Maybe if one says that stuff about AUMF and Article 51 and all that over and over often enough, it somehow becomes "true," or at least most folks get bored enough and move on to some other issue, leaving the people who live for that idiot Gamery to keep on playing, with the lives and money of others as the game pieces.
Important appointments in DC are like a dam in a river. As the pressure builds among all the interest groups and stakeholders on the upstream side, it all comes to a simple binary decision: Confirm the appointment, open the sluice gates and let off the pressure and get that power moving downstream again, or let the head build until the dam fails or the water finds its own way around the obstruction. And minutely or hugely, the dam is changed by all that, so that it never quite fits as well and is just a little less safe against some washout that gives us "Johnstown" residents down in the Valley an experience that like a failure of the "Jesus nut" on a helicopter way up in the air, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L_kxxwql40, will "spoil our whole day."
Once someone like Brennan is in place, he of course is going to find that there's a whole lot of water upstream, with a lot of turbulence and currents that are all seeking to move the whole mass in one direction or another. Thinking that he will, what, "democratize" the CIA, with all its directorates and Secret Squirrel subdivisions and multifarious momentums and stashes of cash and caches of weapons, is something of a durn fool notion. The chance for that to happen died when Wild Bill Donovan ruled the roost, and chose the channel for the river to flow in. So now we have any number of "interests," with all kinds of little and large stratagems in play, freed of any moral constraints thanks to the imperialization of the executive and the militarization of everything else. Brennan, and Hagel, will find that even if they come in with intentions to undo centuries of Stupid that demarcates the playing board of the Great Game, they are "pwned" from the git-go by the people who put them there and who already "pwn" the institutions.
And any number of Serious and Well-Informed People with sheaves of 4 x 6 cards and PowerPoint slides, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/29/mcchrystal-afghanistan-powerpoint-slide , just full of dishonest and seductive and seemingly wise exemplars and false syllogisms and misprisions of fallacy, all happy to obscure the larger picture of what's in play, and working on silencing anyone who holds up a lamp to show any of what's going on in the Darkness.
And every moment, the pentwaters undermine the seemingly well engineered construction, and wash away a little more of the ground that restrains that Deluge...
...And now we have some guy named Karzai telling the, what are they, US or UN?, special-ops people to stand down onaccounta what they are doing, and/or teaching parts of the Afghan National Army that is mostly WHAT tribe, again? to do? in the province next to the nominal capital.
There's been all this chatter here and elsewhere about counter-insurgency versus nation-building versus a bunch of other Grand Strategies. Lots of stuff about what the GIs on the ground are supposed to do -- kick in doors, or knock politely, and walk and drive around the Area of Operations to hopefully find, and if not find, then to trigger, IEDs, and also to attract bullets and rockets from "unlawful enema combatants" so those Bad Wogs can be "lit up," grab local people to put in various forms of confinement, and a lot of other stuff that the Apologists will be sure to tell us was All To The Good, all under leaders some of whom are/were maybe trying to Do The Right Thing in an asymmetrical circumstance where there is no possible "victory" or "success," and many of whom are cynical, self-serving barstids on the model of Westmoreland et al. Being told that assaulting Wardak Province or another chosen as the Hot Front du Jour was going to be the stuff they would tell their grandchildren when it came time to recount the virtues and the roots of VICTORY in Afghanistan. Being confronted by dignified villagers who were ousted from their homes and marketplace by the combat that GIs (and, yes, what we now are calling "fighters" in Syria but which started out all as "terrorists," then "insurgents," then what-ever euphemism the Brass came up with and worked into the DoD Dictionary and all those Grand Strategy documents THIS month) brought to them. So that when the pushy E-5 tells the village leader he HAS to move back into the market town because that's what the field orders call for, and that the "UN" will protect them, the villager can say, almost mildly, "You will protect us from the fighters? You, with all your weapons and technology, cannot even protect yourselves. How can you even pretend to be able to protect me and my family?" Sometimes, when you break something you simply can't fix it, not with any amount of Superglue or eyewash. Best not to break in the first place.
For the GIs and Gyrenes and other service types who are expected to "make war," this is nothing but more effing FUTILITY. Passing out candy bars, conducting medical clinics in the villages, building schools that can't be used, disappearing billions and aiding or winking at or savoring the illicit drug business that's all around, that's not any way to run a war (though of course 'war" is not very well defined, now is it, and there's a huge Gulf between what the public thinks of, Grand strategies and house-to-house fighting, and the real stuff of fraudulent procurements and $400-a-gallon fuel delivered by bribed "fighters" and Bug Splat and mission and battlespace creep. Which is indeed very creepy.. And how about the Consumer Reports-style hype about Game Changers like the XM-25 grenade launcher and the V-22 and even the Reaper/Predator/Hellfire things that don't seem to be making much of a dent in the incidence of the kinds of behaviors we think of as "BAD Muslim, BAAAD!"
So once again, in supposed pursuit of undefined "national interests," and supposedly to protect "national assets" like Forward Operating Bases that, if the Brass and the politicians had maybe kept to a simple "get bin Laden" game would never have been down in the valley of the shadow of death, "needing to be protected." By often mis-aimed artillery, aerial bombardment, and of course Hellfires from Heaven.
All of this being conducted behind a smokescreen of lies and misrepresentations, by subtle and seemingly informed people taking full advantage of the patriotic gullibility of those of us who this time are not even aware of what it's costing us, out of pocket and out of our futures, while we are bovinely allowing the conditions for late-stage imperial repression to be put in place under the nominal banner of "security."
This was not a "mistake." The various "administrations" may not have intended all the consequences that have ensued, but the basic framework, destabilization leading to volatility and opportunities for theft and the growth of the Security State, were sure in the minds of the catalysts that fomented this Change thing, Regime, or Hope'n type. The stuff that's happening is not a bug, as they say (except for the ones that are tracking our Free Exercise 'n stuff) -- it's very definitely part of the intended feature set.
Herbie and Harry are walking down an alley, between dumpsters. Herbie sticks out his arm and stops Harry. "Whoa!" Says Herbie. "That looks like dog poop." Harry grabs a stick and scrapes some of it up, holds it up to the light. "Yup, smells like dog poop too. It even FEELS like it!" Herbie takes the stick, licks it. "Tastes like it, too." "Gee, Herbie, I'm sure glad we didn't STEP in it..."
Waiting now for the Smart Folks to recite all the reasons the idiot's dream was really Wise Policy. Too bad all that, and Vietnam, Etc.,were and are Wise Policy at no cost, and substantial profit, to those who thrive on instability and destabilization...
How the heck can there be any expectation of any kind of substantive change in or limit to the Infinite Threat Generator And Wealth Converter, when the substance of what goes on is so Stupid, every single day?
One tiny example: Here's what the War Department has to say about one of its "key systems," in a stirring flood of Milbabble:
I doubt the average schmuck is likely to get radicalized to anything close to the same degree that flacks for the many Procurements in the Pipeline will manage, right out of the gate...
Maybe the hope for less militarization of the future is that Murphy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics will conspire to bring all those Grand Interoperable Network-Centric Systems to a sand-in-the-gears, manufacturing-tolerance-error, friction-induced halt.
Bill once again demonstrates his fealty and fixity when it comes to carrying on and apologizing for the vestiges of the Cold War. And for one who disses and dismisses others who claim to have some understanding of his mental processing, it is interesting that he knows, KNOWS, what is in the group mind of Those Chinese who just naturally want to Take Over The Far East that our war leaders are now "pivoting toward" with whatever energies and money they have left from their "pivots toward" the African continent and South and Central America.
Too bad the average US taxpayer, all fearful and ignorant, can't or won't take the trouble to read the reams of documents and track the procurements and deployments that make up the comforting "Air-Sea Battle" plans "we" are developing, along with the planning for and implementation of Dronegemony Forever, to see just exactly how little"security" they are getting for their trillion dollars a year.
Joe, might I suggest you read Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement," if you haven't? Maybe you have no use for Taibbi, I don't know of course, but the book is a pretty careful description of the processes that bring people to that broad category called "fundamentalism," and linked up from an insider's view to what is driving a lot of the "governance" (sic) most of us Americans are suffering from. And there's lots of actual reporting on how and why "fundamentalism" is on the ascendant in a lot of places.
Mr. Cockayne, you must have a very limited horizon from where you are. Any idea how dark-skinned Americans are routinely treated in America? Ever heard of the loving Christian Americans who murder "abortion doctors" in the name of their notion of the Judeo-Christian God? Or a guy named Timothy McVeigh, who was one of the more successful Belief-killers in our history? On a large social scale, the "conservatives" are all about setting in place policies that will, that ARE, killing lots of their fellow citizens, by denial of health care, essentially forced labor, and a whole lot more? And is it uniformly the case that the kindly absentee British landlords of Ireland have stopped their war ON people in Ireland, or that Irish "brothers" and Scottish and Welsh "brothers" are all good and calm and living in lovingkindness with each other?
Let's at least be a little bit honest about what we are and what we do to one another, us "white bread" folks, and also note that in Britain, as in the US, the "conservatives" are moving us actually, economically, back to the relationships that characterized the Middle Ages -- aristocracy of huge wealth, and serfdom of everyone else.
Brian, those would have to be some pretty opaque and extensive "shade structures." The sensors on the drones and Apaches and other devices "we" are fielding detect infrared presences, among other "signatures," and if you look at the "war porn" videos, not to mention the "oopsie" reports like the two children just blown away by a "UN" killing machine (See? the tinfoil-hat crowd were right to fear those "black helicopters"), you can see that the people doing the targeting and triggering are not being too nice in their "selection." And as you point out, any kind of effort by people who don't want to be blown to flinders to conceal themselves would be ipso facto invitation and carte blanche for the Bills of the world to "light them up," in the modern phrase...
I've been perusing "war porn" for several years now, looking at the many youtube and other videos of drone-Hellfire and A-10 and AC-130 and Apache 30-mm cannon attacks on humans on the ground in all those far off places. I know, it's a sickness, one shared by millions of my fellow Americans if you look at the view counts for the videos. military.com has a particularly nice collection of the art.
Uniformly, the captions are all about "killing Talibans" or "blasting Insurgents." But here's one, among many, of the nicely ambiguous bit of video -- http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f1b_1232374340 -- must be midgets or dwarfs amongst the "Talibans" in this group, and do you see any weapons? I can't, even with a magnifying glass.
If you look close at a number of these, and there sure are a lot of them, it sure seems that in a lot of cases, many of the explodees are unarmed and inoffensive -- and in many cases it looked a whole lot like maybe a family group (all identified as "Talibans" in the audio from the aircraft) was walking inoffensively from one compound to another. Being unwise enough to do it at night, of course, and like the two women in the pickup truck that was shot up by the LA police recently, "looking suspicious."
And of course the whole killing machinery is justified on the ground that it's needed to protect our troops (and other unspecified "US Interests") that would be in ZERO danger but for the fact that we, like, invaded their country and, like, shot and killed and otherwise destroyed a bunch of their people. Because, if I have it right, some "government" that is not around any more as such ("the Taliban") allowed and maybe assisted one of OUR former assets, some guy named bin Laden, to hang around there.
Which I am sure our local apologists for the "legality" of all this will take as clear total blanket unconstrained authorization to apply lethal, exciting-to-watch, bar-cheer-and-whoop deadly explosive force, even as the whole rationale for the invasion and war thing evaporates as completely as the one that had "us" all invested in the future of some place we arrogantly called South Vietnam.
The latest images of the RedHats putting their aged, patriachal heads together to whisper and connive, as has been the behavior since Paul started all this, ought to illustrate the imperviousness of that hierarchy, that hugely wealthy oligarchy, to any kind of "reform."
It didn't work when the issues were the huge gulf between the nominal holiness and spiritual wealth of the Church, living off the hopes and fears and prayers and labor of millions, and the reality of the hypocrisy, the venality, sale of benefices and indulgences and the gilding of anything that didn't move.
It's human nature, whenever there's power and money in play and a structure that lets greedy, selfish, arrogant Machiavellis play on Big motivators like tribe, nation, the love and fear of the divine. The Old Popes and the whole Vatican Rag Bag were about pleasure and power, and all the recent scandals, while delicious in their own way and in their own right, are nothing new.
All that faith, all that belief, all that yearning for a sense of meaning, a manifestation of the Divine, with that undercurrent of tribalism and the same motivators that bring Condo Commandos to power to "enforce the deed restrictions and rules" with the understanding that the Enforcers are unconstrained, and if caught with a hand where it shouldn't be, are forgiven and graced for the shallowest expression of repentance. Where they can't just suppress or ignore the finger-pointers outright.
It's too big. It's too immanent. And "reform" just leads to infinite schism, and Jimmy "T-Back" Swaggart crying, and Jim "Million Dollar Dog House" Bakker crying, and Tedd "I Did Not Have Sex With That Boy Toy" Haggard crying, and the faithful still flooding them with "pledges" in the hope of earthly prosperity or miracle cures...
See how easy it is to make it all nice and legal? The way our local apologists for arbitrary executions and the unbridled exercise of deadly force tell us this is all being done, exclusively to "Unlawlul Enema Combatants"?
Adam K notes one part of the Home Office spokeswoman's statement. I think the whole thing needs to be flagged and underscored and writ large all over the place:
" ‘Citizenship is a privilege not a right. The Home Secretary has the power to remove citizenship from individuals where she considers it is conducive to the public good. An individual subject to deprivation can appeal to the courts.’"
The Brits don't have a written constitution, but one wonders if even a people who are getting comfortable with hundreds of thousands of "security cameras" watching, watching, might be feeling a little draft? Some Cabinet person can say "Citizen X ought not to be one any more, conducive to the public good." And former Citizen X will get what kind of notice of this? and will be able to appeal that fiat to what court, in what country?
Whatthehell, in the end (so far -- bioscience has surprising benefits in store for the wealthy few) we are all dead. It's just a matter of how much hurt we can cause while yet we live...
What's sad is that in what's supposed to nominally, according to the Sacred Myths, be a government of laws, not of men (and women,) so much seems to depend, and so many hopes hang on, the placing of certain people into certain positions. Elizabeth Warren at CPFB, say, or on the other hand Timmy "Ratface" Geithner at Treasury. Panetta,, or anybody, at CIA. And Rumsfeld, on the Bad'nUgly hand, and now Hagel on the Hope'nChange hand. Can one guy or gal, whatever their political heat and predilections, change the direction of "the backside of Empire" away from the ultimate cliff? Produce anything really different in what, 3 1/2 years if s/he gets that?
Wow. Can't hardly wait to see what this informed synthesis draws in the way of comment, here and elsewhere...
At least Hagel is in place, and hopefully will not succumb to the Hegelian impulses... I wonder what his marching orders from the West Wing really are, and whether a larger notion of Duty, Honor, Country will somehow manifest. I doubt that is possible, too many people with irons in the fire, meat on the table and axes to grind.
To follow your argument or agree with it would constitute another kind of logical fallacy, and an obscuring of the larger context and a maybe wiser view of "national interests" and that silly thing, "truth."
Which part of "Afghanistan" had and has that "major role," again? Just what did "it" do that even starts to justify what "the US" did, has done and is doing there, to the point that our fearful Mr. Karzai wants "us" to stand down, and now, like with Vietnam and Iraq, "we" slinking away and hoping nobody notices that once again, it was not about "victory" or "success" or "protecting national interests" that nobody ever articulates what they are, but about several something-elses altogether?
And by your logic, Castro should be bombing Miami and kicking in doors in Keokuk, since WE "hosted and offered terrorist training facilities to" a bunch of unfortunately incompetent Cuban ex-pats who, even with a lot of covert "US" help, were unable to restore a nice cozy kleptocracy with lots of Mob-ortunities. For just one small example. To claim justification, one ought to have done justice themselves...
Juan, I don't know about what "the US" did in respect to French and other interests in Algeria, or why (any of the complex "whys" that make up post-hoc parsing of "policy").
I'm stuck on the Vietnam/Southeast Asia/Dominoes thing. I saw a little tiny part of it for a year, and then read a whole lot and talked a whole lot trying to figure out what happened. The best synthesis I've come across was in Barbara Tuchman's in "The March of Folly," dismissed by some as just the product of someone with an "agenda." The conclusion was that for a whole lot of reasons, the US apparatus did in fact try pretty hard to extend French colonial positions in "Indo-China," and then just descended by the usual momentum of industrial warfare and "anti-Somethingorother-ism" into all that followed. Ending up with "Made in Vietnam" labels on clothing and stuff in Walmart, 50,000 dead GIs and 2 million dead "gooks," trillions in debt, and the growth of the current thing we support.
Is that just groupthink, or is there the necessary quantum of "what actually happened" to be mostly and importantly true?
"Argo." "Platoon." "The Deer Hunter." "Full Metal Jacket." "Apocalypse Now." Etc. How to screen the Movie-ized images against all those words in all those books? It's hard, in all of this, to try to tease out the honest big picture from all the disparate sources and voices. And maybe, given the reality, it's just a fool's errand to even try?
@Bill, re Japan: All you present here is the baldest of bald assertions about what was in play in mid-1945, dismissing for consistency with your world view a different way "these proceedings," the Great Asian War, could, maybe should, have been "concluded," in MacArthur's sonorous phrase. Nicely consistent with the Majority Narrative you consistently represent, but there's a whole lot of what you say "history" is supposed to be about that says you, in this instance, among others, are just flat wrong. But I bet you know that, in your historian's heart of hearts. The goal, after all, is to get enough people in our voting class to believe, and persist in believing, the myths and cover stories, even against evidence and common sense. Which has always been part of how power is accumulated and extended, here or in Imperial Japan or even Myanmar.
For anyone interested in the degree to which our CIA, among other "agencies," has infested the imagery and discourse of the world at all levels, you could do worse than wade through this horriterrific HISTORY text: "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA In The World of Arts and Letters," http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=61
Who will be the last Sunni, Shia, Wahabbist, Parsee, Palestinian, Pashto, PERSON to die in all of this? Or is that simple notion just a ridiculous conceit of logic, that says that at some point there has to be an end point?
And the lottery is open, too, on which American "troop" will have the eternal honor and glory of being named the last officially Killed-In-Action person in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Costa Rica, Oklahoma............
One wonders if the "average American," looking at this mashup, only sees places to hide nuclear enrichment and Dimona-grade facilities in the landscape, only wonders which of those trucks on the highways are carrying parts of Weapons of Mass Mythification, only is sure that all those unAmerican faces conceal secret plots to Take Over, only reassures him- or herself that the banners all read "Death To The Great Satan!" and "Death To America!" because, after all, they are written in that evil Arabic script...
Where would one find job postings for "propagandist" or "troll" or whatever the subtle players are called, these days, who pop up to slant and poison and obscure the public discourse away from anything that reveals the real nature of the Game and deflects any reflections on what might actually bring that silliness called "peace" and its unprofitable-because-unvolatile partner, "stability?" The pay must be pretty decent, and the job security too, on whatever "side" is hiring...
I guess, it occurs to me, it's not surprising that people who have gotten filthy rich from sucking depleting liquid (and gaseous) resources out of the ground would be attracted to this latest implementation of a similar strategy.
Here, graphically illustrated, in one small corner of the planet, is what's wrong with the whole human species. "Used up in 50 years? Who gives a crap?" says the Saudi princeling. "I'll be long gone, having just about maxed out my personal pleasure machinery off the profits from spending the residual wealth of the planet that I assert a divine right to, and externalizing all those horrific costs in ways that, nyah-nayh, since I write the laws and pay the enforcers, are all perfectly 'not illegal.'
"And what are the folks who come after, and have to try to survive on what me and my kind have left, going to do about it? Dig up our desiccated carcasses and do a dead-Mussolini on us? Ha-ha-ha, big whoop!" -- Or however you say that in Arabic (or Russian, or one of the Chinese dialects, or of course English... That is the native language of the Kochs and Dimons and Blankfeins and even Obamites, isn't it?)
My wife and I use about 100 gallons of domestic potable water a week, for all purposes. Of course, we live on a boat, with solar panels for much of our electricity, and are otherwise pretty frugal too. Across Tampa Bay there's a 50,000-square-foot "home" on a many-acred "estate," where a local real estate mogul, who has other "homes" elsewhere too, uses a couple of million gallons of potable water a year just to keep his "plantings" green and his "water features" topped up and evaporating. His claim is that "he can afford it," that profligacy, and water rates for large users are, get this, cheaper than for little mopes like me.
When any of the folks who cry for the dying planet come up with a fix for or maybe deterrent to that kind of thinking, and for the insulated behaviors of Homo useitipfastus, who by certain kinds of abstract skills involving debt and money and "financialization" and "externalization" have hijacked the machinery of government and culture and the institutions that once provided legitimacy and some limits to predation, please let the rest of us know. I don't see that happening any time soon.
Indeed, since there are so many apologists who, remora-like swim along with the sharks and feed off their scraps, the chances of any change (other than temporarily, in a few locales, where a few people have, for the nonce, put aside greed and self-serving in favor of 'locavore' and 'agroecology' and 'sustainability' and 'living small,' seem pretty near zero.
Yep, and our new Bible should be the Gospel according to what the libertarians say is the Word of Hayek, when they can agree on anything that is, and the currency should be called the "Rand..."
Which articles and connections through a whole other bunch of googlespace links you have to find by searching on something other than just "NDI" or National Democratic Institute, since it appears somebody has flooded google with entries that are all about the thin surface coating that leads people to believe that the "NDI" is the following phrase that appears all over the place so it must be true, right?
"The National Democratic Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to support and strengthen democratic institutions worldwide through citizen participation, openness and accountability in government."
http://www.ndi.org/taxonomy/term/9, and thousands more entries that reassure us all is well, democracy is being spread, you are getting sleepy...
"politics of a parliamentary sort are good, and much better than corrupt, oppressive, inflexible strong men."
Margaret Thatcher? Rupert Murdoch?
One hopes the various interests in Tunisia will find a path to some metastable arrangement that trends always in the direction of what's good and decent for ordinary people, you know, the kind of aspirational stuff that's in the Preamble, and what is good for those planetary issues you also write about... Maybe they can show us muscular JefferHamilDullestonians the next steps that really ought to be taken...
"shocked at how fast and viciously Americans will turn on them."
On the other hand, the Israeli rulers have some 400 nukular weapons already on line, and how many more "latent" ones? It would be hard to believe that Dimona has been idle, these last "conservative" years...
"IF" is a good word to start your sentence with. I would add "there is," to read "IF THERE IS a law of supply and demand." Since that poorly examined postulate that a few actually dare to question as a "law" of any sort is such a binary rough notion based on the "science of economics," all those intuitively seductive and patently misleading graphs and curves and functions that so intentionally obscure the real face of "homo economicus." Nice argument for the dead-end status quo, if that's what was intended, apologies if it was not. "Doing nothing" or continuing to collect rents and wage-enslaving the most of us is just a dead-end game.
Is this to say that the actions of things like Sendero and FARC were/are "equivalent" to what the various right-wing rulers and militaries and death squads did to the people of the countries they were active in? To what's going on now, under the rubric of "the War on Drugs?" Got any support for that, other than the bald assertion? Body counts, maybe? Blown-up and shuttered newspapers and radio stations? Curfews, organized theft of land, terror against ordinary citizens?
I know, sometimes it's hard to gather and marshal facts, particularly when so many of the dead were "disappeared," as in flown out over the ocean and kicked out of the aircraft...
