Hi everyone,

I just finished an extremely intelligent book that presents a comprehensive and scathing denouncement of the G. W. Bush administration policies and what has been called the "neoconservative agenda."

The book is "The Bubble of American Supremacy" by George Soros.

I suppose I should disclose that I consider myself to be a "small L" libertarian and I also consider George Soros to be one of the "good guys". I say "small L" because I don't consider myself a Libertarian in the sense of the Libertarian National Party, mostly because I don't believe that the free market can solve all problems (in Soros' terms, I am not a "market fundamentalist"). I consider Soros to be a modern hero due to his development of the Open Society Foundation and the work of those foundations. I once saw Soros described as "the only private citizen with a foreign policy".

The book focuses on the damage that the W administration has done to the American reputation through their careless "you're either with us or against us" policies. The book discusses American policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, the "War on Terror", as well as the legitimacy of military intervention in soverign states in general.

The second part of the book suggests an alterative approach, where America takes a leadership role in the development of "open societies" around the world, not by trying to install "democracies" through military might, but by acting consistently with the highest standards of liberalism and "American values".

In my experience, most debates about these issues rapidly degrade to "make peace not war" on one side, or "the UN is f*cked and we can do what we want" on the other. Soros is above both of these facile extremes and presents reasoned analysis that, on one hand, recognizes that force is sometimes needed and morally justified, while, on the other, national soverignty needs to be voluntarily limited for the good of all.

I highly recommend this book and would love to discuss it with anyone here who has read it entirely. Not that big of a deal, really, its under 200 pages and I read it in one sitting.

This short paragraph from the preface will probably tell you whether you want to read it or not:

The United States enjoys a dominant position in the world today that cannot be challenged by any state or combination of states for the foreseeable future. It can lose its dominance only as a result of its own mistakes. At present the country is in the hands of a group of extremists whose strong sense of mission is matched only by their false sense of certitude. By abusing the position that the United States occupies in the world, the extremists have made our nation weaker, not stronger.

These are fighting words and many people will violently disagree, but they are justified by the gravity of the situation. These are not normal times. I have made it my primary objective to persuade the American public to reject President Bush in the forthcoming elections. ... America has to reexamine its role in the world and adopt a more constuctive vision.

FWIW,

Jim