[Reader-list] 2025: the end of US dominance

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear Rana,

Even on a morning like that one...

Frankly I do not know whether seemingly spontaneous acts of terrorism have
any co-relationship with policy documents. I agree to your point that this
document is symptomatic of the fact in the ways in which an organization
address itself but I disagree to the formulation that it's importance is an
any way 'limited'. After spending a year at the archives I have come to
deeply respect the often banal, day to day conversations carried out by the
powers that be, precisely because these are the documents that give us an
idea of the movement of thoughts that often takes years to condense before
they form an attitude or govermentality, if you may.

In the light of this don't you think that as people who are trying to
understand and make meaning of a complex, intertwined, and an unfolding
social reality, we must be careful in reading such documents. Its rhetorical
power may not be of any comparison to the best in the trade but I would like
to believe that it is this bareness, this barrenness and this brevity that
makes this document and many hundreds of thousands of such documents a
potential net wherein human lives are coldly trapped and mutilated forever.

Best

Taha


On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 6:38 AM, Rana Dasgupta <rana at ranadasgupta.com>wrote:

> Dear Taha
>
> On a morning like this...
>
> I have to say I thought the document was of interest in more limited
> ways than you - in the sense that it is an internal US government report
> that is focussed on policy formulation.  It is interesting as a sign of
> how the US government talks to itself rather than anything else - and as
> you say, many other forms of discourse have already travelled much
> further along the same lines.
>
> Four years ago, the US government told itself that US dominance of
> global affairs would continue for the forseeable future; it can no
> longer speak with that confidence.  This loss of confidence is, I think,
> interesting, but it is also inherently neither good nor bad - it remains
> to be seen how the Obama administration will take it on.
>
> > consensus building arguments. It seems like after the mind numbing, eye
> > inverting, psycho drama of -change- and yes-we-can, the hydra is making
> > its presence felt. Telling all of us, that now it is time to go back to
> > 'serious', 'expert oriented', 'hard-quantitative data analysis'.
>
> Does this document merit such resentment?  Does it have the rhetorical
> power you give it?
>
> (And why "mind numbing, eye inverting"?  Is only the "hydra" worthy of
> your respect?)
>
> Peace
>
> R
>
>
> Frankly
> > speaking, I felt relieved reading this document. It had the smell of old
> > familiarity.Like one more carefully articulated position of the hegemon
> > to reengage with the new world albeit under old premises.
>
>
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