The really fun ones, PW, are where "we," meaning the sneaky-petes and SOPs that operate nominally as elements of "US" Force Projection and Manipulation (but "have their own agendas," as has been the case since the first warrior castes in the first mud-walled towns,) manage to create, or fertilize and encourage, BOTH "sides," and then have "US" weapons sold to and "technical assistance" provided to both, to the occasional point that some of "our" guys kill some of "our" guys, in the "heat of battle," and in the "fog of war," and beneath the Floods of Money, and the flux of ponderous and pedantic and dysingenuous (sic intended) BS...
Hammer, meet hammer. Laudable statement of faith that more of the same will produce some kind of healthy result. "The operation was a success, madam, but unfortunately the patient died. Your co-pay is $4 trillion. You can pay at the window on your way out."
Interesting. In the slow progress from whatever Israel was in 1948 to whatever it is now, there was, for a time, some emphasis given to something called "purity of arms:" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms
And here is the salient text, maybe, with respect to dispossessing Others and face-planting little insufficiently "diplomatic" feisty French females:
Purity of Arms - The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.
If you read the whole IDF set of pages, and they contain a lot more illuminating bits, it looks like all the "questionable" behaviors turn on both hair-splitting or hypocritical moral relativism, and as with the US Imperial Force, the definition of "THE MISSION."
There are folks who post here, and in the "policy community" and among the Beltway Bandits in all branches of The Government, who have lots of facts and factoids at their ready command, along of course with Talking Points to hammerhammerhammer on to "establish the Truth." In the same way medieval physicians had lots of "everyone knows" to work from in diagnosing and treating illness: that Humors controlled the balance of the body, that bleeding and blistering and shaving and cold baths and various toxins employed on the Truth that "like cures like," so near-killing someone who was vomiting by loading them up with strong emetics was the Way To Go. My bet is that a lot of those practitioners knew they were trampling on that silly notion of "first, do no harm," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere, in pursuit of their holy Fee.
And all these Really Smart People, having mastered the lexicon of "Realism" and/or Neoconism or whatever the current cant is, seeing as they do that they themselves are pretty much immune to any negative consequences for doing some really serious but heavily fee-generating harm, are happy to administer fatal doses of toxic and explosive and socially destructive dogma and brutality.
Medical science and practice has moved on to much less "unenlightened" approaches, and its alchemists have actually found cures for some of mankind's pains and plagues (while setting "industry" up for profit-making stuff like stuffing cows with antibiotics and all that is following that short-term-profit-maximizing idiocy.) Pedantic and subtle and anonymously persistent people, with their fixed set of Great Game/Cold Warrior tests and tools that support and reinforce the idiocy of stuff like the Global Interoperable Rules-Everything Network-centric Battlespace thingie, and support the recent machinations prescribing a "measured" dose of Tomahawk to "retaliate" for this mean guy killing some people over there, trumped, apparently, by small bits of common decency and sense, sure seem to not have a freakin' clue or tiny incentive to aim for what it would take to actually keep the body of humanity stable and healthy, let alone the health of its global house, its oikos.
Because it fits with the narrow worldview they have worked so hard to master and which enables the worst to do the worst then can. Think Netanyahoo and Gadaffyduck and Jonas Savimbi and the rest. Because they can get away with it, and force us to pay them to "treat" the rest of us thusly, even if it's killing us and our loved ones.
One wonders if we will get smart enough to refuse the doses they want to stuff us up with before they kill us off.
Joe, you know, that is just about enough. Defending Assad? That is a flat out bald-faced scurrilous lie. I won't even give you the courtesy Joseph Welch accorded Bomber Joe McCarthy. You have no decency, sir, and no shame, and that goes nicely with your indecent disingenuous anonymous persistence.
But then as such a busy player, you know the subtleties of the blogspace game really well, now don't you? How to get away with crap like the above (and the below) snideries?
One might ask how it advantages you, in your quest for blanket credibility and so very subtle and sometimes abusive efforts to skew and direct the flow and content of discourse here, and at the other places you post, to lay out patent lies like the one above.
Seems to me I don't hate you at all, just see you as a symptom and manifestation of a particularly pernicious disease.
It's hard to keep track of Anonymous Joe's Anonymous Predictions and Pontifications, like the absolute necessity to Protect the World Order by blasting the heck out of something or other RIGHT NOW in Syria to Stop The Use of Chemical Weapons, because the evidence of the actual weapons used was destroyed totally by "massive bombardment."
And the steady drumbeat of usually one-sentence claims applause and assertions that "See? Obama Was Right Again, see how he has achieved his Foreign Policy Goal for this or that thing?"
Maybe somebody else can recall some of them? Or maybe he has always been "right," or at least able to offer some facile two-sentence explanation for why complex behaviors have turned out, for the apparent moment, or as characterized and constrained by him for the sake of argument or attacking someone else's credibility, a particular way...
Mattea and Miriam ought to be careful what they wish for.
The military mindset is, by my lights, evil and persistent and reduces everything to threats and counters and is infinitely inventive in creating both. "Green" is not a threat; at best it's a procurement buzzword.