And of course, how about some support for the tacit assertion that the CIA and other covert and overt US "involvements" in our southern neighbors' business and lives were, I guess, not that big a deal?
Here's part of what we are supposed to find falsely equivalent to "revolutionary terrorist populist movements:"
I'm sure you've heard of the "School of the Americas," right? Teaching the spread of Democracy, American Style?
Re Allende, despite the bland assurances, there sure seems to be a persistent set of facts and opinion that lays a little more than passive "knowledge that something was afoot" at the feet of the US sneaky-pete/jackal people... http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/Chile%20Coup_USHand.html and a whole googlelot more.
What's that hissing sound I hear? A couple of apologists taking in deep breaths, ready to scare-quote and italicize a line or two in the hope of impeaching the whole ugly picture?
Actually, Paul is maybe closer to that ol' Ayatollah Khomeini, as a militant salesman of a particular cult takeoff, built on the reputation and life of some guy named Jesus. He stuffed various loss-leaders in his spiel, that lovely bit about what love is and is not, in 1 Corinthians 13, so nicely put in context here: http://www.evolutionofgod.net/excerpts_chapter11/
But the goal was (and is) domination, and anyone who knows a bit about the ugly history of the "Church" ought in equity to be a little careful about observations on what's pragmatic and what's appropriate comity.
Puzzle, conundrum, whatever: How to turn all those individual energies and motivations, born of brighter or dimmer perceptions of the reasons for their distress, that sum to something a lot greater than the bare sum of their parts, into better, fairer, more decent lives for all of them? Hard, so hard to do, when there are so many who would turn the parts against the whole, for crass personal advantage, or for all those silly-at-a-distance tribal un-reasons?
Well, Brian has a nice thought. The response is as expected. Maybe the response to the response is to ask, "Where is your evidence that (in that hugely unlikely event) the Western Oligarchs WOULD support that kind of change?" It's sure not evident from the way the Game is currently being played. And these little snippets can hardly encompass all the myriad things that those Western potentates have done and are doing to involve themselves in and pretend to direct all that's happening. Oh, Look! No "Victory" or "Success" in Afghanistan, unless one insists on defining what's happened over the last what, eleven years, as "Success!" Yeah, we MEANT to do that, right? Says the GAO, the way you hit the target is to keep moving it into the path of the bullet: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652075.pdf Just change the definitions, right? http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/25/gao-military-lowering-bar-to-evaluate-afghan-troop-progress/
As always, there's this weird notion people have about "natural rights," always confronting and sometimes facing down the guys in uniforms who do what they can get away with to make the world safe for plutocracy, and often mysogynist patriarchy too. Until, as seen in Syria and elsewhere, some combination of nausea, self-interest and personal fear leads them to "switch sides."
For those who peddle, for various purposes and benefits, the latest World Existential Threat, "al Quaeda," as some revenant Monolithic Communism Planning to Do Something To Our Precious Freedom Rights and Bodily Fluids, there's this widely heralded Top Secret Document from a middle-manager Jihadi in Mali, supposedly uncovering, revealing, displaying for all to see the Master Plan of Al Quaeda to Take Over Everything, of which portions have been translated and published in netspaces like here: http://www.chrisjonesmedia.com/2013/02/14/al-qaeda-manifesto-left-behind-in-mali-provides-unprecedented-window-into-the-radical-islamist-terror-group/ Here's part of the blogger's reportage on something that others are laughing about, it's so typical of bureaucracy (https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihadi-middle-manager):
Perhaps the biggest concession Droukdel urges is for his fighters to slow down in implementing Shariah.
When the Islamic extremists took over northern Mali 10 months ago, they restored order in a time of chaos, much as the Taliban did in Afghanistan, and even created a hotline number for people to report crimes. But whatever goodwill they had built up evaporated when they started to destroy the city’s historic monuments, whip women for not covering up and amputate the limbs of suspected thieves.
“One of the wrong policies that we think you carried out is the extreme speed with which you applied Shariah, not taking into consideration the gradual evolution that should be applied in an environment that is ignorant of religion,” Droukdel writes. “Our previous experience proved that applying Shariah this way, without taking the environment into consideration, will lead to people rejecting the religion, and engender hatred toward the mujahedeen, and will consequently lead to the failure of our experiment.”
Droukdel goes on to cite two specific applications of Shariah that he found problematic. He criticizes the destruction of Timbuktu’s World Heritage-listed shrines, because, as he says, “on the internal front we are not strong.” He also tells the fighters he disapproves of their religious punishment for adulterers – stoning to death – and their lashing of people, “and the fact that you prevented women from going out, and prevented children from playing, and searched the houses of the population.”
“Your officials need to control themselves,” he writes.
Droukdel’s words reflect the division within one of al-Qaeda’s most ruthless affiliates, and may explain why Timbuktu, under the thumb of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, experienced a slightly less brutal version of Shariah than Gao, one of the three other major cities controlled by the extremists. There was only one amputation in Timbuktu over their 10-month rule, compared to a dozen or more in Gao, a city governed by an al-Qaeda offshoot, MUJAO, which does not report to Droukdel.
Droukdel’s warning of rejection from locals also turned out to be prescient, as Shariah ran its course in Timbuktu. The breaking point, residents say, was the day last June when the jihadists descended on the cemetery with pickaxes and shovels and smashed the tombs of their saints, decrying what they called the sin of idolatry.
Many in Timbuktu say that was the point of no return. “When they smashed our mausoleums, it hurt us deeply,” said Alpha Sanechirfi, the director of the Malian Office of Tourism in Timbuktu. “For us, it was game over.”
Maybe, Professor, you could give all of us the benefit of the whole text of that memo?
It's not hard to find, in the flood of Milbabble the War Department generates, much the same kinds of complaints about how to get anywhere in places we so kindly invade and occupy, on the pretext of Bringing Democracy to the Unenlightened. Oh, and "protecting National Interests and Installations and Assets."
There's that question, and that word, again. Sure seems to me that the question may be syntactically ok, but the premises and potential reality, just by observation, are made of Unobtainium. There's obviously no such thing as "peace," in the common understanding -- just relatively less violent hiatuses between active murderous interactions involving one set of humans or another, a flux of distemper that settles now here, now there, under various clouds of "interests" and "provocations" and "vendetta." It ain't even worth citing examples.
So here's another wicked seductive invitation to invest hope and effort in a "peace process." Which if you pivot to look at Israel and Palestine, breaking my intent not to cite examples, you have a classic example of futility built in to the expectations of hopeful people in and out of the Area of Confict, that is managed by cynical, greedy, violent, dishonest tribalists on both sides, working against the small energies of people seeking accommodation and, you know, "peace." That word that is supposed to be understood tacitly by all who hear it, since there's no definition that comports with the sense the average person uses it in: Calm, order, comity, stuff like that.
Just like that other phrase that the Machiavellis flap around and decline to define, "national interests," because defining what they mean might narrow their range of justification and argument. And spotlight their lack of interest in anything like that common-folk understanding of "peace."
The other part that matters, for people who are starving, or dying of thirst, or seeing the military leadership stealing their economies, or getting the business end of whatever rockets and bombs even a puny L-39ZA can carry, is this:
A quarter of the world's wealth, and growing, is dumped into armaments of all sexy and puny types, from little antipersonnel mines and 9 mm and 5.56 and 7.62x39 and RPG rounds, to F-16s and F-22s and F-35s, and tanks and littoral combat ships and submarines and all kinds of kinky, murderous munitions. And of course into assembling the many bits of the dysfunctioning, always-vulnerable, always on the edge of collapse, Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace thing, the stuff that no self-respecting Battle Manager would ever settle for less than, with all the necessary contracts and procurements for ever-more-complex "improvements." All, of course, marketed, heavily and actively and very profitably and with a fill range of "Defense Department" corrupt and corrupting initiatives and tactics and skills, by an overarching, interlocking, world-wide collective of "Defence Industry" corporations that actively share technology -- e.g., Chinese chips in US avionics and fire-control and guidance devices, that may or may not have trap doors and vulnerabilities built into them, for one small example. Of which only a tiny fraction might be said to be "fostering democracy" or "providing security," maybe only the part that ends up in the hands of the Opposition in places like Libya and Syria.
The Kabul-centric Afghanis who are soon to become the Thieus and Kys of this phase of the Forever War want the US to gift them with the sexy, heavy-duty stuff, to terrorize and dominate the indefatigable parts of their nominal polity with, and to "control their borders."
How does any of this world-wide arms-bazaar behavior, pioneered industrially by the Krupps in the runup to WW I, do damm-all anything beneficial for either the nations and peoples who are yoked into paying for all of it and suffer for the many failures of policy and "pragmatism" that the militarized rulers repeatedly display? As pointed out, the L-39ZA is only one of many attack jets out there, relatively simple but still deadly, and we are invited to do what, chortle? that like the Iranians post-Shah, saddled by the arms trade and US "policy" with F-4s and "older" stuff, were unable to do the skilled maintenance mostly contracted out by our own war machine, or get spare and replacement parts, so as to keep their sovereign air force, which every self-respecting nation has just got to have, flying and able to "control" its territory?
Yeah, it matters. But that's the downhill line we are on...
Can't hardly wait to see the actual details of this "drawdown," how many "bases" will remain, how many contractors, how many actual uniformed people doing exactly what. And who, officially, will be the last GI to die over there. And of course, as with what Everybody Knows Was The "Legal," "justified" Vietnam War, buried in the valleys and villages will be the actual true nature of the whole "UN" involvement, with all its corruption and covert violence. And once again the Grinning Chimps and Important Generals and Dick(less) Cheneys who spun up the Stupid will get to walk away into a warm sunset, and the machinery that converts wealth into war toys and Bugsplats will keep the drones, ever more of them, in the air.
By the way, here's little snippet for the edification of those who press so hard for the rest of us to just accept that "droning" is legal and trying to bury the patent unwisdom of the whole "counter-terrorism" schtick (maybe, for consistency and to highlight the futility, we should rename the Grand Global Effort the "War on Terrorism," since it's now eliding into that other futile and interminable smokescreen, the "War on Drugs." It's not like the Joint Command Structure is not already in place, along with the "transitioning" of weapons systems and brigades into that other profitable and perpetual fraud:
"Cheney Likes Something Obama's Doing: Drone Strikes!" This from the World Expert on What's Legal, What's Wise, and What He Can Get Away With, who also thinks:
-- Obama's national security team is "second rate."
-- Obama's foreign and national security policies are making the nation "vulnerable to the future." http://www.vpr.net/npr/171803738/ Cheney agrees -- doesn't that make you feel all justified?
WHAT 'fully capable" al Quaeda? the guys who pulled off the 9-11 event largely because "our" state security/police system was hobbled by local empire-building and careerist behaviors and such? "Fully capable" is how WE describe OUR Big Military Hammer, and maybe the Chinese when we are talking about "confronting them" in Cold War Part III, rather than buying their stuff and borrowing their money... You griped about my use of "scare quotes" way back when: Gee, is the use of "fully capable" maybe a whole lot worse, since my use of quotes is usually to denote disbelief and irony?
And while I'm at it, in the way of boosting your creds, how about this?
For all you apologist-jingoist-Chauvinist-Gaullist true believers working so hard and diligently and repetitively to abort the debate over US tactics and strategy in assassinating people in favor of Hegelian ACTing, here is some real comfort: In his usual best sneering, condescending manner, from his height as one who truly has done and shaken and really done some damage in the world, he is happy to report, in his best diplomatic formulation, that he “does not disagree with” the Obama approach to worldwide terminate-with-extreme-prejudice power projection, via what’s coming to be called “droning.” Of course it’s only ok for “us,” not anybody else who might use the same technology and justification to pick off, say, people like Cheney… (Footnote: Cheney says Obama’s foreign policy and security teams are “second rate,” and are setting “us” up for terminal weakness in the future…) http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/12/171803738/cheney-likes-something-obamas-doing-drone-strikes
See? That world-renowned, everybody-fears-him expert on what's legal, and what works in foreign policy and power projection, "doesn't disagree with you!" You must be really smart...
So "we" shoot Hellfires that more or less occasionally go astray and kill Unarmed Nonenema Cohabitants, or send in the SWATs, and do the apologists for Business as Usual say that this has no patent effect on the quantum of ire directed at "us?" That we are, so to say, in the persons of the guys and gals who do the signature and other targeting and launching and post-event obfuscations, on the same side with all those other populaces who "despise and hunt" that clumsy and over-conflated personification you guys flap around, "al Quaeda Communist Menace Whatever Huge Threat to US Interests, otherwise undefined of course, Like Embassies That Are Spy Nests And Destabilization Bases, and FOBs Planted by Invaders Who Are TRYING to Get The Wogs To Shoot At Us So We Can Justify Shooting Back?"
"Terrorism as a strategy doesn't work," but how many proofs are needed that "counter-terrorism" as a strategy, as implemented by the current mix of technologies and justifications and doctrines, also doesn't work?
(Cue the silence, or the canned response, with footnotes and shiny objects...)
Careful, Sherm -- you can't even IMAGINE what those AQAPs and those AFPAK tribespeople can do... their capabilities are, like, unknown, but undoubtedly GYNormous. They could do ANYthing! Shoe bombs, crotch bombs, dirty nuclear thingies, stuff with propane tanks, homebuilt submarines like the drug cartels who employ what, German and Swedish Milspec engineers, stuff with fertilizer and a rental truck in front of a Heartland Federal Building? Just imagine the infinity of threats they can threaten with! Haven't you read ANYthing by Tom Clancy or Dale Brown? Of COURSE it's totally rational to do whatever the Wise Folks tell us is Wise and Necessary to Protect Us!
We are so busy, starting from the premise that killing certain people will be the butterfly wing in Peking that somehow produces the world we insist we are entitled to, where a few of us continue to get very rich and combustion continues to be our hearth, working little complexities or implementing new technological gadgets that liberate the killers in us from constraint, debating the minuscule morality of tactics and volleying arguments about legalities created by being able to, you know, write the law to suit. Hey, guess how the world would be today if someone had killed a young Schikelgruber, or whatever his name was -- http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/06/opinion/l-hitler-never-really-was-schicklgruber-016390.html? Or Pol Pot? That rotten HoHoHoChiMinh? Or FDR?
Don't ask, either, by what authority "we" get to write that law, don't ask about the larger morality or long-term wisdom or anything other than how one pulls together "serious" bits of text and emotion that can be strung into a plausible if disingenuous rationalization for doing stupid stuff that does what, again, to prolong the species? To make life better and safer and saner for most people?
Sorry the linkage seems obscure. Just pointing out how, over time, most people left more or less alone tend to adjust to differences that were worth killing for just a short while earlier. And that a relatively few people of selfish interest and bad intent can, obviously, by playing on certain flawed bits of our design, stir up one mass insanity after another. And how what I call Players,, pursuing other selfish interests, can by giving or withholding weapons and doing destabilizations and invading and stuff, unbalance the neighborhood again and again. My guess is that would happen over time, even in places like Tunisia and Syria and even Afghanistan when Karzai takes off for Dubai or wherever, and what's going on in Myanmar and in Egypt where the ruling juntas have discovered their over-predations and repression threaten their profits and positions.
My thought is there's lots of people with posthole diggers and microscopes, looking at and even seemingly mastering little bits of the panorama, but as with the blindfolded philosophers debating the nature of the elephant from knowledge gained only by handling a tail, a trunk, a tusk, a leg, there's some virtue in broadening the focus and thinking beyond the parochial, trying to take in all the parts, so the critter is seen in full dimension. If nothing else, as a way to avoid being trampled.
And no, I don't begin to claim to know the whole nature of the elephant. But I've been stepped on and whacked by its trunk, and seen what it does to the carefully tended maize and sorhgum...
My nightmares are about bland, reassuring, seemingly wise and seemingly fact-laden (if incompletely depicted) people with blog-post-sized answers for everything, with portfolios of carefully selected and crafted rationales and examples, that apologize for and justify what, in my tiny little appreciation of the world, are behaviors that threaten, not protect, my kids and grandkids, and sure seem to be part of a long repeat of other imperial slides into oblivion that always take a lot of other plain old people down too. The myth you sell, very convincingly when one accepts your postulates anyway, is that all this is "legal," by sovereign fiat "AUMF," and "wise," per policy documents of the day, and run by "competent" people. All like my favorite example, the Vietnam "war," that wonderful expensive stupid Catch-22ism based on an idiot, fraudulent notion of the world. And on the other side, the Soviet investment in Afghanistan. Among just two of the larger ones. And how about the whole tail-chase of spending a quarter, and increasing, of the world's wealth on armaments and atavistic war games?
Time for us to really grow up, not just put on suits and uniforms and claim to be doing really serious grown-up stuff, and spending billions asymmetrically and stupidly to gratify Generals' and politicians' egos and enrich a predatory and destructive few. Like the Egyptian and Iranian militaries, and our own, so thoroughly enmeshed in and draining their respective cultures.
Not to worry, though, Joe, all the money and momentum are on the side you stand up so comfortingly for. Too bad for the rest of us. 'Cuz after all, EEEK! Terraists! Threat! AUMF! Hellfire!
And again, why so much effort, day after day, to convince everyone who reads in these pages of the Rightness and Wisdom and Inevitability of Hellfire and Forever War? What are the national interests in play, again?
A long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious." There are less pejorative definitions, of course.
Thanks! I guess... And the above snaps another impeachment bullet into the banana clips of the full-auto guns of Bill and Joe... I wonder if the discourse would be more illuminating or civil if we were all face-to-face instead of keyboard to keyboard, picking up the non-verbal clues, having to account for impulses to comity and acquiescence and altruism, feeling the guilt of overbearing, redolent of pheromones and earnestness... Wait, wait, I know the answer to that one!
We can do so much better, as a species. Any bets on whether we will? Any Grand Ideas on how Better might actually happen? Or is it all tactics and strategy, targeted at Others?
It's morning on Earth. People get up, open the shutters on their houses and shops, bake the bread, pluck the chickens, wash their children's faces and hands, and go about their day-to-day. Over time, that ordinariness creates the wealth that makes the overlay, the largely predatory overlay, of "civilization," possible, with all the face-to-face chatter and jostling, and seems to tend to eventually, even after horrible, hate-engendering conflicts, to eventually produce a tolerable level of "slack:" that variable tolerance of differences, the shrugging off of petty and larger corruption, the ebb and flow of fellow-feeling that makes community and over centuries has even most of the Irish on the same page. For the time being. In a condition of felt legitimacy and stability, or meta-legitimacy and meta-stability, that being "the behavior of certain physical systems that can exist in long lived states that are less stable than the system's most stable state."
Seems like the trick is always figuring out how to keep those whose skills lie in self-advancement, by sharp dealing, promotion of conflict, aggravation of differences, plain old random or planned violence, and the ability to organize for and promote their cause, or just obscure death wishes, from nudging the gyroscope against its bearings, sending it off in some precessed quantum direction that can't be anticipated by our limited Newtonian understandings.
And of course the Game field is now worldwide, with lots of players who don't walk in the streets and have to greet the neighbors every day. Possible moves in the Game: Give these guys or those guys weapons and training? Bring this or that "leader" to this or that capital to give him or her encouragement or creds, and send him or her back, reinforced? Foment this or that bit of mass violence? Put out this or that "policy" cover for this or that stratagem that serves interests unrelated, except via the network of string theory maybe, to that person pulling the laundry out on one of the many lines that link the tenements? While some people, cursed with the larger empathy and a wider view of what keeps the species going, day to day, promote reading programs or microloans or jirgas or the other ligatures that can tie people, with their limbic systems ever on alert for pleasure, pain or power, together in ways that promote social homeostasis.
We are all increasingly and mutually vulnerable, though the asymmetry of vulnerability is also increasing, to the point that the elements that control our wilder exuberances and riots in smaller spaces and locales are attenuated to the point of insensibility, leading in the recent past and still on the books to the Cold War endgame planning where the political elite goes off to their deep, well-larded bunkers, to wait out the radioactive decay and the rotting of all those bodies, or now to the little people who dress up in their suits or uniforms, kiss the wife and kids, and drive off to offices and trailers where they select and execute the day's Hellfire targets. Because after all, day to day, that's what the system crafted by all those crafty people, earnest and perverse, pays them to do, what keeps them and their loved ones in bread and chicken fricassee or cordon bleu.
Poison gas and germ warfare are tactics too, as are nuclear weapons. As are covert assassinations and decapitations. There are reasons why some tactics don't get used, unless you think you can get away with them, have "legal cover" and are arrogant enough to not care about that stupid thing, "public opinion." Or the eyes are on short-term advantages, or mythical notions of "policy."
And of course the drone program may not produce trillions in wealth transfers to the neoKrupps who produce the MQhardware and software, but it's in the hundreds of billions, what used to be called "real money," and there are floods of side businesses that get wealthy off the entire war industry, so everyone in it is looking for excuses and reasons to continue the Game, and of course they would NEVER manufacture those reasons out of comfortable whole cloth, now would they?...
What? No refutation from our resident experts on "legality?" Is silence to be taken as assent, then, as they have sometimes argued? Or is this one of those "say nothing, and hope nobody notices" kind of moments?
To answer your first question: Naw, of course not. It's just part of the whole thing that does cost in the trillions, the thing you argue constantly to justify "legally," since apparently there's not much wisdom arguable in doing all the stuff "we" are doing, the whole "global war on terror" though of course we can't call it that any more, now can we?
What is your concise statement of "our national interests," again? The ones that are threatened by al Quaeda and all those terrorists out there? And any betting on who will be the last guy or gal in US uniform to be remembered as the last one to die after "we" vacate Afghainistan, "mission accomplished?" As you say, "Care to make it interesting?" Maybe we could gin up a lottery on the date that will be inscribed for that last idiot death on whatever memorial us wistful homebodies cobble up to sanctify the sacrifices of others?
McNamara-style "cost-effectiveness" thinking, the kind that even he acknowledged after the fact was stupid and maybe even evil, currently trumps not only the "legal" considerations, it also brushes away almost all consideration of what some here sneer at as "alternatives." "We have the tools, we have the talent! It's Miller (tm) time!" Yeah, there are day-to-day "necessities," the product of yesterday's STUPID, that the whizzzz-BANG! kids can elevate as excuses for what they really want to do anyway. But who's supposedly looking out for what all Empires supposedly claim as their birthright, that "thousand year" endurance? and gee, what about that idiot notion of promoting the general welfare, stuff like not eating ourselves out of house and planetary home, since food and shelter and stuff are even important to hegemonists, over the long haul? Yeah, I know, "al Quaeda!" and "national interest!" and "security!" and all that jazzzz.
But once again, each human works, most of them, to maximize his or her own pleasure and profit during his or her little lifetime, aided by the kind of forebrain activity that Joe and Bill exemplify that makes whatever they immediately want to do "all right," ignoring that lesson in kindergarten where you are offered one piece of candy now, or five if you can go all day without hitting anyone... "Apres moi, le deluge," after all, so who cares?
"This is war." Half a trillion bucks a year to do what, again? "Take down" a possible hundred or so people who might not be malleable and amenable to the Overall Grand Plan? In light of the reality that the most effective tools against the behavior called "terrorism" have in fact been plain old LAW ENFORCEMENT, gumshoe, cops-and-robbers plays?
"WAR!?" As redefined and expanded by those who keep repeating and repeating the position you espouse, in the hope that no one will maybe have any niggling little thoughts about "wisdom," once the latest version of John Yoo has offered a nice-sounding "legal argument" and "justification" and "don't you worry about mission creep, all you taxpaying citizens and illegal aliens, we're all over this" suave reassurance.
