Kerstein, You're starting to get on my nerves. Zinn wrote a polemical piece, using the conventions of polemics to put forward a formal arugment highlighting the arrogance that can come, and that has come, from certain forms of nationalism. Your credibility lessens each time you use the word "fascist" on this site...

As if this website needed to make it clearer that it aspires to be an arm of The Weekly Standard, and a staging ground for young, tough neoconservative thought, now we have Benjamin telling us that old man Zinn is a traitor and a fascist. I don't think it's possible to get any sillier than this...

...that if we are to believe this about Zinn, then we have to also believe that people like Chomsky and Vidal are fascists and traitors too, not to mention the guy affectionately quoted at the start of this squib. Seeing as how we're all a bunch of traitors, I wonder what Benjamin proposes to be done with all of us? No, nevermind.

While I don't think Zinn is a fascist (he hates nationalism too much to go along with the necessary parades and slogans of a properly fascist regime), I think that his ideology and historical mythologizing contribute greatly to an academic climate of moral inaction. By diminishing the evils committed in so many regimes and focusing myopically on the same flaws in American history and Western expansion generally, he reinforces scores of radical pseudohistories, from Wahabi complaints about the presence of Westerners in the Arabian peninsula to the bizarre ravings of assorted Latin American communists about the American empire.  There have been many competent critics of American greed and expansionism, who recognized that for most of the past century, the alternatives always were worse (among these was the late William Appleman Williams).  The tragedy of American history, in their view, was moral inaction and selfishness, bad enough, bu not the villanious world-conspiracy drivel that Chomsky and Zinn seem hell-bent on proving to the world.  I think that most of the time there is a clear material good in historical choices and commitments (to borrow a phrase from the great Felix Gilbert), and that writers like Zinn prefer to problematize every choice to the point of meaninglessness.  Liberalism, secularism, and humanism require at times unpleasant and unpalatable political and military action to ensure their survival, and many times the motives of individuals defending these ideas sink to base human rapacity.  Nevertheless, the kind of globalized relativism that Zinn continues to ramble about is far worse in its effects.  I'm not a neoconservative, and I'm not pleased with the pig's breakfast occupied Iraq has fast become, but I am unwilling to suggest - as Zinn does - that fighting dictators, rogue states, expansive totalitarianism, and religious fanaticism is somehow morally equivalent to these entities themselves.

I think it's a stretch to call Zinn and his ilk fascists or traitors.  But I share the author's general sentiments.  (Much moreso than his take on the Sopranos.  I'm sorry, but that made me want to run into a brick wall.) 

Anyway, Zinn, Chomsky, and everyone else who love to reflexively denounce American (or Israeli) use of force, are forever fond of using fool's arithmetic, and the word "proportion".  Zinn basically says that because more Afghanis have died than Americans, the moral basis for the invasion of Afghanistan no longer exists.  Because more Japanese died in WWII than the Americans originally killed at Pearl Harbor, America's participation in WWII against Japan was unjust. 

Last summer, everybody's favorite word when denouncing Israel for bombing Lebanon was "proportion".  No one seemed to notice what the actual meaning of proportionality is in international law.  In the Geneva Convention, proportionality means the amount of collateral damage must be in proportion to the military value of the intended target.  It does not mean, as Zinn, Chomsky, and seemingly infinite hordes of their unquestioning fans believe, that Israel's moral position is compromised by the fact that more Lebanese civilians died than Israeli civilians.

Some people will never learn that weakness does not make one virtuous.  Strength does not make one evil.

Gregory absolutely hits the nail on the head with his analysis. It is possible--heck, even advisable--to accept ideals of American hegemonic actions, and the tragedies of these ideas and actions. And most importantly to trace the formation of these idea and how they have effected any number of American policy making ideals. The example of William Appleman Williams is perhaps most pertinent; he was able to effectively trace the formation of American hegemony, yet still frame it within a somewhat objective manner...at least in the sense that in tracing an ideological evolution, he was able to avoid framing ideas of shadowy, evil decision makers intent on mischief and chaos. In fact, that is actually what he saw as the true tragedy; the ultimate idealism of American adventurism being optimistic and positive, yet ultimately failing miserably from the 1890s through the Cold War.