You want to see what the Reeally Smart People who work for the War Department every day have come up with for how to address, confront and defeat the environmental threat of maybe human extinction that is off there somewhere, in part because the entire world economy is built mostly on combusto-consumption that "the military" runs on and is in large measure all about protecting? Here's the .pdf planning document:
"Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and
International Security"
Big parts of it are extablishing interlocking militaries to "control" the whole world, and creating markets, "as has been done for US military products," for US-made (by multi- and post-national corporations) construction and farming equipment. A long and sickening read, for a DFH...
And for those unclear on how the military mind works, the Defense Science Board that authored the above document has a whole lot more advice on all kinds of topics, like "21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors, Volume IV: Accelerating the Transition of Technologies into U.S. Capabilities" and "Creating an Effective National Security Industrial Base for the 21st Century: An Action Plan to Address the Coming Crisis," and "Unconventional Operational Concepts and the Homeland (2007 Summer Study)" and "Air Force Nuclear Enterprise Follow-On Review," and "The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems," and "Counterinsurgency (COIN) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations," and "Science and Technology Issues of Early Intercept Ballistic Missile Defense Feasibility," and hundreds more from just this one source:
And there are hundreds of other sources of similar import and gravamen spewed from other orifices of the Pentagram, costing hundreds of billions of dollars to "manage," produce and publish. Like the contributions of the "Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force" (colloquially the "JIEDDO Knights") that concluded "you can't, really..." after billions in studies, designs, tests, meetings, all that crap. And simulations, pointed out elsewhere, show that a US "war" in the Med and ME would almost invariably result in a massive DEFEAT, like the thing I keep talking about, Lt. Gen. Van Riper's "Red Force" sinking the whole US fleet and decimating "the troops." Even the Israelis come to the same conclusion, and any bets whether Yahoo and his so-serious clowns would blow up the whole dang place if things got "uncomfortable," with all those NUKES.?
That is just one small piece of a huge Juggernaut made up of mostly nice people in and out of uniform who go to church, love their kids, hold doors for each other, maybe plot how to get a bigger office or chair or arrange the "defeat" of a competing colonel's weapons system procurement, that thinks and believes and acts in ways that are totally antithetical to "green-ness," except as "green" stuff like PV panels and fuel cells 'n stuff are "useful for the mission." Whatever the hell the "mission" is... maybe just "fight in every clime and place where we could take a gun, or send a drone or missile or enhanced energy beam..." To do (at the risk of snipes about "repeating myself") what Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler did for a generation and a half: Make the world safe for the United Fruit Company.
"This analysis suffers from treating “the US” as a single entity with a unified political outlook, instead of recognizing the different factions in our foreign policy thinking."
Interesting, given all the "analysis" of "policy" by certain people here who talk in almost all other contexts as if the personifications disdained, in this particular piece of the running argument here, are reality..
Question: if only 3 of the Dolphin class are able to get to sea with their 4 tubes each stuffed with a cruise missile, and if per the estimates, the Israeli MIIC has figured out how to stick a nuke in the nose of each, and if each nuke is kind of conservatively figured at 100KT of "yield" (I hate that word -- should be limited to food crop descriptions, but there's the linguistics), what is left of any "civilization" in that part of the world, and would the Armageddonists in the US various-parts entity called the Nuclear Strike Force be able to resist activating all those pre-targeted nukes that WE have paid for?
Anyone interested in context might do well to read up on the "School of the Americas," which has provided all kinds of "technical assistance" to what are kindly called "authoritarians" in this polite space. One running tally is kept at http://www.soaw.org/
Bill, Anonymous Bill, has implied he was in Chile and has direct knowledge of what transpired during that "victory for Western Democracy." Huh.
The CIA is more like an immune-system problem, where the killer T-cells kind of run wild, attack healthy tissue, and leave the rest of the body open to various nasty infections...
A little context, to go with the condescending, lighthearted sarcasm:
The Story of Syria's Chemical Artillery
Where did the hardware Syria used in its chemical weapons attack come from? It's a long, twisted Cold War tale.
Another little example of what Game of RISK! (tm) more-of-the-same can and will bring. "Another gift that keeps on giving..."
As to a critical ability to distinguish one group of people from another, one wonders if Anonymous Joe is "on the ground" and able, with the CIA and other dudes who ARE "on the ground," to distinguish, between posts, all these people in their many bands, and various "local" bands too, for purposes of figuring out how to just "arm moderates:" http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/16/324193/100000-militants-active-in-syria-study/
Oh, Look! for you people who said looking for remains of the munitions used to deliver the Sarin was a waste of effort, because Heavy Bombardment had "destroyed all the evidence!" The UN guys, who were not supposed to even be worrying about Who Shot Ahmed, actually found rounds sufficiently intact to tell the types of rockets used, and a whole lot about their provenance!
So now you can go off on how condign must be the punishment of the Syrian Regime for Violating the HaHa Norm, via blowing more stuff and people up with Our Great Big Mutha-__kin' Made-Mostly-In-The-USA Hammer-Blow Cruise Missiles, or Arming the Sacred Allahu-Akhbar Gunman Rebels so as to Totally Level The Playing Field By Demolishing Every Standing Structure And All Comity ("Allahu Akhbar" http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UuQu0mwnJAw ), or whatever.
