Leaping to Bill's defense, one must observe that there's scant evidence in the record here to support a charge that he is any flavor of liberal.
Thanks again to Dr. Cole for not suppressing the range and rage in these comments. As a self-proclaimed Futilitarian, I have to chortle and gloat at endless proofs of the obvious unfitness of the species I was born into. (One downside of looser moderation is that this space may become just be another ravin' Partisan Saloon, verbal fists and emotional bottles and chairs flying every whichaway.)
Where we as a species maybe ought to be doing a lot of pulling on the same end of the rope, if we are to have a chance at survival and moderate prosperity for our progeny and maybe even ourselves, instead we go off down the tribal and egoistic paths we usually follow, sniping at others likewise sneaking through the underbrush in pursuit of being the boss of everyone else, or just being absolutely and irrefutably RIGHT about stuff. And of course protecting the little sets of personally profitable behaviors and elements of personal identity and skills as didactic scolds that we have so illiberally gathered about us.
For the ones who are deep into the Game thing, and the Financial Industry and its offshoots, and the upper echelons of politics, of course, where all the money and power congregate, you folks probably don't have to worry too much about being nice and comfortable for the rest of your lives.
"Can we all just get along?" Sorry, Rodney -- you and your hematomas and broken bones knew the answer to that before you asked the question. Stay out of Simi Valley!
I guess the message to all the "geopolitical armchair moralists," transmitted by people who don't really ever lay out their credentials illuminating their deep involvement in and knowledge of the world of Grayness, and its 'appropriateness,' is to shut up and leave the "hard choices" to the so demonstrably morally straight, incorruptible, doing-the-best-they-can Experienced Players and Great Gamers. Since there is such a long history of successes on their part in acting in the supposedly least bad or later-characterizable-or-justifiable-as-best-possible-or-less-awful manner in all the manifold bits of "policy" that are always in play.
And there is never any element of venality or arrogance or ignorance, or at least no more than an excusable amount, in how the Game is played day to day. No self-advancement, no bribery, no meanness, no "hegemonist" element, no institutional pressures from all that MONEY trending doen the well-eroded channels, no defining the "national interest" to include What's Good For General Bullmoose, no self-advancement or groupthink or drivers like a notion of exceptionalism that justifies almost any kind of thing like massive dissimulation ("In wartime [which apparently is ALWAYS], truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."), with defoliation and Arc Light and "free fire zones" and torture and (not so much any more, of course) selling and planting antipersonnel mines, and still actively peddling weapons all over the planet, subverting governments, even ones that God Forbid were actually elected "democratically," as in Iran and Honduras and Chile, like might possibly have happened (that "revolution of the ballot box") in places like Italy after WW II that had to be pretermitted by ACTION.
Too bad that the selection process that are in place mostly bring to the top only a certain kind of personality. Too bad certain kinds of humans on all "sides" are drawn to and carry forward that certain set of behaviors and justifications that, whatever the state of their "consciences" when they lay themselves down to rest, however troubled their dreams may be, or however soundly their personal justifications let them sleep, only seem to add to the parts of the human experience that involve and augment the number of bullets in the air, and explosions and rage and pain and dislocation and consumption and fear and insecurity. Too bad so much of what they do is so nicely invisible, or opaque, or cultured to activate the nastiest parts of the brains and cultures of the rest of us. Too bad that there seems to be so little room for the peacemakers, until the active scene of "conflict" has moved on and the survivors go about forgetting and rebuilding, pending the next stirring-up. Maybe that's the, I won't say "optimal best," but just "simply all" we can do.
"The decision on how to confront genocide has never been easy."
Ask a native American about how that works. Or their cousins in the vanishing forests of South and Central America. Or the populations of certain sub-Saharan nations, where "our" presence has been felt. Regarding Pius XII, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html
Maybe there's "no easy answer" because the moral clarity has been so compromised by the interposition of "national interests?"
While many who read in this space are choosing sides (or just wishing a plague on all their houses) in that "reality show" titled "What's Happening In Syria And All Those Little Countries in Oilland," and the Great Gamers skim high above in "command and control" mode while enunciating their Grand Strategies and moving little markers around on their Game Boards and trying, like the bit players in the stock market, to "pick winners," it might be illuminating to look occasionally at what is happening to fellow humans "on the ground" there. Dr. Cole links to a telling resource, Joshua Landis's "Syria Comment," which is giving the kind of exposure to the violence that the rest of us, living in smoother locales, ought to be aware of. Here's the current lead article, loaded up with exemplars:
The "Great Policy" crotch seems once again to be "give or withhold 'aid' to this or that group if we can figure out who is who and where they are on the arcs of violence and "loyalty" from day to day, whether guns or not-guns," $124 million of this or that, with not a lot of thought, other than "countering Russia" and "protecting our strategic presence" and "retaining freedom of operation" or making more Great Game same-old moves, going into what's beyond the Now." I would doubt that, given the Experienced Players and institutional momentums and the ancient alluvial channels that money flows in, floating weapons that tote up to a quarter of the planet's wealth, anything different might eventuate that might eventually "work better" for the ordinary people who create the wealth the warlords and other rulers and their militaries suck up, that hallmark of the "genius" of Mesopotamian-rooted "civilization," might reduce the rush to tribal flags and the recursion of vengeance.
We label the warrior groups as Fundie, Shia, Sunni, Alawi, "government," whatever. Our brains render one or the other "good guys" or "bad," or "who cares, they're just a bunch of Muslims," irrespective of their actions or the horror and misery they cause. Seems to me the actual category is maybe "gunmen-fighters," which describes all of them and hints at what draws mostly males into the FUN thing called "war" or "battle." Churchill said the exhilaration comes from being shot at and missed. There's a lot more fun to be had in "victory" in the form of KILLING – warriors would much rather kill for their tribe than die for it, and if you spend any time looking through the videos in Landis's http://syriavideo.net/ growing collection, you get a little sense of the fear-excitement-rage-exultation chemistry that impels these dudes to attack, and to murder captives and non-combatants, behind a pasteboard front of "religion:" "Allahu Akbar! God is Great!" How's that again?
Add some video time in youtube looking at "helmetcam" and "hellfire" selections, to see the universality of it all. And maybe feel some revulsion, and get some hints about how us humans might find some path or other out of that reptile-brain set of behaviors? Or not -- "we" don't seem capable of controlling the behaviors that are killing the planet and ourselves...
Nony, I might ask whether the issues go further than concerns about legal bigotry. This young fella seems to me to have a lot of the same flavor as those Columbine teens when it comes to struggling to find a personal identity in a f___ed up world. No excuse, of course. The arguments from the legalists about how to "try, convict and execute" him, whether to "Mirandize" him (which imports a lot more than "reading him his rights," there are procedural and substantive bits that go along with) are more about efforts by authoritarian types who are much more interested in "freedom of action" for their own initiatives, whether wars of choice, torture or subversion of governments with "it was legal" as a defense, should the ordinary people or some hoity-toity "libruls" among the ruling class decide to prosecute them or shove them, as they say, under the bus.
All this chatter about casuistical categories is mostly about pushing EVERYthing into the category of "WAR," in which, if you follow the arguments here, there's a "legal" way to make it come out that "anything goes as long as OUR side does it," with EVERYthing being peddled as an "existential threat" needing some enormous shifting of common wealth to "counter." $4 trillion to "address" a few hundred to a few thousand "al Quaeda?" Requiring hundreds to thousands of "installations" (which of course are also just "necessary" parts of the Global Networked Battlespace -- Nine Areas of Responsibility that blanket the planet with claims of EMPIRE) and all those drones and Hellfires and "smart bombs"? A "thing" that even the loonies in the "militias" here at home scoff at, particularly the ones who have had their institutional butts kicked by Asymmetric Warriors with AKs and IEDs, and know that as has recently been re-proven, Big Wars on Little People tend to have Slink-Away Endings, much as predicted by old guys like Sun Tzu? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/20/1199723/-Dear-FBI-Looking-For-IEDs-Ask-Glenn-Beck-Fans-and-Freepers
This is a whole lot less about bigotry, seems to me, than it is about that "hegemony" thing and what authoritarians like to refer to as "discipline," using the word as noun, adjective and verb, and in all the senses that the dictionary provides. http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/discipline
And always remember: "The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of power is power." Whatever bits of debating-team chintz one tries to dress it up with.
So did those two brothers, to test the attempted analogy to the German-American turncoats, receive training in sabotage from the Russian or Kyrgystanian or Chechnyan government or military in how to turn Mirro cookware into IEDs? Quite a fixation on wanting to thoroughly establish that "military tribunals" with, it would seem, expanding jurisdiction, are sanctified and "legalized" to determine guilt under less rigorous law and procedure and evidence rules than obtain in some civilian courts.
Of course, Bill whoever-you-are, all that has nothing to do with the tiny frame you want the discussion to be compressed into...
Oh, and on how the US government fostered democracy in places like Italy after WW II, by making sure there would be none of that "ballot box revolution" stuff where voters dared to elect an "uncomfortable government" that was not conducive to the forwarding of "US national interests," there's this bit, of course, about the what one might dare to call anti-democratic activities under Operation Gladio:
Hard words from someone who sometimes gets unconnected from facts, makes broad statements, and then walks away. And also detonates a fair number of "drive-by impeachment" attempts, and is pretty good at chiming in just before the comment window closes. Especially hard, coming from a guy who claims to have "been in Chile" when Allende was couped and killed, and to know first-hand that 'the US was not involved in that.'
Tell you what: Show me your examples of where Our Government has done anything in the way of encouraging or supporting what most of us think of as "democratic government" anywhere in the world. Iraq? Notagainistan? Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, Cuba, Costa Rica, Angola, Zaire? Vietnam? Korea? There's a whole alphabet of "little bitty countries" out there covered by a very large set of documentation and literature that pretty clearly establishes a pattern of conduct of the type my Evidence prof in law school would have been very happy to use as an example in litigation to prove present and future conduct as well.
Any proof you got that suddenly our State Security and Policy and Diplomatic apparatuses are changing their spots and going on a Democracy Now! kick? Fer Chrissakes, The Government does not even 'promote Democracy' right here at home. Here's what The US Govt tells people in Hong Kong and Macau:
Here's a cut from the CIA World Yearbook for those wanting to argue over terms, starting with the definition of the US government as a "representative republic:"
"We" really could come a lot closer to the nominal ideal, that is all misty in our fellow citizens' baffled minds, the one that was taught by the Beards, http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/government_type.html, for example, Shining City on a Hill, Give Us Your Emigrants Yearning to be Free, and all, which is pretty much what was in the McGuffey Readers that graced a lot of schools back when. But hey, ECHELON and DHS and Drones and NDAA and on and on and on...
Besides, if as you so often hint, you were somehow part of the State Security apparatus, you know that democratically elected leaderships are so very much harder to "deal with" than, oh, Presidents for Life, and Supreme Rulers, and stuff...
It's so hard to know what are "counter-factuals" and what are "counter-counter-counter-factuals" and what are just made-up stuff. I believe it's pretty well established that the US military and its Bright Fellas at the RAND Institute heavily oversold the "threats" posed by the Soviet Union as part of "muscular" and "vigorous" behaviors that benefitted them personally and scared the hell out of the rest of us, later to be resurrected under the "neocon" heading. Here's a bit of interesting text, with link, subject to the usual caviling:
Reached through sober analysis, Stern’s conclusion that “John F. Kennedy and his administration, without question, bore a substantial share of the responsibility for the onset of the Cuban missile crisis” would have shocked the American people in 1962, for the simple reason that Kennedy’s administration had misled them about the military imbalance between the superpowers and had concealed its campaign of threats, assassination plots, and sabotage designed to overthrow the government in Cuba—an effort well known to Soviet and Cuban officials.
In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy had cynically attacked Richard Nixon from the right, claiming that the Eisenhower-Nixon administration had allowed a dangerous “missile gap” to grow in the U.S.S.R.’s favor. But in fact, just as Eisenhower and Nixon had suggested—and just as the classified briefings that Kennedy received as a presidential candidate indicated—the missile gap, and the nuclear balance generally, was overwhelmingly to America’s advantage. At the time of the missile crisis, the Soviets had 36 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), 138 long-range bombers with 392 nuclear warheads, and 72 submarine-launched ballistic-missile warheads (SLBMs). These forces were arrayed against a vastly more powerful U.S. nuclear arsenal of 203 ICBMs, 1,306 long-range bombers with 3,104 nuclear warheads, and 144 SLBMs—all told, about nine times as many nuclear weapons as the U.S.S.R. Nikita Khrushchev was acutely aware of America’s huge advantage not just in the number of weapons but in their quality and deployment as well.
Kennedy and his civilian advisers understood that the missiles in Cuba did not alter the strategic nuclear balance.
Moreover, despite America’s overwhelming nuclear preponderance, JFK, in keeping with his avowed aim to pursue a foreign policy characterized by “vigor,” had ordered the largest peacetime expansion of America’s military power, and specifically the colossal growth of its strategic nuclear forces. This included deploying, beginning in 1961, intermediate-range “Jupiter” nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey—adjacent to the Soviet Union. From there, the missiles could reach all of the western U.S.S.R., including Moscow and Leningrad (and that doesn’t count the nuclear-armed “Thor” missiles that the U.S. already had aimed at the Soviet Union from bases in Britain).
The Soviet Union was built on a corrupt system of patronage and theft that was patently unsustainable, to the point of that old joke supposedly told by "Soviet" workers: "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work." Human ingenuity produced a huge parallel economy that kept things going. Much the same thing is so aptly descriptive of our own Kulturny; we sure have our Party and our Politburo. And leaving the weasels in charge of "policy" and "procurement" and "deployment" and more generally "government" sure seems to be "spending us into oblivion" more accurately and truly than the myth about how Reagan supposedly decimated and crushed the Reds by all that US first-strike "defense" spending.... And now we have our "wars of choice," at all scales, all over the planet. And we can't even steal the oil and ores effectively, so as to make conquest an even slightly sensible goal.
There's a special card in the little stack that imports the Randomness into the Great Game, that's labeled "The Fog Of Forgetfulness And Believable Bullshit." It's almost as potent as the "Get Out Of Jail Free or Collect A Presidential Pardon Or Benefit From Prosecutorial Discretion or Incompetence" card. Plus, on the flip side is the "Collect $200,000 Per Post-Government-Position Speaking Engagement" entitlement.
Re double-taps -- seems your assertion might be truthy, in a very narrow sense, since the qualification "GENERIC first responders" (whatever that was intended to mean) might arguably have some tenuous taxonomic validity. On the other hand, http://www.businessinsider.com/drone-double-tap-first-responders-2012-9 The CIA technique seems to have been to wait a little longer than "seconds" for the other humans in the area to gather, in the Sneaky Petes' cynical understanding of the kindly impulses to help as so brightly seen in the Boston videos, which, gee willikers, seem to be somewhat universally human. Check the link for other reasons for multiple launches at a single "target," having to do with weapon accuracy and reliability -- two booms needed to get a good "hit." Hey, it's good for the economy! Another obviously pre-impeached "other" source: http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article89242 Lots more of the same. Looks like lots of evidence of random or stupid or just awful/intentional mean killing of "civilians" by drone strike and other tactics, including the lengthy discussions and apologia that appeared in this very netspace.
And I wonder if the guys in the black and white ball caps are going to turn out to be more like McVeigh and the Columbiners than even the Shoe or Crotch Bombers? But let's wait to see... I'm getting anticipatory goose bumps...
@Bill...and of course Serious Scholars are free to provide their own glosses and interpretations and exigeses from the sources they select and with the benefit of their particular approaches to History and Fact and Truth...
The comment implies that the Society of USans either does or should value intellectual diversity and the exchange of ideas. For extra credit, identify and discuss examples and sources that support or refute either contention.
McVeigh: I was raised Catholic. I was confirmed Catholic (received the sacrament of confirmation). Through my military years, I sort of lost touch with the religion. I never really picked it up, however I do maintain core beliefs.
Time: Do you believe in God?
McVeigh: I do believe in a God, yes. But that's as far as I want to discuss. If I get too detailed on some things that are personal like that, it gives people an easier way [to] alienate themselves from me and that's all they are looking for now.
All this text discloses is that McVeigh distanced himself from Catholicism, not Christianity. It also reveals that he did not want to discuss his faith further because he knew most people would find it repulsive. What was repulsive about his faith? Was he an atheist? No. Was he a secular humanist? No. What do we know about his beliefs at the time he was bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City?
There is no doubt that Timothy McVeigh was deeply influenced by the Christian Identity movement.http://www.mainstreambaptists.org/htdocs/mob4/christian_identity.htm Christian Identity is a profoundly racist and theocratic form of faith that developed in the late 1970s and spread like wildfire through rural communities throughout the U.S. in the 1980s.
The chief guidebook for Christian Identity eschatology is "The Turner Diaries" written by William Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. The book is a fictional account of the "day of judgment" for which Identity adherents are preparing. Here's a summary of the book by Joel Dyer, author of "Harvest of Rage: Why Oklahoma City is Only the Beginning" (1997) – by far the best explanation in print for what led to the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City:
In his book "The Turner Diaries," Pierce describes a race war that ends with the government being overthrown. Pierce's book is more than fiction. The most radical elements of the movement view it as a vision or blueprint for action. In the book, the Aryan forces used armored car robberies to finance their revolution. In real life, the radical white supremacist group called "the Order" used Pierce's book as a guide to their armored car robberies in the Northwest. In the book, the revolutionaries blow up a federal building as part of their antigovernment war. In real life, the bombing of Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Building was almost a carbon copy of the incident in Pierce's book. As I mentioned earlier, Timothy McVeigh had photocopies of a portion of "The Turner Diaries" with him when he was arrested. McVeigh also sold copies of the book at gun shows around the country.
...which "contents" seems to include all the stuff that folks who treat adherents of "other" traditions, devout or deviant or not, as "the other," are so happy to attribute every kind of demonico to those "other" folks. See, e.g., Pat Robertson, or other demonstrated actual moral hypocrites like Tedd "That Boy Was Just Carrying My Bag" Haggard and Jim "Show Me The Money" Bakker and this guy, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-04-04/news/mn-401_1_family-worship-center.
Of course, we are all just human, with all that means...
One popular T-shirt from the Vietnam period (I don't dare say how I know) was a skull with bloodshot eyes, a crazed skull's grin, a Fairburn Sykes dagger through both temporal bones, and the legend "Kill 'Em All, And Let God Sort 'Em Out!"
There's always a solipsistic, casuistical apologist, or many, who can provide a gloss on any ethical maxim that justifies or at least obscures the real moral nature of excursions from that silly bedrock principle of "the ethic of reciprocity."
Yes, Joe -- we are all inclined only to credit, or even hear, words that confirm our world view and/or are useful in selling a Narrative...
Did you happen to drop by that Iraqi restaurant in Lowell that got dissed by "someone" throwing a rock through the front plate glass, and then filled up with US war veterans in a show of common decency? http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/01/13/10149681-vets-hold-eat-in-to-help-immigrants-vandalized-restaurant?lite I know I'm making assumptions on small evidence of whether you are IN that particular Lowell, or just FROM there, et cetera. If you did, or just applauded the sentiment, blessings on you.
I guess your point is that we are as bad as everyone else?
Hint: WE are the only ones we can do anything about, behavior- and mindset-wise, day to day. Of course if our Organs of External Action were not all busy doing Exceptional things to other people, maybe the sum total of discord and conflict and destructive consumption and all that would be a lot smaller than it is. Just a guess, I'm sure you know better...
It does seem to me that this time, we at least don't have the Chimp telling us to "go to the mall," and Cheney and Wolfowitz gloating in the shadows... and there's actually a sort of net maturity to the commentary (with strident outliers like Westboro and FOX) that says "wait for the investigators to do their jobs."
And credit to the various police forces who, along with all the "Red Squad" stuff some of them are up to, ask Occupiers how that has worked, have apparently been pretty successful in detecting and foiling all but a very few (if horrific) episodes of terrorism of all colors and creeds. A lot more successful, it would seem, in most senses us ordinary mopes would understand and recognize, than the whole Global War On Terror (that phrase we can't say any more because it has become, in Ron Ziegler's famous formulation, "inoperative") multi-trillion-dollar machine. But then that's not really its actual purpose, is it?
Spyguy, great analysis. (The Great Gamers will of course decree it "jejune" and "unsophisticated" and all that, and lay out "thinkable" scenarios where "deploying nukes" would be so very appropriate and effective, too!)