"I think that his ideology and historical mythologizing contribute greatly to an academic climate of moral inaction"

Thank you for that. I will never forget "moral inaction" - a perfectly bewildering and altogether meaningless phrase. You know, if you separate out "inaction" you can get "in action" - Morals In Action, starring George W. Bush and Christopher Hitchens. Michelle Malkin plays the female lead, as we watch her scrupulously avoid sex and attend church, while lambasting her political opponents on Fox News.

As a once devoted, now very estranged acolyte of Zinn I have to say that this is one of the least offensive things I've seen him write in a while.  I stopped paying attention years ago and put him away with the rest of ZNet, Chomsky, etc.  But the fact is, what Zinn is saying about nationalism here is in large part extremely salient.  It seems to me a conceptual mistake to divorce nationalism from totalitarian collectivism.  For all the pooh-poohing Zinn & Co. rightfully deserve, it isn't only Zinn and the Bostonian anarcho-academic rock stars that make this point.  

The idea of the nation--an extremely recent idea--has been the impetous for all manner of horror in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.   It doesn't surpass the totalitarianisms because it subsumes them.  Narratives of nations are almost never--no I take that back they are never myth-free.  They are at best grandiose exaggerations and at worst pure fiction.  Even Islamism is a 21st century evolution of the nationalist ideal, tailored to fit the decentralized spectacular information age.  In fact, I'd argue that's what makes it unfortunately formidable.     

I don't think I've agreed with anyhing Zinn has said in ages, but the notion that we should concentrate on the human collective as opposed to the national exclusive seems to me absolutely noble.  Granted, he's got some work to do in this area, as many have pointed out--he's hardly upholding his duty so long as he's lending credence to the complaints of theocratic fascists and pretending that fighting evil is something that's avoidable.

Genocide originates most often out of the tension between the national narrative and the reality on the ground.  Nationalism is fundmentally untenable: there are simply more nationalisms than there are nation-states to go around.  The only way to surmount this issue in my view is is if the imagined community is one imagined as a singular diverse human collective and if it is imagined in such a way as to dispense with all the lies and mythology that currently plague most nationalisms--in other words to make the imagination visualize reality as it is rather than fantasize it in a way that is most often narcissistic and self-aggrandizing. 

But in some sense this is no longer nationalism because nationalism is a comradeship vis a vis an Other.  This comradeship is what men and women are willing to die and kill for.  Once the human collective is imagined as the community and the comradeship, the need for national dreaming disappears.  Sure a nation-less world is nowhere in our near future since social organization has pretty much relied on assumptions of the nation-state for the last century.  Transnationalism and internationalism are, I think, the only sorts of things we can be arguing for as an evolution out of the nationalist paradigm and hopefully away from it altogether at some point.  

I don't like Howard Zinn or George W. Bush but when Bush champions the Kurds or Iranian civil society or federal democracy in Iraq I have to at least in principle support him.  Likewise with Zinn--the guy's mainly a windbag, but on nationalism I have to agree.    

"I don't like Howard Zinn or George W. Bush but when Bush champions the Kurds or Iranian civil society or federal democracy in Iraq I have to at least in principle support him."

How can you possibly believe that Bush "champions" any of those things? I think part of the problem here is that you take the man at face value, which seems to me astonishing after all these years. Haven't you been reading the news? Bush actively subverted democracy in Iraq, and would abandon the Kurds in a second if he imagined it convenient to do so. It's as if you fell asleep 5 years ago and are just waking up. Spreading democracy and human rights since 2002! Yeah, right.