Once again, " the troops are being sent to do a task that is both wrong and impossible. There is no numder of troop that is either right or large enough to build a village, let alone a nation. Mechanized and electronicized warriors may have, individually, insights and moments of humility and comity that let them reach across the US-THEM divide. But the institutional idiocy of that colonel who, before jumping in his Black hawk and flying away to his air conditioned billet, tells the Troops that going into Wardak and kicking ass and taking names was going to be the linchpin of the way and they would all be proud to tell their grandkids that they had been there and been a part of the great decisive battle blahnlahblah.
These same O-5s and up who are all studying up on why the Empire cannot and never will "win" any "4th gen" wars. Massive, clumsy, evil incompetent idiocy. Did I say also " grotesquely expensive as well as incompetent"?
"[The US, as just another country] will always act strictly in its own interests...]"
The problem, as always, with personification/reification/hypostatization of the Great Nations, is that there is no perceptible "it" when you get down to it. There are people who claim to be able to perceive some set of "national interests," but what you're really talking about is a large gang of bureaucrats, politicians, thugs, thieves and occasional saints who have a whole large often conflicting set of their own interests that often are completely at odds with what the Narratives tell the rest of us is "the national interest." What, for example, is the "national interest" in having an NSA with all the "capabilities" that are drip, drip, Chinese water torture drip, coming to light, in that so-apt phrase? And thousands of "bases" scattered across the planet, tied together by a gigantic and becoming-infinite Thingie named, in best Milbabble, the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace, that reduces the entire planet to nine, count 'em, "areas of responsibility" presided over by speaking of Mandarins, how 'bout those cosseted General Officers who run the 'COMs that rule these mandates? "Capabilities" defining the "mission." Whatever that is. In a world where some folks have become aware that the history of the military is "Stupid." And now Huge and Voracious and Clumsy.
So I keep asking, can anyone, for purposes of sensible discussion and choice and not just as a shut-up line or a toss-pot line for someone pretending to be all Serious and Wise and In The Loop, define "the national interest(s)"?
Shaun, you touch on one of the key missing elements in all of our current human dysplasia: NO CONSEQUENCES FOR BAD ACTS. Lots of people with lots of explosive and destabilizing and anti-social and personally profitable advice and exhortation, and for those in the right spots, ACTION, suborning governments, "building world militaries," coup-ing elected leaders, blasting stuff, kicking in doors, and tossing bricks of $100 bills and Viagra and weapons around like Warlord Candy, and well-documented et cetera.
But whether it's Sidi or Sisi or Assad or Cheney or Blankfein/Dimon or any of the hundreds of Others who CAUSE all this crap and have no incentives to make it any better for the Ordinary Mortal, rather just the opposite, THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES, other than maybe occasional temporary exile from the cocktail party and "eyes only" circuits.
In the meantime, us mopes who fund and staff the mercenary armies of the night and build and struggle to maintain that huge and dying Imperial carcass find ourselves with less and less of the stuff that supposedly makes life worth living, while more and more of "it" flows up and in to people who sneer at us and don't even say 'thanks' because "that's how it's supposed to be."
Five-year-olds know that without consequences, there is no reason to change any behaviors. Whether it's rocks through windows, bullying the girl with pigtails, or sassing teacher or parent with dirty words and blows... Which is why "the US" ain't subject to the ICC, and stuff...
Yeah, and then Red Force unaccountably comes up with tactics that send that "absolutely clear" Blue Force to the bottom of said Persian Gulf, and trash the other elements of that whole Indomitable Force Structure (can you spell "IED made from US-made and -donated artillery shells and bombs?"). (Of course, that not-do-overable event becomes a huge profit opportunity for the Industrial part of the MIIC, which will then have the basis for whole new sales pitches for Better Weapons Systems And C5 Functions and the re-building of the 600-ship, 5,000 aircraft Navy 'n stuff.)
"The only way to win is not to play the Game..."
No, I'm not rooting against the Home Team, in the way the Rulers have so fraudulently been selling it. Since at least Korea, there has not been a "home team." And no, don't "thank us for our service."
Aziz -- so you really want to invite "the US," that congeries of "interests," to come on down to Arab-town and apply some beat-cop nightstick-and-Tazer-and-Glock Force Structure any time that other parts of "the US" and its "policies," along with the pathogenic post-neo-colonial behaviors of our corporatokleptocracy and the interlocking directorates of other post-national "interests," have produced anomic violence? Among and between people armed with weapons "we" sold or gave into the mix? And who the heck is "appeasing" Assad? And do you really think that even "coalition boots on the ground in the millions," let alone a "No-Fly Zone" unilaterally fired up by "the US," would bring Peace In Our Time?
You say this is a "Bosnian" moment? not even close. It's Iraq and Notagainistan and little echoes of that Vietnam thing and the Shah and et et et et cetera... and even "Sarajevo," with all its meanings... And Something Else altogether, where thanks to all the groundwork laid over all those generations of wealth-building imperialism and the inevitabilities of "civilization," all "options" are bad, and all "outcomes" are imponderable, and the little "benefits" of a World Cop beat-down go to the carrion eaters and tumor cells and maggots.