On another front, sure seems the Constitution and the US Criminal Justice System do not apply to some other aspects of the Imperial Presidency that have been chewed over in Informed Comment and other place, and the creeping, nay, galloping pace, of State Securitization, as in what's been done to all those Dangerous Occupiers by illegal detentions and gas and beatings and getting shot in the face by "non-lethal projectiles." All of which, of course, have been "justified" by the same bunch who tell us that Droning and Assassination are, you know, "legal," because "AUMF!" Nor does the "law" apply, apparently, to Banksters, or contractors to the War Department, etc....
One wonders if there will be immunity from arbitrariness, or maybe some kind of reward structure for people who speak up on behalf of the Lordlings. It worked, for a time, for Quislings and such-like...
So was/is Alan Dershowitz. No magic involved in having mastered the lingo and niceties of a particular body of scholarship. Bork was a con law perfesser too, and many would say that Earl Warren knew a thing or two about it. For every proposition of rights and obligations under the general umbrella of the "Constitution," as extended by the Bill of Rights and a long history of push and shove over crap like "substantive due process" that's back in vogue, there's a countervailing proposition, rule, interpretation, gloss, shading, et cetera.
As the neocons and the War Department and much of State and of course the CIA are wont to say, "there is only power." "Rights" are for suckers. And so are the "legal" pasties and g-string, which really don't conceal all that much of that raddled, poxed fille de joie, now do they?
OK, Bill: who criticizes folks for logical fallacies, alla time. What is that one? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Like the guy in Times Square carrying the elephant gun, claiming success in keeping the wild elephants away?
"Sharia Law" is the new "Red Menace." There's a burka-hawking "towelhead" under the bed, now...
Hope you are right. I think the "stupid" is institutionalized and insuperable. Too much momentum, too much invested, too many "offices" and "commands" working off "stupid" doctrines and dogmas and dictionaries, too many people starting their educations by aiming for degrees in "security." Like how about a Masters degree in "Homeland Security?" http://www.militarytimesedge.com/education/degree-programs/ed_strat_homelandsecurity_degrees_030711w/
Bill just knows that there is this huge and growing secret army of the night out there, more inimical than even Amway, who is just itching to come and get us and take our stuff and put burkas on our females after violating them and keeping us from going to Walmart and other evil deeds, millions and millions of them, and he's all for destroying our village, and theirs, or any village that might be near one of theirs, in order to keep the evil juices of al Quaeda from polluting our precious bodily fluids...
Lots of talk about proportionality, not much of it from the standpoint of what it costs our culture to deal with something the scope of minor eczema. A trillion dollars every year or so, to be able to occasionally kill a few people, and maybe some people who are unwise enough to associate with, those targeted individuals someone has decreed to be Unlawful Enema Combatants?
"To claim that one cannot be both a soldier and a criminal is to argue that nothing done in the prosecution of a war can be illegal."
I guess I am missing something that I am sure will be pointed out, but it sure seems like you and Bill argue, very plainly, albeit behind a screen of "legalisms," that indeed pretty much nothing "we" do in the prosecution of a war can be illegal. Indeed, that "necessity" dictates that EVERYthing any more is a WAR and therefore open season.
Does that mean that generals who run prisons like Abu Ghraib, and generals and colonels and captains who operate(ed) killing machines like the ones that it finally appears were running in Vietnam and other places nominally as "wars," self-declared "wars," with no possible good end, no strategic successes (except in apologists' screeds), no advancement of US interests, can be held as criminals? Or did your predecessors in polemics carry the day in figuring out little corner-shot "legal arguments" for why our former and (as the arguments you contend for) present "actors" are in the "legal" right in the operation of the current killing machines, thus immunizing them from consequences?
(Re good ends, I see the Kabulists are lobbying for a huge bunch of high-dollar, high-prestige weapon systems, F-16s for crissake, to be gifted to them by "the UN." U.S., Afghanistan At Odds Over Weapons Wish List, http://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/171194064/u-s-afghanistan-at-odds-over-weapons-wish-list To "control their borders." Which extend exactly where? Since they don't seem interested in figuring out how to "control" their nominal subjects, and like their predecessors seem to be setting up to try to hold on to just the personally richest bits for as long as they can.At least the Afghanistan "war" sort of looked like a "war." AUMF and all. If congress happened to withdraw the AUMF, the linchpin of your whole argument, could we all go home? and let the cops go back to work?)
Another question I just have to ask: What is so important about blogs like this that folks like you have to keep trying to pound down any little pseudopod of a notion that maybe what "we" are doing is neither "legal," nor right, nor just, nor wise (then and now and once again -- see, e.g. the Phoenix Program, the official version and the extended reality like http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175635/)
You guys are getting to the point of self-parody.
(Wait for it... wait for it... here comes the withering riposte...)
Yeah, we all know the Mightiest Nation on Earth Ever, that can't seem to clobber into submission even a bunch of rock-dwelling tribespeople or paddy-farming rice eaters, has a combination Get Out Of Jail Free Card and Swiss Army knife full of Really Cool Blades...
Too bad the cliques that rule us don't have a penchant or knack for doing anything actually productive or positive that might prolong our species' miserable tenure on the planet. And that's not to say that any other set of ruling elites is any better at unproductive and unhealthy (except for the ones who rule and profit), of course. Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Battista and the Shah and even Saddam and a bunch of South and Central American and African dictators (which strange to say, often gained their positions thanks to US efforts, intended or otherwise -- not Hitler -- except IBM, and a few other sympathetic helpers -- and Stalin, of course) were and are Not Nice People.
The potential was there for us to do so much better... except "limbic system."
Oh, we hear, but the UN thinks this is all hunky-dory! and after all, AUMF!
Here's a fraction of an interesting article, discountable of course 'cuz it comes from the Guardian, which has an "agenda," about what the UN guys who will be looking into droning have to say, under the headline "Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur -- US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings 'may encourage other states to flout international law'":
Heyns ridiculed the US suggestion that targeted UAV strikes on al-Qaida or allied groups were a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. “It’s difficult to see how any killings carried out in 2012 can be justified as in response to [events] in 2001,” he said. “Some states seem to want to invent new laws to justify new practices.
“The targeting is often operated by intelligence agencies which fall outside the scope of accountability. The term ‘targeted killing’ is wrong because it suggests little violence has occurred. The collateral damage may be less than aerial bombardment, but because they eliminate the risk to soldiers they can be used more often.”
Of course, there's a lot more that kind of undercuts the apologist arguments about how all this is, you know, LEGAL, in the linked article. Forgive me for re-posting it in this spot, but it bears some searching inquiry.
But hurry up to point out that the "9-11" justification is, as they said in the Vietnam era, "no longer operative," since of course the "al Quaeda" we define are, you know, doing stuff to US interests at this very moment!!!!" And SOMEthing just HAS to be done with all that technology, you know. Wack-a-Mole, with the added nice feature of, you know, Jobs!, and a seemingly perpetual motion machine that generates new Moles and new Holes and, mirabile dictu, Bigger Hammers and an ever-larger playing surface!
Was this thing plumbed to a producing well? Short video, but it looks like an awful lot of bubbles and froth. Would Joe have any tears if the incident was a blowout? Or is chauvinist schadenfreude more important than, like, bigger stuff?
For fun, let's remember BP-in-the-Gulf Tony Heyward, who wants his life back:
For those who like to hear both sides, I guess, there are always places like this link, which of course carries a full load of amygdala-originated comments:
Is it maybe a matter of how one goes about buy out the jobs of those who go down to the earth in skips? Big Coal sure knows how to play on the fears and traditions of the people they steal the labor of. Who in turn, like the folks at Lockheed-Martin, form up a loud constituency in favor of keeping the F-22 line churning, and the mountains being topped, because hey, "jobs program!"
Hey, did I read somewhere that the total number of workers in coal mining is about 105,000? In a population of 310 million? Not many horsedrawn carriages or buggy whips are made these days, so that part of the culture is gone. Why not just release the people who find meaning in mining, or at least a "living wage" at the Appalachian standard from the need to strip the land and hope their number does not come up, every working day, thanks to heedless, greedy management and the inherent dangers?
You'd think that the costs to the planet, saved from reduced dumping of externalities via the subsidized continued coal combustion, would justify some kind of stipend to feed and clothe and house them and their families.
Hey, if the Reds can jerry-rig and gerrymander the electoral process (along with buying better, slicker, less odious candidates), why not do the world a favor by unlinking that unholy coalonialization in places like PA and WV and OH?
Hey, you Dems: Stand up and fight for your planet, for God's sake.
Joe, which UN are you talking about? The one whose Special Rapporteur had something quite different to say, as reported by the Guardian?
Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur -- US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings 'may encourage other states to flout international law'
The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.
Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.
In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)....
Heyns ridiculed the US suggestion that targeted UAV strikes on al-Qaida or allied groups were a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. "It's difficult to see how any killings carried out in 2012 can be justified as in response to [events] in 2001," he said. "Some states seem to want to invent new laws to justify new practices.
"The targeting is often operated by intelligence agencies which fall outside the scope of accountability. The term 'targeted killing' is wrong because it suggests little violence has occurred. The collateral damage may be less than aerial bombardment, but because they eliminate the risk to soldiers they can be used more often."....
The Pakistani ambassador declared that more than a thousand civilians had been killed in his country by US drone strikes. "We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the war against terror. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them," he said.
Claims made by the US about the accuracy of drone strikes were "totally incorrect", he added. Victims who had tried to bring compensation claims through the Pakistani courts had been blocked by US refusals to respond to legal actions.
Quite a flood of heavy-artillery reinforcement in support of the Narrative, there. Bring smoke on 'em, Chester!
As to arguments over the existence vel non of the Clinton Doctrine and that tu quoque about the Brezhnev doctrine, nicely played. And the slam on Chomsky was a classic of understated dismissal.
As to the really good stuff that the US is doing (forgive the hypostatization, I know it's only a small fragment of us) as the latest extension of the United Fruit Doctrine, so aptly described by my man Gen. Smedley Butler as "nothing but a racket," there's a nice little video snippet here, albeit from that unAmerican, agenda'd al Jazeera, on one little bit. And I am just sure that GIs brought up on counter-whicheveritis are going to just go in and open up a can of whip-a55 on the whole drug business Down There: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/06/201268104039976309.html
And for another Left-Liberal screed to denigrate as "having an agenda," how about this 2002 observation, which has only been trumped and outdated by tacking the Drug War flag to the military masthead:
...not enough attention is being given to the long-term risks of U.S. military training and weapons transfers. The sale of F-16s to Chile may prompt its neighbours to seek similar technology.
Spending money on high-tech weapons at a time of economic uncertainty and when basic human needs are not being met should be challenged by those in both the purchasing and the producing countries. Weapons and training have long shelf-lives. They are gifts that ‘keep on giving’ and not always for the good. Training given for counter-narcotics purposes can be identical to training given for counter-insurgency. How newly acquired skills are applied is entirely in the hands of the recipients, not those who originally funded the training. [See, e.g., Taliban, al Quaeda.} A share of responsibility for future acts weighs upon those who have brought new skills to a military force. The wisdom of consistently training large numbers of troops in a region with no serious cross-border conflicts should be challenged.
If the U.S. military relationship with Latin America were restructured with the long-term promotion of human security as its goal, the relationship would be much different than that we see today. It would show greater concern for the role that the Latin American militaries play in relation to their own civilian institutions and not promote mission expansion beyond matters of national defence, and certainly not promote new roles in countries where the civilian government is trying to limit the role of the military. It would be more cautious about training and weapons transfers, and show more concern about the need to limit military expenditures in states where a significant percentage of the population lives in poverty.
Of course poverty, with its attendant upward wealth transfer to the present generation of the elect, satisfied with "Apres moi, le deluge," is sort of one face of the overall strategy, right?
Dulles and Wild Bill are dead. So. Nothing possibly could be behind that curtain...
Interesting what you learn as you wander the wordspace. For instance, kind of interesting the crossovers you encounter.
A filibuster, or freebooter, is someone who engages in an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country to foment or support a revolution. The term is usually used to describe United States citizens who attempted to foment insurrections in Latin America in the mid-19th century, but is also applicable in the modern day.
Filibusters are irregular soldiers who act without authority from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure. The freewheeling actions of the filibusters of the 1850s led to the name being applied figuratively to the political act of filibustering in the United States Congress.[1] "Freebooter" is the more familiar term in British English, in which "filibuster" normally only refers to the legislative tactic.
One reason what I guess we might call "decapitation" is somewhat problematical is that it is so easily converted into a game of tit-for-tat. In pre-Clausewitz war days (I know, hardly a universal behavior, what with the original Assassins and all that), it was seen not only as bad form but maybe counterproductive to kill off enemy leaders, political and military, since "the enemy you know," and all that, and if you snipe at them, they might do the same to you, or your family or friends...
(Sub-rule in context: If you shoot at the king, general, Fearless Leader, Imam, warlord, whatever, you better be sure you kill him, and not just crank up his followers, and you ought to be pretty sure that picking him off will not cascade into something worse for the "interests" of the Home Team.)
And as to re-casting the "rule of law" that some folks want us to think is being preserved and observed here, it's pretty clear that "our" interpretation is as Chomsky observes: unidirectional and arbitrary. Everyone else, on penalty of "covert" death, has to observe and abide by what "we" decide. "We" who more and more are tiny self-selected bunch, claiming the mantles of High Purpose and Necessity, pretty much immune from the hurly-burly of policy arm-wrestling that might include a broader discussion of aims and interests and means, doing what they damm please behind a pretty skimpy G-string and pasties with some little labels called "AUMF" and "UNSC Resolutions" and "John Yoo" on them.
There's a reason Shakespeare put those words in Dick the Butcher's mouth, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
And for those who might be inclined to buy, wholesale, the repeated assertions that "our" drone assassinations are "legal," please note a significant division of opinion. Like the views and argument laid out here: http://law.wustl.edu/harris/documents/OConnellFullRemarksNov23.pdf Among many others.
The apologist's dilemma: Refrain from repeating the refrain here, and hope observations like these by Engelhardt and Chomsky (that socialist unAmerican) just slide by unremarked, in the hope that no one will pay much attention, or load up the usual comfortable doses of Conventional Wisdom and Inevitability, to inject, insensibly, with as much savoir faire and confident elan as possible?
It's not, of course, that anyone of any significance, who might see suddenly in a different light on their own road to Damascus and maybe be in a position to act to change the underlying policy behaviors, anyone of Player significance that is, is in danger of encountering chains of thought like those that creep out of these impotent corners, the notion that "we don't and can't and don't need to own the world" and "our policies may actually be ensuring that we will not be enduring." It's not even clear that the folks who surface these notions really even want them acted upon, after all. They profit from U.S., LLC too, after all.
Better to just let it lie flopping and gasping for breath, or try to smother or strangle it? Hmmmmmm... Maybe a distraction...
Yeah, in cases of such grand collective guilt, how could anyone ever want people who actually make the day to day, micromoment decisions to get rich off stealing the value of all those ordinary individuals' investments and homes, to what did the old movies say, "face the music?" What a joke to say that adding a little spice of the fear of prosecution and jail time to the swill of greed that the FEW who actually profit, hugely, from all this, swim in? You really have all the hack arguments ready to hand, in between the personalities...
Aaaawww, what would make you say that? Joe is just trying tokeep the rest of us honest. To make sure we know how little we really know of all the important stuff that is being done in our names and for us and to us...
So much, once again, for the idiot hubris of the Late-Roman-Empire "world's greatest deliberative body." Subject, for a fistful of dollars, to the inevitably mortal tyranny of the minority:
Of course, all that analysis requires accepting as a postulate that there's this monadic entity called "foreign policy," and I bet Schopenhauer or one of those guys could point out a whole lot of flaws in that notion. He did have some other insights that might throw some more shadow on the immediate issue:
AIPAC and all the other special courtiers have mastered the relatively easy subversion of the institutions that are supposed generally to "promote the general welfare." Organize, concentrate, metastasize. More money = more malignancy.
Just a thought: this guy will be "in charge" of a real Behemoth-of-many-self-interested-parts, all attached to the tax teat by a large-bore vacuum orifice. He may have experience of what "war," the traditional notion of mano-a-mano combat is, from his Vietnam gig, and hopefully that will give him some backbone to resist really worst efforts of the Villager war wimps and chicken-policy-hawks, to spare other young men (and now women) and various "gooks" and "towelheads" and such the horrors of loosing all those ever-growing piles of increasingly lethal weapons into actual use.
Running an "enterprise," a Milo Minderbinder kind of "enterprise," is another kind of game that masquerades behind the glory facade of WAR. He will be "in charge of" a huge amount of wealth transfer, from butter to bullets, orchestrated by a bunch of Harpies all screaming or sneaking around pushing their favorite Procurement Program or "service interests." A 600-ship navy, with lots of places for Admirals to hang their ever-more-populous flags? More manned fighters and attack aircraft and bombers, requiring more General managers, or more increasingly autonomous UAVs? Gotta give the Marines something to do, to keep the sword's edge sharp. And all that Black Ops stuff, with no guarantee he or the hopefully loyal members of his staff (all bound, supposedly, by that now-silly oath to "support and defend the Constitution") will even know about.
Maybe he could take a shot at enforcing simple (heh, heh) fiscal principles and accounting and accountability, so that the Gods of the Beltway could at least have a complete picture of what they are buying, in men, machines and "policy" magnets, for all that money they get from us and from places like the Social Security Trust Fund. Maybe he would take an interest in the (inevitable, I guess) corruption and incompetence in the whole War Industry game, dialing it back down to something a little less painfully obvious. Maybe he could take another shot at not just spray-painting another shade of "green" on the edifice, but actually putting all those resources to work addressing not who gets to use up the last bits of oil and water and air, but preserving them for some kind of posterity.
All in a huge bureaucracy, staffed by people who know their tenure outlasts his, with their little interests and games. In a place with nominal "traditions" and "services" that span centuries, careers that span generations, programs that span decades. And with lobbyists and contractors circling, circling, circling... How does all that begin to be "managed" and "directed," I'm way too small to begin to understand.
My bet is he will be another nice figurehead, of a trillion-plus-a-year, heavily-armed (in all theatres, all nine AORs that cover the whole planet) operation. Presiding over a huge bureaucracy, with all the hidden niches and enormous momentum that keeps a guy in his new position from really doing much more than re-arranging the window dressing and a few seating positions and office assignments. On a large scale, he's a bus driver, making thousands of life-or-death decisions every second of every minute he's behind the wheel: steering, braking, acceleration, stopping, re-fueling, who to let on and off the bus, following some kind of route and trying to avoid collisions.
Wish him luck... and hope his driving keeps us from something Really Stupid, like WW Whatever Number We Are On. All those thousands of short-target-time nukes are still deployed, after all.
So is it a good thing that the generals have such a large pecuniary stake in kind of keeping the lianas that bind whatever common polity there is in Egypt together and in reasonably good working order? One wonders if they are wise enough to appreciate their parasitic reality, and adaptable enough to accept that maybe they at least have to make a show of working on stability and legitimacy of a central government that seems to this dilettante to have not so much to do, any more. And the many apparent cleavage planes of that enormous diamond in the rough sure are looking to be feeling the stresses that end in a rupture.
Of course, over time, assuming the species can accomplish its own survival, "recovery" ensues, as in places like Ireland and Lebanon and others, people get sick and tired of killing each other for tribal reasons, you have a Romeo&Juliet moment, the Cap'ulites make up with the Montajews, and a new climb up to oligarchy and dissolution resumes.
It's a lot easier to break stuff than to make stuff, and of course very profitable for the breakers as a general rule.
What were the justifications for prolonged US, er, UN involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, again? I do remember one in particular: "We broke it, now we have to fix it." Too bad nations and their fragments are not curios in the china shop, "fixable" with a little Superglue (tm)...
"the U.S. may wax nostalgiac over the Assad era." As some U.S.ans are doing over the Saddam Hussein era, and I bet many Iraqis and other eths are too. How 'bout them Iraqi Oil Reserves and development contracts, hey?
A constant theme with Bill and Joe seems to be that "we," us dilettantes who don't reside in one of the Rings of Power, should just leave all this to the "experts."
Took a walk down memory lane, hearing an interview of the guy who wrote one of the many "Vietnam" books, "DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle." Reminded me of just how idiotic the whole thing was, top to bottom, winning hearts and minds by invading them and killing them and trashing their land to "stop Commyanism," with lots of real-world evidence inescapably concluding that "we" did not even achieve our modest re-re-re-re-re-re-revised goals of leaving a government in half a country that could defend its borders and not be allied with the USSR. A much bigger enemy than the current one, albeit painted the same color.
Apparently a lot of GIs from the present land wars are coming to the same realization, some, many even, to the point of suicide.
McNamara was an "expert," a great business success and a wonderful War Manager. Kissinger was (and is) an "eggsbert," in everything, at all times. Petraeus was (and is) an "expert" in the Brassing of his position, and the promotion of elevated doctrines of serial failure pedigree, and so are the other general officers who are masters of complexity and interoperability and procurement and logistics and dare one say it, institutionalized corruption so big that it can't even attempt to be audited.
Since maybe even Eisenhower, it sure don't seem to me that we have been served by much in the way of effective, win-it or even break-even, expertise.
Got anything more than bits of serial drive-by italicized impeachment?
Or is it worth the time to write out what the real situation is, in your estimation, and what the etiology was, and what the end-game and flux and flow of the policies and behaviors you apologize for is supposed to be? My guess, if you haven't done so elsewhere, is that Prof. Cole would consider giving you a guest podium gig.
Or would that just open up a can of worms, or expose stuff that is currently hidden or ignored or misdirected away from, as part of keeping the same old ball in the same old play? Not to mention retaliatory serial drive-by impeachment, of course, which once again obscures the big picture behind little frames of sarcasm and "Incorrects."
"War is cheap! at these prices..." Of course that facile argument may be tongue in cheek, one would hope. Completely begs the question of what ought to be done with a trillion or two a year that could be "borrowed" at your zero cost to fund shit like transition to a national health care system, repairing or replacing all the bridges that are on the point of falling down, putting back the money (whatever that is, any more) "borrowed" from the Social Security HaHa Trust Fund, encouraging post-combustion energy provisions, securing our food supplies (short of subsidies to the Soylent Corporation), stuff like that.
And of course from my little stack of 3 x 5s, augmented by a zillion examples of corruption and inefficiency and clumsy idiot Bigness, we should remember the fundamental truth, however obscured by apologists and the intense lovers of all things uniform and deadly and expensive, "War is nothing but a racket. Any more, "War," as you indicate, is not about national goals achieved after honest debate -- it's about wealth transfer of Created Money (that for the players, spends just like the dollars in my bi-weekly paycheck) to be-medaled, over-acronymed, overgrown children who want what they want when they want it: "Experimenting with warfare has seldom been so cheap, easy or safe as it is for the peoples of today's West." Which kind of establishes that it is not "war" as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and the Marine Hymn apprehend it.
And I bet Yves Smith, over there at nakedcapitalism, may have a very different notion of the accounting when it comes to toting up the actual costs, internal and external, of the cancerous, metastatic growth of the War Culture. Dare one ask what the endpoint is? Species death, enhanced by encouragement of the behaviors that heat up the planet? And solar panels on the Humvee's roof don't begin to be green enough to do more than give the PR liars a talking point.