So the Israeli nukes might be kind of like the US nukes, some 4,650 or some other large number, whatever happens to be saddled up and ready to go, under "OPLAN 8010, Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike", http://www.docstoc.com/docs/71862481/USSTRATCOM-Operational-Plan-%28OPLAN%29-8010-08-Global-Deterrence-and-Strike-1, a fun read: Use them, and "we" are the "rogue state of all time," and gee, would one think that maybe all of a sudden everyone else in the world would have that thing that Reagan and Gorby wistfully chatted about, how nice it would be to be attacked by Martians, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfejBpD_wm4, so the Superpowers would have what "WE" would be, a COMMON ENEMY. USans, 310M; OTHERS, 7,000M. Interesting odds.
Of course if "we" "deploy" enough of them, then maybe the Greenhouse Overheated Summer will be cancelled by that Nuclear Winter thing! http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nuclear_winter
Lessee now: The guessing is that Israel, not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and not subject to IAEA inspections, has maybe got about 400 nuclear weapons. And there are 400 million "angry Muslims" that the Israeli national leadership seems intent on baiting and tweaking and occasionally assassinating and stuff. Makes you wonder what the targeting maps for those warheads look like, doesn't it? Pollard showed them ours -- I wonder if "we" have been able to penetrate Israeli institutions far enough to see what their strategists have in mind... (Some "old news," circa 1996: http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html . There's more recent stuff, of course...)
Jesper, plaudits for a nice libertarian combination of putting words in the other's mouth and raising up straw men. You completely misrepresent and overpaint my comment. Nice to think about the world in terms of nice libertarian and conservative "axes," but Rand and Rothbard kind of demonstrably do not lay out any kind of working system -- rather one which includes the STRONG people taking what they can take from others. And anyone not clear on what the libertarian Paradise looks like ought to look here, in six interesting parts:
As usual, Bill, your point is drawn from a careful selection of "talking points" and a choice of bits of history, hedged about by an insistence that any discussion must hew to the frame you erect. Formed, of course, by an affection for the point of view of the Few, and mandatory adherence to the "rules" of the Great Game that is one big negative-sum engagement after another. You hint at your CV, but never lay it out -- I'm sure you feel you've earned YOUR iron rice bowl, but others might differ.
AS to the "bloated public sector," have the CEOs of GE or Goldman Sachs or LockheedMartin or Monsanto or BP "earned" rice bowls of the size and oppressive shape that they have people to carry around for them? How about down on K Street? And in the Pentagon? Of course, there are those Welfare Queens and The 47% to get all excited about...
There's a happy medium, a meta-stable set of economic elements, and it's pretty clear that Thatcher and Reagan and others drove, and their successors are driving, the processes into personally beneficial but large-scale UNstable dysequilibrium. Apologize all you want...
"Extremely few are evil enough to deliberately try to make it worse for others. Instead, they are trying to improve what they see as the major problems."
That MIGHT be true in Sweden, though it at least appears that there's a certain problem from the Right, even there. But you must not see much of US politics, or for that matter British or French or Greek or even Israeli politics. In the US, we have a kind of uni-party system which actually has a lot of people in power who pretty much inarguably are trying very hard to make life a lot better for themselves and the small set of wealthy folks they are part of, and doing so by impoverishing and dispossessing most of the rest of us. All while claiming to have only the highest of motives and best of intentions.
The Narrative tries to tell us that what the most of us are emoting is "class hatred." Feels to me more accurately to be "righteous anger," from this direction. That is, from the standpoint of people who make it possible, by working themselves into early graves and keeping little enough of the wealth they create, for people like Baroness Thatcher and the Bushes and the Kochs and so on to Live Large and play their lives' incredibly rich music on our and our children's bones. Note that the mythical "class anger" is supposedly only a unidirectional, irrational, unsupportable, "unfair" entity. On the other hand, one is not supposed to examine or critique the motions and behaviors of the Few, who are the very least are guilty of "class disdain." Nothing new there -- there's an interesting, simple bipole: "noblesse oblige," at the one end, and "droits de seigneur" at the other. Which end of that stick do you think you are more likely to be beaten with?
Interesting, of course, that some of us who sneer at and snigger about "broken rice bowls" appear to carry their own very comfortable ones to the table of the Haves, where they speak so consistently in support of and on the part of their Betters...
Interesting, the relationship between the various parts of "the Palestinians" and "the Israelis." The stage setting of course shows just the facile images, and the directions in the play move the players in the best traditions of Greek drama.
Behind it all is the real world of corruption and venality and cynical manipulation, pretty much usually just for profit, plain old personal gain. It would be nice if humans could do better, if the ones who have the skills and drive to political dominance had the general welfare in mind. Instead there's the long, long litany of corruption in the place called "Israel," and of course in the place called "Whateverland." It's not that the elements that drive the patent insanity, both on the part of the public actors like Yahoo, and in the shadows off in the wings.
It's old news now, but here's a little reminder from Way Back in 2005, almost a century ago in Modern Time, about how venial and self-promotion and whatever the disease process is that produces the mess that drives so much of what is going on in the world right now:
In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat destroyed Palestine
[One little vignette, among many in the article, hinting at the incestuous relations between Israeli "business" and the other side of the Wall.] The amounts of money stolen from the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian people through the corrupt practices of Arafat's inner circle are so staggeringly large that they may exceed one half of the total of $7 billion in foreign aid contributed to the Palestinian Authority. The biggest thief was Arafat himself... A secret report prepared by an official Palestinian Authority committee headed by Arafat's cousin concluded that in 1996 alone, $326 million, or 43 percent of the state budget, had been embezzled, and that another $94 million, or 12.5 percent of the budget, went to the president's office, where it was spent at Arafat's personal discretion. An additional 35 percent of the budget went to pay for the security services, leaving a total of $73 million, or 9.5 percent of the budget, to be spent on the needs of the population of the West Bank and Gaza... Arafat hid his personal stash, estimated at $1 billion to $3 billion, in more than 200 separate bank accounts around the world, the majority of which have been uncovered since his death.
Contrary to the comic-book habits of some Third World leaders, such as President Mobutu Sese Seko, of Zaire, and Saddam Hussein, Arafat eschewed lurid displays of wealth. His corruption was of a more sober-minded type. He was a connoisseur of power, who used the money that he stole to buy influence, to provoke or defuse conspiracies, to pay gunmen, and to collect hangers-on the way other men collect stamps or butterflies. Arafat had several advisers who oversaw the system of patronage and theft, which was convincingly outlined in a series of investigative articles by Ronen Bergman that appeared during the late 1990s in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz. [http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=573&q=1 ] … Official monopolies on basic goods and services had exclusive suppliers on the Israeli side. These profitable contracts were made available by Arafat to companies associated with former high-ranking members of the Israeli civil administration and the security services in the West Bank and Gaza.
"Yes, the Palestinians missed a lot of opportunities, but don't blame us," he tells me. "We were a million people in this land, and the Israelis were less than a hundred thousand people. But they came here very determined, and they worked very hard. Then they committed a few massacres that made people afraid, and then our stupid leaders told the people to leave. We always tend to say it's a Zionist plot with the British. What we call a plot, they call a plan."
What are the chances that anything good for the common person can come out of all of this, the real essence of "government" there, and here?
Does your personal calculus of fact and value count the effects of that STUXNET thing as an "embarrassing failure?" Sure, it does not say much for their ability to protect their industry against the combined smartness and destructive intent of "somebody..." Although they apparently hijacked or something one of our Reeally Smart Drones. I guess Progress and Competence can be sometimes localized to parts of the War Technology front, not extending to the entire apparatus...
Time for the definers of "the national interest" to speak up here and note that all the behavior complained of is all Justified and of course Legal, and indubitably Correct.
The Few seem to me anyway to be more like living in the swank gondola of a giant dirigible or, for those who haven't Hoovered up enough wealth as yet, maybe a tethered blimp like the ones our MIC is fielding to Keep Watch Against Terrorists. http://defense.aol.com/2013/02/04/tars-pit-save-our-blimps-congress-members-beg-usaf-dhs/ with a Money Hose still connected to our major arteries.
So what are the suggested elements of a strategy, policy and behaviors to guide "the US" in the involvement of our various US Field Presences, like who to arm, and who to train, and who to advise, that the rest of us could struggle to understand in our leftist ignorance of the complexity of that mess? Or is this the wrong place and format for such an exchange?
I read that there are some other "externalities" with geothermal, too, like local earthquakes and stuff, and some interesting effects on aquifer water supplies. No free lunch.
Spaniards had it first, the British Empire grabbed it when the elite there were still playing the Great Game as a Major Player. Love the mind set that says killing people and blowing stuff up as part of a claim that flyspeck "strategically important --just how, again" islands are "its own territory." There really is something wrong with humans as a species that this kind of thinking and behavior is what rules. "Correctly defended"? Huh. And the reasons for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, again? Not "our territory," it would seem. Must be something else, then.
How did the kinds of creatures that came to dominate the Argentine military, using the drums of war to protect their political and economic positions, and of course their opposite numbers who ran the British forces, and who all just loved the opportunity to exercise their troops and toys, get to that place? One might hope that "we" might some day advance beyond the antediluvian, atavistic and troglodytic. Of course it's un-Serious even to speak the wish...
But those who claim to have The Knowledge of the Way Things Work and How The Game Is Played tell us that this is all "legal," and "moral," and "wise." Who are we to gainsay them?
To the vets -- Seriously, and without the phony emoticons that accompany the phrase when breathlessly offered by Our Fellow Americans who maybe have gotten rich off of or maybe suffer mindlessly from predatory capitalism and the other slow deaths that accompany the decline of Republic into Empire:
Thank you for your service. For being model citizens, and for remembering that oath thing, that sounds like the one our ruling Pigs up on the porch, sharing cigars with the other Overlords, take, apparently with their little forked toes crossed, the one about "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053502/Occupy-Oakland-Protesters-streets-NYC-solidarity-Scott-Olsen.html
Any questions, now, as to why "we" are in serious trouble? And what a debt we all owe to FOX and the WaPo and Kristol and Wolfowitz and of course the Coors and the Koch Bros. for ensuring that we will have a rational approach to the rest of the world?
Lots of WaPo articles, but I really like this one, that even highlights how deep Teh Stupid is in the idiocy that operates under the pretext of "national interest:"
And for all the folks who keep forgetting that the most persistent principles in the political universe are accident, error, and often personally profitable if globally bankrupting unintended consequences:
"never a good idea to give up an option..." 'wise advice,' all right, if you are playing RISK! with little cardboard and wooden game pieces, where the worst that can happen is that somebody gets pissed and tips over the game board...
This Great Game stuff is really kind of fun. Here's one small sample of the kind of studies and cases and scenarios the Deep Wise Thinkers get into, http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/korea-dam.htm, facilitated by people who spend their lives thinking up not only threats and counter-threats and counter-counter-counter-counter-threats, but reasons for "their side" to deploy or resist the same, in pursuit of one vain "advantage" or another. Like invading Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Costa Rica. Based on a calculus of "advantage" that maybe starts with Sun Tzu's advice on Making War, Not Love, and then wanders off into realms of self-promoting generals and Policy Gurus and of course who gets rich off of this stratagem or device or that other one, and which set of doctrines and war toys and deployments will ensure a steady "need" for more of the "products" of the system down the road.
So "Seoul is just 30 miles from the DMZ (sic)," and "Cuber is just 90 miles from our shores," and Guantanamo is just 90 miles from Havana or thereabouts." Anyone feeling any more secure with the current set of people with their responsible portfolios under their arms "in charge here," with Serious Observers to back them up, repeat the Current Narrative, and promote the current Theme and Doctrine by filling up all the talk in Washington, that remote village full of idiots that controls the keys to the missiles and the helms of the "littoral combat vessels" and the marching orders of all those Troops, etc., and thus our destinies?
We are only able to manage one Two Minute Hate at a time. And "pivoting" a monstrosity as cumbrous as "the US" from one "threat" to another takes a huge amount of logistics and procurement and planning and setting the fools up to Believe In The Changed Reality...
Kind of like the filibuster here, and the "Patriot" Act which is a hard act to follow... As my ex-wife used to say, "When you do that, it's WRONG. When I do that, it's DIFFERENT!"
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and if you are really good, you can fool enough of the people most of the time and really get away with some horrible, very profitable stuff..."
Only 5% of the post you ask about was by the overbearing JTMcPhee. The rest was from an op-ed in the NYT, from a somewhat earlier age:
Op-Ed Contributor
"Pirates of the Mediterranean"
By ROBERT HARRIS
Published: September 30, 2006
Kintbury, England
Nope, the good stuff was from a much more important writer than me. I just missed the target with the . The link will take you there.
IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.
The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.
Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”
Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”
What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.
But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Speaking of "wrong," Bill, you start with a lie: There is NOTHING in the article that implies or states that "Afghanistan, the congeries" was ever a "morally pristine society." So yeah, the corrupt US military that is so corrupt that US auditors cannot even offer any kind of opinion on the fiscal state of the Pentagram, that military with its contractors that build showers that electrocute US soldiers and willingly pays $400 a gallon to get fuel to the latest "front" that varies with no known logic, where generals lie about made-up "heroes" and over the objections of many of their own (who understand the wisdom of ol' Sun Tzu about no nation ever profiting from a prolonged, distant war (though I bet he had his own MIC to contend with) carry out "lawful orders" that are bullshit dead-end idiocy that get lots of people killed for NO GAIN except for the profits of the "War is nothing but a racket" crowd, there's a thousand more examples of moral vacuum and fraud and stupidity, as in now "we" do what other empires have done and flee Afghanistan after spending maybe $4 trillion or more to do WHAT, again, "show our resolve"? after "going into" a place (NOT a nation) where asymmetry and corruption and tech-defeating terrain and inhabitants are, to do WHAT, again? Oh, that's right -- it was decreed to be "in our national interest" by the Big Decree-ers.
And I bet there's a quantum-mechanics principle that produces a significant energy-level jump in the corruption-flux when the US military horde, with its camp-followers, descends on a place. So you don't get to make some kind of silly claim that all the waste, fraud, abuse and death were just a condition inherent in the 'already corrupt society' that you Wise Men surely knew all about and had been taking such advantage of as you could for your own Great Game purposes. YOU forced our fist into that Tarbaby. Keeping your own hands seemingly clean, of course...
It's being called a "revolution." Does the label matter? Only if it distracts from the reality of what's going on, day to day. I mean, there's a whole range of descriptors to argue over, "civil war" and "chaos" and "anomie" and "Leviathan," and the sterile "insurrection" and "insurgency" and "terrorism," up to and including "all of the above." Bunches of heavily armed people killing each other, especially the cool murders of captives in the name of G_D! "Allahuakhbar! Allahuakhbar! Allahuakhbar!" What will the near-mid-term endpoint of this look like, one wonders, in the institutional sense?
We have wonderful "war porn" from the helmet-cams and night vision of Our Troops in Notagainistan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20LkYvEZOZs and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqgHg5LFXmI There's even better, full-color, unedited war porn from the fun and games that I guess they call themselves "jihadis," "Allahu Akhbar!Allahu Akhbar!Allahu Akhbar!" with a full-30-round celebratory burst from the ol' AK or cooler weapon into the unresisting air. It's being carefully collected and archived by the folks over at Syria Comment, one of the professor's blogroll entries, and I commend this fast-growing set of videos, indexed a variety of ways, to any one of us who secretly gets off on closeups of badly dead former fellow humans, "Allahu Akhbar!"
The lede is here, http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=18340, and the triumphal blood and brains are here, ugly and disturbing images for those who want only to think about grand elements of strategy and Big Moves in the Great Game and dismiss the horror of it as "stuff that happens on the way to US getting OUR way in the world," whoever WE happen to be... http://syriavideo.net/
Yeah, let's keep playing the Really Wise Geopolitical Great Game, and "favoring" this or that bunch, and and pumping arms into the murder zone on the excuse that "if we don't do it, someone else will, and then we will lose our 'influence' blah blah blah bullsh_t blah..."
Professor, I know it's just a rhetorical device -- I'm sure you "get it" just fine, both as to what's happening, and in the context of human values and behaviors, why.
As to torture and drone-launched missile and bomb attacks, the "why" is really, really simple, don't you see: "It's in our national interest." (And, you know, it's kind of exciting and can be a lot of fun!) Because you can plainly see that both have had such significant effects on US "security," scaring those nasty Muslims (and all the other Wogs) into doing the bidding of those who rule the rest of us, we who now also have to be scared that "US forces" will spy on us in our bank-robbed homes and Bain-Capital-stripped workplaces and privatized schools, and have decreed they have the power (not the 'right,' of course) to do whatever they darn please to our bodies after some secret process that determines we are a "threat" to Their Rulerships.
And of course taking an ever larger share of the real wealth we generate in all those workplaces, on the institutionalized way to concretizing their dream of becoming Boss of the Whole World.
This should be great, welcome news for the humorless Serious People in the US rulership. They will be more easily able to converse, reactionary to reactionary, across a cultural divide that disappears when common interests in suppressing decency, stealing from the working stiffs, advancing a full-spectrum military industrialism, and "putting '{G_D}' in the driver's seat" become manifest. Any chance this might result in a reduction of predation and those "tensions" that bring "wars of choice" and those opaque and shifting "national interests" that so often lead only to sorrow and stupidity and mourning?
Rogue states? You got Iran all lined up in the same sight picture as North "Dennis Rodman is the Jane Fonda of 2013" Korea? Now that's some in-depth analysis. And as for a definition of "rogue state," what is your working text? Maybe you could find some guidance here, http://jpi-nyu.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Defining-the-Rogue-State-A-Definitional-Comparative-Analysis-Within-the-Rationalist-Culturalist-and-Structural-Traditions...Jason-Rose1.pdf ? Or for simplicity, " a state that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way, disregarding international law or diplomacy." Since the US rulership gets to define whatever it does as "legal," I guess we get a pass on being a "rogue state." And Israel under the current rulership? The N.Kors maybe have a couple of nukes that maybe they can "deliver" somehow; the Iranians have none, the Israeli rulers have maybe 200 or 400 that very surely CAN be delivered, and of course "we" have thousands, along with our other toys that we are using to try to control the behaviors of "states" and individuals all across the planet.
Being a little arbitrary and erratic and starting wars of choice and arranging or accomplishing the overthrow of other nations' governments and threatening anyone who doesn't toe some moving and arbitrary line that defines the extent of "US National Interests?" It's OK if you're a US-an, I guess... Don't let dispassionate reality get in the way of a heavy meal of jingoist comfort food...
One thing's always bothered me a little about the "tradition" with the feet thing. The text reads thus, in my old-man, KJV Bible:
1 Now before the feast of the passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.
2 And supper being ended, the devil having now put into the heart of Judas Iscar'i-ot, Simon's son, to betray him;
3 Jesus knowing that the Father had given all things into his hands, and that he was come from God, and went to God;
4 he riseth from supper, and laid aside his garments; and took a towel, and girded himself.
5 After that he poureth water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel wherewith he was girded.
6 Then cometh he to Simon Peter: and Peter saith unto him, Lord, dost thou wash my feet?
7 Jesus answered and said unto him, What I do thou knowest not now; but thou shalt know hereafter.
8 Peter saith unto him, Thou shalt never wash my feet. Jesus answered him, If I wash thee not, thou hast no part with me.
9 Simon Peter saith unto him, Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head. [Good old Peter, always looking for an edge...]
10 Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit: and ye are clean, but not all.
John 13.
Where is there anything in there, or any of the other texts I can find, about KISSING those feet, which you can bet were carefully pre-washed before the Pope (or the bishops and cardinals who occasionally stoop so low in their own service) does his thing? And to remind us humans of what we are, at the individual level of detail:
A lot of malignant, metastatic cancers work the same way: Chemo and radiation and surgery effect an apparent "remission," but down there in the dark the little black cells that survive the put-down are once again reproducing unchecked, hiding from the immune system (weakened by the treatment), tricking the sufferer's body into building new, large blood vessels to feed the renascent tumors, and sending out little messenger cells to start new tumors here, and there, and over there...
Bill, got a definition of "US national interests" for us yet? Or is the best that can be done another lifted-quote attempt at impeachment by a “serious observer of international affairs and national security?” Why not come on out and use the language of an earlier generation of apologists, and call Engelhardt and the people who contribute there "stooges of _____________ (pick your pejorative)"?