We got Realists and Apologists stamping their feet, and calling anyone who points to different facts than the factoids the R&As persist so valiantly in shoving so insistently out there, "conspiracy theorists" and "dreamers" and such. And abusing anyone who points to Actual Random Badness by "the US," or those parts of us that are apparently Exceptionally Evil as well as Seemingly Incompetent, and insisting on relativism when it suits the moment of their "case," but otherwise not.
So the Realists in the US lined up a bunch of Nazis and adopted them after WW II for their "skills" and "connections," see well-established facts elsewhere, and covered up as best the Brass could the Japanese-perpetrated chemical and biological and surgical and "scientific" horrors of WW II (some of which "our side" worked pretty hard at, too) and also borrowed some skills from some real Dr. No Strangeloves. Relatively BAAAAD? Absolutely BAAAAD? Evidence of the real nature of "Realism" in the context of the effing Great Game that we have the misfortune to be born into? and due to its nature, sweep and momentum, will almost certainly die of, or out of?
"We" could do a whole lot better. "We" won't, far as one can see...
I would say it's more a case of nailing his own foot to the floor after he stepped on his tongue and then painted himself into the corner behind that Bright Red Line. "He" being a faux-benign personification for The Whole Imperial System, in all its Bismarckian, Richelieuvian, Disraelian, Idiotic, Destructive, Dead-End Grabbery Complexity. Which I guess fortunately has not quite yet achieved that Matrix-level penetration into everything so as to be fully ready to shut all this unSerious Annoying Discussion down so they won't have to listen to and tolerate it any more.
Of course, there is a set of Serious Historians who state that "all available evidence, including more recent scholarship," leads to the opposite conclusion: That the A-bombing was a mix of xenophobic retaliation, message-sending to Stalin and the rest of the world, chest-thumping by the New Olympians, some great career and industrial opportunities for folks like Grove, and even that if the US government had just committed to do what in the end was done, leaving the Emperor in place, the surrender would have happened without opening that fateful "Enola Gay" Pandora's bomb-bay door.
I won't leave it as Bill does, with my comforting bare assertion of "the truth:" Here's just one among many bits of scholarship that belies the jingoist view, the comfortable "received wisdom," that cushions and supports and underlies so much of "our policy:"
But I will concede that the SHOUTING from the Bomb-Bomb-Bomb side is LOUDER and MORE PERSISTENT and certainly serves to validate the very valid sentiments for revenge on the part of people who suffered the actual pains of war at the hands of Japanese troops and their political machinery. The same sentiments that seem to motivate a lot of people who resent and have suffered from OUR system.
"Obama says threat of military strike stays on table"
Acknowledging the weariness the nation feels after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama said: "America is not the world's policeman."
And yet, he added, "When with modest effort and risk we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That's what makes America different. That's what makes us exceptional."
"Our ideals and principles, as well as our national security, are at stake in Syria," he declared.
Wow, stirring words until you look a little ways behind them... Then you have to resist the temptation to just go "BWAAAA-HAAA-HAAAAA-HAAAAAAA!"
US not the world's policeman? Maybe in the same way that a bunch of uniformed officers in Chicago were not the City's policemen: "The Babbling Burglar and the Summerdale Scandal:
The Lessons of Police Malfeasance
More than forty years after Chicago's worst police scandal, the department is again under siege. A look back at Summerdale and its aftermath."
Remember all the parts: corrupt war contractors, an opportunist officer corps, a pathetically credulous yet cynical public, a fiat rulership whose actual motions belie its rhetoric and image-building and peddling, enormous momentum of "special constituencies," and essentially unlimited access to fiscal resources, all that stuff. That was Chicago, then. Follow the papers and blogs, and take a look at NYPD now. Are those PO-lices what we have in mind when we both embrace the assumption of the role and tell ourselves "that's not US?"
Bigsaf, may I emphasize a bit from your first link?
An Italian war correspondent held captive by multiple armed groups in Syria has spoken of how he was treated "like an animal".
Domenico Quirico was freed on Sunday, after being held hostage for five months along with Belgian teacher Pierre Piccinin da Prata.
In the pages of his newspaper, La Stampa, the 62-year-old described being subjected to two mock executions.
He said his captors were "mixed-up" men consumed by the pursuit of money. "Our captors were from a group that professed itself to be Islamist but that in reality is made up of mixed-up young men who have joined the revolution because the revolution now belongs to these groups that are midway between banditry and fanaticism," he said.
"They follow whoever promises them a future, gives them weapons, gives them money to buy cell phones, computers, clothes."
Such groups, he said, were trusted by the West but were in truth profiting from the revolution to "take over territory, hold the population to ransom, kidnap people and fill their pockets".
It's always amusing, too, to follow an apologist at work. Wonder if his creds will ever be actually displayed, other than with flirtatious displays of Deep Knowledge and coy glimpses of well-turned ankle and Insider petticoat...
"The United States should become militarily involved only when its interests are at stake"
Once again, which and what and where and when are those "interests," and "why," too, and just who are your editorial or imperial "we?" And since, as another person here observed, the history of "military" is the history of "stupid," as so many times and in so many ways demonstrated, with the stupid excuse of the exigiences of hot combat when the biggest part is procurement and logistics and generating Milbabble, maybe "smarter" would be figuring out a way to keep the evil and greed that seem to define or characterize "US (the reification) interests" from giving the Generals a reason to Demonstrate Their Branches' Capabilities...