Gee, Joe, the War Guys who run the Pentagram and the really deep policy people and the folks who feed the news hens in the FOX coop sure sold and sell it to us as something where a misty water-coolered vision called "Victory" and "Success" and "Defeat of the Enemy" are what it was, is and will be, for all the wealth and bodies we feed it, in future spasms of expensive imperial invasion and rout. Or was that public face of the whole thing just "profoundly misguided?" As in "The whole idea is to keep the public who pays in the total darkness (except for the mandatory 'light at the end of the tunnel') about what the Game Really Is"?
So that once again, after trillions of dollars and (hundreds of) thousands of lives, and further warpage of "civil society," inter alia to prolong the
Oiligarchy, the Smart Guys can come up, post hoc, with all the reasons why, "yeah, we really meant to do that!" and "It's NOT MY FAULT!" And the people that bring us these "wars," these rackets, these meaningless, mindless transfers of wealth, gaily painted in patriotic colors with banners flying reading "National Interest!" are going to tell the folks who pay for them, every which way, that any "analysis of the military question" that does not follow the Script for the Narrative is what, again? WEAK?
And you toss the author off in three sentences. Do you have three sentences that can capture and explain what the "national interests" are that made it mandatory to march on into a place like Afghanistan, all drums and bugles and "We're Gonna Win This Sucker?
And yep, "it's complicated," too complicated to be understood except by the parasites who live in the belly of it, because there are so many ways that billions of dollars can be disappeared, and there's always the excuse that "Stuff happens" on accounta the unknown unknowns, don't you non-military-cognoscenti know?
Don't like what Engelhart and Turse and folks who study the Beast and its behaviors from outside? Pretty weak to relegate them to "second to several." Like some of your retired generals and war wimps who Speak The Lingo?
With the possible exception of WW II, every US "war" since then has been a "victory-fail" bust from the standpoint of the Common Man... And WW I, where the General Officers set in motion the notion that They Had A Plan and Had Everything Under Control. And here we are, back to wars of attrition, where the wearing down is done by guys in turbans with WW I rifles, RPGs, and re-gifted Good Old American Ordnance. What nonsense.
Bearing in mind the way "we" are ordering and conducting ourselves, dumping a huge and growing chunk of our national wealth into a "war" that is conveniently not required to be "declared," and where no one can state, simply, the huge national interests that justify that, other than stating a "threat" that maybe some asymmetric warriors and sneaks might do bad again, and taking full advantage of the ration of noise and hate that has cynically been used to keep us all fearful of "another 9/11," and the refrain that all this GWOT stuff is sui generis, so there is nothing to be learned from past rations and rounds of Stupid, like the cliffward deflection of the whole human world system that began with the Great War:
It is hard to define the role of strategy in modern war, to decide the limits wherein it begins and ends. War is no longer in essence an act of policy, "a continuation of policy by other means," but a supreme effort to break the resistance of the whole enemy population. ... Every kind of measure, whatever its political, financial or economic consequences, may be justified on military grounds alone as essential for winning the war. Briand might well complain that "modern war is too serious a business to be entrusted to soldiers." But the monstrous paradox remains true that the more important the war, the less say the responsible statesmen among the belligerents are likely to have in waging it.
... As everyone knows, the unrestricted submarine campaign was forced through by the general staff in spite of Berthmann-Hollweg's resistance, who foresaw the consequences of provoking the United States beyond remedy. ...It needed but a word from the High Command to overthrow them.
It is clear that the Germans, sentimental, submissive, hierarchical and desperate, welcomed the almost absolute and all-embracing domination of strategy…
Cruttwell, C. R. M. F., The Role of British Strategy in the Great War. Cambridge [Eng.] University Press, 1936
Why is this last paragraph so reminiscent of the state of "the Americans" these days? And in case it ain't clear, Cruttwell's point is that the people who are supposed to conduct the interests of nations have, since 1914, largely been shut up and ignored by the militarists, who settle on "strategies" like Global Wars on Terror and counter-insurgency and tactics and strategies like Droning, in wars and other "involvements," where the ability to simply "do something" (like U-boat warfare in WW I, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat_Campaign_%28World_War_I%29) leads to surprising and could one say negative results.
On the other hand, who cares? Joe and Bill and their side sure have all the throw weight and momentum behind them...
Sidd: You got it, exactly. And Joe and Bill, who apparently can't, or because Might is on their side, don't need to, define what significant national interests are served by hundreds of billions spent, the generation of a whole lot of bad will, and the depositing of imperial excrescences all over the place, want us all to focus on little piddly bits of "rational argument" over what's "legal," as opposed to what's wise for the health of the whole nation.
What "we" are up to might be good for those who profit from making the war toys and operating them and Managing the Battlespace and of course aiding the extraction of resources (on the way to a global climate that humans might not survive,) and who will be comfortably deceased before it happens and thus immune to consequences. It sure does not seem to be good for the rest of us. But then nobody is asking the rest of us, who take our doses of FOX and go with the flow...
Be careful, though -- this pair, who are always challenging others to provide cites to support any contention they don't agree with, will be all over you for the observations you make. By way of impeachment, and one has to ask, for what reasons? Why is it worth their time to spend all that effort undercutting any attempt to point out what are clearly moral and political issues of substance, in a place as remote from the Village as this one?
What is with Joe and Bill, and that need the Germans also felt to make their invasion of the neutral nation of Belgium at least appear "legal," back in August 1914, and the Japanese with respect to Manchuria and stuff? One wonders what kind of skin they have or had in the Great Game.
For those who see the sainted AUMF and that UN resolution as nothing but a couple of minuscule pasties and frayed G-string on a fat, raddled whore of an imperial Hegelian act of pure will, as nothing but the vainest and faintest "excuse" for Doing Stupid on a grand scale, it also seems that the lingo of "Nyah, nyah, Poppa said we could do it" (and the belief system that lies, in all senses, behind it) just creates a nice misdirection and shiny object to distract from questions about, oh, actual effectiveness of "the program," and whether the "targets" chosen actually pose any kind of threat (other than in fevered imaginations and Threat Finding Consciousnesses) that begins to be worth the effort, and the cost. In retrospect, in a somewhat parallel situation, Congress "authorized" that thing called the Vietnam War, also on specious Gulf of Tonkin grounds, and it continued to a stupid, ineffective end that we are STILL paying for. (The way this one is framed, there can never BE an "end," of course, it goes on forever, self-generating like the War on Drugs.)
But our apologists dodge the question of what "national interests" justify, even on economic grounds, the money and "good will" and bodies dumped into the idiocy that is the Pentagram war procurement machine "fighting the Global War On Terror" and the serial foolishness of CIA activities.
Of course what the rest of the world thinks of us is apparently meaningless and valueless to Dronifiying Apologists. It sure looks to me like just one part of a disease state that has only one sequel, and that is not, however much they may insist and pretend, US hegemony or even increased security. Quite the contrary. Of course, some few of us get rich off all this...
Asked here is what are the alternatives? There's an irreducible amount of TERRORISM in the world, including stuff that "we" do in the name of short-term seeming "advantage." (Like "getting rid of Mossadegh for the Shah, and Diem and Allende and many more "actions.") The most effective tools and tactics against what our rulers denominate as "terrorism" have been plain old police work, and over time the kinds of national behaviors (including all the corporate parts of same) that reduce the drivers and incentives that cause and "authorize" a few people all over the planet, including within our military and State Security apparatus, to blow stuff up and kill other people.
For those who like to hide interesting realities behind a screen of words, here's one part of a source for you:
Capturing and detaining a U.S. citizen, or any other human being, is not an activity DoD takes lightly. As in other armed conflicts in which our Nation has been engaged, the detention of enemy combatants serves a vitally important protective function. Equally important, however, the deliberate, conscientious, and humane manner in which we designate and detain enemy combatants reflects our values and character as a Nation. We are committed to defending the United States in accordance with our constitutional responsibilities, while preserving the constitutional rights of United States citizens.
There has been a huge amount of discourse over at places like dailyKos and even nursing websites about what Obama and his people could have accomplished by doing the bully pulpit thing. Dems have been helping to drown the baby of the New Deal for quite a while, and I doubt that from all the managed care applied to the debate (like excluding representatives of single-payer or even "medicare for all" from the room) that even Serious Historians will give a true picture of what happened from 2007 on. Wiki, that always-impeachable source, offers this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_reform_debate_in_the_United_States
The Villagers have their immutable political truths; the rest of us have, maybe, Obamacare. (My wife, like a lot of our fellow Americans, has serious pre-existing conditions, no possible non-employer private UN-surance. She is "lucky" to have a COBRA continuation for a little while yet, and under that ACA mishmash has to gGO WITHOUT ANY "HEALTH UN-SURANCE" for SIX MONTHS, before even qualifying for whatever we here in FL will "receive" from the "exchange" thingie. What could possibly be wrong with that situaton?)
You tell me, from your perspective of a person who maybe has a pretty good group health deal through the University, that's the best that could have been achieved, tell me as a veteran who gets VA single-payer quality care, and who now can "take" advantage of Medicare, and as a nurse who sees the flaws (fixable) in Medicare/Medicaid and the flaws (huge, cruel and inherent) in for-profit or even non-profit privatized UN-surance every working day.
I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," about the prelude to and the early days of the Great War (not the Global War On Terror, that we don't call it any more, but WW I).
Bill's insistence that all the stuff "we" are doing is "legal" under "international law," citing his two or three usual authorities. And of course the claim that anybody "we" target, or kill by oopsie, is ipso facto an "Illegal Enema Combatant" or one of their family or friends who are unwise enough to associate with them.
Interesting how reminiscent his claims are of the claims the Boche used to justify burning Belgium and France and what they could reach of Russia, etc., and "executing" hostages and decimating streets and villages and cities on the ground that under "international law," all that was perfectly legal, because whether in fact or in propaganda, Belgians had dared to shoot at the invading and attacking Boche, as "evil franc-tireurs," and thus invited the implementation of Clausewitz's Total War Doctrine. And besides, as the Germans told it, the Belgians started it by not just bending over and taking it from the git-go, 'cuz Germany was after all Superior and the New Wave of Destiny.
Yeah, I know, Bill -- "That was different."
Interesting that you would try to denigrate Amnesty International as "having an agenda and an ideological lens." I think Amnesty International's staff includes a number of lawyers who specialize in and probably understand "international law," that arbitrary and squishy notion, pretty well. That they do not espouse your position and the position of the folks you apologize for sure does not either impeach them, or validate you.
"Legal," my eye. But of course there's no stopping the GWOT, now is there, or even trying to right-size and rationalize "our" game play...
For anyone unclear about what's gone before, what's happening now, and what's to come: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/12/2012121874846805636.html The logic is sooo, ah, compelling, right? "What we did was not wrong. If the Communists had succeeded, our country would have been altogether different."
Where are the peace-makers, the peace-creators? Where does reconciliation come from? Or is that just another myth, that obscures our human nature and insulates us from ever having to behave differently?
All that smoke and thunder, all those myriad plays and feints and fails in the Great Game, accomplishing exactly what? The Krupps made a killing arming the idiot players 1900-1918 and after, and now a quarter of the world's wealth is dumped into the more "advanced" equivalents of the Maxim and rail gun (the old-fashioned type, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxykqgRodTc, and here's the "modern" version, http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/29/railgun-test-fire-video/) and Fokker DR.1.
Meanwhile, the planet starts to smoke and choke, yet the few who get rich off the idiocy live out their large and pleasant lives without the tiniest care about "le deluge" that they know is likely to descend after they, personally, are dead, gone and beyond retribution. Not that the attitude is anything new or different -- http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/29/railgun-test-fire-video/
When you have an invisible, slippery enemy who has gotten the better of you, and you cannot see them, much less an effective way of payback/retribution, you MUST have something. And I felt that from those people in their bones.
You cannot say that, at some level, this is not a legitimate need that has to be reconciled in some way, at least by the finesse of wiser leaders. The real problem with torture is that, in practice, on the net it is stupid and counterproductive.
I wonder how that observation applies to the hundreds of millions of people who got hammered and continue to suffer the pains and horrors of the, what do we call it, "Financial Crisis?" A pretty clearly intentional sapping of the Big Economy by people who, like the bin Ladins and suchlike, have slip-slided away into penalty-free obscurity,
For a while there, some of us were visualizing lampposts on Wall Street festooned with corpses in what the rich folk call "bespoke suits," stripped of their egos and Patek Phillipe wrist chronometers... but then like good old plow horses and meat animals, we just went back to work trying to fix all the broken stuff, while the Financialists kept writing derivative "contracts" there in the Casino of Personal Immunity.
Re "The Perfect Storm," other possible parallels: The protagonist chose to lead his ship and crew into a very possibly terminal situation out of a combination of pride, habit and greed. Or so the reportage on the incident, so mawkishly portrayed in the movie and in different ways in the book, would lead one to believe.
Too bad that none of the people who enlisted for this Forever War fiasco can even dream about filing a lawsuit, say, to recover some of what they lost by the dishonest failure of "the government" to accurately forecast the various pieces of the outcome. Not after the result reported in this other tale: http://www.michaeltougias.com/court_case.html
It seems (despite serious efforts to obscure the facts and time line) parts of the field forces of our pre-Homeland Securitization Big Agencies were pretty well apprised that there were A-Rabs in the USofA who were doing stuff like learning to fly (but not to land, so much) airplanes. And that these significant bits of "intelligence" were shunted aside because they did not fit with institutional priorities and preferences or were in danger of crossing jurisdictional lines between competing agencies that are all supposed to be about the business of "securing us," and which still, not surprisingly, even having been brought nominally under one umbrella, compete and game each other and do all the inventive crap that humans are so capable of when there's power, prestige and money to fight over. And if you can believe it, even SEX!
For what it's worth, before the 9-11 attack, there were several blockbuster thriller novels written with the use of airliners as missiles to attack targets including the World Trade Center. And after the attacks, our Really Smart Security Experts convened a bunch of these writers to give them ideas about what the next kind of asymmetric attacks by them Durty Terraists might look like. Since they are so instutitionally short on invention and prognostication (though not prevarication) on their own.
The best part about the world as it is now is that now that Threat Perception permeates everything, all our thinking (except about stuff like global warming, which is just opportunity knocking), so the Security State finally has its Forever-War, give-us-all-the-wealth justification nailed down permanently.
Yeah, it's a dangerous place, our planet, and only goin' to get more-so, thanks to the synergistic effects of that way of thinking, and acting, facilitated by our collective inventiveness in developing new kinds of lethal weapons and technologies, in the absence of any inspiration or doctrine or strategy about how to just, you know, LIVE, and let live...
Professor, just a couple of bullets, and more apologies to you that the Nation I actually did that "enlisting" thing for, back in 1966, inter alia in fear of "dominoes falling" all over the place, found it possible to create and support and facilitate the crap that was applied to you, personally, as a result of your trying (as it usually is the case, in vain) to inform and enlighten the Imperial cadres on the real nature of the Outer World they expect to dominate, is so stupidly able to maintain such high levels of cognitive dissonance between what we collectively pretend to be in our myths (until we maybe experience a Cheney Awakening), and what we really are, day to declining day:
1. The purpose of torture is torture. The rest is just verbiage.
2. How many of the functionaries and institutional structures, all those tiny and larger moving parts full of humans with all their inherent flaws augmented by doses of unaccountable power and money, that led to your personal troubles with the Security State (not to mention what's been done and is happening to so many others even now), are still in place, still gathering self-justifying and accreting momentum, and still "guiding" that thing called so archly, so knowingly (and so mindlessly) "policy"?
But... but... all the paperwork was in perfect order! This wasn't supposed to happen!
No, wait, cancel cancel do-over -- this is all part of the Grand Plan! Yeah, that's it! It's more complicated than even most of the folks who read-in on the whole strategy even know! Because there is all this stuff that we can't tell you about 'cuz you have no need to know! And besides, you know, Arms Sales Are Very important To The Economy!
"It also depends on the inclinations of the observer." How well one ought to understand that... And it depends also on the lenses through which one observes, both in optical effects and tint.
Some observers point out a whole lot of detail of the kind one advises us to be careful not to ignore in seeing "lessons" in various tranches of history. Like the words of our Ambassador, April Glaspie, now attempted to be obscured by a lot of spin and disavowal, essentially inviting Saddam to grab Kuwait. Yep, all of this incorporates huge amounts of complexity, all of which includes the kinds of volatility that make for financial profit and personal gain, with the pain and externalities to be borne by "others," but it sure would seem that there are some fundamental major points and observations that can be made, relatively clear and simplistic, that repetitions of Idiot Behavior for all kinds of sub-rosa reasons are unlikely to produce a different category of outcome.
Inability to deal with flexible, inventive asymmetry, on the part of our clumsy, bureaucratized, self-interested institutions
Enormous supply lines, with lots of vulnerabilities and opportunities to siphon off huge amounts of wealth and materiel
Bureaucratic "managers" with personal and organizational wants and goals, a virtual Tower of Babel with all the language problems that go along with all that complexity, facing people who are fighting on and for their own terrain and "freedom" from a cultural base that our rulers and managers disdain and do not understand
Having "goals" and strategies made up in air-conditioned secure conference rooms, based on premises and preferences and biases that over the long haul lead repeatedly and inevitably to "XXXX-ization" and rationalization and obscuring of fault, and no change in the momentum and inertia of the war economy and ineluctable march toward imperial ambition and decline
Detachment of the active Players, in their own closed and competing segments of the whole War Effort, from any goals or needs of the ordinary people whose labor and wealth creation supports all the Gamery, and from any consequences or accountability to the rest of us for doing Stupid and Idiotic and Greedy behind that screen of War Fog and Deniability and Compartmentalization
Having a dogma that claims to see a rational and supportable and "legal" and "justified" course for all the Stupid that happens, with efforts to define the terms of the debate and thus control the "logic," ain't the same as understanding what-all goes on. And no, one doesn't claim any kind of clairvoyance or wisdom to see all the operating parts of it, and yes, one am predisposed to observe a whole lot of bad and stupid and ineffectual behaviors and characteristics in all of this, but there sure seems to be a lot of fire where one seems to see smoke...
Interesting how once the Game moved on to another Area of Operations (AOR, in milbabble), social and political and economic activity kind of reappeared, albeit not to the altogether liking of our Rulers (though Walmart LOVES the profit on clothing Made in Vietnam.)
And if "we" lost some kind of "presence" in Southeast Asia, how come there's all those US "assets" still committed there, and submarines and missiles still on line, and what were the reasons why "we" "lost" "our" bases in the Phillipines, again? Onaccounta the results of "our" efforts to make Uncle Ho say "uncle," and prop up dictatorial kleptocrats in far-off place who were nominally "friendly to some US interests or other?"
The Filipinos in 1991 declined to renew the 99 year lease "we" forced on them at the end of the War on Fading Empire Spain. (That ain't the same thing as "losing bases by not being imperially aggressive enough, I don't think.) This was after decades of "our" support for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos as abusive dictators in a faux "democracy." And the timely eruption of Mount Pinatubo, no doubt caused by "Communist insurgents," wiped out Clark AFB and hammered Subic (along with killing a lot of Filipinos) and rebuilding at least of Clark was simply uneconomic.
As I recall, VIETNAM offered around then to lease Cam Ranh Bay, which I think cost "us" half a trillion to build (one of many huge wealth transfers to largely corrupt contractors), a behavior repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere) back to us. The problem we have is that the Great Game would be best played as a board game or computer simulation, since the direction of play never, ever goes as the players claim to intend. Though many of them make huge personal gains and derive great personal satisfaction and clout from blowing up and gumming up and melting down the structures that might result in more decent lives for most of us. There and here.
The Soviets were sold to us as model Players who had to be defeated at any cost (including Nuclear Winter) or then "contained" or then "detented" and now demolished by their very successful emulation of our own Mafia. Now we got cover stories about "secret Chinese arsenals" of copycat Cold War/Hot War weapons. As my First Sergeant used to sing out as he ordered us to increase the march pace to double-time with full field gear for the next couple of miles, "Here we go agaaaai-nn..."
Arbusto, you must have seen that famous old movie, "Vietnam: The Drawdown." Same script, same scenarios, much of the same equipment -- different pejoratives, of course: "hajjis" and "towelheads" instead of "gooks" and "dinks," and what did the "gooks" call US, and what do the people who live in the area called Afghanistan call US?
There was an ARVN compound outside the US airbase at Phu Bai, or maybe it was Chu Lai, some of it runs together for me. This was in early 1968.
The experienced chopper pilots knew not to overfly it, particularly at night, to avoid Green-on-Green (we gave them their uniforms) violence, in the form of streams of red tracers (we gave them their ammo, too) rising swiftly up to meet you.
To ask again: "What the heck has all this been 'about?'" And that it's a whole bunch of people engaged in doing really complicated bureaucratic tasks and managing huge chunks of procurement and deployment and logistics and creating all kinds of plans and doctrines and the rest of it, while little political games got played out in DC and other capitals, is not an acceptable answer.
And of course I, and I suspect a number of other people, are still waiting for what should be easy to succinctly articulate, exactly what "national interests" were and are in play in all of this Forever War idiocy.
A lot of Smart People have observed that any involvement in mass war at this kind of level really needs to be based on an actual concern about an actual "national interest," not just some Hegelian exercise of The Will, or chicken-hawk gaming, and a willingness of the productive population to sacrifice to protect that interest.
And please don't come back with something about "Everybody who matters, knows." Polls of the broad spectrum of citizens kind of give the lie to that. And to justify $1+ trillion a year on some "need" to "head the Talibaninsurgenterrrorristas off at the pass" ain't gonna fly, either, because what have "we" gotten from all those Foreign Interventions and Wars of Unknown Unknown Choice, except movement of the center of mass of political and social power up and out along the axes of wealth concentration, instability and ascendance of the Security State.
And plain old POLICE activity sure seems to be the most effective means of detecting and foiling, where possible, and catching if not (and don't pretend that droning and black ops and all the other grotesquely expensive and civilly intrusive crap "we" are paying for so many ways, is going to effectively end 'terrorism," as defined by the GreatGamers).
Whatever the program's origins, Colby's definition is comprehensive enough to include the many elements essential if Vietnamization were to succeed: improving and modernizing the armed forces, providing pacification of the rural areas, strengthening the political apparatus, delivering essential services to the populace, nurturing a viable economy, and, most important of all, ensuring security for the people. From these goals derived a host of subsidiary tasks: from expanding and improving the police and territorial forces to land reform, from control of inflation to hamlet and village elections, and from rooting out the Viet Cong infrastructure to increasing the rice harvest. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker noted in a reporting cable that South Vietnam's plan for community defense and local development had "three overall objectives: self-defense, self-government, and self-development, which explains why the Vietnamese refer to 'Vietnamization' as 'the three selfs.'" (snip)
In *No More Vietnams*, Richard Nixon recalled of Vietnamization that "our whole strategy depended on whether this program succeeded." Thus, "our principal objectives shifted to protecting the South Vietnamese at the village level, reestablishing the local political process, and winning the loyalty of the peasants by involving them in the government and providing them with economic opportunity. General Creighton Abrams had initiated this shift in strategy when he took command of our forces in Vietnam in 1968," Nixon acknowledged.
Of course, the Americans could only help and, as Abrams once observed, they could only help so much. The rest was up to the Vietnamese.
And of course Thieu, like Karzai, was a self-serving and corrupt persona who wisely, and like Karzai would be well advised to do, fled Saigon aboard a US chopper as the "strategy" ran its inevitable course.
