Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Babylonia "casts the shadow of its own destruction before it"

And then, as the Iraqi capital's landscape became ever more dangerous, as an insurgency gained traction while the administration's dreams of a redesigned American Middle East remained as strong as ever, its officials evidently concluded that even one of Saddam's palaces, roomy enough for a dictator interested in the control of a single country (or the odd neighboring state), wasn't faintly big enough, or safe enough, or modern enough for the representatives of the planet's New Rome...

In Baghdad, Saddam's giant hands are already on the road to ruin. Still going up in New York and Baghdad are two half-billion dollar-plus monuments to the Bush imperial moment. A 9/11 memorial so grotesquely expensive that, when completed, it will be a reminder only of a time, already long past, when we could imagine ourselves as the Greatest Victims on the planet; and in Baghdad's Green Zone, a monument to the Bush administration's conviction that we were also destined to be the Greatest Dominators this world, and history, had ever seen.
See Tom Engelhardt here.

And Bryan Finoki and commenter Phila here.

5 comments:

MT said...

How does the footprint compare to walled Jerusalem under the crusaders?

helmut said...

Now I'll have to look that up.

MT said...

Actually I ran with this myself in the comments at the blog you referenced us to. "Roughly the same," might be the best one can say. I got the impression scholars have only speculations about where Jerusalem's walls were some eras, and I suppose the footprint evolved (e.g. in response to attack or new threats) and so we might have to pick a particular date just to have the prospect of an exact answer.

helmut said...

Thanks for the heads up, MT.

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