I've got a few functioning ones to spare--even after all the booze I've sopped up this week--and you sound like you could use one.  The problem here is you've got such a raging hard-on to lunge at any remotely positive-sounding thing somebody might say about Bush that your basic reading skills go out the window.  Why do you imagine that I said I don't like George W. Bush?  Think it could possibly be because I'm well familiar with what an utter failure he's been in most regards?  Why do you imagine I qualified my statement with "in principle" rather than doling out an unequivocal, 'if Bush says it then he means it and it's true and I'm behind him 100%?'  It's because rabid Bush-hating tends to blind basic rational judgment and has effectively obliterated any intelligent conversation regarding matters of supreme import regarding social/global justice. 

Fascism still means war.  If Bush says that, you have to in principle agree.  After which you are free as an albatross to follow up with all of the reasons why in practice you do not trust or support him. 

I have no idea what you mean to tell us by saying that you agree with Bush "in principle" - do you mean, in theory? If so, so what? I understand you were trying to qualify your statement, but it amounts to a whole lot of nothing. Who cares what Bush says? He's delusional. He doesn't even know what he's saying half the time, and the words are put into his mouth. Of course, like all politicians, he's going to say some things that he knows certain people want to hear: spreading democracy, etc (throw a bone to people like you) but those stated ideals are just a cover for an entirely different agenda. This is a judgment that now appears to me obvious and I think this is where we fundamentally disagree. To not agree on such a basic tenet makes any constructive conversation rather difficult to have. You believe Bush is a "failure" when I say he never intended to succeed at promoting democracy or human rights.

I'm sorry to hear you abandoned the left and joined the dark side. It probably pays better, but in either case you should go back and read Gore Vidal on the theme of American empire and war, if you haven't already. I refer mainly to his essays from the 60s and 70s, including his famous takedowns of N Podohoretz and Midge Decter. He's obviously faded now, but Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace is still worth taking a look at...and please don't tell me you haven't been keeping up with P Cockburn's dispatches from Iraq. Rambling now...

First off, I enjoy Gore Vidal's elegant vituperations as much as anyone, but to take seriously his political commentary? He did contribute some valuable ideas about social tolerance and the follies of religion in American society, but his understanding of national economies, warfare, and well, the mechanisms of modernity itself are pretty naive (or perhaps utterly mad).  To recommend reading his essays on the American Empire is painfully juvenile.

Secondly,  "moral" action is a rather simple concept to grasp. It refers to an action based upon a subjective individual judgment of what is an appropriate and/or ethical response to a  situation.  In much of human affairs, this means little more than national survival, something envisioned by Hobbes or more elegantly by Spinoza's conatus channeled into affairs of state. In the modern world of globalized economies, conflict for economic survival (and in some cases, hegemony) has replaced old-fashioned war for plunder as a national concern.  Moral action occurs when one actively pursues a moral goal, be it survival, the protection of one's self, one's friends, or one's national or global community. Moral inaction occurs when one does not act or support the actions of others.  Preventing a jihadist takeover of Iraq, allowing the Kurds to live without interference of their neighbors, preventing the Wahabis from consuming European Islam, and (perhaps) toppling hostile regimes when negotiations have failed and no other option remains are moral actions - they are based on moral judgments.  They have consequences, some painful to our country, many to others, but nonetheless may be required by any serious moral consideration.  The relative supremacy of the U.S. however long it may last, does present us with moral obligations to intervene in world affairs to secure our interests, our security, and that of our allies. 

Thirdly, George Bush has had a rather simplistic and unproductive presidency. This does not make his decisions automatically inept, nor does it validate disagreeing with him when he states the obvious.  If Bush chooses a course of action that is logical and morally appropriate (and yes, he or his advisors have chosen some), then it makes far more sense to me to support it rather than oppose.  The fact that domestic life in this nation suffers from local and federal misgovernance should not dissuade us from agreeing with the government on issues of foreign policy and (gasp) national security when appropriate.  The general paralysis of many American intellectuals to endorse serious, rational security policies (as opposed to rambling endlessly about the plight various despots and their national autonomy)  has left this job largely to the conservatives in power.  Imposing democracy around the world is a foolhardy and likely impossible task.  But if those who believe in doing so also propose practical and useful solutions to more specific problems, why dissent for the sake of dissent?

