NEO-BARBARIANS LIKE CHAOS

WILLIAM PFAFF, INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE - Whatever the intentions, the immediate result of what Washington is doing is to produce chaos. The neo-conservatives like to quote the economist Joseph Schumpeter on "creative destruction," as if this phrase, meant to describe a process in the development of capitalism, were a general statement of truth,
guaranteeing that destruction produces creation. It does not.
One of the many curious things President George W. Bush is quoted as saying, this time in Bob Woodward's book, "Bush at War," is that U.S. strategy in Afghanistan "is to create chaos, to create a vacuum." Out of the chaos and vacuum, good would come. This echoes the Trotskyist belief in the constructive effect of "permanent revolution." It has another resonance as well, an apocalyptic religious one, of interest as the president is said by some to see his presidency within the context of the biblical narrative of the end of days. He certainly thinks of the United States as the vessel of mankind's salvation.
Woodward ends his book with another quotation from the president, uncomfortably apposite: "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the Earth in defense of our great nation."