And to put it in the larger setting of the Game of RISK ™ as then being played,
The main differences I can see between THIS tomfoolery-with-enormous-wealth-transfer-and-imperial-warpage-of-our-"free democracy," and the one we label "The Vietnam War," are that rather than learning from one futile effort to prosecute a land war in Asia at the end of an enormous supply line, against a xenophobic population with nationalist and tribal aspirations, our rulers focused on managing the media, planting an all-volunteer army/military, relying on contractors and other stuff to insulate us taxpayers from cognitive dissonance and any non-consumer-economy discomfort, and thus avoiding the "deep divisions in the nation" that led Tricky Dick (bless his practical-politician little heart) and his policy mavens to create the false front of "Vietnamization," to give airbrushed cover and concealment to the scammers and idiots who "managed" the country, by fraudulent and incompetent stages, into an inevitably losing proposition.
No, I don't cheer for "the other side." I have no joy at the failure of our institutions and rulers to avoid losing propositions and put the nation onto a long slide into post-imperial obscurity and virtual feudal impoverishment. We could have done so much better for ourselves and the rest of the world, but it's not in our natures to keep Experienced Players from finding their inevitable way into the seats of power, patent and obscure.
The "strategy" to date has made a few people really rich, and away we go again to the next situation where our rulers will punch another Tarbaby using our fists (not theirs). Don't pick fights it's clear from the beginning you are not going to win, let alone gain anything from (other than wealth transfer and personal power).
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
Timothy McVeigh got a trial.
Maybe if one says that stuff about AUMF and Article 51 and all that over and over often enough, it somehow becomes "true," or at least most folks get bored enough and move on to some other issue, leaving the people who live for that idiot Gamery to keep on playing, with the lives and money of others as the game pieces.
Of course, the Great Game is like a combination of Calvinball http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/18/calvinball_in_cairo and a Monster Truck Jam, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjc8mPth4g0 ...
Important appointments in DC are like a dam in a river. As the pressure builds among all the interest groups and stakeholders on the upstream side, it all comes to a simple binary decision: Confirm the appointment, open the sluice gates and let off the pressure and get that power moving downstream again, or let the head build until the dam fails or the water finds its own way around the obstruction. And minutely or hugely, the dam is changed by all that, so that it never quite fits as well and is just a little less safe against some washout that gives us "Johnstown" residents down in the Valley an experience that like a failure of the "Jesus nut" on a helicopter way up in the air, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-L_kxxwql40, will "spoil our whole day."
Once someone like Brennan is in place, he of course is going to find that there's a whole lot of water upstream, with a lot of turbulence and currents that are all seeking to move the whole mass in one direction or another. Thinking that he will, what, "democratize" the CIA, with all its directorates and Secret Squirrel subdivisions and multifarious momentums and stashes of cash and caches of weapons, is something of a durn fool notion. The chance for that to happen died when Wild Bill Donovan ruled the roost, and chose the channel for the river to flow in. So now we have any number of "interests," with all kinds of little and large stratagems in play, freed of any moral constraints thanks to the imperialization of the executive and the militarization of everything else. Brennan, and Hagel, will find that even if they come in with intentions to undo centuries of Stupid that demarcates the playing board of the Great Game, they are "pwned" from the git-go by the people who put them there and who already "pwn" the institutions.
And any number of Serious and Well-Informed People with sheaves of 4 x 6 cards and PowerPoint slides, http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/29/mcchrystal-afghanistan-powerpoint-slide , just full of dishonest and seductive and seemingly wise exemplars and false syllogisms and misprisions of fallacy, all happy to obscure the larger picture of what's in play, and working on silencing anyone who holds up a lamp to show any of what's going on in the Darkness.
And every moment, the pentwaters undermine the seemingly well engineered construction, and wash away a little more of the ground that restrains that Deluge...
...And now we have some guy named Karzai telling the, what are they, US or UN?, special-ops people to stand down onaccounta what they are doing, and/or teaching parts of the Afghan National Army that is mostly WHAT tribe, again? to do? in the province next to the nominal capital.
There's been all this chatter here and elsewhere about counter-insurgency versus nation-building versus a bunch of other Grand Strategies. Lots of stuff about what the GIs on the ground are supposed to do -- kick in doors, or knock politely, and walk and drive around the Area of Operations to hopefully find, and if not find, then to trigger, IEDs, and also to attract bullets and rockets from "unlawful enema combatants" so those Bad Wogs can be "lit up," grab local people to put in various forms of confinement, and a lot of other stuff that the Apologists will be sure to tell us was All To The Good, all under leaders some of whom are/were maybe trying to Do The Right Thing in an asymmetrical circumstance where there is no possible "victory" or "success," and many of whom are cynical, self-serving barstids on the model of Westmoreland et al. Being told that assaulting Wardak Province or another chosen as the Hot Front du Jour was going to be the stuff they would tell their grandchildren when it came time to recount the virtues and the roots of VICTORY in Afghanistan. Being confronted by dignified villagers who were ousted from their homes and marketplace by the combat that GIs (and, yes, what we now are calling "fighters" in Syria but which started out all as "terrorists," then "insurgents," then what-ever euphemism the Brass came up with and worked into the DoD Dictionary and all those Grand Strategy documents THIS month) brought to them. So that when the pushy E-5 tells the village leader he HAS to move back into the market town because that's what the field orders call for, and that the "UN" will protect them, the villager can say, almost mildly, "You will protect us from the fighters? You, with all your weapons and technology, cannot even protect yourselves. How can you even pretend to be able to protect me and my family?" Sometimes, when you break something you simply can't fix it, not with any amount of Superglue or eyewash. Best not to break in the first place.
For the GIs and Gyrenes and other service types who are expected to "make war," this is nothing but more effing FUTILITY. Passing out candy bars, conducting medical clinics in the villages, building schools that can't be used, disappearing billions and aiding or winking at or savoring the illicit drug business that's all around, that's not any way to run a war (though of course 'war" is not very well defined, now is it, and there's a huge Gulf between what the public thinks of, Grand strategies and house-to-house fighting, and the real stuff of fraudulent procurements and $400-a-gallon fuel delivered by bribed "fighters" and Bug Splat and mission and battlespace creep. Which is indeed very creepy.. And how about the Consumer Reports-style hype about Game Changers like the XM-25 grenade launcher and the V-22 and even the Reaper/Predator/Hellfire things that don't seem to be making much of a dent in the incidence of the kinds of behaviors we think of as "BAD Muslim, BAAAD!"
So once again, in supposed pursuit of undefined "national interests," and supposedly to protect "national assets" like Forward Operating Bases that, if the Brass and the politicians had maybe kept to a simple "get bin Laden" game would never have been down in the valley of the shadow of death, "needing to be protected." By often mis-aimed artillery, aerial bombardment, and of course Hellfires from Heaven.
All of this being conducted behind a smokescreen of lies and misrepresentations, by subtle and seemingly informed people taking full advantage of the patriotic gullibility of those of us who this time are not even aware of what it's costing us, out of pocket and out of our futures, while we are bovinely allowing the conditions for late-stage imperial repression to be put in place under the nominal banner of "security."
This was not a "mistake." The various "administrations" may not have intended all the consequences that have ensued, but the basic framework, destabilization leading to volatility and opportunities for theft and the growth of the Security State, were sure in the minds of the catalysts that fomented this Change thing, Regime, or Hope'n type. The stuff that's happening is not a bug, as they say (except for the ones that are tracking our Free Exercise 'n stuff) -- it's very definitely part of the intended feature set.
Good Morning, Vietnamization!
Herbie and Harry are walking down an alley, between dumpsters. Herbie sticks out his arm and stops Harry. "Whoa!" Says Herbie. "That looks like dog poop." Harry grabs a stick and scrapes some of it up, holds it up to the light. "Yup, smells like dog poop too. It even FEELS like it!" Herbie takes the stick, licks it. "Tastes like it, too." "Gee, Herbie, I'm sure glad we didn't STEP in it..."
Waiting now for the Smart Folks to recite all the reasons the idiot's dream was really Wise Policy. Too bad all that, and Vietnam, Etc.,were and are Wise Policy at no cost, and substantial profit, to those who thrive on instability and destabilization...
Nooo, noooo... no facts contrary to the Narrative are tolerated.
How the heck can there be any expectation of any kind of substantive change in or limit to the Infinite Threat Generator And Wealth Converter, when the substance of what goes on is so Stupid, every single day?
One tiny example: Here's what the War Department has to say about one of its "key systems," in a stirring flood of Milbabble:
http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2012/pdf/army/2012dcgs-a.pdf
Reduced to more common parlance, IT DOESN'T WORK AND IT HAS COST $2.7 BILLION TO DATE (and let's not even talk about the F-35 "jobs program" thing):
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/89048-us-army-spent-2-7-billion-on-a-battlefield-computer-that-doesnt-work
And here, and a whole lot more places: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/58051.html
I doubt the average schmuck is likely to get radicalized to anything close to the same degree that flacks for the many Procurements in the Pipeline will manage, right out of the gate...
Maybe the hope for less militarization of the future is that Murphy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics will conspire to bring all those Grand Interoperable Network-Centric Systems to a sand-in-the-gears, manufacturing-tolerance-error, friction-induced halt.
Bill once again demonstrates his fealty and fixity when it comes to carrying on and apologizing for the vestiges of the Cold War. And for one who disses and dismisses others who claim to have some understanding of his mental processing, it is interesting that he knows, KNOWS, what is in the group mind of Those Chinese who just naturally want to Take Over The Far East that our war leaders are now "pivoting toward" with whatever energies and money they have left from their "pivots toward" the African continent and South and Central America.
Too bad the average US taxpayer, all fearful and ignorant, can't or won't take the trouble to read the reams of documents and track the procurements and deployments that make up the comforting "Air-Sea Battle" plans "we" are developing, along with the planning for and implementation of Dronegemony Forever, to see just exactly how little"security" they are getting for their trillion dollars a year.
Joe, might I suggest you read Matt Taibbi's "The Great Derangement," if you haven't? Maybe you have no use for Taibbi, I don't know of course, but the book is a pretty careful description of the processes that bring people to that broad category called "fundamentalism," and linked up from an insider's view to what is driving a lot of the "governance" (sic) most of us Americans are suffering from. And there's lots of actual reporting on how and why "fundamentalism" is on the ascendant in a lot of places.
Mr. Cockayne, you must have a very limited horizon from where you are. Any idea how dark-skinned Americans are routinely treated in America? Ever heard of the loving Christian Americans who murder "abortion doctors" in the name of their notion of the Judeo-Christian God? Or a guy named Timothy McVeigh, who was one of the more successful Belief-killers in our history? On a large social scale, the "conservatives" are all about setting in place policies that will, that ARE, killing lots of their fellow citizens, by denial of health care, essentially forced labor, and a whole lot more? And is it uniformly the case that the kindly absentee British landlords of Ireland have stopped their war ON people in Ireland, or that Irish "brothers" and Scottish and Welsh "brothers" are all good and calm and living in lovingkindness with each other?
Let's at least be a little bit honest about what we are and what we do to one another, us "white bread" folks, and also note that in Britain, as in the US, the "conservatives" are moving us actually, economically, back to the relationships that characterized the Middle Ages -- aristocracy of huge wealth, and serfdom of everyone else.
Brian, those would have to be some pretty opaque and extensive "shade structures." The sensors on the drones and Apaches and other devices "we" are fielding detect infrared presences, among other "signatures," and if you look at the "war porn" videos, not to mention the "oopsie" reports like the two children just blown away by a "UN" killing machine (See? the tinfoil-hat crowd were right to fear those "black helicopters"), you can see that the people doing the targeting and triggering are not being too nice in their "selection." And as you point out, any kind of effort by people who don't want to be blown to flinders to conceal themselves would be ipso facto invitation and carte blanche for the Bills of the world to "light them up," in the modern phrase...
I've been perusing "war porn" for several years now, looking at the many youtube and other videos of drone-Hellfire and A-10 and AC-130 and Apache 30-mm cannon attacks on humans on the ground in all those far off places. I know, it's a sickness, one shared by millions of my fellow Americans if you look at the view counts for the videos. military.com has a particularly nice collection of the art.
Uniformly, the captions are all about "killing Talibans" or "blasting Insurgents." But here's one, among many, of the nicely ambiguous bit of video -- http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=f1b_1232374340 -- must be midgets or dwarfs amongst the "Talibans" in this group, and do you see any weapons? I can't, even with a magnifying glass.
If you look close at a number of these, and there sure are a lot of them, it sure seems that in a lot of cases, many of the explodees are unarmed and inoffensive -- and in many cases it looked a whole lot like maybe a family group (all identified as "Talibans" in the audio from the aircraft) was walking inoffensively from one compound to another. Being unwise enough to do it at night, of course, and like the two women in the pickup truck that was shot up by the LA police recently, "looking suspicious."
And of course the whole killing machinery is justified on the ground that it's needed to protect our troops (and other unspecified "US Interests") that would be in ZERO danger but for the fact that we, like, invaded their country and, like, shot and killed and otherwise destroyed a bunch of their people. Because, if I have it right, some "government" that is not around any more as such ("the Taliban") allowed and maybe assisted one of OUR former assets, some guy named bin Laden, to hang around there.
Which I am sure our local apologists for the "legality" of all this will take as clear total blanket unconstrained authorization to apply lethal, exciting-to-watch, bar-cheer-and-whoop deadly explosive force, even as the whole rationale for the invasion and war thing evaporates as completely as the one that had "us" all invested in the future of some place we arrogantly called South Vietnam.
Some things just can't be fixed.
The latest images of the RedHats putting their aged, patriachal heads together to whisper and connive, as has been the behavior since Paul started all this, ought to illustrate the imperviousness of that hierarchy, that hugely wealthy oligarchy, to any kind of "reform."
It didn't work when the issues were the huge gulf between the nominal holiness and spiritual wealth of the Church, living off the hopes and fears and prayers and labor of millions, and the reality of the hypocrisy, the venality, sale of benefices and indulgences and the gilding of anything that didn't move.
It's human nature, whenever there's power and money in play and a structure that lets greedy, selfish, arrogant Machiavellis play on Big motivators like tribe, nation, the love and fear of the divine. The Old Popes and the whole Vatican Rag Bag were about pleasure and power, and all the recent scandals, while delicious in their own way and in their own right, are nothing new.
All that faith, all that belief, all that yearning for a sense of meaning, a manifestation of the Divine, with that undercurrent of tribalism and the same motivators that bring Condo Commandos to power to "enforce the deed restrictions and rules" with the understanding that the Enforcers are unconstrained, and if caught with a hand where it shouldn't be, are forgiven and graced for the shallowest expression of repentance. Where they can't just suppress or ignore the finger-pointers outright.
It's too big. It's too immanent. And "reform" just leads to infinite schism, and Jimmy "T-Back" Swaggart crying, and Jim "Million Dollar Dog House" Bakker crying, and Tedd "I Did Not Have Sex With That Boy Toy" Haggard crying, and the faithful still flooding them with "pledges" in the hope of earthly prosperity or miracle cures...
See how easy it is to make it all nice and legal? The way our local apologists for arbitrary executions and the unbridled exercise of deadly force tell us this is all being done, exclusively to "Unlawlul Enema Combatants"?
Adam K notes one part of the Home Office spokeswoman's statement. I think the whole thing needs to be flagged and underscored and writ large all over the place:
The Brits don't have a written constitution, but one wonders if even a people who are getting comfortable with hundreds of thousands of "security cameras" watching, watching, might be feeling a little draft? Some Cabinet person can say "Citizen X ought not to be one any more, conducive to the public good." And former Citizen X will get what kind of notice of this? and will be able to appeal that fiat to what court, in what country?
Whatthehell, in the end (so far -- bioscience has surprising benefits in store for the wealthy few) we are all dead. It's just a matter of how much hurt we can cause while yet we live...
What's sad is that in what's supposed to nominally, according to the Sacred Myths, be a government of laws, not of men (and women,) so much seems to depend, and so many hopes hang on, the placing of certain people into certain positions. Elizabeth Warren at CPFB, say, or on the other hand Timmy "Ratface" Geithner at Treasury. Panetta,, or anybody, at CIA. And Rumsfeld, on the Bad'nUgly hand, and now Hagel on the Hope'nChange hand. Can one guy or gal, whatever their political heat and predilections, change the direction of "the backside of Empire" away from the ultimate cliff? Produce anything really different in what, 3 1/2 years if s/he gets that?
Wow. Can't hardly wait to see what this informed synthesis draws in the way of comment, here and elsewhere...
At least Hagel is in place, and hopefully will not succumb to the Hegelian impulses... I wonder what his marching orders from the West Wing really are, and whether a larger notion of Duty, Honor, Country will somehow manifest. I doubt that is possible, too many people with irons in the fire, meat on the table and axes to grind.
To follow your argument or agree with it would constitute another kind of logical fallacy, and an obscuring of the larger context and a maybe wiser view of "national interests" and that silly thing, "truth."
Which part of "Afghanistan" had and has that "major role," again? Just what did "it" do that even starts to justify what "the US" did, has done and is doing there, to the point that our fearful Mr. Karzai wants "us" to stand down, and now, like with Vietnam and Iraq, "we" slinking away and hoping nobody notices that once again, it was not about "victory" or "success" or "protecting national interests" that nobody ever articulates what they are, but about several something-elses altogether?
And by your logic, Castro should be bombing Miami and kicking in doors in Keokuk, since WE "hosted and offered terrorist training facilities to" a bunch of unfortunately incompetent Cuban ex-pats who, even with a lot of covert "US" help, were unable to restore a nice cozy kleptocracy with lots of Mob-ortunities. For just one small example. To claim justification, one ought to have done justice themselves...
Juan, I don't know about what "the US" did in respect to French and other interests in Algeria, or why (any of the complex "whys" that make up post-hoc parsing of "policy").
I'm stuck on the Vietnam/Southeast Asia/Dominoes thing. I saw a little tiny part of it for a year, and then read a whole lot and talked a whole lot trying to figure out what happened. The best synthesis I've come across was in Barbara Tuchman's in "The March of Folly," dismissed by some as just the product of someone with an "agenda." The conclusion was that for a whole lot of reasons, the US apparatus did in fact try pretty hard to extend French colonial positions in "Indo-China," and then just descended by the usual momentum of industrial warfare and "anti-Somethingorother-ism" into all that followed. Ending up with "Made in Vietnam" labels on clothing and stuff in Walmart, 50,000 dead GIs and 2 million dead "gooks," trillions in debt, and the growth of the current thing we support.
Is that just groupthink, or is there the necessary quantum of "what actually happened" to be mostly and importantly true?
"Argo." "Platoon." "The Deer Hunter." "Full Metal Jacket." "Apocalypse Now." Etc. How to screen the Movie-ized images against all those words in all those books? It's hard, in all of this, to try to tease out the honest big picture from all the disparate sources and voices. And maybe, given the reality, it's just a fool's errand to even try?
@Bill, re Japan: All you present here is the baldest of bald assertions about what was in play in mid-1945, dismissing for consistency with your world view a different way "these proceedings," the Great Asian War, could, maybe should, have been "concluded," in MacArthur's sonorous phrase. Nicely consistent with the Majority Narrative you consistently represent, but there's a whole lot of what you say "history" is supposed to be about that says you, in this instance, among others, are just flat wrong. But I bet you know that, in your historian's heart of hearts. The goal, after all, is to get enough people in our voting class to believe, and persist in believing, the myths and cover stories, even against evidence and common sense. Which has always been part of how power is accumulated and extended, here or in Imperial Japan or even Myanmar.
For anyone interested in the degree to which our CIA, among other "agencies," has infested the imagery and discourse of the world at all levels, you could do worse than wade through this horriterrific HISTORY text: "The Cultural Cold War: The CIA In The World of Arts and Letters," http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=61
Who will be the last Sunni, Shia, Wahabbist, Parsee, Palestinian, Pashto, PERSON to die in all of this? Or is that simple notion just a ridiculous conceit of logic, that says that at some point there has to be an end point?
And the lottery is open, too, on which American "troop" will have the eternal honor and glory of being named the last officially Killed-In-Action person in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Mali, Costa Rica, Oklahoma............
One wonders if the "average American," looking at this mashup, only sees places to hide nuclear enrichment and Dimona-grade facilities in the landscape, only wonders which of those trucks on the highways are carrying parts of Weapons of Mass Mythification, only is sure that all those unAmerican faces conceal secret plots to Take Over, only reassures him- or herself that the banners all read "Death To The Great Satan!" and "Death To America!" because, after all, they are written in that evil Arabic script...
Where would one find job postings for "propagandist" or "troll" or whatever the subtle players are called, these days, who pop up to slant and poison and obscure the public discourse away from anything that reveals the real nature of the Game and deflects any reflections on what might actually bring that silliness called "peace" and its unprofitable-because-unvolatile partner, "stability?" The pay must be pretty decent, and the job security too, on whatever "side" is hiring...
I guess, it occurs to me, it's not surprising that people who have gotten filthy rich from sucking depleting liquid (and gaseous) resources out of the ground would be attracted to this latest implementation of a similar strategy.
Here, graphically illustrated, in one small corner of the planet, is what's wrong with the whole human species. "Used up in 50 years? Who gives a crap?" says the Saudi princeling. "I'll be long gone, having just about maxed out my personal pleasure machinery off the profits from spending the residual wealth of the planet that I assert a divine right to, and externalizing all those horrific costs in ways that, nyah-nayh, since I write the laws and pay the enforcers, are all perfectly 'not illegal.'
"And what are the folks who come after, and have to try to survive on what me and my kind have left, going to do about it? Dig up our desiccated carcasses and do a dead-Mussolini on us? Ha-ha-ha, big whoop!" -- Or however you say that in Arabic (or Russian, or one of the Chinese dialects, or of course English... That is the native language of the Kochs and Dimons and Blankfeins and even Obamites, isn't it?)
My wife and I use about 100 gallons of domestic potable water a week, for all purposes. Of course, we live on a boat, with solar panels for much of our electricity, and are otherwise pretty frugal too. Across Tampa Bay there's a 50,000-square-foot "home" on a many-acred "estate," where a local real estate mogul, who has other "homes" elsewhere too, uses a couple of million gallons of potable water a year just to keep his "plantings" green and his "water features" topped up and evaporating. His claim is that "he can afford it," that profligacy, and water rates for large users are, get this, cheaper than for little mopes like me.
When any of the folks who cry for the dying planet come up with a fix for or maybe deterrent to that kind of thinking, and for the insulated behaviors of Homo useitipfastus, who by certain kinds of abstract skills involving debt and money and "financialization" and "externalization" have hijacked the machinery of government and culture and the institutions that once provided legitimacy and some limits to predation, please let the rest of us know. I don't see that happening any time soon.
Indeed, since there are so many apologists who, remora-like swim along with the sharks and feed off their scraps, the chances of any change (other than temporarily, in a few locales, where a few people have, for the nonce, put aside greed and self-serving in favor of 'locavore' and 'agroecology' and 'sustainability' and 'living small,' seem pretty near zero.
Anyone?
Yep, and our new Bible should be the Gospel according to what the libertarians say is the Word of Hayek, when they can agree on anything that is, and the currency should be called the "Rand..."
And libertarians should learn not to deal always off the bottom of the deck, in their efforts to sucker the rest of us into installing their "system," which looks like THIS when effectuated: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html ...
