High life | 4 August 2012

Thucydides carefully structured his Peloponnesian war history as a cautionary tale about the moral decay that accompanies abuses of imperial power. ‘It is a general law of nature to rule whatever one can,’ say the Athenians blandly to the denizens of Melos before slaughtering them. (The tiny island of Melos, a Spartan colony, had refused to join an alliance with Athens in 416 BC, so the civilised Athenians punished innocent civilians by killing all the men and selling the women and children into slavery.)

Athens was a direct democracy, whereas Sparta was a militaristic oligarchy, yet it was Athens that abused her power once the great Pericles had died of the plague and was replaced by the demagogue and total hawk Cleon. The latter, and after him Alcibiades, were the first neo-cons, greedy, eager to send great men such as Nicias to their death in Sicily (along with the Athenian fleet), and disdainful of compromise as long as others did the dying. Cleon, in fact, had the opportunity to make peace in 424 BC, but brashly broke off peace talks despite the pleadings of his great rival, the pious and cautious Nicias. Read George W. Bush for Cleon (at least the Athenian had the decency to die in battle, unlike W.), Ron Paul for Nicias, Alcibiades as Cheney, and you can look into a crystal ball and see the next 50 years down the Middle East road.

Mighty Uncle Sam, the lone superpower, is going Athenian in its arrogance as it plods on in the Middle East, compounding its catastrophic and criminal actions in Iraq by eyeing Iran and Syria as its next targets. What I don’t understand is how normally clear thinkers like William Hague can play the role of the Chorus, repeating ad nauseam Netanyahu’s ravings about existential threats to the only super nuclear-armed power in the Middle East, Israel.