tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post115937749382209272..comments2024-03-28T08:37:58.136+01:00Comments on Limited, Inc.: Dick Cheney sits on my face -- and yoursRoger Gathmannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11257400843748041639noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3077210.post-1159392653019659082006-09-27T23:30:00.000+02:002006-09-27T23:30:00.000+02:00I hoped you'd bring this up. I don't know whether...I hoped you'd bring this up. I don't know whether I thought the piece as a whole was quite as effective as what she usually does for NYRB, but only because I would have liked it to be more detailed, longer, especially because of that many books cited, which then get only a sentence or two. However, the famous Didion 'killer detail' is there and I think comes toward the end in this passage, also introduced with the Nelson Rockefeller thing:<BR/><BR/>'Nor, when it has not been in his interest to do so, has he since taken consistent positions on what would seem to be his own most hardened policies. <BR/><BR/>"I think it is a false dichotomy to be told that we have to choose between 'commercial' interests and other interests that the United States might have in a particular country or region around the world," he said at the Cato Institute in 1998, during the period he was CEO of Halliburton, after he had pursued one war against Iraq and before he would pursue the second. He was arguing against the imposition by the United States of unilateral economic sanctions on such countries as Libya and Iran, two countries, although he did not mention this, in which Halliburton subsidiaries had been doing business. Nor did he mention, when he said in the same speech that he thought multilateral sanctions "appropriate" in the case of Iraq, that Iraq was a third country in which a Halliburton subsidiary would by the year's end be doing business. <BR/><BR/>The notion that he takes a consistent view of America's role in the world nonetheless remains general. The model on which he has preferred to operate is the cold war, or, to use the words in which he and the President have repeatedly described the central enterprise of their own administration, the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight.... <BR/><BR/>'Rumsfeld and Cheney, in other words, had transcended what others might present as facts. They could feel the current. They knew how to catch the wave and ride it.'<BR/><BR/>I think here she came up with something I had never thought of, the matter of lack of consistency and how it is usually perceived regarding 'America's role in the world'. As such, when first reading it, I thought she managed to portray him as a waterhead, and hoped that her title 'Fatal Touch' could have more than one meaning.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com