Gregory,

I appreciate your thoughts, but I'm afraid we're not going to see eye to eye on these matters because there are too many fundamental differences in our belief systems. 5 years ago, I too thought the US government could be harnassed to support and promote 'moral' action abroad. But then the more I traveled abroad and the more I read, it dawned upon me that this is pure fantasy. The US government is (esp. when headed up by these scoundrels), in my view, a nefarious operation that doesn't give a damn about anything other than the perceived personal interests of its leaders. Any good we've ever done has been accidental, and all in all we've done far more 'bad' than 'good' in the world.

To dismiss Vidal outright strikes me as peculiar. The guy is a product of the American oligarchy and a true insider if there ever was one. He has lived a life that would seem fictional if you didn't know any better. The Kennedys, Buckley, Kerouac, Tennesee Williams, he was intimates with all of these people and experienced the closeness to power you and I could only dream of. The key is he remained uncorrupted by his wealth, fame and power. With his unmatched wit, style and intelligence, he told us how things work. And yet you still choose to blow him off as if you knew better and as if your own life experiences afforded you the authority to make such arbitrary judgments. I frankly don't understand this. You need to go back and "take seriously" Vidal's work. His historical novels Burr and Julian are masterpieces, while 1876 and Lincoln are flawed but nevertheless excellent.

There's an interesting history to the relationship between Vidal and the Commentary/Podhoretz crowd. In the 70's, back when it was a leftie pub, Vidal contribued a few essays to the mag, one called Literary Gangsters in which he attacked academic novelists such as John Barth. But then Pod and Gore had a falling out over Israel in the early 80's and have been enemies ever since. Vidal's anti-Norman polemics are perhaps the funniest and most damning screeds that have ever been written in the English language.

...of how we're on different wavelengths. You wrote:

"If Bush chooses a course of action that is logical and morally appropriate (and yes, he or his advisors have chosen some), then it makes far more sense to me to support it rather than oppose."

As if I would ever disagree with that. Of course, if Bush ever gets around to doing anything that is logically or morally appropriate, I will be there with bells on. But he doesn't ever do anything that is logically OR morally appropriate, that's the problem. And it's not as if I'm some sort of Democrat Party hack or otherwise dogmatically anti-Bush: I actually like his personality and originally supported his foreign policies after 9-11 (including the invasion of Iraq, to my great shame).

It's worth mentioning, by the way, that Vidal's views on history and politics were openly endorsed by C Hitchens (a man who I suspect has real influence on the opinions of the editors and writers of this website). Do you mean to tell me that Hitch's writings were "painfully juvenile" for all those years? Or have you ever considered the possibility that Hitchens used to be right, and that his turnabout, though perhaps genuine, is the result of having been corrupted by power, wealth and fame?

Mark, I have neither power, wealth nor fame, nor an ounce of poor will to anyone in the world and yet, yet I still believed in the need to go to war in Iraq if only for the Kurdish cause. Disagree with me if you will, but it never ceases to amaze me how those who purport to be representative of "the left" forget of the actions of our older heroes (FDR, JFK, etc...) who not only believed in but actively utilized adventurist military power. I have always respected those who were against this war for well-thought  reasons. Very few people that I have run into have ever afforded me the same basic intellectual courtesy to express my own opinion without saying, as you did, that I went to "the dark side."

Power, I believe, only brings out the tendencies people already possess. I think many people pretend to oppose to powerful only when they themselves don't have it, therefore resent or envy it. 

