THE SAKER—Surely when America fought against a third-rate adversary it was possible to rain death from the skies, and then roll over its forces, if any remained by that time, with very little difficulty and casualties. That will work in the future too against that type of adversary—similar in size and flimsiness of Iraqi Forces circa 2003. But Ledeen’s Doctrine had one major flaw—one adult cannot continue to go around the sandbox constantly fighting children and pretend to be good at fighting adults.
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JOHN GERASSI—The basic difference between American imperialism today and American imperialism a century ago is that it is more violent, more far-reaching, and more carefully planned today. But American foreign policy, at least since 1823, has always been assertive, always expansionist, always imperialist. Of course, it has rarely been pushed beyond America’s capabilities. Thus, when the United States was weak, its interventions abroad were mild. When its strength grew, so did its daring.
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STEVE WEISSMAN—”Geoffrey Pyatt is one of these State Department high officials who does what he’s told and fancies himself as a kind of a CIA operator,” laughs Ray McGovern, who worked for 27 years as an intelligence analyst for the agency. “It used to be the CIA doing these things,” he tells Democracy Now. “I know that for a fact.” Now it’s the State Department, with its coat-and-tie diplomats, Twitter and Facebook accounts, and a trick bag of goodies to build support for American policy.
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ANDRE VLTCHEK—If you drive towards Petra and then Aqaba, it is all desert and misery, villages covered with dust and poverty on roughly the Yemeni level. You drive towards Syria and it is approximately the same: miserable towns, military airports and refugee camps.
But back in Amman, it is 8 of what is called ‘5-star malls’, while several new ones are being built. The country is totally grotesque, but it is actually not something unique – just a condensed reality of the Middle East, or at least of the client states of the West in this part of the world.
