Captain Langston Illuminates Inwards

Captain Langston: "As Foucault famously shows, time and again, power is a medium, a relationship."

And for Machiavelli and Hobbes, "desire" is the key.

Machiavelli: "It is a thing truly very natural and ordinary to desire to aquire; and when men who are able to do so do it, they are always praised or not blamed; but when they are not able and yet want to do so in every mode, here is the error and the blame" (Prince, Mixed Principates).

Hobbes: "Nor can a man anymore live, whoe Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later."

Hobbes also establishes knowledge (that which we have when we "pretend to Reasoning") is of consequences--such as, "Science, that is Knowledge of Consequences; which is called also Philosophy" or "Consequences from the Accidents of Politique Bodies which is called Politiques and Civill Philosophy: 1. Of Consequences from the Institution of Common-Wealths, to the Rights and Duties of the Body Politique, or Soveraign. 2. Of Consequences from the same, to the Duty, and Right of the Subjects."

This is what worries us all about the Bush Administration's use of power, which appears to only be able to repeat a status quo without being able to study and learn from the consequences of misapplied force and a population that is not homogeneous. Again Chapter III from the Prince:
"For the Romans, in these cases, did all that wise princes ought to do, which is, to have regard not only for present disorders, but also for future ones, and with all industry to anticipate and provide for them; because, when one forsees them from afar, once can easily remedy them; but if you wait until they are near the medicine is not in time, for the malady has become incurable."
Also, "In this mode you have as enemies all those whom you have hurt in seizing that principate; and you are not able to maintain as friends those who have placed you there, being unable to satisfy them in the mode that they had expected and by your not being able to use strong medicines against them, being obligated to them, for even if one has the most powerful of armies, one always has need of the favor of the inhabitants of a province to enter it." Saddam Hussein's Iraq appears to meet the definition of a mixed principate. But, of course, others might better advise me on this.