And gee, how unfortunate, how sad, how almost unfair, how pitiable, how "the US" keeps getting somehow handed, or running up against, these "realities" to "deal with," as if they are landed on Earth from some distant planet, with no relation to anything "we" have been doing in "our interest."
If the CIA and other US players are moving arms onto Syrian "sovereign terrain," and the "rebels" or "insurgents" or more neutrally or applaudingly, if you happen to like the particular image of a particular bunch, "gunmen" or "fighters" consist of anomic bunches of fluid membership under grandiose names dreamed up by "charismatic" warlords and bosses and "preachers," and these critters morph and "ally" and re-cast themselves dozens of times weekly, and there are supply lines delivering truck and planeloads hither and yon, well then, it would seem to be hard to say with any confidence that the CIA or whoever is signing the chits for them has even the slightest bit of control of who gets "armed." And we used to police up the battlefield arms from killed "gooks," who were even more efficient about policing up the ones laying around dead GIs, and about cleaning out "bases" and "camps" and "LZs" they overran.
Has anything changed in the Practice of War since Achilles stripped Hector's corpse and dragged it around the walls of Troy?
On the other hand, "First Syria rebels armed and trained by CIA 'on way to battlefield'
The first cell of Syrian rebels trained and armed by the CIA is making its way to the battlefield, President Barack Obama has reportedly told senators...."
"U.S. Begins Shipping Arms for Syrian Rebels
CIA Aims to Vet and Train Fighters With New Weapons for Deployment by August; Saudi Antiaircraft Missiles Expected"
Oh, you were only talking about that limited set, "al Quaeda forces." Is there a McCainDetector that distinguishes one bearded dude with an AK or RPG and a copy of the Qu'ran yelling "Allahu Akhbar!" over and over from another, so readily? Like, the CIA has such a great track record of Arming The Right People And Teaching Them To Shoot Straight. Maybe that's why "Pentagon may help arm Syrian rebels instead of CIA
US officials mull increased push for moderate opposition to be armed, trained via special operations"
It is SO hard to know what the heck is actually going on over there, isn't it? Even the people that are supposedly "in the loop" don't seem to know... Except that guns&money are changing hands, and sneaky-petes are "building relationships" with "Freedom Fighters!"
Why, after the CIA "successes" in places like Notagainistan, would one possibly doubt the premise of the article cited?
Sometimes credible diplomacy is backed by moral force and the ability to attract enough humans to a position based not on fear, threats, and money (and careers) on the simpler ground that it's the right thing to do -- maybe fortuitously consistent with a "national interest," and that sick chestnut about all actions are based on "self-interest."
But in the Game Frame, that's not possible, given the immutable definition and reality of how, pace Wikileaks, "diplomacy" is imagined and conducted. Per the Serious Players, that is, who bamboozle and cozen the rest of us, and profit personally from stirring up the flames of the ancient seductions of tribalism...
It is a solemn responsibility to have to order even limited military action by forces whose overall strength is as vast and as awesome as those of the United States of America, but it is my considered conviction, shared throughout your Government, that firmness in the right is indispensable today for peace; that firmness will always be measured. Its mission is peace.
And let us not forget the lessons taught by one Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper, USMC (Ret.), during a relatively recent simulation of naval, etc. war in the Persian Gulf, in which the Evil Red Force under his command sank most of the Great Force Projecting US Capital And Other Ships and did such other havoc that the Pentagram had to stop the Games, re-spool, and basically force a happier (for the MIIC) outcome: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/ $250 million, 13,500 players, 18 Navy ships sunk, the Blue Force routed, and in the real world there is no "do-over." See, e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan. Fog of war, my backside --- one ought to watch where one steps, and not take reassurances from ergonomic-chair "battlespace manager warfighters" and their Policy Cheerleaders that "We got it right NOW, $7 trillion later."
For what it's worth, on the quality and strength and tactics of some of the players in this latest or at least currently topmost horror brought to us by the proponents and beneficiaries of the continuation of the Great Game:
After the Islamist-led rebel alliance took the town, the Syrian regime responded by sending in aircraft to attack the rebel positions. This is the ever-disastrous pattern to the Syria conflict: rebels take a town doing its best to mind its own business, and the regime comes to the defense of the town and destroys it in the process. I spoke yesterday with a Syrian Christian who traveled near Ma’loula during the time of the attack. Like many Christians in the country, he has no love for the oppression of the regime, but remains somewhat “pro-regime” in relation to the conflict, since the threat of Islamists showing up and taking over his town outweighs his dislike of the regime. I asked him, “Regardless of the fact that these rebels invaded uninvited, would it not be better for the regime to just leave them alone, rather than conducting an airstrike on one of the most historical places in the country?” He responded sadly: “They don’t care. They will destroy anyplace the rebels are to be found.” He reminded me of other historical treasures that have been damaged through the regime’s response to rebel incursions, such as occurred in Palmyra, and recently at the Qal’at al-Hosn (Crac des Chevaliers), a magnificent Crusader castle and important tourist attraction that the regime bombed after rebels set up base inside. For someone who has defended the regime’s side during the conflict, his attitude of exasperation toward the scale of their responses was telling. Still, residents of Ma’loula have expressed gratitude for the military reinforcements sent in to expel the unwanted rebels. Many in Syria still prefer the devil they know to the one they don’t—though they’re getting to know the latter all the same.