And Bill, and a few others, qualify themselves as, I guess, that set of "serious observers of international affairs and national security." Because they all adhere to a dead-end worldview and are masters of arcanae that have nothing to do with survival even of the nation (in any form that people not born into the Great Decline we are in might recognize or care to live in or "fight for"). Because they all read from the Rule Book of the Great Game, where everything is everything, and they can't (or won't, because that would be too limiting for their grandiosity) define "victory" and they can't define "national interests."
Just remember, according to the Wise, you can't believe anything that comes out of Tomdispatch. Because, as one of the Wise Men observed of another source in a different denial-of-credibility attack, 'they have an AGENDA.' Throwable impeachment eggs are wherever you can find them...
Yes, let's only focus on one little thing at a time. There's this place called Zaire, and this place called Angola -- and of course the "Grown-ups" had Very Good Reasons for doing what they did, including, if I read right, "weapons." Lots of them... to support "CONTRAS," which these days are called "terrorists" or "insurgents" or something.
Oh, and for the Great Gamers who apologize here, who have all kinds of carefully constrained and studied notions as to how there's any kind of structure and order and grandeur and plan to all the crap that really goes on. How about how well all those effing CIA guys and other sneaky petes are doing, "dealing" with the latest set of uncontrollable idiocies they have been playing with in "the Middle East." Look here, folks, at what's being reported about what's going on in and around Syria, or whatever that area will be in the future:
Syria Comment is a running blog, so I'm just pointing to the stuff that's dated from say 3/24 to this point. These CIAholes who "facilitate" and "support" and "encourage" and think they have any kind of control of anything other than their little local deals and scams... NOT. How is our vaunted set of Secret Squirrels going to tell the rest of us this is what they PLANNED, what they MEANT to have happen, just like,, oh, IRAQ and NOTAGAINISTAN and soon, coming to a theatre of operations near you, AFRICA! Waiting on the bland assurances of the Wise about how this is all under control...
Maybe it's time to kick out the Reaally Wise Experienced Players and try something else? Nah -- they're too, ah,, "embedded," aren't they?
...factories all over the planet, large and small, churning out weapons of all kinds, from itty-bitty 5.56 bullets, cases and primers to depleted-uranium-toxic-and-radioactive cannon rounds to, well, tanks and jets and bombers and of course drones and their armaments. All paid for by involuntary levies on ordinary people, involved happily or stupidly or against their will or without their knowledge in the dirty, murderous business of Milo Minderbinder's "Syndicate," http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/an-investment-lesson-from-milo/21358, and "Wild Bill" Donovan's excitements and Allen Dulles's strata-gems. "And everyone has a share." Gee: How did Qaddaffi *GET* all those "arms" in the first instance? Or Saddam? Or pick-a-dictator (tm)?
Nice thought, the momentary concern about "regulating the arms trade." The supply is relatively low-tech and low-cost, it's easy to generate and thus almost infinite. The appetite for violence appears as unlimited as the one for sex, and you can rent or buy human bodies with sex organs of your choice anywhere on the planet, despite or with the connivance of, the best efforts of the "puritanical," who are so often found with their body parts where theoretically they should not be...
All of this enables the actors in and apologists for the Great Game to keep on doing what they so enjoy. You got any ideas on how to stop people with sexy guns who've passed that threshold of having killed other humans to put away their toys and give up their power over others? C'mon, be real -- that stuff is too exciting, too much dang FUN!
(By the way, I think those scary-looking alloy pods are just, and I use that "just" advisedly, auxiliary external fuel tanks for various attack jets -- what they call "drop tanks." Not even napalm canisters, like were so popular in my little war...)
So are the parts of "industry" that are getting "disrupted" by the externalities from the other parts of "industry" going to do anything about it?
Anything effective, that is,other than capitalizing on the "opportunities in volatile change," that might have some positive effect on the crap that's hitting the rest of us billions who have not mastered the art of extraction, externalization, and that privatize/socialize thing in a big enough way to be immune to the horrors of our profits for at least the length of our lifetimes?
...Time to move on, let the dying bury their dead, chalk it up to experience, and get on about planning the NEXT war, aka wealth transfer or whatever the whole complex thing is called, procurement, logistics, recruitment, blah blah blah, by the "experts" who just KNOW that this time, THIS time, their "expertise" will surely triumph, and produce VICTORY! and a BIG WIN!
Yeah, the reason parents don't tell their kids not to pull the wings off of flies or beat up on the little kids in the neighborhood is that their kids may BLOW UP IN THE PARENTS' FACE! Never let it happen that Dad cuts off the allowance, or sends the kid to his room...
Aha! another drive-by, captured-quote "impeachment!"
I read in Gary Schroen's book "First In: An Insider's Account of How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan," lots of interesting stuff about how important and effective "air power" was NOT, in moving the Northern Alliance into Kabul. It never much of an "alliance" except in memos and cables, that now has morphed, if I have it right, into lots of parts of the many "opposition groups" who get to sneer at the unfortunate boots and butts of the US/UN forces as they leave Afghanistan, as what, "winners?"
Schroen tells a more compelling story of how that air power was more often "not available," often killed CIA and other "friendly" forces, was controlled and used as any "air power" is in modern Battlespace by people with political interests that seemed to have little to do with single-minded pursuit of "victory" (hard anyway in a place as variegated as Afghanistan with all its warlords and shifting "alliances" and through a mess as Byzantine as the power centers of Washington.)
To hear the CIA guy tell it, shrink-wrapped blocks of $100 bills, disbursed to this or that warlord along with other favors (like the Viagra the smarties in the CIA used to try to buy some "warlord loyalty" not so very long ago) had a lot more to do with displacing or turning "the Taliban" (along with a shitload of other forces like disgust at reactionary patriarchalism and behaviors that looked kind of Khmer-Rougie) from Kabul.
"We took their capital" means nothing to tribal Afghanistan, which has an actual sense of and memory for "history." And I make no confusion between 1940s bombing of all types, carried into Vietnam, and "surgical" drone strikes that like a lot of surgery result in dead patients. Is your claim that "air power" led to the Northern Alliance that isn't, any more, any "proof" of the efficacy of "air power?" Is that the best you got, in answer to my question about what "we won" in Iraq or Afghanistan? And have you got any proofs of the efficacy of Hellfires from drones as a mainstay of "victory" in any other activity the parts of the US "security" establishment are currently spending Big Money on? Other than some body count, and brags about how this or that "terrorist organization" that "we" don't seem to have much intelligence about has been decimated or decapitated?
You are backing an ancient set of grossly expensive stupidities, garlanded and bejeweled with questionable laurels and shiny medals, that benefits an ever-smaller set of people and has nothing to say to the future except more exotic ways to do the same crap that has never led to anything but "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings!..." If you needed any more proof for yourself that I am not, thank God, "serious."
So desperate the "experts" are to impeach one of their classmates who dares to break ranks and look at a wider view, not just color inside the lines in their restricted comic books.
What's always missing in all this we're-wise self-congratuation on mastery of the terminology and tenets and tactics/strategies/tools/toys of the Game of War is the whole normative and even economic question: Why?
Sun Tzu sure put answering the question of the "profitability" TO THE NATION of the "war" thing being contemplated right up there at the top of the list. There's infinite text arguing and discussing and railing about details of battles and tactics and methods and doctrines, but in the end it sure looks, for all the reasons that matter to ordinary people, that Vietnam was wrong, Iraq was wrong, Afghanistan was wrong, arming Syrian opposition forces and putting US troops and toys into the mix is wrong, so is picking a fight with Iran, or trying to dominate Africa or Central America. We can't even manage "victory" or "success" in any of the Asias except by changing the definitions to suit and declaring we meant to do that, maybe because we have all these "experts," like MchChrystal and Petraeus, but not a wise commander in the whole bunch.
And being involved in Great Game stuff that leads to episodes that may give the Air Force some bragging rights, like Serbia/Kosovo, is also wrong. In the name of some set of national-identity strategems aimed at hegemony or glomming onto resources or making "friends" who can buy "our" weapons, our rulers lose or dissipate all the advantages Sun Tzu says ought to be in hand:
... The art of war is of vital importance to the State.... It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.
...The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one's deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field.
These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method and discipline.
The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger... [and you can read the rest at the link below]...
[And how often has this been proven true?] There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.... Contributing to maintain an army at a distance causes the people to be impoverished. [this latter is apparently considered a BAD thing]
"Expertise" is not the same thing as "righteousness." An expert torturer or propagandist or master of Pentagonal procurement chess may have a little power, along with "mastery," but does that advance the species or even, as events move, the supposed, presumed, UNDEFINED "national interest?" Did Vietnam or Iraq (shorthands for enormous violence and waste and horror that there's NO evidence our Really Expert Brass could improve upon) "advance US interests?" Make the world safer, more stable, healthier for humans, even our own humans who are nominally all US-ans and on the same side?
Love to hear any support for that notion. And "It's just the way things are" ain't a winning argument. Global warming is "the way things are," too.
"ergo propter hoc..." Another example from the set of truthyisms about this and that, like the occasional corrections given by the Expert on how counter-terrorism or something worked in Malaysia. Anyone want to make their own individual judgment on how well "air power" did in "winning the war over Serbia might want to start by reading this piece, from the Air Force perspective, that kind of points out how this was another case of special circumstances:
That thing the Gamers call "war" sure is complicated, and EXPENSIVE! and OUT OF CONTROL! so much of the time. Note how successful the AF claims the JDAMs were, even though so much of the time when used elsewhere they have this problem of "improper target strike"ing and stuff. Of course JDAMs could only be "delivered" by B-2s flying half way around the world, thereby "proving" the utility and value of those trillion-dollar resurrected dreams of Jack Northrop of a "flying wing" intercontinental bomber 'cuz That Would Be Really Cool!, leading from Jack's original entrepreneurialism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Corporation, to the MICBeast called NorthropGrumman today, which corp brags as follows: http://www.northropgrumman.com/AboutUs/OurHeritage/Pages/default.aspx OOOoohhh! The B-35! The early investment in Drone Technology, buying the Radioplane! the so very efficient vertical and horizontal and diagonal and multiversedimensional integration of it all! The sales to all those "foreign governments!"
I got to see "Arc Light" missions under way in Vietnam, http://www.war-stories.com/aspprotect/b52-poss-arclight-guam-to-svn-1965-2.asp, which did not a damn thing to stop or really even slow the flow of materiel and troops from the North, and the old whine that that was just because of the "cowardly civilian constraints on the LeMay types" does not cut it.
Tell us, you subtle proponents, of "this time will be different:" did "air power" WIN anything in Iraq or Afghanistan? The level of aerial violence in Serbia was pretty intense, for all the operational problems of command-by-veto. How many Reapers and their successors, how many Hellfires directed by how many unaccountable invisible enthusiasts, will it take to "win" in whatever contest you have committed the rest of us to this time around?
So, Mr. Bill, you are so smart and deep and invested in the machinations of the Game, that the best you can do in bloglands like this is lift quotes from others and imply impeachment of their contributions, from your assumed position of Deep Wisdom and Long Experience?
That quote you lifted is not "what I think of Erdogan:" It's much more what I think of what you let the rest of us believe is you, and people in the apparent same line of work -- someone who has toiled in the bowels of the great Security Apparatus, who was e.g. in Chile when Interesting Things that the CIA "was not involved in" were happening, who claims to understand and support and apologize for what ordinary non-Great-Gamers are sickened by, when the "covert" covers come off and the rest of us get to see the thefts of land and other resources, the mass graves, the "supports" for "freedom fighters" that sure look like "terrorists" and Death Squads, the backing of kleptocratic dictators, the undermining and overthrow of elected governments. All in the name, of course,, of "putting (fill in the blank 'national') interests first." Every one of those Game stratagems cause present pain and future dislocation and instability.
You've stated pretty clearly that ordinary people, most of the folks who participate here, 'have no idea of the Realities.' I believe that, implicitly -- and make no apologies for being sickened at the thought that the sneaks and jackals and people who craft BS for Obama and others to parrot to cover REEAAALLL motives and motions are the ones who rule us, and get there only because they are drawn to power and self-interest and see how to manipulate or terrorize the rest of us as we work to raise families, support healthy institutions, and generate the wealth that the parasites and cancers that play the Game get to enjoy.
Skep, might I venture that in your personal bestiary, Gaza = West Bank = any area where non-Jewish non-staunch Israelis or their colonists live = renegade state?
How about a little grammatical exercise? Let's just exchange some words: "Israel is in effect a renegade state, which apparently thinks it has a right to take over Gaza, and the West Bank, and South Jordan, and the Jordan River, and all the oil and gas reserves in the Western Mediterranean, and Sinai." And of course if one dares engage in an observation on stuff like body counts on all sides, And who vows "50 for one" in that counting, and who has the most weapons and who ensures the national position by being always ready to use one or many of those maybe (ssssshh!) 400 nuclear weapons and of course has figured out how to be The Mouse That Roared and dictate the policies and behaviors of good ol' Uncle Sucker as they call us US-ans who send them how many billions a year in what kind of aid as they snicker about what a bunch of "freiers" we are? What might be Yahoo's reasonable objectives?
No, don't "let Hamas run wild--" any time a leader of Hamas or the PLO starts to look moderate and starts to maybe moves the needle of "dead" in that fraud the rest of us pin our hopes on, "the peace process," guess who gets KILLED? and by WHOM? Who is going to control LIKUD and the others who make up the current parliamentary gaggle? If the Palestinians are not permitted to defend themselves, or even get enough calories and nutrients to survive, what's the chances that they will do anything other than what people in Warsaw and many of the now increasingly visible hundreds of other ghettos in WW II Europe did?
And why does the wishful Greater Israel seem to look ever so very much more like the old land of P.W. Botha's Boer-Afrikaners? Which may eventually become a land of milk and honey, but not until long ages hence, when the last bits of memory of the current abuses have died out.
And I guess the Forever Excuse for every outrage and atrocity will always be "the need to concentrate on the next-upcoming-manufactured-or-real-crisis," so no one will ever have to break cover and simply do something right and decent and honest, because, obviously, after all, we must always allow the devious, the murderous, the money-grubbing, the apologists to just keep on doing what they do to "stabilize the world" in ways that we ordinary laboring fools cannot be trusted to know that they are always on the job about, keeping the rest of us from the great Gotterdammerung. After all, as with US torture and war crimes, "we are only looking FORWARD!" to what? the next set of war crimes? the eventual triumph of the Security State?
"Watch the pea, it's under this shell, or is it this one? C'mon, folks, lay down your money - ten'll get you 20..."
Interesting, too, in the Mediterranean context, that the Germans, having failed a couple of times to prove that by right of conquest, they deserve to run the Whole World, are now using a different set of weapons to try to run at least what was once considered their Reich...
...plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Isn't it, hey?
Anyone wanting a look into the kinds of thought processes that lie (using that word advisedly) behind various expressions of the kinds of behavior in play in Palestisrael (or Israpalestine, take your pick or make up your own portmanteau) could do worse than read this little apologium:
And for the propagandists among us who work to manage the language and thus control the terms of all debate, there's lots of useful models in this little piece:
And we should remember the lessons of the life of P.W. Botha, who masterminded the takeover of the South African government by his particular brand of social policy and politics, that are sort of reminiscent of other more current manifestations:
Down a thread, Bill offered a piece of the original Harry Truman recognition of the self-declared Israeli nation (how come they can do it and not the Palestinians?), which like a lot of Great Game text, warrants a careful reading:
“This Government has been informed that a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine, and recognition has been requested by the provisional government thereof. The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de-facto government of the new state of Israel.”
Signed: Harry S. Truman
Approved: May 14, 1948
Harry does NOT say "Israel is recognized as a Jewish state." He notes that "a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine." He then adds that the self-proclaimed Provisional New Rulers are the "de-facto government," but says not a (to use a word he used a lot) DAMN thing about it being a "Jewish state." And of course history shows how friendly the US was to the establishment of that provisional self-declared state, after the various approaches and inactions "it" took toward Jews and Gypsies and all those non-white-boy "others" in Europe in earlier times...
Of course, for present purposes, as is usual with the mealy-mouthisms of "diplomatic speech" and the Faery Castles that violent, greedy, self-aggrandizing folks want to build on those careful ambiguities, one can sort of squint and see whatever one wants to in the bare text... And let us never forget that "we who were giving a reactor to the Shahahaha cannot tolerate even the scintilla of the possibility of the thought of an 'Iranian' nuclear weapon or latency or what-ever," having had some of us connive at making Dimona possible so that there are now (snigger) maybe 20-score nuclear warheads under the control of the Right Wing Loonies whose models and buddies in South Africa could not quite manage the same feat, now have to tread very lightly and Feed the Beast for fear of it eating us...
Reee-alpolitik: you gotta love it, that sum of all the infinite crafty fearful murderous grasping invisible destructive behaviors, now coming up on the part where "protecting access to resources" leads to the final demolition of the myth of "democracy," the dyspeptic dream of "freedom'n'liberty (tm)," and of course the heat death of the habitable planet...
The use of the 2002 AUMF against Iraq to justify the Bush invasion and an ongoing US military presence there. The UN Resolutions it cites, including those sanctioning military force, are from the 1990-1991 Gulf War. The UN never passed a resolution that authorized the use of military force in the Second Gulf War. On June 28, 2004, the US returned sovereignty to the reconstituted state of Iraq and in doing so acknowledged that the Iraq referenced in the AUMF as well as the legal rationale for a US presence in (and occupation of) the country no longer existed.
The AUMF placed Democrats in a political bind. Despite later protestations, they knew it meant war. Knowing this, they were faced with the following calculus. They could vote against the AUMF, but since Bush was going to war anyway they would be portrayed as unpatriotic and not supporting the troops. If the war was quick and successful, regardless of the merits of the case, they would be portrayed as weak and wrong. If they voted for, they might not get credit but they would avoid blame. Still some did vote no.
The AUMF passed in the House October 10, 2002 by a vote of 296-133 with 3 not voting. 81 Democrats voted for the AUMF. 126 voted against it (with 1 not voting). Only 6 Republicans voted against. It passed the Senate the next day with a vote of 77-23. 27 Democrats voted for it. 22 Democrats voted against, including Jeffords (I-VT). Only one Republican Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) voted against. Bush signed the AUMF into law on October 16, 2002.
But who cares? The cruds in Congress are just a bunch of immensely cynical and self-serving oath-breakers who know that the real decisions are way outside their scope -- all they have to do, all they CAN do, is hand some kind of credit card debit on the account of the most of us to the MIC to cover the whole thing. And us little folks who pay for all this? Pfffftt.
Makes you wonder why people who attend here to do their version of fact checking and impeachment even bother. It's not like anyone who reads this stuff has any clout or would act on what they might learn here to keep the stupidity and wealth transfer from rolling on, rolling on...
What the gang that's shorthanded as "Obama" knows, which is what Cheney and the various Pentagon and Foggy Bottom "war leaders" also understood just fine, is that the thing called "war," being all institutionalized and industrialized and with all the logistics and planning bureaucracy being operational and in place and the media being so well under control, it does not matter what "the citizens" think, say or do when it comes to "opening these proceedings." The machinery of "war" is a JOBS PROGRAM, the machines themselves have "constituencies," and as with the "drone program," and after several generations of life and economy under the Imperial executive, the "deciders" don't even have to ask, or persuade, or badger any more. Consent to fire up the Grand Racket does not have to even be presumed; it's irrelevant, as irrelevant as the opinions of the barista on the employment policies of Starbucks, or of the part-timer stocking shelves at Walmart. Sort of like what obtains in "the only democracy in the Middle East," where the industrial entity that sits on 400 nuclear weapons and runs an apartheid state can pretty much do what it wants, with maybe a little more political shenanigans thanks to the parliamentary system than our own "captured or wholly owned subsidiary" legislature.
What's the endpoint, and what's the object of the Game, again?
See? The whole drone thing is, until Congress changes the law, which it will no doubt do, whatever the popular will says on the subject, illegal, and changing the law here will only make it "legal" as far as US courts go. "International law" is another story. The Pakis know what the next set of target lists can very well include... Not all of them are loved by or on the payroll of our Lords and Masters.
There's a reason a popular theme and plot recurs in "thriller" novels and movies. That's the one were the hero has to try and defeat the small group of monsters who have found some obscure and covert way to "take over the world." Via drones, large and small? Via itty-bitty nanotech thingies? Via really BIG data collection and "computing" involving the CIA having hands on all the data on the planet?
Love it! not a single little comment up to this point. Can't let that situation stand - must add the above, to smoke out the apologists who will reassure us that everything is cool, the grown-ups are in charge, not to worry... Nothing can to wrong...
