Emerald Twilight

In brightest day, in blackest night, no straight thing was ever made: John Quiggin considers Yglesias's Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics, that is, the notion that the U.S. military "can accomplish absolutely anything in the world through the application of sufficient military force," so long as there is the willpower to do so.

The theory explains how we find ourselves presently in Iraq, where U.S. officials are considering
one last push. (Ostensibly to secure Baghdad—though who knows? One U.S. official says, "There has not been a full articulation of what we would want the surge to accomplish." Just something to try, the ramifications or troops themselves be damned in the eyes of the Bush administration.) Quiggin writes that, not only is today's war party pretty much the Green Lantern Corps, but we can expect GL supporters to retcon any American retreat from Iraq as the result of liberal posturing. It's the Green Lantern Provisio for Revision and Rehabilitation—goes hand in hand with the Theory for Geopolitics (and the Parallax Fear Anomaly).

Kevin Drum figures that One Last Push is the only way by which liberals will be able to resist the eventual, inevitable charge that liberal footdragging is the reason America lost Iraq. But this assumes some rational limit to the GL theory—that, given their "surge" (even put in terms of a "last push," if that stands), war lanterns will accept whatever happens as the final say on Iraq. But the last push will never be enough, and liberals will always have lacked the resolve to see Baghdad through. The best liberals can do, in the political arena, is hope that war lanterns discredit themselves so thoroughly that the public in revulsion turns a deaf ear to the revisionist take on Iraq, Viet Nam, and the Cold War.

Quiggin goes over the archives and finds other examples (beyond Viet Nam) to illustrate an empirical Green Lantern effect: the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, and the Korean War—in addition to Viet Nam—with Iraq embodying the lessons we failed to learn from all of them. Yet he still finds in America's might justification for its global police work: "[T]he US has a unique capacity to enforce the global law that makes wars of aggression a crime against humanity."

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer proves himself to be the Hal Jordan-drunk-with-Parallax-power of the Green Lantern set (which will mean something to the geeks in the audience). Krauthammer says we should stop short of dominating the world in, say, the Winter Olympics—lest we be perceived as arrogant. Take that, Sinestro!