As for Vidal's novels, I think they are brilliant, but prefer Julian to his American novels. I think, while uncorrupted by his money (or as uncorrupted as anyone with an $18 million house on the Amalfi coast can be), Vidal was certainly enchanted with his own brilliance. His "Norm" polemics are very amusing.  I doubt seriously that knowing literary and political figures in the Cold War era made Vidal an insider, though in his youth he certainly was one.  There are far more reliable interpreters of the American hegemony.  I would take, for one, the memoirs of George Kennan, particularly his discussions of America's accidental policies and the happenstance of it all, over Gore Vidal's literary opinions, most of which were formed while he lived his luxurious self-imposed exile in Italy.  Unless we are talking about the policymakers or major players themselves, I see no reason to defer to an author's life experiences as a form of authority.  And frankly, I would be suspicious of anyone whose views of power and policy remain the same despite having the kind of acessibility and knowledge you attribute to Gore Vidal. Many people with far greater access to power, from Kennan to Fulbright, saw the postwar American order very differently, and presented their criticisms of that order in more logical and plausible ways than Vidal has in his (admittedly eloquent) fiction and essays.  Your take on Vidal seems to use a logical fallacy - the appeal to authority.

Personally, I'm not a fan of Trotsky or socialism, and that limits my appreciation of early Hitchens. Post The Nation, Hitchens is much more interesting. While I find Hitchens recent enthusiasm sometimes a bit much to stomach (and I find "Islamofascism" a misnomer, and his treatment of religious history terribly simplistic), I agree a lot more with him now than I did prior to his "conversion." Hitchens as quasi-neocon makes a lot more sense, historically and economically, than he did previously. I simply see more evidence in the way that the world works to support the things Hitchens writes about now, than I did when he was writing as a Trotskyite.

Adam - Well phrased. I find it depressing that so many people so quickly dismiss the Kurdish situation altogether, and endless atrocities they suffered for the past 25 years (at least).

You're a fan of JFK's 'active utilization of adventurist miliary power'? Well, really, I'm not! JFK didn't know what the hell he was doing, and that in part led to the glorious war in Vietnam (and Laos - have you see Rescue Dawn?). As for FDR, he didn't give a damn about concentration camps in Germany. He saw Germany as a threat to the US economy (and all of his investments), and that's why he either allowed or precipitated Pearl Harbor to happen. The US response to the Nazis was evil in itself: bombing the fuck out of Dresden killing 200,000 civilians, nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima with a death toll in the millions...how can you possibly defend this track record of murder and mayhem?

"Your take on Vidal seems to use a logical fallacy - the appeal to authority."

No! That's not what I was saying. I like him because he makes persuasive arguments; I was merely trying to tell you that it'd be dumb to dismiss him outright, in part because he has an accumulated wisdom and he has all of these experiences within and around US power. I hate authority probably more than anyone, but certainly we should be willing to learn from those who have greater experience than us?

"his luxurious self-imposed exile in Italy"

This is needlessly derisive. For one thing, it wasn't quite "self-imposed" - Vidal was essentially blacklisted after The City and the Pillar came out in 1949. Why? Because his main characters were "same-sexers" - he couldn't get published for a long time after that and had to start ghost writing scripts for Hollywood just to make a living. His novels were DOA (except the ones he wrote under the psuedonym Edgar Box). So, in many respects, the American establishment chased Vidal out of America and, of course (there is some justice), he was much more appreciated in Europe. It's a good thing he went there, too, because he gained the type of perspective about America (about how things really are) that most Americans have zero concept of.

I didn't mean to suggest that I am a great fan of either JFK or FDR (though, I do have my fascinations with FDR on some levels). All I meant was that our conceptions (en mass) of Kennedy and Roosevelt are of two of the better presidents. Yet their actions are in many ways no different. It is interesting how the left and right in the United States has flip flopped; that the left is now irrationally isolationist and the right is adventurist.