C'mon, folks -- tell the rest of us why that UN guy is just a naif in the world of Reeeeeaaalopololotik!
It ain't ignorance -- it's just another manifestation of the banality of evil. Wrapped in an increasingly tattered flag that used to actually stand for something other than being a "battle standard" like the Napoleonic "Eagles:" "The day after the coronation, Napoleon had an eagle placed at the top of the shaft of every flag in the Napoleonic army." http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/symbols/index.asp, and on our official side, http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/UniformedServices/Flags/Flagstaff_Head.aspx And driven by the flux of forces and interests that have killed any vestiges of the wisdom of folks like "Beware entangling alliances" Washington and "Beware the MIC" Eisenhower and of course my personal favorite for telling it like it really is, Smedley "War is nothing but a racket" Butler. It's the ability of a very few to sucker the many into paying, in so many ways, for what the many ought to perceive as Idiot Games from which they can derive NOTHING of value, most certainly not that siren-song wetdream called "victory!"
It ain't ignorance at the top -- it's imperial arrogance and post-national corporate interests ruling. The latter evidenced by looking to that old adage, "Follow the money." And that hippie snarkism, "War is good business! Invest YOUR son! (and now, of course, with a politically correct nod to Equal Opportunity To Be Killed By the Stupidity of Others, your daughter too!)"
But of course "None so blind as those who will not see, none so deaf as those who will not hear, none so dumb as those who persist in playing out the end game of the Great Game....)
And I guess other folks reading here can gauge the relative turgidity of your apologetics for how "wars" COULD be "competently managed." And your bland assumption that "war" is the way to accomplish any kind of "national interest." Ooooh! Watch out for that "Vietnam Syndrome!" If only it had still been active ten years ago, maybe people would not be wondering who the last Americans to die in "our involvement" in Iraq and Afgapakistan will unfortunately be.
"the primary reason for the war, WMD,"... Reason, in whose little Game-playing universe? THAT was the REASON? REALLY?
Love your analysis of the Three Big Wrongs. How about let's NOT take the invasion as a given. If you are really serious about fearing a future "Vietnam syndrome," which given your apparent affection for all the other imperial activities "we" are involved in, like killing Wogs in Afpakistan and a lot of other place, you might not finish that little comment with a nice excuse for the military, that the "civilian leadership" and a few assh__e "top military officers" who get there by working the processes that bring them to the "decider" spot as they did with Korea and Vietnam and on and on, can you spell McChrystal and Petraeus?, were the the reason that all did not go smoothly.
"With enough soldiers," with more "rebuilding" with people with the right political bent, and I bet, fella, you have no more idea of what constitutes a textbook case of how TO "engage in a war and its aftermath." Got a blueprint for going to war with Iran? Got a set of ideas on how the "Afghanistan" exercise, the "War is nothing but a racket" exercise, among the other ones that are in the offing, should have been undertaken? Or now that once again "we" come to the end, with nothing but wealth transfer and dead people and increased instability and decreased security to show for it? Faugh.
And how about another silly tiny little question that means something to the dumb-sh_t GIs and Gyrenes who were sent to do the Big Deciders' bidding, some of them believing they were actually on a crusade to preserve Freedomnliberty (tm) and serve our "national interests?":
The First and the Last
The first American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Air Force T-Sgt. Richard B. Fitzgibbon Jr. He is listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having a casualty date of June 8, 1956. His name was added to the Wall on Memorial Day 1999.
First battlefield fatality was Specialist 4 James T. Davis who was killed on December 22, 1961.
The last American soldier killed in the Vietnam War was Kelton Rena Turner, an 18-year old Marine. He was killed in action on May 15, 1975, two weeks after the evacuation of Saigon, in what became known as the Mayaguez incident.
Others list Gary L. Hall, Joseph N. Hargrove and Danny G. Marshall as the last to die in Vietnam. These three US Marines Corps veterans were mistakenly left behind on Koh Tang Island during the Mayaguez incident. They were last seen together but unfortunately to date, their fate is unknown. They are located on panel 1W, lines 130 - 131.
The last pilot casualty in the country of Vietnam occurred during the Embassy evacuation in Saigon, William C. Nystal and Michael J. Shea both died on the helicopter on April 30, 1975 approaching the USS Hancock in the China Sea (both are located at 1W, 124). The last pilot killed in the Vietnam war was Air Force helicopter pilot Second Lieutenant Richard Vandegeer who was killed on Koh Tang Island, Cambodia. This occured during the Mayaguez incident when his helicopter crashed on May 15, 1975. It is concidered the last combat action of the Vietnam War.
The youngest Vietnam KIA is believed to be Dan Bullock at 15 years old.
The oldest person on the Wall is Dwaine McGriff at 63 years old.
At least 5 men killed in Vietnam were 16 years old.
At least 12 men killed in Vietnam were 17 years old.
There are 120 persons who listed foreign countries as their home of record.
At least 25,000 of those killed were 20 years old or younger.
More than 17,000 of those killed were married.
Veterans killed on their first day in Vietnam 997 (unconfirmed)
Veterans killed on their last day in Vietnam 1,448 (unconfirmed)
Number of Chaplains on the Wall -- 16 (2 Medal Of Honor)
Number of Women on the Wall -- 8 (7 Army, 1 USAF - 7,484 served)
There are 226 Native Americans on the Memorial.
There are 22 countries represented on the Memorial.
Most common name on the Memorial "Smith" with 667 veterans.
The most casualties for a single day was on January 31, 1968 ~ 245 casualties.
The most casualties for a single month was May 1968, 2,415 casualties were incurred.
Who will the entries be on the next set of walls for the next set of wars that will be "competently engaged in?" Who will be the last one to die for the next set of incompetencies?
No, no, no, no, no... All WRONG! this whole exercise was and is being clearly undertaken to preserve and protect our NATIONAL INTERESTS! It's just a matter of definitions, now isn't it? Some folks are doing just fine out of all this motion and expense, in keeping with the principles enunciated first by the Krupps, and more recently by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, that part about how "war is nothing but a racket," and profit is where you can take it.
Cogressional authorizations for full-blown in-retrospect-and-also-prospectively-stupid War, or whatever it was, on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.: 1
"If someone investigating the legality of drone strikes issued a statement about their legality based entirely on the public statements of the United States Department of State, would you be asking why people have a problem with his methods?" Maybe I would, if I was a subtle person and the idea was to keep the Fog of War wrapped tightly around the eyes of the people who pay the price of nominal "legal" cover, especially if I could get away with a nice double standard when it comes to US "wars of choice" based on false claims of WMD and Saddam-hand-in-glove-with-bin-Ladin.
OOOOhh, look at the shiny AUMFobject! And REALpolitics says that it's not what the nominal organs of government, the ones who sit in the UN, have to say, it's what the Gamers get to infer from the behavior of all or some part of the sneaky, violent, corrupt sh_ts that do all the other stuff that we are not supposed to pay any attention to, just pay for...
Hmmm. ISI jump-starts and supports the pseudo-entity called Taliban. Some part of Taliban supposedly hides bin Ladin. The logic is irrefutable that ISI should be attacked, invaded, Helfire-droned under the claimed logic of the AUMF (al Quaeda and its "allies," right?) Oh, that's right -- they got nukes, don't they? And they are as crazy as we are. Once you wallow in the relativism, it's impossible to do anything decent or to get clean ever again...
"ignore these realities"? Of course he is supposed to ignore them. We have to maintain the fictions that Bill in particular, seconded by Joe, both of whom find it for some reason important to use the ""-selections of text and serial efforts to impeach anyone who dents the armor of arrogance that shields our Serious People from any consequences, profess and support, with varying degrees of subtlety in their pitches. Because after all, "AUMF!" And (undefined) "National Interests!"
And so we just jump right past the whole supposed justification for this neo-exercise, whether those "Taliban," that convenient if obfuscatory collective noun, constitute any kind of threat to the nation (ours, that is) or "US interests" other than troops and "civilians" doing "government work" for "us" in the murky depths of the Game where Spies are largely indistiguishable from Spies (how about that Col. (ret) david Steele and his private fun, hey? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22632700 ), worthy of a drone program that sure seems to have flown high, right over the Constitution, and a lot of people's ideas of "international order."
But then the Game we are supposed to perceive and believe in sure seems, if you follow the money, not to be the actual Game that counts, in the end, at all...
Yeah, I know -- AUMF and all that crap. Keep on with the serial impeachment in support of the Whoever Is In Charge -- I see Joe weighs in on this one too -- "the most naive investigator ever..."
Of those 1,800-odd "people" killed, how many of them, even by the wildest stretch of Threatmongering imaginatuitation, posed any kind of actual danger, imminent or remote, to "US interests?" Oh yeah, OBL was one of them, right? and if "we" don't find, fix and kill every one of "them," whoever they are, there might be another OBL among them, right? Maybe something like this? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/16/1194520/-Your-War-on-Drugs-59-Police-car-chase-137-bullets-2-unarmed-people-dead
At what point does this idiocy, this mythically "regulated" outsourcing of assassination and murder, completely and finally get to the point of failing even General Dreedle's and Doc Panetta's and now Ex-Medaled Kerry's JeebusEffingChrahst Laugh Test?
What's the point you and Bill are tag-teaming here? That the State Internal Intelligence people can tell St. Peter that they "registered skepticism" at the time? Did any of them go out on any kind of Bradley Manning limb, and make a woeful noise unto the MSM and Congress and the Joint Chiefs and the Web?
I might give a pass to the FBI investigators who pushed the careerists and the NeoBlob a little bit, in trying to point to the machinations of Mr. Atta and his merry band, to no freakin' avail. But to annotate a file or three, send a couple of memos, and maybe you know what else the sterling State Department’s Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR)(adding the parenthesized acronym makes you sound so much more In The Loop, right?) may have done to be Honorable Men? Does that get them into Heaven? "We" still invaded Iraq, in what the perps themselves now have christened a "war of choice." A "preemptive war." And other sicknesses.
Even I, silly little me, was aware enough, as were a significant number of My Fellow Americans, including a lot of Viet Vets, to know, way back then, that this was just another bullshit Gulf of Tonkin idiocy, backed by some guy named Milo Minderbinder and his Syndicate, and I sent a few messages to my Congresscritters and newspaper editors and useless stuff like that... That won't get me into Heaven, either...
"The government" requires secrecy for what purposes? No doubt, given the way the Game is played, there are "legitimate" areas where playing the Game requires hiding your cards and lying and obfuscating and suchlike. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of crimes and misdemeanors, not to mention plain old stupidity and venality and stuff that would just be "embarrassing" and "career-limiting" if it got out, that get covered over by Red Filing and that "SECRET" stamp. But I bet you know that.
What's the need to try to impeach Dr. Beam's observations? Too close to home truths?
Scold, scold, scold. That is substantive, isn't it?
I guess the answer to my wishful question will always be "All we can do is more of the same Stupid."
Yeah, let's set the conditions, one little compelling stratagem at a time, not what we maybe intend, but there you are, for the kinds of people who do this sort of stuff to flourish and spread like some intractable crotch fungus, until they become a systemic infection and bid fair to kill the host: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeUKfIz0mmE
So the British MIC and State Security will be adding arms to the mix? THAT is likely to turn out well... And hey, "we" sure tried to kill Castro and Gaddaffi and Hussein with "our" vaunted trickies and technology. And Mossad and those folks have a pretty good record of political murder, though who knows what they are thinking, in the complex of enemies they have built for themselves -- but if Assad is the problem, why is he still around? Little complex worries about global thermonuclear war? That's a strange kind of "stability" and "security" we have achieved...
Given all the interests that profit from and enjoy mass violence and conflict, it's unlikely there will ever be "peace in our time." The reportage here helps to display and inform the prejudices and plots of the various Players, and also us little folks like myself who view the mayhem and toss out our little tidbits for whatever reason.
One asks, hopefully, whether there is at least maybe any indication that there is any set of conditions and directions that might at least lead to Accommodation, short of waiting for some number 'n' of generations to be born into and to die out of the current state of play of the Great Game in Syria and Bahrain and Pakistan and Notagainistan and so forth.
Shows my naivete, I'm sure, that I would even entertain such an "unserious" question. But I betcha that there are a lot of people sick of war, sick of tribal and sectarianist predations, sick of being used by oligarchs and kleptocrats as nothing more than, ah, Bug Splat and cannon fodder and worker bees to keep refilling the honeycombs that the militarists and their contractors feed from so voraciously and destructively. Even in Israel, there are Israelis sick of the ruling motions toward an inevitable dead end.
Would it break the spell, put a hex on anyone who thought "peace and quiet would be so nice," to even talk about such possibilities? Joe and Bill and others, having developed some stock of skills at it, are invested in the Game the way it is, no doubt convinced that it's the Right or maybe the Only Way, or at least personally beneficial or consistent with their world view. Not everybody is, or wants to be...
Here in St. Pete, it's New Year's, the Fourth of July, Christmas Eve, and random other nights. We've had a couple KIA (killed in assininity) and many wounded by 'stray bullets' that somehow slipped their leashes.
The part I like, from where I live, is the swank condo buildings on the expensive waterfront, from which idiot wealthy white males loose everything from .38s to .308s, with a smattering of 9mm, .223, and 7.62 rounds, many fired "full auto" in 30-round bursts.
Yah, that's all we have to do is be all tech-y and "recycle it." Do the French "recycle" spent nuclear fuel into plutonium, from which we get substantial security headaches since it's so much easier to make a backyard nuclear or dirty weapon with Pu, which has a certain, shall we say, chemical toxicity all its own too? Are you mixing FUEL RODS in with "high-level radioactive waste" in the notion that it's simple to recycle all that stuff if one is just as "green" about it as about solar energy? And it is the case for some reason that most of the entries when you google nuclear waste that most of the early entries in the data dump are from nuclear-industry and government-interested entities, though if you look you can find a few people who seem to have some informed and reasonable concerns about what to do with 70,000 tons of the stuff? http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/6-Things-to-do-with-Nuclear-Waste-None-of-them-Ideal.html
And as to the wonderful "recycling," maybe you could read the AREVA La Hague advertising, indicating that maybe there is still a lot of high-level schmutz left after "reprocessing," that has to be shipped back to the Homeland, or dumped off the coast of Somalia, or in the case of France,
n accordance with French law:
The waste taken from used fuel from foreign electricity companies are returned to their country of origin after processing.
French waste is temporarily stored onsite pending a permanent storage facility.
Seems to me that the Japanese corpolitical entity is doing a much better job of concealing the toll of dead and wounded and "damage" than the Soviets managed to do. And unless I am not reading the right stuff, it appears that those structures with all that fuel inside are still adding significantly to the amount of ionizing radiation out where the rest of us live, not to mention straight chemical toxicity and of course economic devastation and "exclusion" of people from a pretty large area. That much of the crap is going out to sea is not cause for celebration -- even us older people know that "dilution is not the solution to pollution," and hey, actual scientists with data are actually starting to get a little worried about the myth of the Infinite Capacity of the Oceans To Regenerate...
Yes, that whole process just totally legitimized Karzai as the Leader of All Afghanistan. And the US had nothing to do with any of that. And of course that election you refer to had no rancid taint of fraud about it. And speaking of history, who elected the Shah? And how did Diem come to power? and how did Marcos hang around? Et cetera? I bet the people who Make Things Happen are really proud of the great changes they have forced on the rest of the world...
The people you apologize for in our Secret Squirrel Agencies seem to have not too much trouble putting Their Guys into places of national rulership. Or removing "unfriendly" guys.
Can't choose the leaders "you" support? Like the Shah, and Battista, and Noriega, and Diem and Ky, and even, when it suited the Great Gamers, Saddam Hussein (who was told by Amb. April Glaspie, on orders from Foggy Bottom, to let Saddam know "we" had no interest in his petty intra-Arab disputes) and a whole long list of others? Your "elementary" seems to glide untroubled over a whole ocean of turbulence... And you were the one who asserted that the guy was mentally unstable, even psychotic!, as you admit, "from the beginning."
I guess the Wise Ones are now seeking to unwind their involvement with Karzai, as they did with Diem and others, in advance of a change of regime? Nothing like that has ever happened before, of course -- is that why you made your diagnosis?
I guess we just have to hope that people who are as smart and informed as Bill would want us to believe he is are staffing all the important posts in our State Department. Because if one kind of looks at the history of US diplomacy, as managed by the various iterations of State policies and strategies, as intersected and undermined by the activities of the CIA and similar fellas and gals, as affected by profit-driven "other activities," one might be left with the impression that many of them can't find their backsides with both hands, or are strangely indistinguishable from what they might complain are "agents of a foreign government."
But there's no doubt they are Serious People. Smoke-Blowing Serious. Deadly Serious. Rendition Serious. Corruption and Bribery and Destabilization and Advancement of Corporate (as opposed to, you know, "National") Interests Serious. (I know -- Corporate Interests ARE National Interests, right? The "experts" here have not deigned to offer any kind of definition for the term, so we just have to kind of go by what gets apologized for and puffed as "wise" and of course "legal.")
I wonder: Do any of those Serious People, in their nice offices, sit around with a drink or three and laugh and sneer at how stupid and gullible the Wogs and the Taxpayers are?
Could it maybe be just another manifestation of tribal identification, coupled to the activities of that other part of the brain's limbic system, the amygdala? Ever been in a Big 10 or PAC 8 college town or (name the major city with an MLB or NFL team) after a "big win?" How about a "rock event" or a large First Amendment gathering, where the COPS might be the "in-group" doing the clubbing and stomping? Humans do this kind of stuff. There's some effort to understand the "why," in part because there's POWER in the behavior if it can be directed, but so little effort to figure out how to defuse the occasions and diffuse all that horrific energy...
Good questions, Professor. Apparently there's resounding disinterest and eloquent silence -- much more interest, what a surprise!, in "getting weapons to the Resistance." And having created gadgets like shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, and having them spread around by the Great Gamers and manufacturers' reps in armed and covert "service," arguing about which entity is more "culpable" for making it possible for one bunch of warriors or another to "level the playing field" by shooting down helicopters and attack jets and as the target environment gets emptier and the conflict conflates, maybe the occasional civilian passenger aircraft? After all, the Navy shot down that Iranian jetliner way back when, maybe simply because the weapon system and training of the swabbies biased their view of actual reality, a situation that I am just SURE our Brass and skilled contractors have carefully cured...
The violence is so much more, ah, energizing and entertaining. And suffering civilians are a feature, not a bug...
"An enemy combatant is something you are; engaged in combat is something you are doing." What fluff. Do you claim that Atta and his guys who were learning to fly were one, or the other, or both? Where's the limit to "engaged in combat?" Are the sh_ts in the Pentagon who are procuring F-35s "engaged in combat?" (Yeah, maybe not, since that whole device is unlikely ever to be used.) How 'bout US contractors abusing people in Far Away prisons?
And you can just bet the "authorities" will be very careful about that semantic nicety. They've shown such dedicated skill, so far, in distinguishing between guys with guns (who gee, might not be even a tiny bit interested in "attacking the United States" at all, or only interested in attacking a bunch of INVADING FORCES, forces hiding behind a nice shifting "legal" pretext of what, having been "invited" by "the government," conveniently made up of Our Guys who won't even stay bought -- see Karzai --- or what's the justification for Iraq, again?), distinguishing "insurgents" from guys with telephoto lenses, wedding parties, two children and other Bug Splat. And of course "the government" would never, like, outright MURDER people, would it/they? Fred Hampton, that bunch of wackos at Waco, Ruby Ridge, I know, you have convenient explanations for all of that, that "explain" nothing because one would have to either be simply stupid to expect that the same impulses that motivate the state-security people everywhere and in every time would be "constrained" by a bit of sophistry as the weapons get more sexy and the accountability becomes even more remote, or you would have to be part of, or an apologist for, the apparatus.
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Leaping to Bill's defense, one must observe that there's scant evidence in the record here to support a charge that he is any flavor of liberal.
Thanks again to Dr. Cole for not suppressing the range and rage in these comments. As a self-proclaimed Futilitarian, I have to chortle and gloat at endless proofs of the obvious unfitness of the species I was born into. (One downside of looser moderation is that this space may become just be another ravin' Partisan Saloon, verbal fists and emotional bottles and chairs flying every whichaway.)