Not so very long ago, here in this very blogspace, Joe, whoever he is, was castigating and impeaching others for daring to use unsupported phrases in argument like "Everybody knows" and "it is a well-known fact" and "it is well established," I guess like the Moon landing, which happened, so that means irrefutably that whatever Joe says also happened, or exists, according to his repeatedly repeated narrative. A "foolish consistency..."
Re that observation that total dominance can't and won't remain uncontested, see, eg, "history," and on a smaller scale, the vain effort to create a perfect unchanging Kentucky bluegrass monoculture lawn around one's McMansion. Salafis got nothing on crabgrass and dollar weed and suchlike, despite largely unconstrained chemical warfare and wholesale deportation, transplantation and as with the West Bank and Gaza, "settlements."
Being a "constitutional lawyer" and even a "professor of constitutional law" means exactly nothing in terms of application of those principles. Those charmers on the Supreme Court, Scaly-a, and Roberts, and "Pubic Hair" Thomas, and near-miss Robert Bork, are well versed in the lexicon and precedents and how The Rule Of Law can be invoked, seemingly plausibly and irrefutably, to screw over the General Welfare. Ever hear of "substantive due process," freedom of contract and child labor?
There are a lot of "experts" in the world -- a set of skills, like how to manufacture chemicals, or nasty inorganic or complex organic molecules, or invent "nanotubes" that will kill you quicker than asbestos, is morally indifferent. It's all the intent and application that counts, to the people who suffer from same...
Don't be thinking that since Obama is credited with deep learning on "The Constitution" that he will have any dedication to making it work the way We All, with our varying own interpretations of what Should Be, might Wish It Would...
Got any cites to support that "very small number of people"? Polling, maybe? Does the universe include people outside the MSMiasma? And it appears that a "very large number of people" as you put it "opposed strikes on Syria." but keep hammering those talking points... Maybe repetition will make up for idiocy.
If I recall correctly, there are supposed to be organs of the US government, State, CIA, FBI, et cetera, that analyze commerce, even deals that don't on their face require licenses for technology transfer or because the items being sold for a profit have military applications. In the Modern Environment of "NSA Panopticonia" there's even more of that. As with 9/11, an ounce of prevention would have been worth the "pound of pretend cure" you want to credit the US Government with. Cat out of bag, bag in jail for a little while? Horse out of barn, barn door locked for 9 months? Oh, and a $3,000 or even $30,000 fine?
People who want context on this one particular incident can look here, for contemporary reporting. http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=287388 Or just search on the company name for more.
This is only one of hundreds of instances of this kind of behavior, ignored, overlooked, winked at, or actively encouraged by the complex Behemoth personification that is the "US Government."
Short Bill: "Comfort ye, my people...sleep, baby sleep..." Short JTM: "Why, again?"
...Crucial chemicals and the missiles to deliver them have come not just from nations long allied with the Assad government, like Iran and Russia, but also from China (sometimes operating through North Korea) and a variety of Western nations, the cables and other documents show. In a few instances, American companies became players in Syria’s efforts to add to the sophistication of its stores.
One of the best-known cases in the United States involved a Waterville, Me., company once known as Maine Biological Laboratories. The company and several top executives were found guilty of allowing a series of shipments to Syria in 2001, including restricted biological agents.
That was one of several instances that involved deals with American firms, the cables show. In another case, ...
A March 2006 State Department cable from the American Embassy in Damascus described how Syrians seemed to be exploiting trade with the West. “Syrian businessmen regularly report on the ease with which their fellow businessmen illegally import U.S. commodities with seeming impunity, as well as express concerns that the USG’s lack of enforcement of the economic sanctions” are “hurting those that choose to play by the rules.”
Those transactions presumably included chemicals that could be precursors for chemical warfare.
The Americans were not the only ones concerned...
BAAAD SYRIA, BAAD BAAD SYRIA! Go lie down!
[That headline and various sidetracks in the article are just a little misleading: a good part of "the world" was making a profit and furthering their "national interests" and knocking pawns off the Great Game board.
Isn't it just fascinating to look behind the BS Mythscreen at what the Great Game actually involves, includes, incurs? One wonders what stake the apologists and other Players might have in continuing the Idiocy of all those little sales transaction that happen because of wink, winkery, and the global and profitable and career-boosting amassing and distribution of weapons of retail, wholesale and MASS destruction.]
Mr. Steel might be a backwoods survivalist America-Firster militiaman, we might disagree on lots of stuff, I don't know or care -- he's come up with an interesting virus to combat the runaway tumor of Surveillancism...
In other news, "SWAT officers kill man, 107, in standoff." Makes you wonder what that was all about, proportionality and reality-checking and all that...
Yes, indeed, if that includes the people whose motions you represent. Not that it will make the slightest difference to the Game play over time, as you full well know...
The decision to launch "something explosive" at "some part of Syria" has long been taken. Now it's just a matter of finding something other than quicksand and eyewash to provide the Casus Idioticus to Just Do It...