Vidal has a mixed reception. Many academics I've run into like his criticisms of American politics, but cannot really understand why he gets so worked up over what they see as the products of American hubris or stupidity, not the incredibly conspiratorial system that Vidal, from time to time, claims exists here. 

"How things really are?" How can anyone, looking inside or outside a system as complex as the most powerful nation on the planet really understand anything that well? While I'd agree that most Americans are clueless about their own country, I'm not really sure postwar Italians understood things that much more clearly. The Italian Vidal went to was, at least in the North, more tolerant of sexual diversity and liberal social ideas. But in many ways their view of America and the world was hardly clearer than many American perspectives.  For one thing, the left in Italy had to constantly reshape their own views of America as Stalin and Khruschev's USSR kept disappointing them, and, until the 1970s, the DC governing coalition was as paranoid (if not more) than the US was of (to quote Dr. Strangelove) "communist infiltration.")  I am not saying it did provide some distance from the American scene, but I doubt there was any grand insight to be had simply by looking at US from a country that benefited exceedingly from its policies ('cept for keeping the mob in power in Sicily)....

 And if my description of Vidal's picaresque years in Italy seem needless, I think his endless railings against the concept of empire are rather over the top.  He portrays the nature of empire as an inherent human evil, even in his recent writings, despite a lot of good historical evidence that sometimes, empires just keep all the little nationalist groups from butchering each other. 

"It is interesting how the left and right in the United States has flip flopped; that the left is now irrationally isolationist and the right is adventurist."

I like how you throw in "irrationally" - unintentionally, as it were, opening the possibility for a 'rational' isolationism. So the right is full of adventure these days, eh? I wonder if the cheerleaders of this war would care to sacrifice their own bodies or personal savings for it? Surely, the Kurds are worth it.

Have you studied American history, my dear Adam? There has been no flip flop. The left has always opposed American imperialism. It's boring to repeat all this, but apparently necessary: Eugene Debbs was the socialist candidate for president leading up to WWI. Unlike the others, he was opposed to war. New School University - that bastion of leftist thought and also my alma mater - was founded by exiled professors from Columbia who were opposed to American involvement in WWI.

And it goes back further than that. Mark Twain, who is a leftie in many respects by today's standards, saw the folly in McKinley's attack on the Phillipines. Twain was so enraged by McKinley's and T Roosevelt's meddling that I think it drove him to the brink. And why shouldn't it? It was a betrayal of the founding idea...

I'm actually an American History doctoral candidate, but thanks for trying to make me feel like it is a pointless exercise. Just to clarify (and I realize now in re-reading what I posted above that it is really necessary) by "the left" I didn't mean socialists, Communists and the like--usually I would specifically talk about socialists and Communists if they were who I specifically was talking about. Anyway, you make an entirely fair point to be sure. However, for every Eugene Debs and (outside of the US, of course) Bertrand Russell there was a Robert Taft or Charles Lindburgh. But here's the thing, I think there is a difference between being anti-war (or heck, even a pacifist) and being an isolationist--thus why I threw in the world irrational. While I may not agree with pacifism, it is still rooted within a rational desire for world peace. Isolationism is rooted within a fairly unrealistic, provincial view of the world that I think is inherently impossible in the modern world.

please read my post above re: W.A. Williams and you will get a good idea of my thoughts on the effectiveness of American adventurism for economic or market-driven reasons. However, I also do believe in the moral imperative to protect the Kurdish people from being gassed to death. Contrary positions, I realize, yet one does in the end trump another in my head.

'"How things really are?" How can anyone, looking inside or outside a system as complex as the most powerful nation on the planet really understand anything that well?'