Where we as a species maybe ought to be doing a lot of pulling on the same end of the rope, if we are to have a chance at survival and moderate prosperity for our progeny and maybe even ourselves, instead we go off down the tribal and egoistic paths we usually follow, sniping at others likewise sneaking through the underbrush in pursuit of being the boss of everyone else, or just being absolutely and irrefutably RIGHT about stuff. And of course protecting the little sets of personally profitable behaviors and elements of personal identity and skills as didactic scolds that we have so illiberally gathered about us.
For the ones who are deep into the Game thing, and the Financial Industry and its offshoots, and the upper echelons of politics, of course, where all the money and power congregate, you folks probably don't have to worry too much about being nice and comfortable for the rest of your lives.
"Can we all just get along?" Sorry, Rodney -- you and your hematomas and broken bones knew the answer to that before you asked the question. Stay out of Simi Valley!
I guess the message to all the "geopolitical armchair moralists," transmitted by people who don't really ever lay out their credentials illuminating their deep involvement in and knowledge of the world of Grayness, and its 'appropriateness,' is to shut up and leave the "hard choices" to the so demonstrably morally straight, incorruptible, doing-the-best-they-can Experienced Players and Great Gamers. Since there is such a long history of successes on their part in acting in the supposedly least bad or later-characterizable-or-justifiable-as-best-possible-or-less-awful manner in all the manifold bits of "policy" that are always in play.
And there is never any element of venality or arrogance or ignorance, or at least no more than an excusable amount, in how the Game is played day to day. No self-advancement, no bribery, no meanness, no "hegemonist" element, no institutional pressures from all that MONEY trending doen the well-eroded channels, no defining the "national interest" to include What's Good For General Bullmoose, no self-advancement or groupthink or drivers like a notion of exceptionalism that justifies almost any kind of thing like massive dissimulation ("In wartime [which apparently is ALWAYS], truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies."), with defoliation and Arc Light and "free fire zones" and torture and (not so much any more, of course) selling and planting antipersonnel mines, and still actively peddling weapons all over the planet, subverting governments, even ones that God Forbid were actually elected "democratically," as in Iran and Honduras and Chile, like might possibly have happened (that "revolution of the ballot box") in places like Italy after WW II that had to be pretermitted by ACTION.
Too bad that the selection process that are in place mostly bring to the top only a certain kind of personality. Too bad certain kinds of humans on all "sides" are drawn to and carry forward that certain set of behaviors and justifications that, whatever the state of their "consciences" when they lay themselves down to rest, however troubled their dreams may be, or however soundly their personal justifications let them sleep, only seem to add to the parts of the human experience that involve and augment the number of bullets in the air, and explosions and rage and pain and dislocation and consumption and fear and insecurity. Too bad so much of what they do is so nicely invisible, or opaque, or cultured to activate the nastiest parts of the brains and cultures of the rest of us. Too bad that there seems to be so little room for the peacemakers, until the active scene of "conflict" has moved on and the survivors go about forgetting and rebuilding, pending the next stirring-up. Maybe that's the, I won't say "optimal best," but just "simply all" we can do.
But of course, what do I know?
"The decision on how to confront genocide has never been easy."
Ask a native American about how that works. Or their cousins in the vanishing forests of South and Central America. Or the populations of certain sub-Saharan nations, where "our" presence has been felt. Regarding Pius XII, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/pius.html
Maybe there's "no easy answer" because the moral clarity has been so compromised by the interposition of "national interests?"
While many who read in this space are choosing sides (or just wishing a plague on all their houses) in that "reality show" titled "What's Happening In Syria And All Those Little Countries in Oilland," and the Great Gamers skim high above in "command and control" mode while enunciating their Grand Strategies and moving little markers around on their Game Boards and trying, like the bit players in the stock market, to "pick winners," it might be illuminating to look occasionally at what is happening to fellow humans "on the ground" there. Dr. Cole links to a telling resource, Joshua Landis's "Syria Comment," which is giving the kind of exposure to the violence that the rest of us, living in smoother locales, ought to be aware of. Here's the current lead article, loaded up with exemplars:
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/refugees-in-jordan-increase-by-331-percent-in-four-months/
The "Great Policy" crotch seems once again to be "give or withhold 'aid' to this or that group if we can figure out who is who and where they are on the arcs of violence and "loyalty" from day to day, whether guns or not-guns," $124 million of this or that, with not a lot of thought, other than "countering Russia" and "protecting our strategic presence" and "retaining freedom of operation" or making more Great Game same-old moves, going into what's beyond the Now." I would doubt that, given the Experienced Players and institutional momentums and the ancient alluvial channels that money flows in, floating weapons that tote up to a quarter of the planet's wealth, anything different might eventuate that might eventually "work better" for the ordinary people who create the wealth the warlords and other rulers and their militaries suck up, that hallmark of the "genius" of Mesopotamian-rooted "civilization," might reduce the rush to tribal flags and the recursion of vengeance.
We label the warrior groups as Fundie, Shia, Sunni, Alawi, "government," whatever. Our brains render one or the other "good guys" or "bad," or "who cares, they're just a bunch of Muslims," irrespective of their actions or the horror and misery they cause. Seems to me the actual category is maybe "gunmen-fighters," which describes all of them and hints at what draws mostly males into the FUN thing called "war" or "battle." Churchill said the exhilaration comes from being shot at and missed. There's a lot more fun to be had in "victory" in the form of KILLING – warriors would much rather kill for their tribe than die for it, and if you spend any time looking through the videos in Landis's http://syriavideo.net/ growing collection, you get a little sense of the fear-excitement-rage-exultation chemistry that impels these dudes to attack, and to murder captives and non-combatants, behind a pasteboard front of "religion:" "Allahu Akbar! God is Great!" How's that again?
Add some video time in youtube looking at "helmetcam" and "hellfire" selections, to see the universality of it all. And maybe feel some revulsion, and get some hints about how us humans might find some path or other out of that reptile-brain set of behaviors? Or not -- "we" don't seem capable of controlling the behaviors that are killing the planet and ourselves...
Nony, I might ask whether the issues go further than concerns about legal bigotry. This young fella seems to me to have a lot of the same flavor as those Columbine teens when it comes to struggling to find a personal identity in a f___ed up world. No excuse, of course. The arguments from the legalists about how to "try, convict and execute" him, whether to "Mirandize" him (which imports a lot more than "reading him his rights," there are procedural and substantive bits that go along with) are more about efforts by authoritarian types who are much more interested in "freedom of action" for their own initiatives, whether wars of choice, torture or subversion of governments with "it was legal" as a defense, should the ordinary people or some hoity-toity "libruls" among the ruling class decide to prosecute them or shove them, as they say, under the bus.
All this chatter about casuistical categories is mostly about pushing EVERYthing into the category of "WAR," in which, if you follow the arguments here, there's a "legal" way to make it come out that "anything goes as long as OUR side does it," with EVERYthing being peddled as an "existential threat" needing some enormous shifting of common wealth to "counter." $4 trillion to "address" a few hundred to a few thousand "al Quaeda?" Requiring hundreds to thousands of "installations" (which of course are also just "necessary" parts of the Global Networked Battlespace -- Nine Areas of Responsibility that blanket the planet with claims of EMPIRE) and all those drones and Hellfires and "smart bombs"? A "thing" that even the loonies in the "militias" here at home scoff at, particularly the ones who have had their institutional butts kicked by Asymmetric Warriors with AKs and IEDs, and know that as has recently been re-proven, Big Wars on Little People tend to have Slink-Away Endings, much as predicted by old guys like Sun Tzu? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/20/1199723/-Dear-FBI-Looking-For-IEDs-Ask-Glenn-Beck-Fans-and-Freepers
This is a whole lot less about bigotry, seems to me, than it is about that "hegemony" thing and what authoritarians like to refer to as "discipline," using the word as noun, adjective and verb, and in all the senses that the dictionary provides. http://oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/discipline
And always remember: "The purpose of torture is torture. The purpose of power is power." Whatever bits of debating-team chintz one tries to dress it up with.
So did those two brothers, to test the attempted analogy to the German-American turncoats, receive training in sabotage from the Russian or Kyrgystanian or Chechnyan government or military in how to turn Mirro cookware into IEDs? Quite a fixation on wanting to thoroughly establish that "military tribunals" with, it would seem, expanding jurisdiction, are sanctified and "legalized" to determine guilt under less rigorous law and procedure and evidence rules than obtain in some civilian courts.
I might offer that on the civilian side there's no guarantee of "justice" in any sense of the word either; anyone who's ever been involved professionally in the Cook County courts can attest to that. Ever heard of the Red Squad? http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/confessions-of-a-red-squad-spy/Content?oid=3293807 Seen the recent abstracting of "terror events" here, and what it might tell about how "the system" works? http://www.motherjones.com/special-reports/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants Happy that the Guantanamo captives might be on the way to freeing themselves by starving themselves to death (except for the forced feeding? Here's the "legalist justification" from the Right Side: http://www.nationalreview.com/human-exceptionalism/346175/right-force-feed-guantanamo-prisoners
Of course, Bill whoever-you-are, all that has nothing to do with the tiny frame you want the discussion to be compressed into...
Oh, and on how the US government fostered democracy in places like Italy after WW II, by making sure there would be none of that "ballot box revolution" stuff where voters dared to elect an "uncomfortable government" that was not conducive to the forwarding of "US national interests," there's this bit, of course, about the what one might dare to call anti-democratic activities under Operation Gladio:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio
Hard words from someone who sometimes gets unconnected from facts, makes broad statements, and then walks away. And also detonates a fair number of "drive-by impeachment" attempts, and is pretty good at chiming in just before the comment window closes. Especially hard, coming from a guy who claims to have "been in Chile" when Allende was couped and killed, and to know first-hand that 'the US was not involved in that.'
Tell you what: Show me your examples of where Our Government has done anything in the way of encouraging or supporting what most of us think of as "democratic government" anywhere in the world. Iraq? Notagainistan? Nicaragua, Honduras, Chile, Cuba, Costa Rica, Angola, Zaire? Vietnam? Korea? There's a whole alphabet of "little bitty countries" out there covered by a very large set of documentation and literature that pretty clearly establishes a pattern of conduct of the type my Evidence prof in law school would have been very happy to use as an example in litigation to prove present and future conduct as well.
Any proof you got that suddenly our State Security and Policy and Diplomatic apparatuses are changing their spots and going on a Democracy Now! kick? Fer Chrissakes, The Government does not even 'promote Democracy' right here at home. Here's what The US Govt tells people in Hong Kong and Macau:
http://www.usconsulate.org.hk/pas/kids/government.htm
Here's a cut from the CIA World Yearbook for those wanting to argue over terms, starting with the definition of the US government as a "representative republic:"
http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/government_type.html
"We" really could come a lot closer to the nominal ideal, that is all misty in our fellow citizens' baffled minds, the one that was taught by the Beards, http://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/government_type.html, for example, Shining City on a Hill, Give Us Your Emigrants Yearning to be Free, and all, which is pretty much what was in the McGuffey Readers that graced a lot of schools back when. But hey, ECHELON and DHS and Drones and NDAA and on and on and on...
Besides, if as you so often hint, you were somehow part of the State Security apparatus, you know that democratically elected leaderships are so very much harder to "deal with" than, oh, Presidents for Life, and Supreme Rulers, and stuff...
"aren’t hoping that a democratic government emerges." Same is true of our Great US government.
It's so hard to know what are "counter-factuals" and what are "counter-counter-counter-factuals" and what are just made-up stuff. I believe it's pretty well established that the US military and its Bright Fellas at the RAND Institute heavily oversold the "threats" posed by the Soviet Union as part of "muscular" and "vigorous" behaviors that benefitted them personally and scared the hell out of the rest of us, later to be resurrected under the "neocon" heading. Here's a bit of interesting text, with link, subject to the usual caviling:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-missile-crisis/309190/ There's a whole lot more in the linked article.
Our generals and admirals knew that the Mighty Warsaw Pact Armies were staffed by demoralilzed troops who were not allowed to have maps, for fear they would defect. The "bomber gap" was a deadly and expensive fraud: http://www.coldwar.org/articles/50s/bomber_gap.asp The "missile gap." http://www.thefreelibrary.com/%22Who+ever+believed+in+the+%27missile+gap%3F%22%3A+John+F.+Kennedy+and+the...-a0111695835 And the insane idiot fraud of the "window of vulnerability." And they lied about this crap right into the face of a gullible public and complicit Congress.
The Soviet Union was built on a corrupt system of patronage and theft that was patently unsustainable, to the point of that old joke supposedly told by "Soviet" workers: "They pretend to pay us, so we pretend to work." Human ingenuity produced a huge parallel economy that kept things going. Much the same thing is so aptly descriptive of our own Kulturny; we sure have our Party and our Politburo. And leaving the weasels in charge of "policy" and "procurement" and "deployment" and more generally "government" sure seems to be "spending us into oblivion" more accurately and truly than the myth about how Reagan supposedly decimated and crushed the Reds by all that US first-strike "defense" spending.... And now we have our "wars of choice," at all scales, all over the planet. And we can't even steal the oil and ores effectively, so as to make conquest an even slightly sensible goal.
"Stupid is as stupid does."
'I'm going to say this again: I did not have torture with that man...' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KiIP_KDQmXs
'If mistakes were made, I would have to accept the responsibility for them.' http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1697&dat=19860827&id=ljQqAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ZUcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6550,6530129
There's a special card in the little stack that imports the Randomness into the Great Game, that's labeled "The Fog Of Forgetfulness And Believable Bullshit." It's almost as potent as the "Get Out Of Jail Free or Collect A Presidential Pardon Or Benefit From Prosecutorial Discretion or Incompetence" card. Plus, on the flip side is the "Collect $200,000 Per Post-Government-Position Speaking Engagement" entitlement.
Re double-taps -- seems your assertion might be truthy, in a very narrow sense, since the qualification "GENERIC first responders" (whatever that was intended to mean) might arguably have some tenuous taxonomic validity. On the other hand, http://www.businessinsider.com/drone-double-tap-first-responders-2012-9 The CIA technique seems to have been to wait a little longer than "seconds" for the other humans in the area to gather, in the Sneaky Petes' cynical understanding of the kindly impulses to help as so brightly seen in the Boston videos, which, gee willikers, seem to be somewhat universally human. Check the link for other reasons for multiple launches at a single "target," having to do with weapon accuracy and reliability -- two booms needed to get a good "hit." Hey, it's good for the economy! Another obviously pre-impeached "other" source: http://kabulpress.org/my/spip.php?article89242 Lots more of the same. Looks like lots of evidence of random or stupid or just awful/intentional mean killing of "civilians" by drone strike and other tactics, including the lengthy discussions and apologia that appeared in this very netspace.
And did I read about some report indicating that Exceptional Americans actually DO do real TORTURE, as it turns out producing (bipartisan conclusion) NO information that made "us" any safer? http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/world/us-practiced-torture-after-9-11-nonpartisan-review-concludes.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And I wonder if the guys in the black and white ball caps are going to turn out to be more like McVeigh and the Columbiners than even the Shoe or Crotch Bombers? But let's wait to see... I'm getting anticipatory goose bumps...
@Bill...and of course Serious Scholars are free to provide their own glosses and interpretations and exigeses from the sources they select and with the benefit of their particular approaches to History and Fact and Truth...
The comment implies that the Society of USans either does or should value intellectual diversity and the exchange of ideas. For extra credit, identify and discuss examples and sources that support or refute either contention.
Always gotta check these things:
http://www.ethicsdaily.com/news.php?viewStory=15532 {There's more in the link that would kind of cast that claim about McVeigh into some doubt.}
Is that the interview you were relying on for the assertion?
...which "contents" seems to include all the stuff that folks who treat adherents of "other" traditions, devout or deviant or not, as "the other," are so happy to attribute every kind of demonico to those "other" folks. See, e.g., Pat Robertson, or other demonstrated actual moral hypocrites like Tedd "That Boy Was Just Carrying My Bag" Haggard and Jim "Show Me The Money" Bakker and this guy, http://articles.latimes.com/1988-04-04/news/mn-401_1_family-worship-center.
Of course, we are all just human, with all that means...
Only God can be the final judge? Which God?
One popular T-shirt from the Vietnam period (I don't dare say how I know) was a skull with bloodshot eyes, a crazed skull's grin, a Fairburn Sykes dagger through both temporal bones, and the legend "Kill 'Em All, And Let God Sort 'Em Out!"
Google gives this updated image:
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.demotivationalposters.org/image/demotivational-poster/0912/marine-sniper-semper-fi-kill-em-all-let-god-sort-them-out-demotivational-poster-1260808972.jpg&imgrefurl=http://movie-posters.feedio.net/thank-you-marine-semper-fi-carry-on-demotivational-poster/motifake.com*image*demotivational-poster*0806*thank-you-marine-demotivational-poster-1213961903.jpg/&h=510&w=640&sz=66&tbnid=R27sXuloUgkRUM:&tbnh=92&tbnw=115&zoom=1&usg=__rai-aC0o01VECaGekQD9863dnNc=&docid=xCn4yyw1HF0NiM&sa=X&ei=wShvUbiAJo2E8ASv9ICwBQ&ved=0CD8Q9QEwAw&dur=13636
And in all the religious traditions I've looked at (except maybe the real Assassins, and the Thuggees, http://www.unexplainedstuff.com/Secret-Societies/The-Thuggee.html, there's this weird notion that reads something like the various examples laid out here:
http://www.teachingvalues.com/goldenrule.html
There's always a solipsistic, casuistical apologist, or many, who can provide a gloss on any ethical maxim that justifies or at least obscures the real moral nature of excursions from that silly bedrock principle of "the ethic of reciprocity."
How about Christians who blow up federal buildings, to enhance the equivalence?
Yes, Joe -- we are all inclined only to credit, or even hear, words that confirm our world view and/or are useful in selling a Narrative...
Did you happen to drop by that Iraqi restaurant in Lowell that got dissed by "someone" throwing a rock through the front plate glass, and then filled up with US war veterans in a show of common decency? http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/01/13/10149681-vets-hold-eat-in-to-help-immigrants-vandalized-restaurant?lite I know I'm making assumptions on small evidence of whether you are IN that particular Lowell, or just FROM there, et cetera. If you did, or just applauded the sentiment, blessings on you.
I guess your point is that we are as bad as everyone else?
Hint: WE are the only ones we can do anything about, behavior- and mindset-wise, day to day. Of course if our Organs of External Action were not all busy doing Exceptional things to other people, maybe the sum total of discord and conflict and destructive consumption and all that would be a lot smaller than it is. Just a guess, I'm sure you know better...
It does seem to me that this time, we at least don't have the Chimp telling us to "go to the mall," and Cheney and Wolfowitz gloating in the shadows... and there's actually a sort of net maturity to the commentary (with strident outliers like Westboro and FOX) that says "wait for the investigators to do their jobs."
And credit to the various police forces who, along with all the "Red Squad" stuff some of them are up to, ask Occupiers how that has worked, have apparently been pretty successful in detecting and foiling all but a very few (if horrific) episodes of terrorism of all colors and creeds. A lot more successful, it would seem, in most senses us ordinary mopes would understand and recognize, than the whole Global War On Terror (that phrase we can't say any more because it has become, in Ron Ziegler's famous formulation, "inoperative") multi-trillion-dollar machine. But then that's not really its actual purpose, is it?
Spyguy, great analysis. (The Great Gamers will of course decree it "jejune" and "unsophisticated" and all that, and lay out "thinkable" scenarios where "deploying nukes" would be so very appropriate and effective, too!)
So the Israeli nukes might be kind of like the US nukes, some 4,650 or some other large number, whatever happens to be saddled up and ready to go, under "OPLAN 8010, Strategic Deterrence and Global Strike", http://www.docstoc.com/docs/71862481/USSTRATCOM-Operational-Plan-%28OPLAN%29-8010-08-Global-Deterrence-and-Strike-1, a fun read: Use them, and "we" are the "rogue state of all time," and gee, would one think that maybe all of a sudden everyone else in the world would have that thing that Reagan and Gorby wistfully chatted about, how nice it would be to be attacked by Martians, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfejBpD_wm4, so the Superpowers would have what "WE" would be, a COMMON ENEMY. USans, 310M; OTHERS, 7,000M. Interesting odds.
