AND JUST AS THE rEALISTS DIDN'T CARE ABOUT THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN...:

Emulating Nixon : Peacemaker as Warmonger (John Feffer, CounterPunch)

Richard Nixon was the greatest peacemaker in U.S. history. He orchestrated the historic opening with Beijing. And he presided over the most significant arms control treaties of the détente period: the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the ABM treaty.

Wait, that doesn’t sound right. Let’s start over.

Richard Nixon was the greatest warmonger in U.S. history. He sharply escalated the war in Vietnam and widened the conflict, tragically, to Cambodia and Laos. He destabilized Chile, looked the other way as his West Pakistani ally laid waste to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and ignored the Nigerian civil war and the resulting famine in Biafra.

This bifocal view of Richard Nixon reveals one of the great paradoxes of the U.S. peace movement. Peace activists divide into two sometimes irreconcilable groups — the antiwar movement and the arms control community. The former considered Richard Nixon and his henchman Henry Kissinger to be war criminals. The arms controllers, meanwhile, worked through Nixon’s Arms Control and Disarmament Agency to score significant though partial successes.

The same cognitive dissonance holds true today. Though he would no doubt run from the comparison, President Barack Obama is shaping up to be a true heir of Richard Nixon.

...Mr. Obama doesn't care about people living under Arab, Asian and African dictatorships.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 10, 2010 6:44 AM