If Brzezinski Is Worried...

Zbigniew Brzezinski is probably America’s most important imperial thinker. Not as deranged as the neocons and not as shortsighted as Henry Kissinger (but that ain’t saying much, especially given Brzezinski’s crucial role in masterminding the jihad against the Soviet Union), Brzezinski is the man to run an empire. In some sense, one should be thankful he was not at the helm post-9/11: the empire would have expanded and strengthened. As it is, the empire has been weakened, but the destruction wrought in the process is nightmarish.

Essentially, the U.S. foreign policy elite are a combination Brzezinskists and Kissingerians, with the recently arrived (and despised) neocons, a lunatic strain of imperial thought who pretend not to adore Kissinger, now very much in the background, having virtually wrecked the U.S. empire. Another two terms of neocon foreign policy and the empire will be lost. Hence the outrage within foreign policy circles in the United States.

What Brzezinski says is important - not because of who he was but of what he represents. And if he’s worried, well, we all better be worried:

“If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a ‘defensive’ U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”