Of course if "we" "deploy" enough of them, then maybe the Greenhouse Overheated Summer will be cancelled by that Nuclear Winter thing! http://www.eoearth.org/article/Nuclear_winter
Lessee now: The guessing is that Israel, not a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and not subject to IAEA inspections, has maybe got about 400 nuclear weapons. And there are 400 million "angry Muslims" that the Israeli national leadership seems intent on baiting and tweaking and occasionally assassinating and stuff. Makes you wonder what the targeting maps for those warheads look like, doesn't it? Pollard showed them ours -- I wonder if "we" have been able to penetrate Israeli institutions far enough to see what their strategists have in mind... (Some "old news," circa 1996: http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/nuke.html . There's more recent stuff, of course...)
Jesper, plaudits for a nice libertarian combination of putting words in the other's mouth and raising up straw men. You completely misrepresent and overpaint my comment. Nice to think about the world in terms of nice libertarian and conservative "axes," but Rand and Rothbard kind of demonstrably do not lay out any kind of working system -- rather one which includes the STRONG people taking what they can take from others. And anyone not clear on what the libertarian Paradise looks like ought to look here, in six interesting parts:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-ii-%E2%80%93-the-strategy.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-iii-%E2%80%93-regulation.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-iv-%E2%80%93-the-journey-into-a-libertarian-past.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-v-%E2%80%93-dark-realities.html
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-vi-%E2%80%93-certainty.html
As usual, Bill, your point is drawn from a careful selection of "talking points" and a choice of bits of history, hedged about by an insistence that any discussion must hew to the frame you erect. Formed, of course, by an affection for the point of view of the Few, and mandatory adherence to the "rules" of the Great Game that is one big negative-sum engagement after another. You hint at your CV, but never lay it out -- I'm sure you feel you've earned YOUR iron rice bowl, but others might differ.
AS to the "bloated public sector," have the CEOs of GE or Goldman Sachs or LockheedMartin or Monsanto or BP "earned" rice bowls of the size and oppressive shape that they have people to carry around for them? How about down on K Street? And in the Pentagon? Of course, there are those Welfare Queens and The 47% to get all excited about...
There's a happy medium, a meta-stable set of economic elements, and it's pretty clear that Thatcher and Reagan and others drove, and their successors are driving, the processes into personally beneficial but large-scale UNstable dysequilibrium. Apologize all you want...
"Extremely few are evil enough to deliberately try to make it worse for others. Instead, they are trying to improve what they see as the major problems."
That MIGHT be true in Sweden, though it at least appears that there's a certain problem from the Right, even there. But you must not see much of US politics, or for that matter British or French or Greek or even Israeli politics. In the US, we have a kind of uni-party system which actually has a lot of people in power who pretty much inarguably are trying very hard to make life a lot better for themselves and the small set of wealthy folks they are part of, and doing so by impoverishing and dispossessing most of the rest of us. All while claiming to have only the highest of motives and best of intentions.
The Narrative tries to tell us that what the most of us are emoting is "class hatred." Feels to me more accurately to be "righteous anger," from this direction. That is, from the standpoint of people who make it possible, by working themselves into early graves and keeping little enough of the wealth they create, for people like Baroness Thatcher and the Bushes and the Kochs and so on to Live Large and play their lives' incredibly rich music on our and our children's bones. Note that the mythical "class anger" is supposedly only a unidirectional, irrational, unsupportable, "unfair" entity. On the other hand, one is not supposed to examine or critique the motions and behaviors of the Few, who are the very least are guilty of "class disdain." Nothing new there -- there's an interesting, simple bipole: "noblesse oblige," at the one end, and "droits de seigneur" at the other. Which end of that stick do you think you are more likely to be beaten with?
Interesting, of course, that some of us who sneer at and snigger about "broken rice bowls" appear to carry their own very comfortable ones to the table of the Haves, where they speak so consistently in support of and on the part of their Betters...
Also from today's TB Times, and maybe more accurate and realistic and honest than other paeans to the "Iron Lady, May She Rust In Peace:"
http://www.tampabay.com/news/perspective/column-iron-ladys-myth-reality/2114714
Say it again, maybe people will bite this time:
https://www.juancole.com/2013/04/margaret-thatchers-policies.html
Others of course have different views:
http://michael-hudson.com/2013/04/failed-privatizations-the-thatcher-legacy/
Interesting, the relationship between the various parts of "the Palestinians" and "the Israelis." The stage setting of course shows just the facile images, and the directions in the play move the players in the best traditions of Greek drama.
Behind it all is the real world of corruption and venality and cynical manipulation, pretty much usually just for profit, plain old personal gain. It would be nice if humans could do better, if the ones who have the skills and drive to political dominance had the general welfare in mind. Instead there's the long, long litany of corruption in the place called "Israel," and of course in the place called "Whateverland." It's not that the elements that drive the patent insanity, both on the part of the public actors like Yahoo, and in the shadows off in the wings.
It's old news now, but here's a little reminder from Way Back in 2005, almost a century ago in Modern Time, about how venial and self-promotion and whatever the disease process is that produces the mess that drives so much of what is going on in the world right now:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/09/in-a-ruined-country/304167/?single_page=true
And from the same source:
What are the chances that anything good for the common person can come out of all of this, the real essence of "government" there, and here?
And for dessert, how about this?
Reality Check: The Hazards of Optimism
http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=5451&q=1
Does your personal calculus of fact and value count the effects of that STUXNET thing as an "embarrassing failure?" Sure, it does not say much for their ability to protect their industry against the combined smartness and destructive intent of "somebody..." Although they apparently hijacked or something one of our Reeally Smart Drones. I guess Progress and Competence can be sometimes localized to parts of the War Technology front, not extending to the entire apparatus...
Let the Great Game Continue.
Time for the definers of "the national interest" to speak up here and note that all the behavior complained of is all Justified and of course Legal, and indubitably Correct.
...prayers for those who died, the injured and the dispossessed. Our fellow humans, for good and ill and everything in between.
The Few seem to me anyway to be more like living in the swank gondola of a giant dirigible or, for those who haven't Hoovered up enough wealth as yet, maybe a tethered blimp like the ones our MIC is fielding to Keep Watch Against Terrorists. http://defense.aol.com/2013/02/04/tars-pit-save-our-blimps-congress-members-beg-usaf-dhs/ with a Money Hose still connected to our major arteries.
...and anyone wondering whether there is any "fat" to be trimmed from the MIC, American Style, there's this: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/world-surveillance-group-and-lighter-than-air-systems-deliver-initial-blimp-in-a-box-aerostat-system-to-department-of-defense-2013-04-03
Speaking of links, sure, the details are a little different, but why does this sound so familiar?
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA%20Hits/Angola_CIAHits.html
And it's not like there's no long list of other precedents:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm
So what are the suggested elements of a strategy, policy and behaviors to guide "the US" in the involvement of our various US Field Presences, like who to arm, and who to train, and who to advise, that the rest of us could struggle to understand in our leftist ignorance of the complexity of that mess? Or is this the wrong place and format for such an exchange?
Germans felt the same way in 1910, 12, 14. And it looks like since the engines of war are less Krupp-ish and more financial-ish, the feeling is still there, but the damage is a lot bigger and longer than the rail guns of August. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-04-08/guest-post-real-cyprus-template-one-youre-not-supposed-notice
Lots of inventive ways to conquer, subjugate and extract from...
I read that there are some other "externalities" with geothermal, too, like local earthquakes and stuff, and some interesting effects on aquifer water supplies. No free lunch.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-tech/energy-production/artificial-geothermal-energy2.htm
Spaniards had it first, the British Empire grabbed it when the elite there were still playing the Great Game as a Major Player. Love the mind set that says killing people and blowing stuff up as part of a claim that flyspeck "strategically important --just how, again" islands are "its own territory." There really is something wrong with humans as a species that this kind of thinking and behavior is what rules. "Correctly defended"? Huh. And the reasons for invading Iraq and Afghanistan, again? Not "our territory," it would seem. Must be something else, then.
How did the kinds of creatures that came to dominate the Argentine military, using the drums of war to protect their political and economic positions, and of course their opposite numbers who ran the British forces, and who all just loved the opportunity to exercise their troops and toys, get to that place? One might hope that "we" might some day advance beyond the antediluvian, atavistic and troglodytic. Of course it's un-Serious even to speak the wish...
But those who claim to have The Knowledge of the Way Things Work and How The Game Is Played tell us that this is all "legal," and "moral," and "wise." Who are we to gainsay them?
To the vets -- Seriously, and without the phony emoticons that accompany the phrase when breathlessly offered by Our Fellow Americans who maybe have gotten rich off of or maybe suffer mindlessly from predatory capitalism and the other slow deaths that accompany the decline of Republic into Empire:
Thank you for your service. For being model citizens, and for remembering that oath thing, that sounds like the one our ruling Pigs up on the porch, sharing cigars with the other Overlords, take, apparently with their little forked toes crossed, the one about "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same..." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2053502/Occupy-Oakland-Protesters-streets-NYC-solidarity-Scott-Olsen.html
Thank you.
Any questions, now, as to why "we" are in serious trouble? And what a debt we all owe to FOX and the WaPo and Kristol and Wolfowitz and of course the Coors and the Koch Bros. for ensuring that we will have a rational approach to the rest of the world?
Bill knows all about what "Washington" is saying --
From the hippie seats:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/when_are_goals_ever_truly_realized_in_international_affairs_20130402/?ln
http://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-lobby-is-actively-promoting-war-on-iran/5325263
And by Serious Observers:
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-high-cost-war-iran-8265
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/hagel-confirmation-war-iran-more-likely-205057684--politics.html
Says Sun Tzu, sometimes war is a really dumb idea:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/department106.cfm
Lots of WaPo articles, but I really like this one, that even highlights how deep Teh Stupid is in the idiocy that operates under the pretext of "national interest:"
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-09-20/opinions/35495695_1_assassinations-of-iranian-scientists-iranian-supreme-leader-nuclear-program
And for all the folks who keep forgetting that the most persistent principles in the political universe are accident, error, and often personally profitable if globally bankrupting unintended consequences:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/washington/12navy.html?_r=0
"never a good idea to give up an option..." 'wise advice,' all right, if you are playing RISK! with little cardboard and wooden game pieces, where the worst that can happen is that somebody gets pissed and tips over the game board...
This Great Game stuff is really kind of fun. Here's one small sample of the kind of studies and cases and scenarios the Deep Wise Thinkers get into, http://www1.american.edu/ted/ice/korea-dam.htm, facilitated by people who spend their lives thinking up not only threats and counter-threats and counter-counter-counter-counter-threats, but reasons for "their side" to deploy or resist the same, in pursuit of one vain "advantage" or another. Like invading Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or Costa Rica. Based on a calculus of "advantage" that maybe starts with Sun Tzu's advice on Making War, Not Love, and then wanders off into realms of self-promoting generals and Policy Gurus and of course who gets rich off of this stratagem or device or that other one, and which set of doctrines and war toys and deployments will ensure a steady "need" for more of the "products" of the system down the road.
So "Seoul is just 30 miles from the DMZ (sic)," and "Cuber is just 90 miles from our shores," and Guantanamo is just 90 miles from Havana or thereabouts." Anyone feeling any more secure with the current set of people with their responsible portfolios under their arms "in charge here," with Serious Observers to back them up, repeat the Current Narrative, and promote the current Theme and Doctrine by filling up all the talk in Washington, that remote village full of idiots that controls the keys to the missiles and the helms of the "littoral combat vessels" and the marching orders of all those Troops, etc., and thus our destinies?
We are only able to manage one Two Minute Hate at a time. And "pivoting" a monstrosity as cumbrous as "the US" from one "threat" to another takes a huge amount of logistics and procurement and planning and setting the fools up to Believe In The Changed Reality...
Kind of like the filibuster here, and the "Patriot" Act which is a hard act to follow... As my ex-wife used to say, "When you do that, it's WRONG. When I do that, it's DIFFERENT!"
"You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, and if you are really good, you can fool enough of the people most of the time and really get away with some horrible, very profitable stuff..."
Only 5% of the post you ask about was by the overbearing JTMcPhee. The rest was from an op-ed in the NYT, from a somewhat earlier age:
Op-Ed Contributor
"Pirates of the Mediterranean"
By ROBERT HARRIS
Published: September 30, 2006
Kintbury, England
Nope, the good stuff was from a much more important writer than me. I just missed the target with the . The link will take you there.
Nothing much new under the sun:
IN the autumn of 68 B.C. the world’s only military superpower was dealt a profound psychological blow by a daring terrorist attack on its very heart. Rome’s port at Ostia was set on fire, the consular war fleet destroyed, and two prominent senators, together with their bodyguards and staff, kidnapped.
The incident, dramatic though it was, has not attracted much attention from modern historians. But history is mutable. An event that was merely a footnote five years ago has now, in our post-9/11 world, assumed a fresh and ominous significance. For in the panicky aftermath of the attack, the Roman people made decisions that set them on the path to the destruction of their Constitution, their democracy and their liberty. One cannot help wondering if history is repeating itself.
Consider the parallels. The perpetrators of this spectacular assault were not in the pay of any foreign power: no nation would have dared to attack Rome so provocatively. They were, rather, the disaffected of the earth: “The ruined men of all nations,” in the words of the great 19th-century German historian Theodor Mommsen, “a piratical state with a peculiar esprit de corps.”
Like Al Qaeda, these pirates were loosely organized, but able to spread a disproportionate amount of fear among citizens who had believed themselves immune from attack. To quote Mommsen again: “The Latin husbandman, the traveler on the Appian highway, the genteel bathing visitor at the terrestrial paradise of Baiae were no longer secure of their property or their life for a single moment.”
What was to be done? Over the preceding centuries, the Constitution of ancient Rome had developed an intricate series of checks and balances intended to prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a single individual. The consulship, elected annually, was jointly held by two men. Military commands were of limited duration and subject to regular renewal. Ordinary citizens were accustomed to a remarkable degree of liberty: the cry of “Civis Romanus sum” — “I am a Roman citizen” — was a guarantee of safety throughout the world.
But such was the panic that ensued after Ostia that the people were willing to compromise these rights. The greatest soldier in Rome, the 38-year-old Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (better known to posterity as Pompey the Great) arranged for a lieutenant of his, the tribune Aulus Gabinius, to rise in the Roman Forum and propose an astonishing new law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/opinion/30harris.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
And from a slightly different era:
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1057&context=revisioning
"Quick! Quick! Give up our hard-won rights! The ________s are coming to destroy our way of life!"
Oh good! We're off the morally-relativistic hook, then, on a casuist's cavil!
Speaking of "wrong," Bill, you start with a lie: There is NOTHING in the article that implies or states that "Afghanistan, the congeries" was ever a "morally pristine society." So yeah, the corrupt US military that is so corrupt that US auditors cannot even offer any kind of opinion on the fiscal state of the Pentagram, that military with its contractors that build showers that electrocute US soldiers and willingly pays $400 a gallon to get fuel to the latest "front" that varies with no known logic, where generals lie about made-up "heroes" and over the objections of many of their own (who understand the wisdom of ol' Sun Tzu about no nation ever profiting from a prolonged, distant war (though I bet he had his own MIC to contend with) carry out "lawful orders" that are bullshit dead-end idiocy that get lots of people killed for NO GAIN except for the profits of the "War is nothing but a racket" crowd, there's a thousand more examples of moral vacuum and fraud and stupidity, as in now "we" do what other empires have done and flee Afghanistan after spending maybe $4 trillion or more to do WHAT, again, "show our resolve"? after "going into" a place (NOT a nation) where asymmetry and corruption and tech-defeating terrain and inhabitants are, to do WHAT, again? Oh, that's right -- it was decreed to be "in our national interest" by the Big Decree-ers.
And I bet there's a quantum-mechanics principle that produces a significant energy-level jump in the corruption-flux when the US military horde, with its camp-followers, descends on a place. So you don't get to make some kind of silly claim that all the waste, fraud, abuse and death were just a condition inherent in the 'already corrupt society' that you Wise Men surely knew all about and had been taking such advantage of as you could for your own Great Game purposes. YOU forced our fist into that Tarbaby. Keeping your own hands seemingly clean, of course...
...and on the subject of "the national interest," which is whatever whoever says it is, I'm sure all the stuff in this link is all just Conspiracy Theory, right? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/04/03/1199001/-Jeb-Bush-Oliver-North-and-the-Murder-of-CIA-Drug-Smuggler-Barry-Seal-in-1986 The CIA was never involved in any DRUG dealing! or other Bad Dumb Stuff. Those were just ROGUES, I guess.
"Forward!" "Don't focus on the past!" "How about a nice pardon?"
It's being called a "revolution." Does the label matter? Only if it distracts from the reality of what's going on, day to day. I mean, there's a whole range of descriptors to argue over, "civil war" and "chaos" and "anomie" and "Leviathan," and the sterile "insurrection" and "insurgency" and "terrorism," up to and including "all of the above." Bunches of heavily armed people killing each other, especially the cool murders of captives in the name of G_D! "Allahuakhbar! Allahuakhbar! Allahuakhbar!" What will the near-mid-term endpoint of this look like, one wonders, in the institutional sense?
We have wonderful "war porn" from the helmet-cams and night vision of Our Troops in Notagainistan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20LkYvEZOZs and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqgHg5LFXmI There's even better, full-color, unedited war porn from the fun and games that I guess they call themselves "jihadis," "Allahu Akhbar!Allahu Akhbar!Allahu Akhbar!" with a full-30-round celebratory burst from the ol' AK or cooler weapon into the unresisting air. It's being carefully collected and archived by the folks over at Syria Comment, one of the professor's blogroll entries, and I commend this fast-growing set of videos, indexed a variety of ways, to any one of us who secretly gets off on closeups of badly dead former fellow humans, "Allahu Akhbar!"
The lede is here, http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=18340, and the triumphal blood and brains are here, ugly and disturbing images for those who want only to think about grand elements of strategy and Big Moves in the Great Game and dismiss the horror of it as "stuff that happens on the way to US getting OUR way in the world," whoever WE happen to be... http://syriavideo.net/
Yeah, let's keep playing the Really Wise Geopolitical Great Game, and "favoring" this or that bunch, and and pumping arms into the murder zone on the excuse that "if we don't do it, someone else will, and then we will lose our 'influence' blah blah blah bullsh_t blah..."
Not exactly Will Rogers...
Professor, I know it's just a rhetorical device -- I'm sure you "get it" just fine, both as to what's happening, and in the context of human values and behaviors, why.
As to torture and drone-launched missile and bomb attacks, the "why" is really, really simple, don't you see: "It's in our national interest." (And, you know, it's kind of exciting and can be a lot of fun!) Because you can plainly see that both have had such significant effects on US "security," scaring those nasty Muslims (and all the other Wogs) into doing the bidding of those who rule the rest of us, we who now also have to be scared that "US forces" will spy on us in our bank-robbed homes and Bain-Capital-stripped workplaces and privatized schools, and have decreed they have the power (not the 'right,' of course) to do whatever they darn please to our bodies after some secret process that determines we are a "threat" to Their Rulerships.
And of course taking an ever larger share of the real wealth we generate in all those workplaces, on the institutionalized way to concretizing their dream of becoming Boss of the Whole World.
This should be great, welcome news for the humorless Serious People in the US rulership. They will be more easily able to converse, reactionary to reactionary, across a cultural divide that disappears when common interests in suppressing decency, stealing from the working stiffs, advancing a full-spectrum military industrialism, and "putting '{G_D}' in the driver's seat" become manifest. Any chance this might result in a reduction of predation and those "tensions" that bring "wars of choice" and those opaque and shifting "national interests" that so often lead only to sorrow and stupidity and mourning?
Rogue states? You got Iran all lined up in the same sight picture as North "Dennis Rodman is the Jane Fonda of 2013" Korea? Now that's some in-depth analysis. And as for a definition of "rogue state," what is your working text? Maybe you could find some guidance here, http://jpi-nyu.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Defining-the-Rogue-State-A-Definitional-Comparative-Analysis-Within-the-Rationalist-Culturalist-and-Structural-Traditions...Jason-Rose1.pdf ? Or for simplicity, " a state that conducts its policy in a dangerously unpredictable way, disregarding international law or diplomacy." Since the US rulership gets to define whatever it does as "legal," I guess we get a pass on being a "rogue state." And Israel under the current rulership? The N.Kors maybe have a couple of nukes that maybe they can "deliver" somehow; the Iranians have none, the Israeli rulers have maybe 200 or 400 that very surely CAN be delivered, and of course "we" have thousands, along with our other toys that we are using to try to control the behaviors of "states" and individuals all across the planet.
