade, but it was a pleasant sentiment for a decade. Rome didn't destroy Carthage because it deeply needed to spread the system of the republic; it did it because Carthage was a rival. So too us. Now, however, despite all the jibjab about Islamofascianazitolitarianism, about the, ahem, "caliphate," about Iran, the bomb, jihadism, and all the rest, we have no singular rival against which to organize our brutishness. And so we're swatting flies with shotguns. Indoors. And reaping the benefits, which, it turns out, aren't beneficial at all.