The damage will be felt for decades, as will the revulsion.

I think that's quite broad brush. The commons of the world will feel the damage and the revulsion, but they don't set policy.

European elites will continue to seek advantage in the shadow of the shining city on a shining hill, the necrophilic embrace of America's "reputation" whilst Middle Eastern elites will continue to hide behind Washington's skirts in rightful fear of their own people.

It wasn't the right that won, it was authoritarianism. An ideology which adheres only to the ruling elite ruthless enough to claim it, be it of the "left" or the "right", just as liberalism isn't necessarily a leftish position.

There have been liberal right-wingers. Can you imagine any US politician giving the speech below nowadays ? Yet it came from Margaret Chase Smith, a republican, yes a republican, in 1954 about Eugene MmCarthy.

http://www.mcslibrary.org/program/library/declaration.htm

I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution. I think that it is high time that we remembered; that the Constitution, as amended, speaks not only of the freedom of speech but also of trial by jury instead of trial by accusation.

Whether it be a criminal prosecution in court or a character prosecution in the Senate, there is little practical distinction when the life of a person has been ruined.

Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all to frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism --

The right to criticize;

The right to hold unpopular beliefs;

The right to protest;

The right of independent thought.

The exercise of these rights should not cost one single American citizen his reputation or his right to a livelihood nor should he be in danger of losing his reputation or livelihood merely because he happens to know some one who holds unpopular beliefs. Who of us doesn't? Otherwise none of us could call our souls our own. Otherwise thought control would have set in.

But this time it was right wing authoritarians, as it usually is in the USA. But don't think 9-11 allowed this, it merely allowed it to come into the open.

Vietnam was a filthy war fought, not against communists, but against a people who merely wanted to control their own sovereignty. who did not want their leaders imposed upon them by remote corporations, the better to rape their land. The people almost destroyed S Vietnam suicidally in order to save it.

During the 70s the dirty wars of S America, CIA backed militias genuflecting to washington's demands, kept their peoples in terrified acquiescence.

Then Reagan turned on Central America.

Yet somehow all of these filthy wars, the torture, the terrorism, the death squads never quite made it into people's consciousness. Not because it wasn't reported but because we weren't having our noses rubbed in it, it was somebody else's war. We weren't involved, we weren't implicated. We could tut-tut and pass the canapes.

Now it's all over the place. 9-11 changed nothing, it just lifted the rock and revealed the squalid underbelly of every working practice operative since the 50s. Every working practice we all signed up for. NATO, the special relationship, we are all complicit.

keep to the Fen Causeway