Being a little arbitrary and erratic and starting wars of choice and arranging or accomplishing the overthrow of other nations' governments and threatening anyone who doesn't toe some moving and arbitrary line that defines the extent of "US National Interests?" It's OK if you're a US-an, I guess... Don't let dispassionate reality get in the way of a heavy meal of jingoist comfort food...
One thing's always bothered me a little about the "tradition" with the feet thing. The text reads thus, in my old-man, KJV Bible:
John 13.
Where is there anything in there, or any of the other texts I can find, about KISSING those feet, which you can bet were carefully pre-washed before the Pope (or the bishops and cardinals who occasionally stoop so low in their own service) does his thing? And to remind us humans of what we are, at the individual level of detail:
http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?132946-Why-do-Muslims-wash-their-feet-before-prayer
And of course http://news.yahoo.com/popes-foot-wash-final-straw-traditionalists-004235548.html
In other words, "national interest" is whatever you say it is, at any given time and in any given situation. Huh.
A lot of malignant, metastatic cancers work the same way: Chemo and radiation and surgery effect an apparent "remission," but down there in the dark the little black cells that survive the put-down are once again reproducing unchecked, hiding from the immune system (weakened by the treatment), tricking the sufferer's body into building new, large blood vessels to feed the renascent tumors, and sending out little messenger cells to start new tumors here, and there, and over there...
On a "legitimate" scale, looking at the same effect, how's this? http://www.defense.gov/home/features/2009/0109_unifiedcommand/ "We've got the whole wor-old in our hands, We've got the whole wide wor-old in our hands..." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xscZeFD2m_o
Bill, got a definition of "US national interests" for us yet? Or is the best that can be done another lifted-quote attempt at impeachment by a “serious observer of international affairs and national security?” Why not come on out and use the language of an earlier generation of apologists, and call Engelhardt and the people who contribute there "stooges of _____________ (pick your pejorative)"?
And there sure is plenty of evidence that the scared and violent and so very poorly "led" Imperial soldiers over there are taught that Wedding Party = "Towelhead" = "Taliban" = free-fire zone: http://www.military.com/video/operations-and-strategy/afghanistan-conflict/soldiers-fire-at-4-and-m249-at-taliban/2235709958001/. Check the comments...
And of course, Study: Iraq and Afghan War Tab $4-6 Trillion , http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/03/29/harvard-study-iraq-and-afghan-war-tab-46-trillion.html?comp=1198882887570&rank=2
And Bill, and a few others, qualify themselves as, I guess, that set of "serious observers of international affairs and national security." Because they all adhere to a dead-end worldview and are masters of arcanae that have nothing to do with survival even of the nation (in any form that people not born into the Great Decline we are in might recognize or care to live in or "fight for"). Because they all read from the Rule Book of the Great Game, where everything is everything, and they can't (or won't, because that would be too limiting for their grandiosity) define "victory" and they can't define "national interests."
Just remember, according to the Wise, you can't believe anything that comes out of Tomdispatch. Because, as one of the Wise Men observed of another source in a different denial-of-credibility attack, 'they have an AGENDA.' Throwable impeachment eggs are wherever you can find them...
Thank you. There ARE grown-ups in the building. Too bad they are for some reason never in charge of things...
Yes, let's only focus on one little thing at a time. There's this place called Zaire, and this place called Angola -- and of course the "Grown-ups" had Very Good Reasons for doing what they did, including, if I read right, "weapons." Lots of them... to support "CONTRAS," which these days are called "terrorists" or "insurgents" or something.
"CIA Covert Action in Zaire and Angola: Patterns and Consequences." http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2149851?uid=3739600&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101834296453
And
"The US and the War in Angola," http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/4005928?uid=3739600&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101834296453
And a whole lot more. And of course there are now only a few actual "sovreignties" left on the whole planet:
USNORTHCOM
USSOUTHCOM
USPACCOM
USEUCOM
USCENTOM
USAFRICOM
And a whole bunch of Really Important Planning described in documents like this:
http://www.stratcom.mil/factsheets/snapshot/
One big happy family...
Oh, and for the Great Gamers who apologize here, who have all kinds of carefully constrained and studied notions as to how there's any kind of structure and order and grandeur and plan to all the crap that really goes on. How about how well all those effing CIA guys and other sneaky petes are doing, "dealing" with the latest set of uncontrollable idiocies they have been playing with in "the Middle East." Look here, folks, at what's being reported about what's going on in and around Syria, or whatever that area will be in the future:
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/
Stuff like this:
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=18293, and a whole lot more...
Syria Comment is a running blog, so I'm just pointing to the stuff that's dated from say 3/24 to this point. These CIAholes who "facilitate" and "support" and "encourage" and think they have any kind of control of anything other than their little local deals and scams... NOT. How is our vaunted set of Secret Squirrels going to tell the rest of us this is what they PLANNED, what they MEANT to have happen, just like,, oh, IRAQ and NOTAGAINISTAN and soon, coming to a theatre of operations near you, AFRICA! Waiting on the bland assurances of the Wise about how this is all under control...
Maybe it's time to kick out the Reaally Wise Experienced Players and try something else? Nah -- they're too, ah,, "embedded," aren't they?
...factories all over the planet, large and small, churning out weapons of all kinds, from itty-bitty 5.56 bullets, cases and primers to depleted-uranium-toxic-and-radioactive cannon rounds to, well, tanks and jets and bombers and of course drones and their armaments. All paid for by involuntary levies on ordinary people, involved happily or stupidly or against their will or without their knowledge in the dirty, murderous business of Milo Minderbinder's "Syndicate," http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/an-investment-lesson-from-milo/21358, and "Wild Bill" Donovan's excitements and Allen Dulles's strata-gems. "And everyone has a share." Gee: How did Qaddaffi *GET* all those "arms" in the first instance? Or Saddam? Or pick-a-dictator (tm)?
Nice thought, the momentary concern about "regulating the arms trade." The supply is relatively low-tech and low-cost, it's easy to generate and thus almost infinite. The appetite for violence appears as unlimited as the one for sex, and you can rent or buy human bodies with sex organs of your choice anywhere on the planet, despite or with the connivance of, the best efforts of the "puritanical," who are so often found with their body parts where theoretically they should not be...
All of this enables the actors in and apologists for the Great Game to keep on doing what they so enjoy. You got any ideas on how to stop people with sexy guns who've passed that threshold of having killed other humans to put away their toys and give up their power over others? C'mon, be real -- that stuff is too exciting, too much dang FUN!
(By the way, I think those scary-looking alloy pods are just, and I use that "just" advisedly, auxiliary external fuel tanks for various attack jets -- what they call "drop tanks." Not even napalm canisters, like were so popular in my little war...)
So are the parts of "industry" that are getting "disrupted" by the externalities from the other parts of "industry" going to do anything about it?
Anything effective, that is,other than capitalizing on the "opportunities in volatile change," that might have some positive effect on the crap that's hitting the rest of us billions who have not mastered the art of extraction, externalization, and that privatize/socialize thing in a big enough way to be immune to the horrors of our profits for at least the length of our lifetimes?
Anyone think Tony "I wanted my life back, and now I got it, so screw you saps" Hayward, BP's Gulf Man, gives a slug about it? Ho, lookie here! Lands on his feet in a bed of roses in where? IRAQ? http://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/09/07/tony-haywards-revenge-former-bp-ceo-to-head-iraqi-oil-company/
Anybody else getting mad yet?
...Time to move on, let the dying bury their dead, chalk it up to experience, and get on about planning the NEXT war, aka wealth transfer or whatever the whole complex thing is called, procurement, logistics, recruitment, blah blah blah, by the "experts" who just KNOW that this time, THIS time, their "expertise" will surely triumph, and produce VICTORY! and a BIG WIN!
Yeah, the reason parents don't tell their kids not to pull the wings off of flies or beat up on the little kids in the neighborhood is that their kids may BLOW UP IN THE PARENTS' FACE! Never let it happen that Dad cuts off the allowance, or sends the kid to his room...
Aha! another drive-by, captured-quote "impeachment!"
I read in Gary Schroen's book "First In: An Insider's Account of How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror In Afghanistan," lots of interesting stuff about how important and effective "air power" was NOT, in moving the Northern Alliance into Kabul. It never much of an "alliance" except in memos and cables, that now has morphed, if I have it right, into lots of parts of the many "opposition groups" who get to sneer at the unfortunate boots and butts of the US/UN forces as they leave Afghanistan, as what, "winners?"
Schroen tells a more compelling story of how that air power was more often "not available," often killed CIA and other "friendly" forces, was controlled and used as any "air power" is in modern Battlespace by people with political interests that seemed to have little to do with single-minded pursuit of "victory" (hard anyway in a place as variegated as Afghanistan with all its warlords and shifting "alliances" and through a mess as Byzantine as the power centers of Washington.)
To hear the CIA guy tell it, shrink-wrapped blocks of $100 bills, disbursed to this or that warlord along with other favors (like the Viagra the smarties in the CIA used to try to buy some "warlord loyalty" not so very long ago) had a lot more to do with displacing or turning "the Taliban" (along with a shitload of other forces like disgust at reactionary patriarchalism and behaviors that looked kind of Khmer-Rougie) from Kabul.
"We took their capital" means nothing to tribal Afghanistan, which has an actual sense of and memory for "history." And I make no confusion between 1940s bombing of all types, carried into Vietnam, and "surgical" drone strikes that like a lot of surgery result in dead patients. Is your claim that "air power" led to the Northern Alliance that isn't, any more, any "proof" of the efficacy of "air power?" Is that the best you got, in answer to my question about what "we won" in Iraq or Afghanistan? And have you got any proofs of the efficacy of Hellfires from drones as a mainstay of "victory" in any other activity the parts of the US "security" establishment are currently spending Big Money on? Other than some body count, and brags about how this or that "terrorist organization" that "we" don't seem to have much intelligence about has been decimated or decapitated?
You are backing an ancient set of grossly expensive stupidities, garlanded and bejeweled with questionable laurels and shiny medals, that benefits an ever-smaller set of people and has nothing to say to the future except more exotic ways to do the same crap that has never led to anything but "I am Ozymandias, King of Kings!..." If you needed any more proof for yourself that I am not, thank God, "serious."
So desperate the "experts" are to impeach one of their classmates who dares to break ranks and look at a wider view, not just color inside the lines in their restricted comic books.
What's always missing in all this we're-wise self-congratuation on mastery of the terminology and tenets and tactics/strategies/tools/toys of the Game of War is the whole normative and even economic question: Why?
Sun Tzu sure put answering the question of the "profitability" TO THE NATION of the "war" thing being contemplated right up there at the top of the list. There's infinite text arguing and discussing and railing about details of battles and tactics and methods and doctrines, but in the end it sure looks, for all the reasons that matter to ordinary people, that Vietnam was wrong, Iraq was wrong, Afghanistan was wrong, arming Syrian opposition forces and putting US troops and toys into the mix is wrong, so is picking a fight with Iran, or trying to dominate Africa or Central America. We can't even manage "victory" or "success" in any of the Asias except by changing the definitions to suit and declaring we meant to do that, maybe because we have all these "experts," like MchChrystal and Petraeus, but not a wise commander in the whole bunch.
And being involved in Great Game stuff that leads to episodes that may give the Air Force some bragging rights, like Serbia/Kosovo, is also wrong. In the name of some set of national-identity strategems aimed at hegemony or glomming onto resources or making "friends" who can buy "our" weapons, our rulers lose or dissipate all the advantages Sun Tzu says ought to be in hand:
http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html This stuff is taught in War Colleges all over the planet, but I guess the officers sleep through those classes...
"Expertise" is not the same thing as "righteousness." An expert torturer or propagandist or master of Pentagonal procurement chess may have a little power, along with "mastery," but does that advance the species or even, as events move, the supposed, presumed, UNDEFINED "national interest?" Did Vietnam or Iraq (shorthands for enormous violence and waste and horror that there's NO evidence our Really Expert Brass could improve upon) "advance US interests?" Make the world safer, more stable, healthier for humans, even our own humans who are nominally all US-ans and on the same side?
Love to hear any support for that notion. And "It's just the way things are" ain't a winning argument. Global warming is "the way things are," too.
"ergo propter hoc..." Another example from the set of truthyisms about this and that, like the occasional corrections given by the Expert on how counter-terrorism or something worked in Malaysia. Anyone want to make their own individual judgment on how well "air power" did in "winning the war over Serbia might want to start by reading this piece, from the Air Force perspective, that kind of points out how this was another case of special circumstances:
http://www.airforce-magazine.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2009/March%202009/0309balkan.aspx
That thing the Gamers call "war" sure is complicated, and EXPENSIVE! and OUT OF CONTROL! so much of the time. Note how successful the AF claims the JDAMs were, even though so much of the time when used elsewhere they have this problem of "improper target strike"ing and stuff. Of course JDAMs could only be "delivered" by B-2s flying half way around the world, thereby "proving" the utility and value of those trillion-dollar resurrected dreams of Jack Northrop of a "flying wing" intercontinental bomber 'cuz That Would Be Really Cool!, leading from Jack's original entrepreneurialism, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Corporation, to the MICBeast called NorthropGrumman today, which corp brags as follows: http://www.northropgrumman.com/AboutUs/OurHeritage/Pages/default.aspx OOOoohhh! The B-35! The early investment in Drone Technology, buying the Radioplane! the so very efficient vertical and horizontal and diagonal and multiversedimensional integration of it all! The sales to all those "foreign governments!"
I got to see "Arc Light" missions under way in Vietnam, http://www.war-stories.com/aspprotect/b52-poss-arclight-guam-to-svn-1965-2.asp, which did not a damn thing to stop or really even slow the flow of materiel and troops from the North, and the old whine that that was just because of the "cowardly civilian constraints on the LeMay types" does not cut it.
Tell us, you subtle proponents, of "this time will be different:" did "air power" WIN anything in Iraq or Afghanistan? The level of aerial violence in Serbia was pretty intense, for all the operational problems of command-by-veto. How many Reapers and their successors, how many Hellfires directed by how many unaccountable invisible enthusiasts, will it take to "win" in whatever contest you have committed the rest of us to this time around?
So, Mr. Bill, you are so smart and deep and invested in the machinations of the Game, that the best you can do in bloglands like this is lift quotes from others and imply impeachment of their contributions, from your assumed position of Deep Wisdom and Long Experience?
That quote you lifted is not "what I think of Erdogan:" It's much more what I think of what you let the rest of us believe is you, and people in the apparent same line of work -- someone who has toiled in the bowels of the great Security Apparatus, who was e.g. in Chile when Interesting Things that the CIA "was not involved in" were happening, who claims to understand and support and apologize for what ordinary non-Great-Gamers are sickened by, when the "covert" covers come off and the rest of us get to see the thefts of land and other resources, the mass graves, the "supports" for "freedom fighters" that sure look like "terrorists" and Death Squads, the backing of kleptocratic dictators, the undermining and overthrow of elected governments. All in the name, of course,, of "putting (fill in the blank 'national') interests first." Every one of those Game stratagems cause present pain and future dislocation and instability.
You've stated pretty clearly that ordinary people, most of the folks who participate here, 'have no idea of the Realities.' I believe that, implicitly -- and make no apologies for being sickened at the thought that the sneaks and jackals and people who craft BS for Obama and others to parrot to cover REEAAALLL motives and motions are the ones who rule us, and get there only because they are drawn to power and self-interest and see how to manipulate or terrorize the rest of us as we work to raise families, support healthy institutions, and generate the wealth that the parasites and cancers that play the Game get to enjoy.
Skep, might I venture that in your personal bestiary, Gaza = West Bank = any area where non-Jewish non-staunch Israelis or their colonists live = renegade state?
How about a little grammatical exercise? Let's just exchange some words: "Israel is in effect a renegade state, which apparently thinks it has a right to take over Gaza, and the West Bank, and South Jordan, and the Jordan River, and all the oil and gas reserves in the Western Mediterranean, and Sinai." And of course if one dares engage in an observation on stuff like body counts on all sides, And who vows "50 for one" in that counting, and who has the most weapons and who ensures the national position by being always ready to use one or many of those maybe (ssssshh!) 400 nuclear weapons and of course has figured out how to be The Mouse That Roared and dictate the policies and behaviors of good ol' Uncle Sucker as they call us US-ans who send them how many billions a year in what kind of aid as they snicker about what a bunch of "freiers" we are? What might be Yahoo's reasonable objectives?
No, don't "let Hamas run wild--" any time a leader of Hamas or the PLO starts to look moderate and starts to maybe moves the needle of "dead" in that fraud the rest of us pin our hopes on, "the peace process," guess who gets KILLED? and by WHOM? Who is going to control LIKUD and the others who make up the current parliamentary gaggle? If the Palestinians are not permitted to defend themselves, or even get enough calories and nutrients to survive, what's the chances that they will do anything other than what people in Warsaw and many of the now increasingly visible hundreds of other ghettos in WW II Europe did?
And why does the wishful Greater Israel seem to look ever so very much more like the old land of P.W. Botha's Boer-Afrikaners? Which may eventually become a land of milk and honey, but not until long ages hence, when the last bits of memory of the current abuses have died out.
And I guess the Forever Excuse for every outrage and atrocity will always be "the need to concentrate on the next-upcoming-manufactured-or-real-crisis," so no one will ever have to break cover and simply do something right and decent and honest, because, obviously, after all, we must always allow the devious, the murderous, the money-grubbing, the apologists to just keep on doing what they do to "stabilize the world" in ways that we ordinary laboring fools cannot be trusted to know that they are always on the job about, keeping the rest of us from the great Gotterdammerung. After all, as with US torture and war crimes, "we are only looking FORWARD!" to what? the next set of war crimes? the eventual triumph of the Security State?
"Watch the pea, it's under this shell, or is it this one? C'mon, folks, lay down your money - ten'll get you 20..."
Interesting, too, in the Mediterranean context, that the Germans, having failed a couple of times to prove that by right of conquest, they deserve to run the Whole World, are now using a different set of weapons to try to run at least what was once considered their Reich...
...plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose... Isn't it, hey?
Anyone wanting a look into the kinds of thought processes that lie (using that word advisedly) behind various expressions of the kinds of behavior in play in Palestisrael (or Israpalestine, take your pick or make up your own portmanteau) could do worse than read this little apologium:
http://www.boervolkradio.co.za/who_are_the_boers.php
And for the propagandists among us who work to manage the language and thus control the terms of all debate, there's lots of useful models in this little piece:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031001202018/rebellie.org/Raaktief/rk_openletter_ISS.htm
And we should remember the lessons of the life of P.W. Botha, who masterminded the takeover of the South African government by his particular brand of social policy and politics, that are sort of reminiscent of other more current manifestations:
http://web.archive.org/web/20031001202018/rebellie.org/Raaktief/rk_openletter_ISS.htm
Good luck to people of good will and real faith who have any hope of something better for our fascinating species...
Rosemerry, you just gotta love the principle (and maybe that's not the best descriptor, given the motivations) of "false equivalence..."
Down a thread, Bill offered a piece of the original Harry Truman recognition of the self-declared Israeli nation (how come they can do it and not the Palestinians?), which like a lot of Great Game text, warrants a careful reading:
Harry does NOT say "Israel is recognized as a Jewish state." He notes that "a Jewish state has been proclaimed in Palestine." He then adds that the self-proclaimed Provisional New Rulers are the "de-facto government," but says not a (to use a word he used a lot) DAMN thing about it being a "Jewish state." And of course history shows how friendly the US was to the establishment of that provisional self-declared state, after the various approaches and inactions "it" took toward Jews and Gypsies and all those non-white-boy "others" in Europe in earlier times...
Of course, for present purposes, as is usual with the mealy-mouthisms of "diplomatic speech" and the Faery Castles that violent, greedy, self-aggrandizing folks want to build on those careful ambiguities, one can sort of squint and see whatever one wants to in the bare text... And let us never forget that "we who were giving a reactor to the Shahahaha cannot tolerate even the scintilla of the possibility of the thought of an 'Iranian' nuclear weapon or latency or what-ever," having had some of us connive at making Dimona possible so that there are now (snigger) maybe 20-score nuclear warheads under the control of the Right Wing Loonies whose models and buddies in South Africa could not quite manage the same feat, now have to tread very lightly and Feed the Beast for fear of it eating us...
Reee-alpolitik: you gotta love it, that sum of all the infinite crafty fearful murderous grasping invisible destructive behaviors, now coming up on the part where "protecting access to resources" leads to the final demolition of the myth of "democracy," the dyspeptic dream of "freedom'n'liberty (tm)," and of course the heat death of the habitable planet...
