Informed Comment

Informed Comment:
"Dick Cheney and the Two 21st Centuries;
On Nukes, Vice President Confuses Television with Reality"

This kind of sounds like the argument I had with the Centcom type on the peace train home from DC. He seemed to think that nothing oculd be done about the technological mistakes in Iraq like the armoured humvee and couldn't understand anything I said about how the technology was useless if you were ignorant of the culture and politics involved.
MaryB

"Cheney has been watching the television show "24" too much, and says he is worried about terrorists getting a nuke. That prospect is actually very, very remote. Cheney worries about high tech terrorism because he does not understand low key social mobilization. He is worried about the wrong thing. Slum kids with RPG-29s and GPS systems are the real threat to his plans.

There are two 21st centuries, that of the Osprey on which Cheney is depending, and that of the national liberation movements. There is the 21st century of the aircraft carrier and that of the suicide bomber. There is the 21st century of the Tomahawk missile and that of the religiously inspired crowd, hundreds of thousands strong, who demonstrated at Najaf last Monday (about which everyone has already, unwisely, forgotten).

It is precisely because it is the 21st century that the US is unlikely to be able to stay in Iraq in the way Cheney imagines.

When Cheney and his pals came back into office in 2001 after Clinton defeated them in 1992, the terrorism czar Richard Clarke was amazed at how hung up they still were on Iraq and threats posed by lumbering rogue states. They had not seen the rise of al-Qaeda and discounted asymmetrical struggles. Clarke said that it was as though they had been frozen in amber since 1992.

But since Cheney & Co. don't even so much as seem to know about how Nehru, Gandhi and Jinnah kicked Britain out of India, it would be more accurate to say that they have been frozen in amber since 1945. They haven't understood the social history of decolonization."