Which population would that be: the Vietnamese, with Agent Orange and spare the crap about how in some tiny definition it's not a chemical weapon? The Iranians gassed with US connivance and "Western" sourcing of the chemicals and munitions and "battlefield intelligence (sic)?" The Kurds, with the same? The Afghans?
Professor, your acute observations must be cutting close to the quick, given how suddenly and subtly or not so subtly the apologists have been popping up or off on the recent "crisis" of idiocy...
On November 15, 2005, U.S. Department of Defense spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Barry Venable confirmed to the BBC that white phosphorus had been used as an incendiary antipersonnel weapon in Fallujah. Venable stated "When you have enemy forces that are in covered positions that your high explosive artillery rounds are not having an impact on and you wish to get them out of those positions, one technique is to fire a white phosphorus round into the position because the combined effects of the fire and smoke - and in some case the terror brought about by the explosion on the ground - will drive them out of the holes so that you can kill them with high explosives."
Agent Orange and depleted uranium and white phosphorus and such things are not "chemical weapons."
Under Drone Rules, there are no "innocent civilians." Their bad, for being stupid or unfortunate enough to be "in proximity to Unlawful Enema Combatants."
"Everything is also sui generis," whatever Bad was done has nothing to do with Bad that is about to be done.
Let Reagan be Reagan -- Obama is Different, the MIIC is filled with beneficent do-gooders just aching to "retaliate" for evil done to and by somebody or other.
The function of the world economy is to build out the entirety of the Grand Global Interoperable Network-Centric Panopticonal Battlespace, which actually has no determinate function or end point except More of Itself. And is always Under Construction, Addition, Design Revision, and Repair.
See how pleasingly simple it all can be, if you just let yourself be carried by the flow of false logic?
I understand a lot of Great Gamers are also inveterate bridge players. One thing an inveterate and masterful bridge player hates is when someone else at the table asks to "review the bidding."
But the world of humans is so complex, and there's so much going on, and the lies are so difficult to sort from the truths and of course since "We" are at perpetual war now, and as Churchill famously observed, that crap about how "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies," maybe it would be helpful to review the bidding on chemical weaponry bidding by the US of A, about whom one is not supposed to make Random Bad Observatons, and other players, Here's one interesting source, that kind of gives the lie to all that noise about 90 years of "norms:"
For those who are so exercised about chemical weapons, you got any idea about what pathogen warfare, and its successors that the MIIC is so diligently moving toward deployability, might be like? Want to lose some sleep, even over a somewhat dated (2004) observation of potential uses and "legalities" that surround them? Lookie here (.pdf):
Smart people are bringing incredible death to you, behind the promise of "incredible benefits," by the playing of their close-to-the-vest cards, according to the rules of their idiot Game... Is that the future we are paying for?
Interesting. No comments on, possibly no interest in, an article that carries the seeds of what might become the antibiotic and insect - and nematocide so badly needed to relieve the human population of that post-Industrial Revolution set of plagues that's killing so many and our f fragile planet...
That "subsidy" notion only persists at all if one accepts the notion of some "necessity" for all the patently idiotic and expensive and self-promoting and self-defeating MIICcrap, like NATO and all those generals and the rest of the structure that takes all tat wealth that might be used for General Welfare rather than the welfare of the Generals...
Follow the money. And which careers get the big rewards. "National security" is a great career path these days. Look how teachers and social workers and nurses are treated in the US. Those items, and the general bloody-mindedness of an unfortunately tenacious and destructive fraction of humanity. "Allahu Akhbar!" "U-S-A! U-S-A!"
No cites, then, to support the Authoritative Assertion?
And I've read a lot of stuff, too, over the years, that purports to justify all kinds of crap that our rulers and military leaders have put out that would, if you bought into it, "make a case" for all kinds of idiocy. "Light at the end of the tunnel" being only one tiny example. And of course if one succeeds in limiting the frame of the argument to "where are the minuscule set of Big Bad Quada-men at at the moment," to justify the legalistically questionable justificationalism, from the Company, or whoever runs it all these days, and get everyone arguing about that, and not recalling and accounting for and talking about trillions of dollars disappearing down MIIC rat and snake holes, and the futility of the whole apparatus in delivering "victory" or even "security", or having an honest "mission" or even taxpayers' Return On Investment (sic), while Creeps are peering down and up and around and at and into every freaking thing we ordinary schleps do or say or think while paying for all this, and what about the future of the species, if you can manage that, well, there you are! "Success!"
So glad you are comfortable that "the terrorists" have been "vastly diminished." When do we get to stand down, sir? The troops are tired, the nation is drained, and for some reason, blowing all those people up and playing the Game the way "we" do just makes MORE of what we call "terrorists..."
People who castigate others with claims that they make broad assertions without benefit of any authoritative support other than such a bare "authoritative" or maybe authoritarian assertion ought to consider their own conduct. Got some cites for all that? Or just personal judgment?
Have we citizens all gotten to the apparently usual and inevitable point yet that the "droning" noise in the background has become such a usual and inevitable part of the way "we" do bidness that nobody notices, nobody cares, hardly anybody pays any attention any more?
Settled comfortably in our myths, happy with the gentle fog of war...
