My Crazy Boss Isn't Crazy Like The Other Crazies

The transcript of the recent speech by Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, is well worth reading if you are the type of weirdo who likes this kind of stuff. As Billmon puts it:

Like Richard Clarke, Wilkerson strikes me as reasonably representative of the technicians who actually run the empire -- and his assumptions largely appear to reflect those of his class. American supremecy is a taken as a given, requiring no legal or moral justification. Not because America has any grand historical mission to spread the blessings of democracy to the heathen, but because American power maintains the world order and keeps the peace, or at least something approximating it...

It does appear to have dawned on Wilkerson that the U.S. hegomony isn't viewed as quite such an execise in utilitarian benevolance by the rest of the world, but I'm not sure he understands exactly why this is. I think he puts far too much blame on the cabal's shenanigans -- although these admittedly have made things worse -- and not enough on the fact that empires, even the practical, no nonsense type favored by the realists, are anachronisms in the modern world.

So, Wilkerson thinks everything would be A-OK if only non-crazy imperialists like George H.W. Bush, Colin Powell and himself were running things. This makes him less terrifying than the insane imperialists, but still blind to most aspects of our small, blue planet. For instance, here's one specific thing Wilkerson said:

I like to use the world gracelessness, and I use that word because grace is something we have lost in the modern world... walk in with a foreign leader and find something you can be magnanimous about. You don’t have to win everything. You don’t have to be the big bully on the block. Find something you can be magnanimous about, that you can give him, that you can say he gets credit for, or she gets credit for. That’s diplomacy. That’s diplomacy. You don’t walk in and say, I’m the big mother on the block and if everybody’s not with me, they’re against me, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The difference between [Bush] father and son, in my mind, sort of comes from that attitudinal approach to the world.

The problem here is that when you get down to it, you really can't be a non-bully imperialist. It's like being a quadriplegic quarterback. As Wilkerson's hero Powell himself once said:

I like to use the term decisive force...

It's the equivalent of being the biggest bully on the block. "I've got my knife, I've got my gun, I've got my stick ball bat, are you sure you really want to challenge me?"

So on one side you have the people Wilkerson hates, who say "We should be huge bullies all the time!" Then you have the people Wilkerson loves, who say "We should only be bullies some of the time!" The one unthinkable option is not to be bullies at all.