Would you be referring to THIS National Democratic Institute?
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/mar/07/opinion/la-oe-meisler-prodemocracy-20120306
Or maybe THIS one?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4332.htm
Which articles and connections through a whole other bunch of googlespace links you have to find by searching on something other than just "NDI" or National Democratic Institute, since it appears somebody has flooded google with entries that are all about the thin surface coating that leads people to believe that the "NDI" is the following phrase that appears all over the place so it must be true, right?
http://www.ndi.org/taxonomy/term/9, and thousands more entries that reassure us all is well, democracy is being spread, you are getting sleepy...
"politics of a parliamentary sort are good, and much better than corrupt, oppressive, inflexible strong men."
Margaret Thatcher? Rupert Murdoch?
One hopes the various interests in Tunisia will find a path to some metastable arrangement that trends always in the direction of what's good and decent for ordinary people, you know, the kind of aspirational stuff that's in the Preamble, and what is good for those planetary issues you also write about... Maybe they can show us muscular JefferHamilDullestonians the next steps that really ought to be taken...
"shocked at how fast and viciously Americans will turn on them."
On the other hand, the Israeli rulers have some 400 nukular weapons already on line, and how many more "latent" ones? It would be hard to believe that Dimona has been idle, these last "conservative" years...
"IF" is a good word to start your sentence with. I would add "there is," to read "IF THERE IS a law of supply and demand." Since that poorly examined postulate that a few actually dare to question as a "law" of any sort is such a binary rough notion based on the "science of economics," all those intuitively seductive and patently misleading graphs and curves and functions that so intentionally obscure the real face of "homo economicus." Nice argument for the dead-end status quo, if that's what was intended, apologies if it was not. "Doing nothing" or continuing to collect rents and wage-enslaving the most of us is just a dead-end game.
"the other half of the story."
Is this to say that the actions of things like Sendero and FARC were/are "equivalent" to what the various right-wing rulers and militaries and death squads did to the people of the countries they were active in? To what's going on now, under the rubric of "the War on Drugs?" Got any support for that, other than the bald assertion? Body counts, maybe? Blown-up and shuttered newspapers and radio stations? Curfews, organized theft of land, terror against ordinary citizens?
I know, sometimes it's hard to gather and marshal facts, particularly when so many of the dead were "disappeared," as in flown out over the ocean and kicked out of the aircraft...
And of course, how about some support for the tacit assertion that the CIA and other covert and overt US "involvements" in our southern neighbors' business and lives were, I guess, not that big a deal?
Here's part of what we are supposed to find falsely equivalent to "revolutionary terrorist populist movements:"
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/SOA.html
I'm sure you've heard of the "School of the Americas," right? Teaching the spread of Democracy, American Style?
Re Allende, despite the bland assurances, there sure seems to be a persistent set of facts and opinion that lays a little more than passive "knowledge that something was afoot" at the feet of the US sneaky-pete/jackal people... http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/Chile%20Coup_USHand.html and a whole googlelot more.
What's that hissing sound I hear? A couple of apologists taking in deep breaths, ready to scare-quote and italicize a line or two in the hope of impeaching the whole ugly picture?
...in 3, 2, 1...
One might reflect on the behavior of people who call themselves "religious," like those numbering themselves among the "ultra-orthodox" in Israel: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/24/orthodox-jews-riots-jerusalem-streets
Same-same "Taliban," Jerry Falwell, etc.
Actually, Paul is maybe closer to that ol' Ayatollah Khomeini, as a militant salesman of a particular cult takeoff, built on the reputation and life of some guy named Jesus. He stuffed various loss-leaders in his spiel, that lovely bit about what love is and is not, in 1 Corinthians 13, so nicely put in context here: http://www.evolutionofgod.net/excerpts_chapter11/
But the goal was (and is) domination, and anyone who knows a bit about the ugly history of the "Church" ought in equity to be a little careful about observations on what's pragmatic and what's appropriate comity.
Oooh, listen to the crickets!
Puzzle, conundrum, whatever: How to turn all those individual energies and motivations, born of brighter or dimmer perceptions of the reasons for their distress, that sum to something a lot greater than the bare sum of their parts, into better, fairer, more decent lives for all of them? Hard, so hard to do, when there are so many who would turn the parts against the whole, for crass personal advantage, or for all those silly-at-a-distance tribal un-reasons?
Well, Brian has a nice thought. The response is as expected. Maybe the response to the response is to ask, "Where is your evidence that (in that hugely unlikely event) the Western Oligarchs WOULD support that kind of change?" It's sure not evident from the way the Game is currently being played. And these little snippets can hardly encompass all the myriad things that those Western potentates have done and are doing to involve themselves in and pretend to direct all that's happening. Oh, Look! No "Victory" or "Success" in Afghanistan, unless one insists on defining what's happened over the last what, eleven years, as "Success!" Yeah, we MEANT to do that, right? Says the GAO, the way you hit the target is to keep moving it into the path of the bullet: http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652075.pdf Just change the definitions, right? http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/07/25/gao-military-lowering-bar-to-evaluate-afghan-troop-progress/
As always, there's this weird notion people have about "natural rights," always confronting and sometimes facing down the guys in uniforms who do what they can get away with to make the world safe for plutocracy, and often mysogynist patriarchy too. Until, as seen in Syria and elsewhere, some combination of nausea, self-interest and personal fear leads them to "switch sides."
For those who peddle, for various purposes and benefits, the latest World Existential Threat, "al Quaeda," as some revenant Monolithic Communism Planning to Do Something To Our Precious Freedom Rights and Bodily Fluids, there's this widely heralded Top Secret Document from a middle-manager Jihadi in Mali, supposedly uncovering, revealing, displaying for all to see the Master Plan of Al Quaeda to Take Over Everything, of which portions have been translated and published in netspaces like here: http://www.chrisjonesmedia.com/2013/02/14/al-qaeda-manifesto-left-behind-in-mali-provides-unprecedented-window-into-the-radical-islamist-terror-group/ Here's part of the blogger's reportage on something that others are laughing about, it's so typical of bureaucracy (https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/jihadi-middle-manager):
Maybe, Professor, you could give all of us the benefit of the whole text of that memo?
It's not hard to find, in the flood of Milbabble the War Department generates, much the same kinds of complaints about how to get anywhere in places we so kindly invade and occupy, on the pretext of Bringing Democracy to the Unenlightened. Oh, and "protecting National Interests and Installations and Assets."
So what's this all about, again? http://www.gao.gov/assets/660/652075.pdf It's long, it's detailed, and it ought to make us sick of this crap.
Meanwhile, back at "Red States"...
"Is peace finally achievable?...
"Is peace finally achievable?"
There's that question, and that word, again. Sure seems to me that the question may be syntactically ok, but the premises and potential reality, just by observation, are made of Unobtainium. There's obviously no such thing as "peace," in the common understanding -- just relatively less violent hiatuses between active murderous interactions involving one set of humans or another, a flux of distemper that settles now here, now there, under various clouds of "interests" and "provocations" and "vendetta." It ain't even worth citing examples.
So here's another wicked seductive invitation to invest hope and effort in a "peace process." Which if you pivot to look at Israel and Palestine, breaking my intent not to cite examples, you have a classic example of futility built in to the expectations of hopeful people in and out of the Area of Confict, that is managed by cynical, greedy, violent, dishonest tribalists on both sides, working against the small energies of people seeking accommodation and, you know, "peace." That word that is supposed to be understood tacitly by all who hear it, since there's no definition that comports with the sense the average person uses it in: Calm, order, comity, stuff like that.
Just like that other phrase that the Machiavellis flap around and decline to define, "national interests," because defining what they mean might narrow their range of justification and argument. And spotlight their lack of interest in anything like that common-folk understanding of "peace."
The other part that matters, for people who are starving, or dying of thirst, or seeing the military leadership stealing their economies, or getting the business end of whatever rockets and bombs even a puny L-39ZA can carry, is this:
A quarter of the world's wealth, and growing, is dumped into armaments of all sexy and puny types, from little antipersonnel mines and 9 mm and 5.56 and 7.62x39 and RPG rounds, to F-16s and F-22s and F-35s, and tanks and littoral combat ships and submarines and all kinds of kinky, murderous munitions. And of course into assembling the many bits of the dysfunctioning, always-vulnerable, always on the edge of collapse, Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace thing, the stuff that no self-respecting Battle Manager would ever settle for less than, with all the necessary contracts and procurements for ever-more-complex "improvements." All, of course, marketed, heavily and actively and very profitably and with a fill range of "Defense Department" corrupt and corrupting initiatives and tactics and skills, by an overarching, interlocking, world-wide collective of "Defence Industry" corporations that actively share technology -- e.g., Chinese chips in US avionics and fire-control and guidance devices, that may or may not have trap doors and vulnerabilities built into them, for one small example. Of which only a tiny fraction might be said to be "fostering democracy" or "providing security," maybe only the part that ends up in the hands of the Opposition in places like Libya and Syria.
The Kabul-centric Afghanis who are soon to become the Thieus and Kys of this phase of the Forever War want the US to gift them with the sexy, heavy-duty stuff, to terrorize and dominate the indefatigable parts of their nominal polity with, and to "control their borders."
How does any of this world-wide arms-bazaar behavior, pioneered industrially by the Krupps in the runup to WW I, do damm-all anything beneficial for either the nations and peoples who are yoked into paying for all of it and suffer for the many failures of policy and "pragmatism" that the militarized rulers repeatedly display? As pointed out, the L-39ZA is only one of many attack jets out there, relatively simple but still deadly, and we are invited to do what, chortle? that like the Iranians post-Shah, saddled by the arms trade and US "policy" with F-4s and "older" stuff, were unable to do the skilled maintenance mostly contracted out by our own war machine, or get spare and replacement parts, so as to keep their sovereign air force, which every self-respecting nation has just got to have, flying and able to "control" its territory?
Yeah, it matters. But that's the downhill line we are on...
Can't hardly wait to see the actual details of this "drawdown," how many "bases" will remain, how many contractors, how many actual uniformed people doing exactly what. And who, officially, will be the last GI to die over there. And of course, as with what Everybody Knows Was The "Legal," "justified" Vietnam War, buried in the valleys and villages will be the actual true nature of the whole "UN" involvement, with all its corruption and covert violence. And once again the Grinning Chimps and Important Generals and Dick(less) Cheneys who spun up the Stupid will get to walk away into a warm sunset, and the machinery that converts wealth into war toys and Bugsplats will keep the drones, ever more of them, in the air.
By the way, here's little snippet for the edification of those who press so hard for the rest of us to just accept that "droning" is legal and trying to bury the patent unwisdom of the whole "counter-terrorism" schtick (maybe, for consistency and to highlight the futility, we should rename the Grand Global Effort the "War on Terrorism," since it's now eliding into that other futile and interminable smokescreen, the "War on Drugs." It's not like the Joint Command Structure is not already in place, along with the "transitioning" of weapons systems and brigades into that other profitable and perpetual fraud:
"Cheney Likes Something Obama's Doing: Drone Strikes!" This from the World Expert on What's Legal, What's Wise, and What He Can Get Away With, who also thinks:
-- Obama's national security team is "second rate."
-- Obama's foreign and national security policies are making the nation "vulnerable to the future." http://www.vpr.net/npr/171803738/ Cheney agrees -- doesn't that make you feel all justified?
Yes, but is it. like, LEGAL?
WHAT 'fully capable" al Quaeda? the guys who pulled off the 9-11 event largely because "our" state security/police system was hobbled by local empire-building and careerist behaviors and such? "Fully capable" is how WE describe OUR Big Military Hammer, and maybe the Chinese when we are talking about "confronting them" in Cold War Part III, rather than buying their stuff and borrowing their money... You griped about my use of "scare quotes" way back when: Gee, is the use of "fully capable" maybe a whole lot worse, since my use of quotes is usually to denote disbelief and irony?
And while I'm at it, in the way of boosting your creds, how about this?
For all you apologist-jingoist-Chauvinist-Gaullist true believers working so hard and diligently and repetitively to abort the debate over US tactics and strategy in assassinating people in favor of Hegelian ACTing, here is some real comfort: In his usual best sneering, condescending manner, from his height as one who truly has done and shaken and really done some damage in the world, he is happy to report, in his best diplomatic formulation, that he “does not disagree with” the Obama approach to worldwide terminate-with-extreme-prejudice power projection, via what’s coming to be called “droning.” Of course it’s only ok for “us,” not anybody else who might use the same technology and justification to pick off, say, people like Cheney… (Footnote: Cheney says Obama’s foreign policy and security teams are “second rate,” and are setting “us” up for terminal weakness in the future…) http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/02/12/171803738/cheney-likes-something-obamas-doing-drone-strikes
See? That world-renowned, everybody-fears-him expert on what's legal, and what works in foreign policy and power projection, "doesn't disagree with you!" You must be really smart...
So "we" shoot Hellfires that more or less occasionally go astray and kill Unarmed Nonenema Cohabitants, or send in the SWATs, and do the apologists for Business as Usual say that this has no patent effect on the quantum of ire directed at "us?" That we are, so to say, in the persons of the guys and gals who do the signature and other targeting and launching and post-event obfuscations, on the same side with all those other populaces who "despise and hunt" that clumsy and over-conflated personification you guys flap around, "al Quaeda Communist Menace Whatever Huge Threat to US Interests, otherwise undefined of course, Like Embassies That Are Spy Nests And Destabilization Bases, and FOBs Planted by Invaders Who Are TRYING to Get The Wogs To Shoot At Us So We Can Justify Shooting Back?"
"Terrorism as a strategy doesn't work," but how many proofs are needed that "counter-terrorism" as a strategy, as implemented by the current mix of technologies and justifications and doctrines, also doesn't work?
(Cue the silence, or the canned response, with footnotes and shiny objects...)
Careful, Sherm -- you can't even IMAGINE what those AQAPs and those AFPAK tribespeople can do... their capabilities are, like, unknown, but undoubtedly GYNormous. They could do ANYthing! Shoe bombs, crotch bombs, dirty nuclear thingies, stuff with propane tanks, homebuilt submarines like the drug cartels who employ what, German and Swedish Milspec engineers, stuff with fertilizer and a rental truck in front of a Heartland Federal Building? Just imagine the infinity of threats they can threaten with! Haven't you read ANYthing by Tom Clancy or Dale Brown? Of COURSE it's totally rational to do whatever the Wise Folks tell us is Wise and Necessary to Protect Us!
We are so busy, starting from the premise that killing certain people will be the butterfly wing in Peking that somehow produces the world we insist we are entitled to, where a few of us continue to get very rich and combustion continues to be our hearth, working little complexities or implementing new technological gadgets that liberate the killers in us from constraint, debating the minuscule morality of tactics and volleying arguments about legalities created by being able to, you know, write the law to suit. Hey, guess how the world would be today if someone had killed a young Schikelgruber, or whatever his name was -- http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/06/opinion/l-hitler-never-really-was-schicklgruber-016390.html? Or Pol Pot? That rotten HoHoHoChiMinh? Or FDR?
Don't ask, either, by what authority "we" get to write that law, don't ask about the larger morality or long-term wisdom or anything other than how one pulls together "serious" bits of text and emotion that can be strung into a plausible if disingenuous rationalization for doing stupid stuff that does what, again, to prolong the species? To make life better and safer and saner for most people?
Sorry the linkage seems obscure. Just pointing out how, over time, most people left more or less alone tend to adjust to differences that were worth killing for just a short while earlier. And that a relatively few people of selfish interest and bad intent can, obviously, by playing on certain flawed bits of our design, stir up one mass insanity after another. And how what I call Players,, pursuing other selfish interests, can by giving or withholding weapons and doing destabilizations and invading and stuff, unbalance the neighborhood again and again. My guess is that would happen over time, even in places like Tunisia and Syria and even Afghanistan when Karzai takes off for Dubai or wherever, and what's going on in Myanmar and in Egypt where the ruling juntas have discovered their over-predations and repression threaten their profits and positions.
My thought is there's lots of people with posthole diggers and microscopes, looking at and even seemingly mastering little bits of the panorama, but as with the blindfolded philosophers debating the nature of the elephant from knowledge gained only by handling a tail, a trunk, a tusk, a leg, there's some virtue in broadening the focus and thinking beyond the parochial, trying to take in all the parts, so the critter is seen in full dimension. If nothing else, as a way to avoid being trampled.
And no, I don't begin to claim to know the whole nature of the elephant. But I've been stepped on and whacked by its trunk, and seen what it does to the carefully tended maize and sorhgum...
Never? https://www.juancole.com/2012/09/top-ten-likely-consequences-of-muslim-anti-us-embassy-riots.html, https://www.juancole.com/2013/02/objections-houses-killing.html#comment-168399 Not even remarks about 3 x 5 cards? Or was that Bill? You guys seem to be sort of fungible.
My nightmares are about bland, reassuring, seemingly wise and seemingly fact-laden (if incompletely depicted) people with blog-post-sized answers for everything, with portfolios of carefully selected and crafted rationales and examples, that apologize for and justify what, in my tiny little appreciation of the world, are behaviors that threaten, not protect, my kids and grandkids, and sure seem to be part of a long repeat of other imperial slides into oblivion that always take a lot of other plain old people down too. The myth you sell, very convincingly when one accepts your postulates anyway, is that all this is "legal," by sovereign fiat "AUMF," and "wise," per policy documents of the day, and run by "competent" people. All like my favorite example, the Vietnam "war," that wonderful expensive stupid Catch-22ism based on an idiot, fraudulent notion of the world. And on the other side, the Soviet investment in Afghanistan. Among just two of the larger ones. And how about the whole tail-chase of spending a quarter, and increasing, of the world's wealth on armaments and atavistic war games?
Time for us to really grow up, not just put on suits and uniforms and claim to be doing really serious grown-up stuff, and spending billions asymmetrically and stupidly to gratify Generals' and politicians' egos and enrich a predatory and destructive few. Like the Egyptian and Iranian militaries, and our own, so thoroughly enmeshed in and draining their respective cultures.
Not to worry, though, Joe, all the money and momentum are on the side you stand up so comfortingly for. Too bad for the rest of us. 'Cuz after all, EEEK! Terraists! Threat! AUMF! Hellfire!
And again, why so much effort, day after day, to convince everyone who reads in these pages of the Rightness and Wisdom and Inevitability of Hellfire and Forever War? What are the national interests in play, again?
"screed
/skrēd/
Noun
A long speech or piece of writing, typically one regarded as tedious." There are less pejorative definitions, of course.
Thanks! I guess... And the above snaps another impeachment bullet into the banana clips of the full-auto guns of Bill and Joe... I wonder if the discourse would be more illuminating or civil if we were all face-to-face instead of keyboard to keyboard, picking up the non-verbal clues, having to account for impulses to comity and acquiescence and altruism, feeling the guilt of overbearing, redolent of pheromones and earnestness... Wait, wait, I know the answer to that one!
We can do so much better, as a species. Any bets on whether we will? Any Grand Ideas on how Better might actually happen? Or is it all tactics and strategy, targeted at Others?
It's morning on Earth. People get up, open the shutters on their houses and shops, bake the bread, pluck the chickens, wash their children's faces and hands, and go about their day-to-day. Over time, that ordinariness creates the wealth that makes the overlay, the largely predatory overlay, of "civilization," possible, with all the face-to-face chatter and jostling, and seems to tend to eventually, even after horrible, hate-engendering conflicts, to eventually produce a tolerable level of "slack:" that variable tolerance of differences, the shrugging off of petty and larger corruption, the ebb and flow of fellow-feeling that makes community and over centuries has even most of the Irish on the same page. For the time being. In a condition of felt legitimacy and stability, or meta-legitimacy and meta-stability, that being "the behavior of certain physical systems that can exist in long lived states that are less stable than the system's most stable state."
Seems like the trick is always figuring out how to keep those whose skills lie in self-advancement, by sharp dealing, promotion of conflict, aggravation of differences, plain old random or planned violence, and the ability to organize for and promote their cause, or just obscure death wishes, from nudging the gyroscope against its bearings, sending it off in some precessed quantum direction that can't be anticipated by our limited Newtonian understandings.
And of course the Game field is now worldwide, with lots of players who don't walk in the streets and have to greet the neighbors every day. Possible moves in the Game: Give these guys or those guys weapons and training? Bring this or that "leader" to this or that capital to give him or her encouragement or creds, and send him or her back, reinforced? Foment this or that bit of mass violence? Put out this or that "policy" cover for this or that stratagem that serves interests unrelated, except via the network of string theory maybe, to that person pulling the laundry out on one of the many lines that link the tenements? While some people, cursed with the larger empathy and a wider view of what keeps the species going, day to day, promote reading programs or microloans or jirgas or the other ligatures that can tie people, with their limbic systems ever on alert for pleasure, pain or power, together in ways that promote social homeostasis.
We are all increasingly and mutually vulnerable, though the asymmetry of vulnerability is also increasing, to the point that the elements that control our wilder exuberances and riots in smaller spaces and locales are attenuated to the point of insensibility, leading in the recent past and still on the books to the Cold War endgame planning where the political elite goes off to their deep, well-larded bunkers, to wait out the radioactive decay and the rotting of all those bodies, or now to the little people who dress up in their suits or uniforms, kiss the wife and kids, and drive off to offices and trailers where they select and execute the day's Hellfire targets. Because after all, day to day, that's what the system crafted by all those crafty people, earnest and perverse, pays them to do, what keeps them and their loved ones in bread and chicken fricassee or cordon bleu.
Poison gas and germ warfare are tactics too, as are nuclear weapons. As are covert assassinations and decapitations. There are reasons why some tactics don't get used, unless you think you can get away with them, have "legal cover" and are arrogant enough to not care about that stupid thing, "public opinion." Or the eyes are on short-term advantages, or mythical notions of "policy."
And of course the drone program may not produce trillions in wealth transfers to the neoKrupps who produce the MQhardware and software, but it's in the hundreds of billions, what used to be called "real money," and there are floods of side businesses that get wealthy off the entire war industry, so everyone in it is looking for excuses and reasons to continue the Game, and of course they would NEVER manufacture those reasons out of comfortable whole cloth, now would they?...
What? No refutation from our resident experts on "legality?" Is silence to be taken as assent, then, as they have sometimes argued? Or is this one of those "say nothing, and hope nobody notices" kind of moments?
To answer your first question: Naw, of course not. It's just part of the whole thing that does cost in the trillions, the thing you argue constantly to justify "legally," since apparently there's not much wisdom arguable in doing all the stuff "we" are doing, the whole "global war on terror" though of course we can't call it that any more, now can we?
What is your concise statement of "our national interests," again? The ones that are threatened by al Quaeda and all those terrorists out there? And any betting on who will be the last guy or gal in US uniform to be remembered as the last one to die after "we" vacate Afghainistan, "mission accomplished?" As you say, "Care to make it interesting?" Maybe we could gin up a lottery on the date that will be inscribed for that last idiot death on whatever memorial us wistful homebodies cobble up to sanctify the sacrifices of others?
McNamara-style "cost-effectiveness" thinking, the kind that even he acknowledged after the fact was stupid and maybe even evil, currently trumps not only the "legal" considerations, it also brushes away almost all consideration of what some here sneer at as "alternatives." "We have the tools, we have the talent! It's Miller (tm) time!" Yeah, there are day-to-day "necessities," the product of yesterday's STUPID, that the whizzzz-BANG! kids can elevate as excuses for what they really want to do anyway. But who's supposedly looking out for what all Empires supposedly claim as their birthright, that "thousand year" endurance? and gee, what about that idiot notion of promoting the general welfare, stuff like not eating ourselves out of house and planetary home, since food and shelter and stuff are even important to hegemonists, over the long haul? Yeah, I know, "al Quaeda!" and "national interest!" and "security!" and all that jazzzz.