That's true. Vidal, with his insider perspective, gave us his take on how things work, and while his views shouldn't be revered as revelation, they certainly shouldn't be ignored and dismissed, either (as you lamely tried to do, Gregory). I like the point you bring up about 'complexity', by the way, however, it naturally complicates any argument you have for war:

How can you intellectually support our supposed attempts to fix and save the world? As you put it yourself:

"How can anyone, looking inside or outside a system as complex as the most powerful nation on the planet really understand anything that well?"

"I'm actually an American History doctoral candidate, but thanks for trying to make me feel like it is a pointless exercise."

No offense intended, but let's agree that the history American political thought on foreign policy is rather complicated, and not to be reduced to any one-dimensional left-right analysis as you originally tried to pass off.

I personally see GW Bush as the true "isolationist" in that he believes in American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny and the horrible notion that we our somehow 'better' than other countries.

haha, I know that you didn't mean any offense...I actually found it pretty funny. And the thing is, we absolutely agree on precisely what you stated in your last paragraph, because surely those are all things that I reject as well. And I apologize for my poor use of language in speaking about the "left" I definitely agree that we always have to be really careful in the words we choose and how we apply them.

"I also do believe in the moral imperative to protect the Kurdish people from being gassed to death."

Then go over there and protect them! I'm not stopping you. (You might get confused, however, when you realize you're protecting them from the US armed forces).

And what about the Palestinian people? Any moral imperative there? I was just reading The Brooklyn Rail today in which Tom Hayden made the claim that Palestinians make "1/25th" of what Israelis make in terms of salary. Hayden argues, persuasively in my view, that it's the growing economic divide that is causing tension and war, rather than simply religious fanaticism.

Well, folks, I'm off to bed - thanks for debating! I was glad to see that Adam and I could reach an understanding on some level. The divides that separate us all are probably not as wide as we sometimes imagine. And sometimes the English language just gets in the way....

In the future, I will hit upon this theme.

It's troubling the way it's been perverted: anyone opposed to American war and imperialism is either an isolationist or isolationist-sympathizer, while the crooks who kill and maim get to pass themselves off as internationalists!

Which is why I come to this site. How can seemingly intelligent people allow themselves to be degraded by all these pitiful ideas?

Mark, I agree...our thoughts are definitely driven from the same place if not the exact same conclusions. And perhaps that was one of my original points--not directed at you, but based solely in my own personal experience--of the anger directed at anyone who had a similar perspective as myself. Immediately we were labelled sell outs to our cause, as if something within us changed. Yet--and this is speaking for just myself and some others who feel vaguely the same--in many ways we felt a distinct connection between what we have always felt with conviction. It's not as if we started reading Commentary (well, I have had to for research purposes in the past, but not as a hobby) and thinking of ways to kill innocent people....I mean, that's what the weekends are for.

"You believe Bush is a 'failure' when I say he never intended to succeed at promoting democracy or human rights."

Pointless exercise in speculation.  Your assertion that all politicians never mean what they say and are always covering up for another agenda is just conspiracy thinking.  Politicians often do this sure, but Jesus leave a little room for misguided idealism or for grand ambitions not matched by adequate knowledge.  Even from a basic non-political look at human beings, sheer material gain is generally not enough to motivate men to war.  And just because they might feel entitled to the plunder doesn't mean that the course of causation necessarily flows from material motivation to ideological justification.  It is equally as possible for it to flow from a more primary idelogical zeal to material profit.   

It's far more interesting to investigate the Bush administration through the lens of past European misjudgments about the Middle East--misjudgments that were also informed by a misguided idealism.  Of course today we see more clearly what was wrong with the colonialist civilizing mentality.  But nobody today would say that the Christianizing/civilizing aspect of colonialsim was mere cover for plunder--many Europeans really did believe what they were saying.  History is more this way than a series of dark conspiracies where men in power always lie to cheat and kill off the rest.  Accidents, bad ideas, good intentions gone wrong in addition to shadiness and exercise of brute power for gain.       

"I'm sorry to hear you abandoned the left and joined the dark side. It probably pays better." 

