According to the plan

A shallow but entertaining piece from Russian Journal (not to be confused with The Russia Journal). An inelegant translation of some excerpts follows.

It looks like the anti-Iraqi allies did not realize indeed what they were getting into. Americans planned to stroll through Iraq in a victory march and were completely bewildered when they understood nobody was about to throw flowers at their feet but, instead, (Iraqis) were going to fight, for a war had begun. (…) It’s sad to be watching all this absurdity — sad and disturbing. What’s disturbing is not that the UN has crumbled (after all, all social institutions exhaust themselves sooner or later); not that the world is unipolar (this, as history shows, won’t be long); not even that we’ve realized that humanity has managed to avoid moral progress: geopolitical problems in the Twenty-First century are solved as in, say, the Twelfth, only armies are equipped with more perfect devices (…).

What hurts is that the only superpower in the world, the leader of the unipolar world, is coping poorly with the leadership role. Unprofessionals are at America’s steering wheel, and it shows. The ship, instead of moving elegantly and proudly in the global political space, with all the grace and grandness it is capable of, is spinning around its axis, tilting to one side and the other. And it scares not with its size or weaponry but mostly with its uncontrolledness.

Why the analogies? Because things obvious to an outside observer come as great surprises to the crew of the ship called America. (…)

…Judging by everything, the White House was in the mood to act on the principle, ‘If I have the Soviet press at my disposal, no one will know I lost at Waterloo’ [an old Soviet joke]. Turning CNN into Pravda, and taking under control the work of all American journalists in the region, the allies expected to make observers believe ‘everything is going according to the plan’.

It’s all hyberbolized and all that, but not without some valid points.

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