Off with your tin-foil hats, lefties. Bush ain’t gonna find sanctuary in Paraguay no more. It’s his own fault really, because he failed to put freedom and democracy on the march down there. It’s hard work to be President. So many wars; so little time.
We have our Democratic wars (Korea, Kosovo), principally Euro-Asian-centric. We have our Republican wars (Panama, Iraq) principally Latin-Muslim-oil-centric. Of course, Russia/USSR was the enemy both parties loved to hate. That explains the bipartisanship on Georgia. As for the war on terror, the long-term war orientation of the two parties pretty much explains why the central front for McCain is in Iraq and for Obama is in Afghanistan. A massive US Military-Intelligence-Industrial-Complex that is very good at bringing fomenting conflict, laying waste to people and their counties, exporting disaster capitalism but sucks at leaving behind anything remotely resembling freedom and democracy.
If the boys must have their war toys (and I can see no reason that this isn't an absolute necessity for a majority of American girls and boys and the ranks of peace-niks is too small to prevent this), the only avenue that might be open to lefties is to leave them alone when they get themselves bogged down. Stuck in the muck of their own hubris.
Confident that with the US flailing away in Iraq or Afghanistan, huge regions of the world are spared our nefarious meddling. From that perspective, I wrote A Case for Staying in Iraq in January 2006. The money quote might be:
The best news is that Bu$hCo is so incompetent that they cannot multitask. Remember back to early 2001 when Bu$hCo was already bombing Iraq and challenging China when that US spy plane made an emergency landing there? N. Korea has become almost as forgotten as Osama bin Laden. While the NSA is busy collecting so much raw data that they couldn’t analyze it in a couple of centuries, they don’t have the resources to pay attention to anything happening south of the border. For the first time in like forever, Latin and South America is practically free of US meddling in their domestic affairs. Freer to symbolically spit on Bush than they were fifty years ago to actually spit on Nixon. Unlike Nixon that could carry on the Cold War and expand a war in Vietnam into Cambodia and still have resources around to facilitate a coup in Chile, Bu$hCo has nothing left for South America. Freedom is on the march all right, but it’s not in Iraq. It’s in South America.
I sort of overlooked the historical fact that Latin/South America is principally owned as a sphere of influence by the Republicans (as recently confirmed by McCain's jaunts to Colombia and Mexico). Had I not done so, I would have been even more optimistic about the near term futures prospects for that region. However, in my wildest flights of fancy, I wouldn't have projected the election of The Bishop of the Poor to the presidency of Paraguay. Fernando Lugo, Democracy Now and Al Jazeera report on his election even if the NYTimes doesn't.
Amazing how much liberal democracy can spread when the US MIIC is AWOL. Imagine how much faster it would spread if we cut that MIIC budget in half and had universal healthcare instead. (Even a pessimist can dream.)