Some leftist you are not to have noticed that the majority of potential capital today lies in a standardized liberal/left POV.  Where does this notion come from that right wing politics pay so well while left pays peanuts?!  Are George Clooney, Tim Robbins, Matt Damon, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Rage Against The Machine, Naomi Klein, NIN, Pearl Jam, and Radiohead really living so small (though Colin from Radiohead apparently enjoyed Nick Cohen's recent book as much as I did, so perhaps you no longer count them).         

And just out of curiosity, what side is the "dark side?"  This isn't Star Wars m'friend.  Chomsky/Zinn doesn't equal left and just because I've become skeptical, tired of, and in some cases adversarial to what I feel are missteps by a wide portion of the left doesn't mean that I've "abandoned the left."  Granted I don't feel much a part of it anymore most of the time unless I'm reading about the left of the 1930's.  I feel a little nomadic, but certaily not 'part of' or 'joined up' with any other side.    

In fact, I'd say skepticism is my polity these days combined with liberalism and humanism, which is why I find it hard to pry my mind away from Iran these days.  Barely an ideology that they haven't experienced or tried or been invaded or fucked with by.  But what's interesting is that they already tried radical Marxist anti-captialist, anti-American revolution colluding with Islamism in the late 70's and learned they weren't too keen on the outcome.  Listening to what's going on there, to their political evolution and ideas for a social order after all that is far more interesting than listening to this dead horse in America of leftists who still haven't learned from the Iranian experience.  

You do not appear to appreciate the value of the dialectic as a corrective to the echo-chamber.  You speak as if you believe no conservative is smart or capable of being idealistic or even occasionally correct about something.  You seem to think that politicians--mainly right wing ones--snivel in dark rooms and plot their world takeover like villains in a cartoon.  Somewhere there is a brave, just resistance who knows only truth but can't get off the ground because there's no money for them.  Sorry I think you have to be both more cynical and less.  The resistance is tainted and sometimes self-sabotaging; the conspirators have values that aren't 100% evil.  So yeah, I guess that's kinda dark but only in the sense that I don't think these events play out like a Disney film.            

I've been away, Josh, but I read your comments. I think the time has passed for me to respond on this one, so I'll just give you this Vidal bit to think about. It answers some of your questions anyway...

Mark Davis interviews Vidal in March 2003:

GV: People ask me, "Are you saying there's a conspiracy?" --because that's the word where everybody starts laughing. It means you believe in flying saucers. "No," I said, "I'm going to change the world." We won't say it's a conspiracy that all the great offices of state are occupied by gas and oil people --the President, the Vice-President, National Security Adviser. "It's a coincidence," and everybody smiles --that's a nice word --"Oh, yes, of course, it's a coincidence" that they are running the government and getting us into a war in oil-rich places.

MARK DAVIS: Well, Bush has claimed that the American belief in liberty will deliver a free and peaceful Iraq, even with the stench of oil in the air, George Bush probably can deliver that --a free and peaceful Iraq that is. Isn't there a legitimate case to be argued that there's a greater good at work here?

GORE VIDAL: There is no greater good at work. We cannot deliver it. Only the Iraqis can deliver that. You don't go in and smash up a country, which we will do, and gain their love so that they then want to imitate our highly corrupt political system and, on the subject of democracy --I happen to be something of a student of the American constitution --it was set up in order to avoid majority rule. The two things the founding fathers hated were majoritarian rule and monarchy. So they devised a republic in which only a very few white men of property could vote. Then, to make sure that we never had any democracy at work at the highest levels of governance, they created something called the electoral college, which can break any change that might upset them. We saw what happened in November 2000, when Albert Gore won the popular vote by 600,000, he actually won the electoral vote of Florida, but a lot of dismal things happened and denied him the election. So that's what happened there. So for us to talk about a democracy that we are going to translate into other lands is the height of hypocrisy and is simply foolish. We don't invent governments for other people.