But once again, each human works, most of them, to maximize his or her own pleasure and profit during his or her little lifetime, aided by the kind of forebrain activity that Joe and Bill exemplify that makes whatever they immediately want to do "all right," ignoring that lesson in kindergarten where you are offered one piece of candy now, or five if you can go all day without hitting anyone... "Apres moi, le deluge," after all, so who cares?
"This is war." Half a trillion bucks a year to do what, again? "Take down" a possible hundred or so people who might not be malleable and amenable to the Overall Grand Plan? In light of the reality that the most effective tools against the behavior called "terrorism" have in fact been plain old LAW ENFORCEMENT, gumshoe, cops-and-robbers plays?
"WAR!?" As redefined and expanded by those who keep repeating and repeating the position you espouse, in the hope that no one will maybe have any niggling little thoughts about "wisdom," once the latest version of John Yoo has offered a nice-sounding "legal argument" and "justification" and "don't you worry about mission creep, all you taxpaying citizens and illegal aliens, we're all over this" suave reassurance.
On another front, sure seems the Constitution and the US Criminal Justice System do not apply to some other aspects of the Imperial Presidency that have been chewed over in Informed Comment and other place, and the creeping, nay, galloping pace, of State Securitization, as in what's been done to all those Dangerous Occupiers by illegal detentions and gas and beatings and getting shot in the face by "non-lethal projectiles." All of which, of course, have been "justified" by the same bunch who tell us that Droning and Assassination are, you know, "legal," because "AUMF!" Nor does the "law" apply, apparently, to Banksters, or contractors to the War Department, etc....
One wonders if there will be immunity from arbitrariness, or maybe some kind of reward structure for people who speak up on behalf of the Lordlings. It worked, for a time, for Quislings and such-like...
So was/is Alan Dershowitz. No magic involved in having mastered the lingo and niceties of a particular body of scholarship. Bork was a con law perfesser too, and many would say that Earl Warren knew a thing or two about it. For every proposition of rights and obligations under the general umbrella of the "Constitution," as extended by the Bill of Rights and a long history of push and shove over crap like "substantive due process" that's back in vogue, there's a countervailing proposition, rule, interpretation, gloss, shading, et cetera.
As the neocons and the War Department and much of State and of course the CIA are wont to say, "there is only power." "Rights" are for suckers. And so are the "legal" pasties and g-string, which really don't conceal all that much of that raddled, poxed fille de joie, now do they?
So much palaver about little niceties of, ahem, urp!. "AUMF" legalities. So horribly little about wisdom.
In the meantime, SOCOM and AFRICOM continue to grow, like medium-sized tumors...
OK, Bill: who criticizes folks for logical fallacies, alla time. What is that one? Post hoc, ergo propter hoc? Like the guy in Times Square carrying the elephant gun, claiming success in keeping the wild elephants away?
Oh, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO24XmP1c5E
"Sharia Law" is the new "Red Menace." There's a burka-hawking "towelhead" under the bed, now...
Hope you are right. I think the "stupid" is institutionalized and insuperable. Too much momentum, too much invested, too many "offices" and "commands" working off "stupid" doctrines and dogmas and dictionaries, too many people starting their educations by aiming for degrees in "security." Like how about a Masters degree in "Homeland Security?" http://www.militarytimesedge.com/education/degree-programs/ed_strat_homelandsecurity_degrees_030711w/
Can't afford it? Wait, I thought the Chinese were lending us all that money so we could dump ourselves into their laps? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM
There is no fixing some things.
Bill just knows that there is this huge and growing secret army of the night out there, more inimical than even Amway, who is just itching to come and get us and take our stuff and put burkas on our females after violating them and keeping us from going to Walmart and other evil deeds, millions and millions of them, and he's all for destroying our village, and theirs, or any village that might be near one of theirs, in order to keep the evil juices of al Quaeda from polluting our precious bodily fluids...
Lots of talk about proportionality, not much of it from the standpoint of what it costs our culture to deal with something the scope of minor eczema. A trillion dollars every year or so, to be able to occasionally kill a few people, and maybe some people who are unwise enough to associate with, those targeted individuals someone has decreed to be Unlawful Enema Combatants?
"To claim that one cannot be both a soldier and a criminal is to argue that nothing done in the prosecution of a war can be illegal."
I guess I am missing something that I am sure will be pointed out, but it sure seems like you and Bill argue, very plainly, albeit behind a screen of "legalisms," that indeed pretty much nothing "we" do in the prosecution of a war can be illegal. Indeed, that "necessity" dictates that EVERYthing any more is a WAR and therefore open season.
Does that mean that generals who run prisons like Abu Ghraib, and generals and colonels and captains who operate(ed) killing machines like the ones that it finally appears were running in Vietnam and other places nominally as "wars," self-declared "wars," with no possible good end, no strategic successes (except in apologists' screeds), no advancement of US interests, can be held as criminals? Or did your predecessors in polemics carry the day in figuring out little corner-shot "legal arguments" for why our former and (as the arguments you contend for) present "actors" are in the "legal" right in the operation of the current killing machines, thus immunizing them from consequences?
(Re good ends, I see the Kabulists are lobbying for a huge bunch of high-dollar, high-prestige weapon systems, F-16s for crissake, to be gifted to them by "the UN." U.S., Afghanistan At Odds Over Weapons Wish List, http://www.npr.org/2013/02/06/171194064/u-s-afghanistan-at-odds-over-weapons-wish-list To "control their borders." Which extend exactly where? Since they don't seem interested in figuring out how to "control" their nominal subjects, and like their predecessors seem to be setting up to try to hold on to just the personally richest bits for as long as they can.At least the Afghanistan "war" sort of looked like a "war." AUMF and all. If congress happened to withdraw the AUMF, the linchpin of your whole argument, could we all go home? and let the cops go back to work?)
Another question I just have to ask: What is so important about blogs like this that folks like you have to keep trying to pound down any little pseudopod of a notion that maybe what "we" are doing is neither "legal," nor right, nor just, nor wise (then and now and once again -- see, e.g. the Phoenix Program, the official version and the extended reality like http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175635/)
You guys are getting to the point of self-parody.
(Wait for it... wait for it... here comes the withering riposte...)
Yeah, we all know the Mightiest Nation on Earth Ever, that can't seem to clobber into submission even a bunch of rock-dwelling tribespeople or paddy-farming rice eaters, has a combination Get Out Of Jail Free Card and Swiss Army knife full of Really Cool Blades...
Too bad the cliques that rule us don't have a penchant or knack for doing anything actually productive or positive that might prolong our species' miserable tenure on the planet. And that's not to say that any other set of ruling elites is any better at unproductive and unhealthy (except for the ones who rule and profit), of course. Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot and Battista and the Shah and even Saddam and a bunch of South and Central American and African dictators (which strange to say, often gained their positions thanks to US efforts, intended or otherwise -- not Hitler -- except IBM, and a few other sympathetic helpers -- and Stalin, of course) were and are Not Nice People.
The potential was there for us to do so much better... except "limbic system."
For a possibly working link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/21/drone-strikes-international-law-un
Oh, we hear, but the UN thinks this is all hunky-dory! and after all, AUMF!
Here's a fraction of an interesting article, discountable of course 'cuz it comes from the Guardian, which has an "agenda," about what the UN guys who will be looking into droning have to say, under the headline "Drone strikes threaten 50 years of international law, says UN rapporteur -- US policy of using drone strikes to carry out targeted killings 'may encourage other states to flout international law'":
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/21/drone-strikes-international-law-un
Of course, there's a lot more that kind of undercuts the apologist arguments about how all this is, you know, LEGAL, in the linked article. Forgive me for re-posting it in this spot, but it bears some searching inquiry.
But hurry up to point out that the "9-11" justification is, as they said in the Vietnam era, "no longer operative," since of course the "al Quaeda" we define are, you know, doing stuff to US interests at this very moment!!!!" And SOMEthing just HAS to be done with all that technology, you know. Wack-a-Mole, with the added nice feature of, you know, Jobs!, and a seemingly perpetual motion machine that generates new Moles and new Holes and, mirabile dictu, Bigger Hammers and an ever-larger playing surface!
Was this thing plumbed to a producing well? Short video, but it looks like an awful lot of bubbles and froth. Would Joe have any tears if the incident was a blowout? Or is chauvinist schadenfreude more important than, like, bigger stuff?
For fun, let's remember BP-in-the-Gulf Tony Heyward, who wants his life back:
http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heather/bp-ceo-hayward-i-want-my-life-back-claims
For those who like to hear both sides, I guess, there are always places like this link, which of course carries a full load of amygdala-originated comments:
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/06/11/lisa-jackson-epa-isnt-to-blame-for-coal-industrys-problems/
Life is simple, isn't it? and getting more so. Us versus Them. All of Them. More than enough Them to go around.
Maybe the simplification will take us back to the unicellular stage, for another protoplasmic, carbon-based run at greatness...
Consider yourself hugged, Joe.
Is it maybe a matter of how one goes about buy out the jobs of those who go down to the earth in skips? Big Coal sure knows how to play on the fears and traditions of the people they steal the labor of. Who in turn, like the folks at Lockheed-Martin, form up a loud constituency in favor of keeping the F-22 line churning, and the mountains being topped, because hey, "jobs program!"
Hey, did I read somewhere that the total number of workers in coal mining is about 105,000? In a population of 310 million? Not many horsedrawn carriages or buggy whips are made these days, so that part of the culture is gone. Why not just release the people who find meaning in mining, or at least a "living wage" at the Appalachian standard from the need to strip the land and hope their number does not come up, every working day, thanks to heedless, greedy management and the inherent dangers?
You'd think that the costs to the planet, saved from reduced dumping of externalities via the subsidized continued coal combustion, would justify some kind of stipend to feed and clothe and house them and their families.
Hey, if the Reds can jerry-rig and gerrymander the electoral process (along with buying better, slicker, less odious candidates), why not do the world a favor by unlinking that unholy coalonialization in places like PA and WV and OH?
Hey, you Dems: Stand up and fight for your planet, for God's sake.
Joe, which UN are you talking about? The one whose Special Rapporteur had something quite different to say, as reported by the Guardian?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/21/drone-strikes-international-law-un
That UN?
Speaking of patent dishonesty.
Quite a flood of heavy-artillery reinforcement in support of the Narrative, there. Bring smoke on 'em, Chester!
As to arguments over the existence vel non of the Clinton Doctrine and that tu quoque about the Brezhnev doctrine, nicely played. And the slam on Chomsky was a classic of understated dismissal.
As to the really good stuff that the US is doing (forgive the hypostatization, I know it's only a small fragment of us) as the latest extension of the United Fruit Doctrine, so aptly described by my man Gen. Smedley Butler as "nothing but a racket," there's a nice little video snippet here, albeit from that unAmerican, agenda'd al Jazeera, on one little bit. And I am just sure that GIs brought up on counter-whicheveritis are going to just go in and open up a can of whip-a55 on the whole drug business Down There: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/06/201268104039976309.html
And for another Left-Liberal screed to denigrate as "having an agenda," how about this 2002 observation, which has only been trumped and outdated by tacking the Drug War flag to the military masthead:
http://www.unidir.org/pdf/articles/pdf-art1448.pdf
Of course poverty, with its attendant upward wealth transfer to the present generation of the elect, satisfied with "Apres moi, le deluge," is sort of one face of the overall strategy, right?
Dulles and Wild Bill are dead. So. Nothing possibly could be behind that curtain...
Interesting what you learn as you wander the wordspace. For instance, kind of interesting the crossovers you encounter.
A filibuster, or freebooter, is someone who engages in an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country to foment or support a revolution. The term is usually used to describe United States citizens who attempted to foment insurrections in Latin America in the mid-19th century, but is also applicable in the modern day.
Filibusters are irregular soldiers who act without authority from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure. The freewheeling actions of the filibusters of the 1850s led to the name being applied figuratively to the political act of filibustering in the United States Congress.[1] "Freebooter" is the more familiar term in British English, in which "filibuster" normally only refers to the legislative tactic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29
One reason what I guess we might call "decapitation" is somewhat problematical is that it is so easily converted into a game of tit-for-tat. In pre-Clausewitz war days (I know, hardly a universal behavior, what with the original Assassins and all that), it was seen not only as bad form but maybe counterproductive to kill off enemy leaders, political and military, since "the enemy you know," and all that, and if you snipe at them, they might do the same to you, or your family or friends...
(Sub-rule in context: If you shoot at the king, general, Fearless Leader, Imam, warlord, whatever, you better be sure you kill him, and not just crank up his followers, and you ought to be pretty sure that picking him off will not cascade into something worse for the "interests" of the Home Team.)
And as to re-casting the "rule of law" that some folks want us to think is being preserved and observed here, it's pretty clear that "our" interpretation is as Chomsky observes: unidirectional and arbitrary. Everyone else, on penalty of "covert" death, has to observe and abide by what "we" decide. "We" who more and more are tiny self-selected bunch, claiming the mantles of High Purpose and Necessity, pretty much immune from the hurly-burly of policy arm-wrestling that might include a broader discussion of aims and interests and means, doing what they damm please behind a pretty skimpy G-string and pasties with some little labels called "AUMF" and "UNSC Resolutions" and "John Yoo" on them.
There's a reason Shakespeare put those words in Dick the Butcher's mouth, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
And for those who might be inclined to buy, wholesale, the repeated assertions that "our" drone assassinations are "legal," please note a significant division of opinion. Like the views and argument laid out here: http://law.wustl.edu/harris/documents/OConnellFullRemarksNov23.pdf Among many others.
The apologist's dilemma: Refrain from repeating the refrain here, and hope observations like these by Engelhardt and Chomsky (that socialist unAmerican) just slide by unremarked, in the hope that no one will pay much attention, or load up the usual comfortable doses of Conventional Wisdom and Inevitability, to inject, insensibly, with as much savoir faire and confident elan as possible?
It's not, of course, that anyone of any significance, who might see suddenly in a different light on their own road to Damascus and maybe be in a position to act to change the underlying policy behaviors, anyone of Player significance that is, is in danger of encountering chains of thought like those that creep out of these impotent corners, the notion that "we don't and can't and don't need to own the world" and "our policies may actually be ensuring that we will not be enduring." It's not even clear that the folks who surface these notions really even want them acted upon, after all. They profit from U.S., LLC too, after all.
Better to just let it lie flopping and gasping for breath, or try to smother or strangle it? Hmmmmmm... Maybe a distraction...
Yeah, in cases of such grand collective guilt, how could anyone ever want people who actually make the day to day, micromoment decisions to get rich off stealing the value of all those ordinary individuals' investments and homes, to what did the old movies say, "face the music?" What a joke to say that adding a little spice of the fear of prosecution and jail time to the swill of greed that the FEW who actually profit, hugely, from all this, swim in? You really have all the hack arguments ready to hand, in between the personalities...
Aaaawww, what would make you say that? Joe is just trying tokeep the rest of us honest. To make sure we know how little we really know of all the important stuff that is being done in our names and for us and to us...
So much, once again, for the idiot hubris of the Late-Roman-Empire "world's greatest deliberative body." Subject, for a fistful of dollars, to the inevitably mortal tyranny of the minority:
http://130.102.44.246/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/sais_review/v022/22.2saideman.pdf
Of course, all that analysis requires accepting as a postulate that there's this monadic entity called "foreign policy," and I bet Schopenhauer or one of those guys could point out a whole lot of flaws in that notion. He did have some other insights that might throw some more shadow on the immediate issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer
AIPAC and all the other special courtiers have mastered the relatively easy subversion of the institutions that are supposed generally to "promote the general welfare." Organize, concentrate, metastasize. More money = more malignancy.
Dilettante remark for the hour:
Just a thought: this guy will be "in charge" of a real Behemoth-of-many-self-interested-parts, all attached to the tax teat by a large-bore vacuum orifice. He may have experience of what "war," the traditional notion of mano-a-mano combat is, from his Vietnam gig, and hopefully that will give him some backbone to resist really worst efforts of the Villager war wimps and chicken-policy-hawks, to spare other young men (and now women) and various "gooks" and "towelheads" and such the horrors of loosing all those ever-growing piles of increasingly lethal weapons into actual use.
Running an "enterprise," a Milo Minderbinder kind of "enterprise," is another kind of game that masquerades behind the glory facade of WAR. He will be "in charge of" a huge amount of wealth transfer, from butter to bullets, orchestrated by a bunch of Harpies all screaming or sneaking around pushing their favorite Procurement Program or "service interests." A 600-ship navy, with lots of places for Admirals to hang their ever-more-populous flags? More manned fighters and attack aircraft and bombers, requiring more General managers, or more increasingly autonomous UAVs? Gotta give the Marines something to do, to keep the sword's edge sharp. And all that Black Ops stuff, with no guarantee he or the hopefully loyal members of his staff (all bound, supposedly, by that now-silly oath to "support and defend the Constitution") will even know about.
Maybe he could take a shot at enforcing simple (heh, heh) fiscal principles and accounting and accountability, so that the Gods of the Beltway could at least have a complete picture of what they are buying, in men, machines and "policy" magnets, for all that money they get from us and from places like the Social Security Trust Fund. Maybe he would take an interest in the (inevitable, I guess) corruption and incompetence in the whole War Industry game, dialing it back down to something a little less painfully obvious. Maybe he could take another shot at not just spray-painting another shade of "green" on the edifice, but actually putting all those resources to work addressing not who gets to use up the last bits of oil and water and air, but preserving them for some kind of posterity.
All in a huge bureaucracy, staffed by people who know their tenure outlasts his, with their little interests and games. In a place with nominal "traditions" and "services" that span centuries, careers that span generations, programs that span decades. And with lobbyists and contractors circling, circling, circling... How does all that begin to be "managed" and "directed," I'm way too small to begin to understand.
My bet is he will be another nice figurehead, of a trillion-plus-a-year, heavily-armed (in all theatres, all nine AORs that cover the whole planet) operation. Presiding over a huge bureaucracy, with all the hidden niches and enormous momentum that keeps a guy in his new position from really doing much more than re-arranging the window dressing and a few seating positions and office assignments. On a large scale, he's a bus driver, making thousands of life-or-death decisions every second of every minute he's behind the wheel: steering, braking, acceleration, stopping, re-fueling, who to let on and off the bus, following some kind of route and trying to avoid collisions.
Wish him luck... and hope his driving keeps us from something Really Stupid, like WW Whatever Number We Are On. All those thousands of short-target-time nukes are still deployed, after all.
Tell us why this sortie was "legal, " willya, fellas? So it's just as just as droning and "preventive wars of choice? "
Sarajevo, how we love ya, how we love ya...
Here we go agaaiin...
Stupid effing humans. There's reason why we need to worry about self-extinction...
So is it a good thing that the generals have such a large pecuniary stake in kind of keeping the lianas that bind whatever common polity there is in Egypt together and in reasonably good working order? One wonders if they are wise enough to appreciate their parasitic reality, and adaptable enough to accept that maybe they at least have to make a show of working on stability and legitimacy of a central government that seems to this dilettante to have not so much to do, any more. And the many apparent cleavage planes of that enormous diamond in the rough sure are looking to be feeling the stresses that end in a rupture.
Of course, over time, assuming the species can accomplish its own survival, "recovery" ensues, as in places like Ireland and Lebanon and others, people get sick and tired of killing each other for tribal reasons, you have a Romeo&Juliet moment, the Cap'ulites make up with the Montajews, and a new climb up to oligarchy and dissolution resumes.
It's a lot easier to break stuff than to make stuff, and of course very profitable for the breakers as a general rule.
What were the justifications for prolonged US, er, UN involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, again? I do remember one in particular: "We broke it, now we have to fix it." Too bad nations and their fragments are not curios in the china shop, "fixable" with a little Superglue (tm)...
"the U.S. may wax nostalgiac over the Assad era." As some U.S.ans are doing over the Saddam Hussein era, and I bet many Iraqis and other eths are too. How 'bout them Iraqi Oil Reserves and development contracts, hey?
A constant theme with Bill and Joe seems to be that "we," us dilettantes who don't reside in one of the Rings of Power, should just leave all this to the "experts."
Took a walk down memory lane, hearing an interview of the guy who wrote one of the many "Vietnam" books, "DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle." Reminded me of just how idiotic the whole thing was, top to bottom, winning hearts and minds by invading them and killing them and trashing their land to "stop Commyanism," with lots of real-world evidence inescapably concluding that "we" did not even achieve our modest re-re-re-re-re-re-revised goals of leaving a government in half a country that could defend its borders and not be allied with the USSR. A much bigger enemy than the current one, albeit painted the same color.
Apparently a lot of GIs from the present land wars are coming to the same realization, some, many even, to the point of suicide.
McNamara was an "expert," a great business success and a wonderful War Manager. Kissinger was (and is) an "eggsbert," in everything, at all times. Petraeus was (and is) an "expert" in the Brassing of his position, and the promotion of elevated doctrines of serial failure pedigree, and so are the other general officers who are masters of complexity and interoperability and procurement and logistics and dare one say it, institutionalized corruption so big that it can't even attempt to be audited.
Since maybe even Eisenhower, it sure don't seem to me that we have been served by much in the way of effective, win-it or even break-even, expertise.
Got anything more than bits of serial drive-by italicized impeachment?
Or is it worth the time to write out what the real situation is, in your estimation, and what the etiology was, and what the end-game and flux and flow of the policies and behaviors you apologize for is supposed to be? My guess, if you haven't done so elsewhere, is that Prof. Cole would consider giving you a guest podium gig.
Or would that just open up a can of worms, or expose stuff that is currently hidden or ignored or misdirected away from, as part of keeping the same old ball in the same old play? Not to mention retaliatory serial drive-by impeachment, of course, which once again obscures the big picture behind little frames of sarcasm and "Incorrects."
"War is cheap! at these prices..." Of course that facile argument may be tongue in cheek, one would hope. Completely begs the question of what ought to be done with a trillion or two a year that could be "borrowed" at your zero cost to fund shit like transition to a national health care system, repairing or replacing all the bridges that are on the point of falling down, putting back the money (whatever that is, any more) "borrowed" from the Social Security HaHa Trust Fund, encouraging post-combustion energy provisions, securing our food supplies (short of subsidies to the Soylent Corporation), stuff like that.
And of course from my little stack of 3 x 5s, augmented by a zillion examples of corruption and inefficiency and clumsy idiot Bigness, we should remember the fundamental truth, however obscured by apologists and the intense lovers of all things uniform and deadly and expensive, "War is nothing but a racket. Any more, "War," as you indicate, is not about national goals achieved after honest debate -- it's about wealth transfer of Created Money (that for the players, spends just like the dollars in my bi-weekly paycheck) to be-medaled, over-acronymed, overgrown children who want what they want when they want it: "Experimenting with warfare has seldom been so cheap, easy or safe as it is for the peoples of today's West." Which kind of establishes that it is not "war" as Clausewitz and Sun Tzu and the Marine Hymn apprehend it.
And I bet Yves Smith, over there at nakedcapitalism, may have a very different notion of the accounting when it comes to toting up the actual costs, internal and external, of the cancerous, metastatic growth of the War Culture. Dare one ask what the endpoint is? Species death, enhanced by encouragement of the behaviors that heat up the planet? And solar panels on the Humvee's roof don't begin to be green enough to do more than give the PR liars a talking point.
