I watched a bit of Tucker Carlson's PBS garbage yesterday, and had a good laugh. The guest was Bob Kaplan, whose book The Coming Anarchy I read with interest a couple years back (at the same time I read Barber's Jihad vs. McWorld, which is a lefty take on the same theme), and Kaplan, who is no dummy, is either befuddled by an ideological filteration system (see Chomsky and Herman) that prevents him from an objective view of the facts, or he's plain and simple a propagandist for American Empire. I suspect the latter, frankly, because when he said the Chinese had just signed a half-billion dollar oil deal with Uzbekistan because they don't care about working with morally repugnant regimes we refuse to deal with because of our history of cuddly human rights values, I coughed a mouthful of shiraz out in indignation.
Bob, you have to know our sordid and indefensible relations with the Uzbek torturers, who boil our rendered prisoners alive for us. We also maintain a significant military presence in Uzbekistan, the base leased for 25 years, and our criticism of the Uzbek regime was slow in coming of late, and only ramped up after they massacred hundreds of demonstrators seeking democratic reform.
So for Kaplan to claim that Chinese economic supremacy has resulted from their willingness to work with regimes we won't touch for moral reasons, and for him to use the Uzbeks in particular, is simply absurd. The US works with those thugs too. Bob Kaplan is far smarter than me, and obviously must know this. And surely Tucker Carlson, who allowed this nonsense an unchallenged airing, knows the truth as well.