Just the facts, ma'am...
http://www.netrootsmass.net/2008/09/128-aumf-against-iraq-often-cited-seldom-read/
But who cares? The cruds in Congress are just a bunch of immensely cynical and self-serving oath-breakers who know that the real decisions are way outside their scope -- all they have to do, all they CAN do, is hand some kind of credit card debit on the account of the most of us to the MIC to cover the whole thing. And us little folks who pay for all this? Pfffftt.
Makes you wonder why people who attend here to do their version of fact checking and impeachment even bother. It's not like anyone who reads this stuff has any clout or would act on what they might learn here to keep the stupidity and wealth transfer from rolling on, rolling on...
What the gang that's shorthanded as "Obama" knows, which is what Cheney and the various Pentagon and Foggy Bottom "war leaders" also understood just fine, is that the thing called "war," being all institutionalized and industrialized and with all the logistics and planning bureaucracy being operational and in place and the media being so well under control, it does not matter what "the citizens" think, say or do when it comes to "opening these proceedings." The machinery of "war" is a JOBS PROGRAM, the machines themselves have "constituencies," and as with the "drone program," and after several generations of life and economy under the Imperial executive, the "deciders" don't even have to ask, or persuade, or badger any more. Consent to fire up the Grand Racket does not have to even be presumed; it's irrelevant, as irrelevant as the opinions of the barista on the employment policies of Starbucks, or of the part-timer stocking shelves at Walmart. Sort of like what obtains in "the only democracy in the Middle East," where the industrial entity that sits on 400 nuclear weapons and runs an apartheid state can pretty much do what it wants, with maybe a little more political shenanigans thanks to the parliamentary system than our own "captured or wholly owned subsidiary" legislature.
What's the endpoint, and what's the object of the Game, again?
See? The whole drone thing is, until Congress changes the law, which it will no doubt do, whatever the popular will says on the subject, illegal, and changing the law here will only make it "legal" as far as US courts go. "International law" is another story. The Pakis know what the next set of target lists can very well include... Not all of them are loved by or on the payroll of our Lords and Masters.
There's a reason a popular theme and plot recurs in "thriller" novels and movies. That's the one were the hero has to try and defeat the small group of monsters who have found some obscure and covert way to "take over the world." Via drones, large and small? Via itty-bitty nanotech thingies? Via really BIG data collection and "computing" involving the CIA having hands on all the data on the planet?
Love it! not a single little comment up to this point. Can't let that situation stand - must add the above, to smoke out the apologists who will reassure us that everything is cool, the grown-ups are in charge, not to worry... Nothing can to wrong...
C'mon, folks -- tell the rest of us why that UN guy is just a naif in the world of Reeeeeaaalopololotik!
It ain't ignorance -- it's just another manifestation of the banality of evil. Wrapped in an increasingly tattered flag that used to actually stand for something other than being a "battle standard" like the Napoleonic "Eagles:" "The day after the coronation, Napoleon had an eagle placed at the top of the shaft of every flag in the Napoleonic army." http://www.napoleon.org/en/essential_napoleon/symbols/index.asp, and on our official side, http://www.tioh.hqda.pentagon.mil/UniformedServices/Flags/Flagstaff_Head.aspx And driven by the flux of forces and interests that have killed any vestiges of the wisdom of folks like "Beware entangling alliances" Washington and "Beware the MIC" Eisenhower and of course my personal favorite for telling it like it really is, Smedley "War is nothing but a racket" Butler. It's the ability of a very few to sucker the many into paying, in so many ways, for what the many ought to perceive as Idiot Games from which they can derive NOTHING of value, most certainly not that siren-song wetdream called "victory!"
It ain't ignorance at the top -- it's imperial arrogance and post-national corporate interests ruling. The latter evidenced by looking to that old adage, "Follow the money." And that hippie snarkism, "War is good business! Invest YOUR son! (and now, of course, with a politically correct nod to Equal Opportunity To Be Killed By the Stupidity of Others, your daughter too!)"
Owwwwww...
But of course "None so blind as those who will not see, none so deaf as those who will not hear, none so dumb as those who persist in playing out the end game of the Great Game....)
And I guess other folks reading here can gauge the relative turgidity of your apologetics for how "wars" COULD be "competently managed." And your bland assumption that "war" is the way to accomplish any kind of "national interest." Ooooh! Watch out for that "Vietnam Syndrome!" If only it had still been active ten years ago, maybe people would not be wondering who the last Americans to die in "our involvement" in Iraq and Afgapakistan will unfortunately be.
"the primary reason for the war, WMD,"... Reason, in whose little Game-playing universe? THAT was the REASON? REALLY?
Love your analysis of the Three Big Wrongs. How about let's NOT take the invasion as a given. If you are really serious about fearing a future "Vietnam syndrome," which given your apparent affection for all the other imperial activities "we" are involved in, like killing Wogs in Afpakistan and a lot of other place, you might not finish that little comment with a nice excuse for the military, that the "civilian leadership" and a few assh__e "top military officers" who get there by working the processes that bring them to the "decider" spot as they did with Korea and Vietnam and on and on, can you spell McChrystal and Petraeus?, were the the reason that all did not go smoothly.
"With enough soldiers," with more "rebuilding" with people with the right political bent, and I bet, fella, you have no more idea of what constitutes a textbook case of how TO "engage in a war and its aftermath." Got a blueprint for going to war with Iran? Got a set of ideas on how the "Afghanistan" exercise, the "War is nothing but a racket" exercise, among the other ones that are in the offing, should have been undertaken? Or now that once again "we" come to the end, with nothing but wealth transfer and dead people and increased instability and decreased security to show for it? Faugh.
And how about another silly tiny little question that means something to the dumb-sh_t GIs and Gyrenes who were sent to do the Big Deciders' bidding, some of them believing they were actually on a crusade to preserve Freedomnliberty (tm) and serve our "national interests?":
http://thewall-usa.com/names.asp
Who will the entries be on the next set of walls for the next set of wars that will be "competently engaged in?" Who will be the last one to die for the next set of incompetencies?
No, no, no, no, no... All WRONG! this whole exercise was and is being clearly undertaken to preserve and protect our NATIONAL INTERESTS! It's just a matter of definitions, now isn't it? Some folks are doing just fine out of all this motion and expense, in keeping with the principles enunciated first by the Krupps, and more recently by Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, that part about how "war is nothing but a racket," and profit is where you can take it.
Cogressional authorizations for full-blown in-retrospect-and-also-prospectively-stupid War, or whatever it was, on Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, etc.: 1
"If someone investigating the legality of drone strikes issued a statement about their legality based entirely on the public statements of the United States Department of State, would you be asking why people have a problem with his methods?" Maybe I would, if I was a subtle person and the idea was to keep the Fog of War wrapped tightly around the eyes of the people who pay the price of nominal "legal" cover, especially if I could get away with a nice double standard when it comes to US "wars of choice" based on false claims of WMD and Saddam-hand-in-glove-with-bin-Ladin.
OOOOhh, look at the shiny AUMFobject! And REALpolitics says that it's not what the nominal organs of government, the ones who sit in the UN, have to say, it's what the Gamers get to infer from the behavior of all or some part of the sneaky, violent, corrupt sh_ts that do all the other stuff that we are not supposed to pay any attention to, just pay for...
Hmmm. ISI jump-starts and supports the pseudo-entity called Taliban. Some part of Taliban supposedly hides bin Ladin. The logic is irrefutable that ISI should be attacked, invaded, Helfire-droned under the claimed logic of the AUMF (al Quaeda and its "allies," right?) Oh, that's right -- they got nukes, don't they? And they are as crazy as we are. Once you wallow in the relativism, it's impossible to do anything decent or to get clean ever again...
"ignore these realities"? Of course he is supposed to ignore them. We have to maintain the fictions that Bill in particular, seconded by Joe, both of whom find it for some reason important to use the ""-selections of text and serial efforts to impeach anyone who dents the armor of arrogance that shields our Serious People from any consequences, profess and support, with varying degrees of subtlety in their pitches. Because after all, "AUMF!" And (undefined) "National Interests!"
And so we just jump right past the whole supposed justification for this neo-exercise, whether those "Taliban," that convenient if obfuscatory collective noun, constitute any kind of threat to the nation (ours, that is) or "US interests" other than troops and "civilians" doing "government work" for "us" in the murky depths of the Game where Spies are largely indistiguishable from Spies (how about that Col. (ret) david Steele and his private fun, hey? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22632700 ), worthy of a drone program that sure seems to have flown high, right over the Constitution, and a lot of people's ideas of "international order."
But then the Game we are supposed to perceive and believe in sure seems, if you follow the money, not to be the actual Game that counts, in the end, at all...
Yeah, I know -- AUMF and all that crap. Keep on with the serial impeachment in support of the Whoever Is In Charge -- I see Joe weighs in on this one too -- "the most naive investigator ever..."
Of those 1,800-odd "people" killed, how many of them, even by the wildest stretch of Threatmongering imaginatuitation, posed any kind of actual danger, imminent or remote, to "US interests?" Oh yeah, OBL was one of them, right? and if "we" don't find, fix and kill every one of "them," whoever they are, there might be another OBL among them, right? Maybe something like this? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/16/1194520/-Your-War-on-Drugs-59-Police-car-chase-137-bullets-2-unarmed-people-dead
At what point does this idiocy, this mythically "regulated" outsourcing of assassination and murder, completely and finally get to the point of failing even General Dreedle's and Doc Panetta's and now Ex-Medaled Kerry's JeebusEffingChrahst Laugh Test?
What's the point you and Bill are tag-teaming here? That the State Internal Intelligence people can tell St. Peter that they "registered skepticism" at the time? Did any of them go out on any kind of Bradley Manning limb, and make a woeful noise unto the MSM and Congress and the Joint Chiefs and the Web?
I might give a pass to the FBI investigators who pushed the careerists and the NeoBlob a little bit, in trying to point to the machinations of Mr. Atta and his merry band, to no freakin' avail. But to annotate a file or three, send a couple of memos, and maybe you know what else the sterling State Department’s Bureau for Intelligence and Research (INR)(adding the parenthesized acronym makes you sound so much more In The Loop, right?) may have done to be Honorable Men? Does that get them into Heaven? "We" still invaded Iraq, in what the perps themselves now have christened a "war of choice." A "preemptive war." And other sicknesses.
Even I, silly little me, was aware enough, as were a significant number of My Fellow Americans, including a lot of Viet Vets, to know, way back then, that this was just another bullshit Gulf of Tonkin idiocy, backed by some guy named Milo Minderbinder and his Syndicate, and I sent a few messages to my Congresscritters and newspaper editors and useless stuff like that... That won't get me into Heaven, either...
"The government" requires secrecy for what purposes? No doubt, given the way the Game is played, there are "legitimate" areas where playing the Game requires hiding your cards and lying and obfuscating and suchlike. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of crimes and misdemeanors, not to mention plain old stupidity and venality and stuff that would just be "embarrassing" and "career-limiting" if it got out, that get covered over by Red Filing and that "SECRET" stamp. But I bet you know that.
What's the need to try to impeach Dr. Beam's observations? Too close to home truths?
Scold, scold, scold. That is substantive, isn't it?
I guess the answer to my wishful question will always be "All we can do is more of the same Stupid."
Yeah, let's set the conditions, one little compelling stratagem at a time, not what we maybe intend, but there you are, for the kinds of people who do this sort of stuff to flourish and spread like some intractable crotch fungus, until they become a systemic infection and bid fair to kill the host: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeUKfIz0mmE
Must make the Great Gamers proud, to know they set this kind of stuff in motion... And there's lots more where that came from: http://www.youtube.com/user/doctordarfil?feature=watch
So the British MIC and State Security will be adding arms to the mix? THAT is likely to turn out well... And hey, "we" sure tried to kill Castro and Gaddaffi and Hussein with "our" vaunted trickies and technology. And Mossad and those folks have a pretty good record of political murder, though who knows what they are thinking, in the complex of enemies they have built for themselves -- but if Assad is the problem, why is he still around? Little complex worries about global thermonuclear war? That's a strange kind of "stability" and "security" we have achieved...
Given all the interests that profit from and enjoy mass violence and conflict, it's unlikely there will ever be "peace in our time." The reportage here helps to display and inform the prejudices and plots of the various Players, and also us little folks like myself who view the mayhem and toss out our little tidbits for whatever reason.
One asks, hopefully, whether there is at least maybe any indication that there is any set of conditions and directions that might at least lead to Accommodation, short of waiting for some number 'n' of generations to be born into and to die out of the current state of play of the Great Game in Syria and Bahrain and Pakistan and Notagainistan and so forth.
Shows my naivete, I'm sure, that I would even entertain such an "unserious" question. But I betcha that there are a lot of people sick of war, sick of tribal and sectarianist predations, sick of being used by oligarchs and kleptocrats as nothing more than, ah, Bug Splat and cannon fodder and worker bees to keep refilling the honeycombs that the militarists and their contractors feed from so voraciously and destructively. Even in Israel, there are Israelis sick of the ruling motions toward an inevitable dead end.
Would it break the spell, put a hex on anyone who thought "peace and quiet would be so nice," to even talk about such possibilities? Joe and Bill and others, having developed some stock of skills at it, are invested in the Game the way it is, no doubt convinced that it's the Right or maybe the Only Way, or at least personally beneficial or consistent with their world view. Not everybody is, or wants to be...
Here in St. Pete, it's New Year's, the Fourth of July, Christmas Eve, and random other nights. We've had a couple KIA (killed in assininity) and many wounded by 'stray bullets' that somehow slipped their leashes.
The part I like, from where I live, is the swank condo buildings on the expensive waterfront, from which idiot wealthy white males loose everything from .38s to .308s, with a smattering of 9mm, .223, and 7.62 rounds, many fired "full auto" in 30-round bursts.
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!
Yah, that's all we have to do is be all tech-y and "recycle it." Do the French "recycle" spent nuclear fuel into plutonium, from which we get substantial security headaches since it's so much easier to make a backyard nuclear or dirty weapon with Pu, which has a certain, shall we say, chemical toxicity all its own too? Are you mixing FUEL RODS in with "high-level radioactive waste" in the notion that it's simple to recycle all that stuff if one is just as "green" about it as about solar energy? And it is the case for some reason that most of the entries when you google nuclear waste that most of the early entries in the data dump are from nuclear-industry and government-interested entities, though if you look you can find a few people who seem to have some informed and reasonable concerns about what to do with 70,000 tons of the stuff? http://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/6-Things-to-do-with-Nuclear-Waste-None-of-them-Ideal.html
And as to the wonderful "recycling," maybe you could read the AREVA La Hague advertising, indicating that maybe there is still a lot of high-level schmutz left after "reprocessing," that has to be shipped back to the Homeland, or dumped off the coast of Somalia, or in the case of France,
http://www.areva.com/EN/operations-1092/areva-la-hague-recycling-used-fuel.html
No glib answers to an intractable problem here, I guess...
Seems to me that the Japanese corpolitical entity is doing a much better job of concealing the toll of dead and wounded and "damage" than the Soviets managed to do. And unless I am not reading the right stuff, it appears that those structures with all that fuel inside are still adding significantly to the amount of ionizing radiation out where the rest of us live, not to mention straight chemical toxicity and of course economic devastation and "exclusion" of people from a pretty large area. That much of the crap is going out to sea is not cause for celebration -- even us older people know that "dilution is not the solution to pollution," and hey, actual scientists with data are actually starting to get a little worried about the myth of the Infinite Capacity of the Oceans To Regenerate...
Yes, that whole process just totally legitimized Karzai as the Leader of All Afghanistan. And the US had nothing to do with any of that. And of course that election you refer to had no rancid taint of fraud about it. And speaking of history, who elected the Shah? And how did Diem come to power? and how did Marcos hang around? Et cetera? I bet the people who Make Things Happen are really proud of the great changes they have forced on the rest of the world...
The people you apologize for in our Secret Squirrel Agencies seem to have not too much trouble putting Their Guys into places of national rulership. Or removing "unfriendly" guys.
Can't choose the leaders "you" support? Like the Shah, and Battista, and Noriega, and Diem and Ky, and even, when it suited the Great Gamers, Saddam Hussein (who was told by Amb. April Glaspie, on orders from Foggy Bottom, to let Saddam know "we" had no interest in his petty intra-Arab disputes) and a whole long list of others? Your "elementary" seems to glide untroubled over a whole ocean of turbulence... And you were the one who asserted that the guy was mentally unstable, even psychotic!, as you admit, "from the beginning."
I guess the Wise Ones are now seeking to unwind their involvement with Karzai, as they did with Diem and others, in advance of a change of regime? Nothing like that has ever happened before, of course -- is that why you made your diagnosis?
I guess we just have to hope that people who are as smart and informed as Bill would want us to believe he is are staffing all the important posts in our State Department. Because if one kind of looks at the history of US diplomacy, as managed by the various iterations of State policies and strategies, as intersected and undermined by the activities of the CIA and similar fellas and gals, as affected by profit-driven "other activities," one might be left with the impression that many of them can't find their backsides with both hands, or are strangely indistinguishable from what they might complain are "agents of a foreign government."
But there's no doubt they are Serious People. Smoke-Blowing Serious. Deadly Serious. Rendition Serious. Corruption and Bribery and Destabilization and Advancement of Corporate (as opposed to, you know, "National") Interests Serious. (I know -- Corporate Interests ARE National Interests, right? The "experts" here have not deigned to offer any kind of definition for the term, so we just have to kind of go by what gets apologized for and puffed as "wise" and of course "legal.")
I wonder: Do any of those Serious People, in their nice offices, sit around with a drink or three and laugh and sneer at how stupid and gullible the Wogs and the Taxpayers are?
Gee, then why did "we", ah, "support" him?
Could it maybe be just another manifestation of tribal identification, coupled to the activities of that other part of the brain's limbic system, the amygdala? Ever been in a Big 10 or PAC 8 college town or (name the major city with an MLB or NFL team) after a "big win?" How about a "rock event" or a large First Amendment gathering, where the COPS might be the "in-group" doing the clubbing and stomping? Humans do this kind of stuff. There's some effort to understand the "why," in part because there's POWER in the behavior if it can be directed, but so little effort to figure out how to defuse the occasions and diffuse all that horrific energy...
Good questions, Professor. Apparently there's resounding disinterest and eloquent silence -- much more interest, what a surprise!, in "getting weapons to the Resistance." And having created gadgets like shoulder-fired heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, and having them spread around by the Great Gamers and manufacturers' reps in armed and covert "service," arguing about which entity is more "culpable" for making it possible for one bunch of warriors or another to "level the playing field" by shooting down helicopters and attack jets and as the target environment gets emptier and the conflict conflates, maybe the occasional civilian passenger aircraft? After all, the Navy shot down that Iranian jetliner way back when, maybe simply because the weapon system and training of the swabbies biased their view of actual reality, a situation that I am just SURE our Brass and skilled contractors have carefully cured...
The violence is so much more, ah, energizing and entertaining. And suffering civilians are a feature, not a bug...
"An enemy combatant is something you are; engaged in combat is something you are doing." What fluff. Do you claim that Atta and his guys who were learning to fly were one, or the other, or both? Where's the limit to "engaged in combat?" Are the sh_ts in the Pentagon who are procuring F-35s "engaged in combat?" (Yeah, maybe not, since that whole device is unlikely ever to be used.) How 'bout US contractors abusing people in Far Away prisons?
And you can just bet the "authorities" will be very careful about that semantic nicety. They've shown such dedicated skill, so far, in distinguishing between guys with guns (who gee, might not be even a tiny bit interested in "attacking the United States" at all, or only interested in attacking a bunch of INVADING FORCES, forces hiding behind a nice shifting "legal" pretext of what, having been "invited" by "the government," conveniently made up of Our Guys who won't even stay bought -- see Karzai --- or what's the justification for Iraq, again?), distinguishing "insurgents" from guys with telephoto lenses, wedding parties, two children and other Bug Splat. And of course "the government" would never, like, outright MURDER people, would it/they? Fred Hampton, that bunch of wackos at Waco, Ruby Ridge, I know, you have convenient explanations for all of that, that "explain" nothing because one would have to either be simply stupid to expect that the same impulses that motivate the state-security people everywhere and in every time would be "constrained" by a bit of sophistry as the weapons get more sexy and the accountability becomes even more remote, or you would have to be part of, or an apologist for, the apparatus.
We should enjoy our freedom to post while we can. It's not a given that it will last.