Gee, Joe, the War Guys who run the Pentagram and the really deep policy people and the folks who feed the news hens in the FOX coop sure sold and sell it to us as something where a misty water-coolered vision called "Victory" and "Success" and "Defeat of the Enemy" are what it was, is and will be, for all the wealth and bodies we feed it, in future spasms of expensive imperial invasion and rout. Or was that public face of the whole thing just "profoundly misguided?" As in "The whole idea is to keep the public who pays in the total darkness (except for the mandatory 'light at the end of the tunnel') about what the Game Really Is"?
So that once again, after trillions of dollars and (hundreds of) thousands of lives, and further warpage of "civil society," inter alia to prolong the
Oiligarchy, the Smart Guys can come up, post hoc, with all the reasons why, "yeah, we really meant to do that!" and "It's NOT MY FAULT!" And the people that bring us these "wars," these rackets, these meaningless, mindless transfers of wealth, gaily painted in patriotic colors with banners flying reading "National Interest!" are going to tell the folks who pay for them, every which way, that any "analysis of the military question" that does not follow the Script for the Narrative is what, again? WEAK?
And you toss the author off in three sentences. Do you have three sentences that can capture and explain what the "national interests" are that made it mandatory to march on into a place like Afghanistan, all drums and bugles and "We're Gonna Win This Sucker?
And yep, "it's complicated," too complicated to be understood except by the parasites who live in the belly of it, because there are so many ways that billions of dollars can be disappeared, and there's always the excuse that "Stuff happens" on accounta the unknown unknowns, don't you non-military-cognoscenti know?
Don't like what Engelhart and Turse and folks who study the Beast and its behaviors from outside? Pretty weak to relegate them to "second to several." Like some of your retired generals and war wimps who Speak The Lingo?
With the possible exception of WW II, every US "war" since then has been a "victory-fail" bust from the standpoint of the Common Man... And WW I, where the General Officers set in motion the notion that They Had A Plan and Had Everything Under Control. And here we are, back to wars of attrition, where the wearing down is done by guys in turbans with WW I rifles, RPGs, and re-gifted Good Old American Ordnance. What nonsense.
"Reaction formation," or something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_formation Such a difficult notion that even Christians claim to understand the phenomenon. http://ucmpage.org/jwarrene/messages/whyenemy.html
Bearing in mind the way "we" are ordering and conducting ourselves, dumping a huge and growing chunk of our national wealth into a "war" that is conveniently not required to be "declared," and where no one can state, simply, the huge national interests that justify that, other than stating a "threat" that maybe some asymmetric warriors and sneaks might do bad again, and taking full advantage of the ration of noise and hate that has cynically been used to keep us all fearful of "another 9/11," and the refrain that all this GWOT stuff is sui generis, so there is nothing to be learned from past rations and rounds of Stupid, like the cliffward deflection of the whole human world system that began with the Great War:
Cruttwell, C. R. M. F., The Role of British Strategy in the Great War. Cambridge [Eng.] University Press, 1936
Why is this last paragraph so reminiscent of the state of "the Americans" these days? And in case it ain't clear, Cruttwell's point is that the people who are supposed to conduct the interests of nations have, since 1914, largely been shut up and ignored by the militarists, who settle on "strategies" like Global Wars on Terror and counter-insurgency and tactics and strategies like Droning, in wars and other "involvements," where the ability to simply "do something" (like U-boat warfare in WW I, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-boat_Campaign_%28World_War_I%29) leads to surprising and could one say negative results.
On the other hand, who cares? Joe and Bill and their side sure have all the throw weight and momentum behind them...
Sidd: You got it, exactly. And Joe and Bill, who apparently can't, or because Might is on their side, don't need to, define what significant national interests are served by hundreds of billions spent, the generation of a whole lot of bad will, and the depositing of imperial excrescences all over the place, want us all to focus on little piddly bits of "rational argument" over what's "legal," as opposed to what's wise for the health of the whole nation.
What "we" are up to might be good for those who profit from making the war toys and operating them and Managing the Battlespace and of course aiding the extraction of resources (on the way to a global climate that humans might not survive,) and who will be comfortably deceased before it happens and thus immune to consequences. It sure does not seem to be good for the rest of us. But then nobody is asking the rest of us, who take our doses of FOX and go with the flow...
Be careful, though -- this pair, who are always challenging others to provide cites to support any contention they don't agree with, will be all over you for the observations you make. By way of impeachment, and one has to ask, for what reasons? Why is it worth their time to spend all that effort undercutting any attempt to point out what are clearly moral and political issues of substance, in a place as remote from the Village as this one?
What is with Joe and Bill, and that need the Germans also felt to make their invasion of the neutral nation of Belgium at least appear "legal," back in August 1914, and the Japanese with respect to Manchuria and stuff? One wonders what kind of skin they have or had in the Great Game.
For those who see the sainted AUMF and that UN resolution as nothing but a couple of minuscule pasties and frayed G-string on a fat, raddled whore of an imperial Hegelian act of pure will, as nothing but the vainest and faintest "excuse" for Doing Stupid on a grand scale, it also seems that the lingo of "Nyah, nyah, Poppa said we could do it" (and the belief system that lies, in all senses, behind it) just creates a nice misdirection and shiny object to distract from questions about, oh, actual effectiveness of "the program," and whether the "targets" chosen actually pose any kind of threat (other than in fevered imaginations and Threat Finding Consciousnesses) that begins to be worth the effort, and the cost. In retrospect, in a somewhat parallel situation, Congress "authorized" that thing called the Vietnam War, also on specious Gulf of Tonkin grounds, and it continued to a stupid, ineffective end that we are STILL paying for. (The way this one is framed, there can never BE an "end," of course, it goes on forever, self-generating like the War on Drugs.)
But our apologists dodge the question of what "national interests" justify, even on economic grounds, the money and "good will" and bodies dumped into the idiocy that is the Pentagram war procurement machine "fighting the Global War On Terror" and the serial foolishness of CIA activities.
Of course what the rest of the world thinks of us is apparently meaningless and valueless to Dronifiying Apologists. It sure looks to me like just one part of a disease state that has only one sequel, and that is not, however much they may insist and pretend, US hegemony or even increased security. Quite the contrary. Of course, some few of us get rich off all this...
Asked here is what are the alternatives? There's an irreducible amount of TERRORISM in the world, including stuff that "we" do in the name of short-term seeming "advantage." (Like "getting rid of Mossadegh for the Shah, and Diem and Allende and many more "actions.") The most effective tools and tactics against what our rulers denominate as "terrorism" have been plain old police work, and over time the kinds of national behaviors (including all the corporate parts of same) that reduce the drivers and incentives that cause and "authorize" a few people all over the planet, including within our military and State Security apparatus, to blow stuff up and kill other people.
For those who like to hide interesting realities behind a screen of words, here's one part of a source for you:
http://www.cfr.org/international-law/enemy-combatants/p5312
Yeah, right. Makes your eyes get all misty, doesn't it?
Respectfully sort of have to disagree, professor.
There has been a huge amount of discourse over at places like dailyKos and even nursing websites about what Obama and his people could have accomplished by doing the bully pulpit thing. Dems have been helping to drown the baby of the New Deal for quite a while, and I doubt that from all the managed care applied to the debate (like excluding representatives of single-payer or even "medicare for all" from the room) that even Serious Historians will give a true picture of what happened from 2007 on. Wiki, that always-impeachable source, offers this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_reform_debate_in_the_United_States
The Villagers have their immutable political truths; the rest of us have, maybe, Obamacare. (My wife, like a lot of our fellow Americans, has serious pre-existing conditions, no possible non-employer private UN-surance. She is "lucky" to have a COBRA continuation for a little while yet, and under that ACA mishmash has to gGO WITHOUT ANY "HEALTH UN-SURANCE" for SIX MONTHS, before even qualifying for whatever we here in FL will "receive" from the "exchange" thingie. What could possibly be wrong with that situaton?)
You tell me, from your perspective of a person who maybe has a pretty good group health deal through the University, that's the best that could have been achieved, tell me as a veteran who gets VA single-payer quality care, and who now can "take" advantage of Medicare, and as a nurse who sees the flaws (fixable) in Medicare/Medicaid and the flaws (huge, cruel and inherent) in for-profit or even non-profit privatized UN-surance every working day.
I'm reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August," about the prelude to and the early days of the Great War (not the Global War On Terror, that we don't call it any more, but WW I).
Bill's insistence that all the stuff "we" are doing is "legal" under "international law," citing his two or three usual authorities. And of course the claim that anybody "we" target, or kill by oopsie, is ipso facto an "Illegal Enema Combatant" or one of their family or friends who are unwise enough to associate with them.
Interesting how reminiscent his claims are of the claims the Boche used to justify burning Belgium and France and what they could reach of Russia, etc., and "executing" hostages and decimating streets and villages and cities on the ground that under "international law," all that was perfectly legal, because whether in fact or in propaganda, Belgians had dared to shoot at the invading and attacking Boche, as "evil franc-tireurs," and thus invited the implementation of Clausewitz's Total War Doctrine. And besides, as the Germans told it, the Belgians started it by not just bending over and taking it from the git-go, 'cuz Germany was after all Superior and the New Wave of Destiny.
Yeah, I know, Bill -- "That was different."
Interesting that you would try to denigrate Amnesty International as "having an agenda and an ideological lens." I think Amnesty International's staff includes a number of lawyers who specialize in and probably understand "international law," that arbitrary and squishy notion, pretty well. That they do not espouse your position and the position of the folks you apologize for sure does not either impeach them, or validate you.
"Legal," my eye. But of course there's no stopping the GWOT, now is there, or even trying to right-size and rationalize "our" game play...
For anyone unclear about what's gone before, what's happening now, and what's to come: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2012/12/2012121874846805636.html The logic is sooo, ah, compelling, right? "What we did was not wrong. If the Communists had succeeded, our country would have been altogether different."
As just one example.
No doubt (Uganda, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraganakifanistan, China, pretty much everywhere... e.g., http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175639/tomgram%3A_jonathan_schell%2C_seeing_the_reality_of_the_vietnam_war%2C_50_years_late/)
Where are the peace-makers, the peace-creators? Where does reconciliation come from? Or is that just another myth, that obscures our human nature and insulates us from ever having to behave differently?
All that smoke and thunder, all those myriad plays and feints and fails in the Great Game, accomplishing exactly what? The Krupps made a killing arming the idiot players 1900-1918 and after, and now a quarter of the world's wealth is dumped into the more "advanced" equivalents of the Maxim and rail gun (the old-fashioned type, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxykqgRodTc, and here's the "modern" version, http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/29/railgun-test-fire-video/) and Fokker DR.1.
Meanwhile, the planet starts to smoke and choke, yet the few who get rich off the idiocy live out their large and pleasant lives without the tiniest care about "le deluge" that they know is likely to descend after they, personally, are dead, gone and beyond retribution. Not that the attitude is anything new or different -- http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/29/railgun-test-fire-video/
...And of course there was the whole Nixon-Agnew (remember him?)-Colson-etc. "enemies list." http://www.enemieslist.info/
Don'tcha just love "democracy?"
How many Viagra pills did Rush Limbaugh have on hand and on board, again? http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/crime/rush-limbaughs-dominican-stag-party
I wonder how that observation applies to the hundreds of millions of people who got hammered and continue to suffer the pains and horrors of the, what do we call it, "Financial Crisis?" A pretty clearly intentional sapping of the Big Economy by people who, like the bin Ladins and suchlike, have slip-slided away into penalty-free obscurity,
For a while there, some of us were visualizing lampposts on Wall Street festooned with corpses in what the rich folk call "bespoke suits," stripped of their egos and Patek Phillipe wrist chronometers... but then like good old plow horses and meat animals, we just went back to work trying to fix all the broken stuff, while the Financialists kept writing derivative "contracts" there in the Casino of Personal Immunity.
Re "The Perfect Storm," other possible parallels: The protagonist chose to lead his ship and crew into a very possibly terminal situation out of a combination of pride, habit and greed. Or so the reportage on the incident, so mawkishly portrayed in the movie and in different ways in the book, would lead one to believe.
Too bad that none of the people who enlisted for this Forever War fiasco can even dream about filing a lawsuit, say, to recover some of what they lost by the dishonest failure of "the government" to accurately forecast the various pieces of the outcome. Not after the result reported in this other tale: http://www.michaeltougias.com/court_case.html
It's worse than you think, sir.
It seems (despite serious efforts to obscure the facts and time line) parts of the field forces of our pre-Homeland Securitization Big Agencies were pretty well apprised that there were A-Rabs in the USofA who were doing stuff like learning to fly (but not to land, so much) airplanes. And that these significant bits of "intelligence" were shunted aside because they did not fit with institutional priorities and preferences or were in danger of crossing jurisdictional lines between competing agencies that are all supposed to be about the business of "securing us," and which still, not surprisingly, even having been brought nominally under one umbrella, compete and game each other and do all the inventive crap that humans are so capable of when there's power, prestige and money to fight over. And if you can believe it, even SEX!
For what it's worth, before the 9-11 attack, there were several blockbuster thriller novels written with the use of airliners as missiles to attack targets including the World Trade Center. And after the attacks, our Really Smart Security Experts convened a bunch of these writers to give them ideas about what the next kind of asymmetric attacks by them Durty Terraists might look like. Since they are so instutitionally short on invention and prognostication (though not prevarication) on their own.
The best part about the world as it is now is that now that Threat Perception permeates everything, all our thinking (except about stuff like global warming, which is just opportunity knocking), so the Security State finally has its Forever-War, give-us-all-the-wealth justification nailed down permanently.
Yeah, it's a dangerous place, our planet, and only goin' to get more-so, thanks to the synergistic effects of that way of thinking, and acting, facilitated by our collective inventiveness in developing new kinds of lethal weapons and technologies, in the absence of any inspiration or doctrine or strategy about how to just, you know, LIVE, and let live...
Professor, just a couple of bullets, and more apologies to you that the Nation I actually did that "enlisting" thing for, back in 1966, inter alia in fear of "dominoes falling" all over the place, found it possible to create and support and facilitate the crap that was applied to you, personally, as a result of your trying (as it usually is the case, in vain) to inform and enlighten the Imperial cadres on the real nature of the Outer World they expect to dominate, is so stupidly able to maintain such high levels of cognitive dissonance between what we collectively pretend to be in our myths (until we maybe experience a Cheney Awakening), and what we really are, day to declining day:
1. The purpose of torture is torture. The rest is just verbiage.
2. How many of the functionaries and institutional structures, all those tiny and larger moving parts full of humans with all their inherent flaws augmented by doses of unaccountable power and money, that led to your personal troubles with the Security State (not to mention what's been done and is happening to so many others even now), are still in place, still gathering self-justifying and accreting momentum, and still "guiding" that thing called so archly, so knowingly (and so mindlessly) "policy"?
But... but... all the paperwork was in perfect order! This wasn't supposed to happen!
No, wait, cancel cancel do-over -- this is all part of the Grand Plan! Yeah, that's it! It's more complicated than even most of the folks who read-in on the whole strategy even know! Because there is all this stuff that we can't tell you about 'cuz you have no need to know! And besides, you know, Arms Sales Are Very important To The Economy!
"It also depends on the inclinations of the observer." How well one ought to understand that... And it depends also on the lenses through which one observes, both in optical effects and tint.
Some observers point out a whole lot of detail of the kind one advises us to be careful not to ignore in seeing "lessons" in various tranches of history. Like the words of our Ambassador, April Glaspie, now attempted to be obscured by a lot of spin and disavowal, essentially inviting Saddam to grab Kuwait. Yep, all of this incorporates huge amounts of complexity, all of which includes the kinds of volatility that make for financial profit and personal gain, with the pain and externalities to be borne by "others," but it sure would seem that there are some fundamental major points and observations that can be made, relatively clear and simplistic, that repetitions of Idiot Behavior for all kinds of sub-rosa reasons are unlikely to produce a different category of outcome.
Inability to deal with flexible, inventive asymmetry, on the part of our clumsy, bureaucratized, self-interested institutions
Enormous supply lines, with lots of vulnerabilities and opportunities to siphon off huge amounts of wealth and materiel
Bureaucratic "managers" with personal and organizational wants and goals, a virtual Tower of Babel with all the language problems that go along with all that complexity, facing people who are fighting on and for their own terrain and "freedom" from a cultural base that our rulers and managers disdain and do not understand
Having "goals" and strategies made up in air-conditioned secure conference rooms, based on premises and preferences and biases that over the long haul lead repeatedly and inevitably to "XXXX-ization" and rationalization and obscuring of fault, and no change in the momentum and inertia of the war economy and ineluctable march toward imperial ambition and decline
Detachment of the active Players, in their own closed and competing segments of the whole War Effort, from any goals or needs of the ordinary people whose labor and wealth creation supports all the Gamery, and from any consequences or accountability to the rest of us for doing Stupid and Idiotic and Greedy behind that screen of War Fog and Deniability and Compartmentalization
Having a dogma that claims to see a rational and supportable and "legal" and "justified" course for all the Stupid that happens, with efforts to define the terms of the debate and thus control the "logic," ain't the same as understanding what-all goes on. And no, one doesn't claim any kind of clairvoyance or wisdom to see all the operating parts of it, and yes, one am predisposed to observe a whole lot of bad and stupid and ineffectual behaviors and characteristics in all of this, but there sure seems to be a lot of fire where one seems to see smoke...
Interesting how once the Game moved on to another Area of Operations (AOR, in milbabble), social and political and economic activity kind of reappeared, albeit not to the altogether liking of our Rulers (though Walmart LOVES the profit on clothing Made in Vietnam.)
And if "we" lost some kind of "presence" in Southeast Asia, how come there's all those US "assets" still committed there, and submarines and missiles still on line, and what were the reasons why "we" "lost" "our" bases in the Phillipines, again? Onaccounta the results of "our" efforts to make Uncle Ho say "uncle," and prop up dictatorial kleptocrats in far-off place who were nominally "friendly to some US interests or other?"
The Filipinos in 1991 declined to renew the 99 year lease "we" forced on them at the end of the War on Fading Empire Spain. (That ain't the same thing as "losing bases by not being imperially aggressive enough, I don't think.) This was after decades of "our" support for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos as abusive dictators in a faux "democracy." And the timely eruption of Mount Pinatubo, no doubt caused by "Communist insurgents," wiped out Clark AFB and hammered Subic (along with killing a lot of Filipinos) and rebuilding at least of Clark was simply uneconomic.
As I recall, VIETNAM offered around then to lease Cam Ranh Bay, which I think cost "us" half a trillion to build (one of many huge wealth transfers to largely corrupt contractors), a behavior repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere) back to us. The problem we have is that the Great Game would be best played as a board game or computer simulation, since the direction of play never, ever goes as the players claim to intend. Though many of them make huge personal gains and derive great personal satisfaction and clout from blowing up and gumming up and melting down the structures that might result in more decent lives for most of us. There and here.
The Soviets were sold to us as model Players who had to be defeated at any cost (including Nuclear Winter) or then "contained" or then "detented" and now demolished by their very successful emulation of our own Mafia. Now we got cover stories about "secret Chinese arsenals" of copycat Cold War/Hot War weapons. As my First Sergeant used to sing out as he ordered us to increase the march pace to double-time with full field gear for the next couple of miles, "Here we go agaaaai-nn..."
(Recourse to 3 x 5 card #113: "War is a racket.")
Arbusto, you must have seen that famous old movie, "Vietnam: The Drawdown." Same script, same scenarios, much of the same equipment -- different pejoratives, of course: "hajjis" and "towelheads" instead of "gooks" and "dinks," and what did the "gooks" call US, and what do the people who live in the area called Afghanistan call US?
There was an ARVN compound outside the US airbase at Phu Bai, or maybe it was Chu Lai, some of it runs together for me. This was in early 1968.
The experienced chopper pilots knew not to overfly it, particularly at night, to avoid Green-on-Green (we gave them their uniforms) violence, in the form of streams of red tracers (we gave them their ammo, too) rising swiftly up to meet you.
To ask again: "What the heck has all this been 'about?'" And that it's a whole bunch of people engaged in doing really complicated bureaucratic tasks and managing huge chunks of procurement and deployment and logistics and creating all kinds of plans and doctrines and the rest of it, while little political games got played out in DC and other capitals, is not an acceptable answer.
And of course I, and I suspect a number of other people, are still waiting for what should be easy to succinctly articulate, exactly what "national interests" were and are in play in all of this Forever War idiocy.
A lot of Smart People have observed that any involvement in mass war at this kind of level really needs to be based on an actual concern about an actual "national interest," not just some Hegelian exercise of The Will, or chicken-hawk gaming, and a willingness of the productive population to sacrifice to protect that interest.
And please don't come back with something about "Everybody who matters, knows." Polls of the broad spectrum of citizens kind of give the lie to that. And to justify $1+ trillion a year on some "need" to "head the Talibaninsurgenterrrorristas off at the pass" ain't gonna fly, either, because what have "we" gotten from all those Foreign Interventions and Wars of Unknown Unknown Choice, except movement of the center of mass of political and social power up and out along the axes of wealth concentration, instability and ascendance of the Security State.
And plain old POLICE activity sure seems to be the most effective means of detecting and foiling, where possible, and catching if not (and don't pretend that droning and black ops and all the other grotesquely expensive and civilly intrusive crap "we" are paying for so many ways, is going to effectively end 'terrorism," as defined by the GreatGamers).
What's the tune for "Afghanization?"
Second verse, same as the first:
http://www.history.com/topics/vietnamization
And from another angle,
http://www.historyandtheheadlines.abc-clio.com/ContentPages/ContentPage.aspx?entryId=1194597¤tSection=1194544&productid=10
And of course Thieu, like Karzai, was a self-serving and corrupt persona who wisely, and like Karzai would be well advised to do, fled Saigon aboard a US chopper as the "strategy" ran its inevitable course.
And to put it in the larger setting of the Game of RISK ™ as then being played,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamization
The main differences I can see between THIS tomfoolery-with-enormous-wealth-transfer-and-imperial-warpage-of-our-"free democracy," and the one we label "The Vietnam War," are that rather than learning from one futile effort to prosecute a land war in Asia at the end of an enormous supply line, against a xenophobic population with nationalist and tribal aspirations, our rulers focused on managing the media, planting an all-volunteer army/military, relying on contractors and other stuff to insulate us taxpayers from cognitive dissonance and any non-consumer-economy discomfort, and thus avoiding the "deep divisions in the nation" that led Tricky Dick (bless his practical-politician little heart) and his policy mavens to create the false front of "Vietnamization," to give airbrushed cover and concealment to the scammers and idiots who "managed" the country, by fraudulent and incompetent stages, into an inevitably losing proposition.
No, I don't cheer for "the other side." I have no joy at the failure of our institutions and rulers to avoid losing propositions and put the nation onto a long slide into post-imperial obscurity and virtual feudal impoverishment. We could have done so much better for ourselves and the rest of the world, but it's not in our natures to keep Experienced Players from finding their inevitable way into the seats of power, patent and obscure.
The "strategy" to date has made a few people really rich, and away we go again to the next situation where our rulers will punch another Tarbaby using our fists (not theirs). Don't pick fights it's clear from the beginning you are not going to win, let alone gain anything from (other than wealth transfer and personal power).