On the other hand, Real Christians like Pat Robertson, James Robinson, Tedd Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell could not give a fig for those Apostates Over There who are not part of the Confession. Except as bit players in the Great Leviticus-to-Revelation Romp that they pretend will bring Rapture to the Elect, lots of sucker money to their various PACs and perversions, and all that Seven Seals crap to be visited on the rest of us UNBELIEVERS...
There actually are "dominoes" in the Great Game. The actions that result in tipping them are nothing like as carefully scripted and well planned and controlled and based on minute placement and cooperation as this:
Anyone want to start a pool on when the first weapon from whatever nonsense ooops!-erational acronym and "coalition" cover name will be given to "distinguish" US warcraft-launched or -delivered explosives lands in Damascus or other Syrian territory? I claim Tuesday, 9/10 at 0800... first prize is a piece of shrapnel from the site. Grand prize is a piece of shrapnel with body parts and blood smears, maybe even HAIR! suitable for framing or mantelpiece mounting.
You're the one perceiving a "Preferred Narrative," Bill. I did read what you wrote, several times. Dare one react to moral-relativistic statements like "Compared to the Germans, the US was a piker in its use of landmines"? And efforts to divert the conversation away from current bad behaviors by Empires that pretend to Higher Moral Purposes in the face of some pretty amoral/immoral (by the standards applied for convenience to others) behaviors?
Joe extracts an interesting and limited moral from Wilfred Owen's poetry. The gas shells in the poem were "friendly fire," for starters, "short rounds" as they say. My notion of the message is that once again, we are being told that the remedy for any chemical weapon use is bombing SOMEbody with SOMEthing, to do what, preserve the face of the Imperial President? Seems to me Owen was trying to tell the rest of us (he himself died in the trench warfare-of-attrition that was the current idiocy in 1914-18) to not be so stupid as to keep peddling the notions of glory and valiant death "for the Homeland" to each succeeding generation. And speaking to the idiot futility of the Great Game, and all it meant and continues to mean.
Bill would say the only land mines that count, apparently, are the German ones, forget about the "piker" distribution by the Allies, still killing and maining, and more important, forget about the US use of mines of all kinds of interesting types, including undetectable ones with plastic shrapnel that can't be located with diagnostic x-rays. It's hardly worth entering a debate. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/01/opinion/la-oe-williams1-2009dec01 I guess we are supposed to take comfort in stuff like this: http://www.state.gov/t/pm/wra/c11735.htm
Yeah, "we" will take long strides to "get rid of" PERSISTENT and NON-DETECTABLE mines. The other ones? Well, there's a Military Need, anyone who plays "Call of Duty" knows that... Speaking of moral high ground...
But wait! THIS time "we" are only Upholding The 90-Year-Old International Norm That Says Nobody Is Supposed To Use Or Encourage Or Allow The Use Of Chemical Weapons Except If It Happens To Be In Some National Interest Grand Global Geopolitical Gizmo Whizbang Blowback Inducement! No, really! This time "we're" serious! Really! "We" are doing the best "we" can in a bad situation! Do not weaken the Presidency! It's NOT OUR FAULT!
Shootin' wars produce wealth transfer. Getting ready for shootin' wars transfers a lot more wealth. Setting up a Global Network with the idea of, well, just what is the idea again behind the Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace with all its Panopticonial explosive deadly clumsy idiotic parts, again, is infinitely expensive -- "all the wealth you have." Kerry, we might recall, went to Sweden to negotiate with the Pope, or somebody, about how to divvy up the "hidden riches" of the Arctic and Antarctic, which are becoming visible thanks to all that heat that our common culture generates. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnkerry/climate-change-and-the-fu_b_3272250.html?utm_hp_ref=world The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and its Atlantic equivalent are plowing ahead, which will put paid to national limits on corporate rapine -- not a "race to the bottom," but us being DRIVEN to the bottom by kleptocrats with whips. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/will-snowden-revelations-about-spying-on-foreign-governments-undermine-the-european-and-pacific-trade-talks.html
And soon this site may feature a post that may be headlined, based on the Beltway Ba__tards doing the only stuff they know how to do and what's being reported about the 'negotiations,' advance the Imperium by blowing things up with little nods to "legalisticationalism," just like in 1914, PROUDLY we hail that "IT"S WAR!" having no eefffeeeng idea what that all means...
I know, pedantic definitionalists would love to lay a net of split hairs between carefully delineated and manufactured categories. But looking at the big picture, neither "realists" nor neocons nor Wahabbists nor any other Big-ists have any defense against the observation that NONE of them know how to manage and direct the enormous blessing of a planet that we humans fell into, a whole long while ago. ALL of them are simply about very parochial and tribal and egocentric "advantages" and "benefits" and "interests." Cf. all the wars since Sun Tzu, especially the industrialized wars of the last 200 years or so.
To put it another way, all the rulers, and the little and big men and women behind them pulling strings and propping up and engineering hegemony and "change" and "growth," have managed mostly to do, in pursuit of short-term apparent gain, is put all of the rest of us on a perpetual knife edge of wholesale destruction. And they keep adding weights to the backs of those of us with our feet perched anxiously on the blade's edge. On the US side, ALL the potentates, of whatever uniform or stripe, are all about hegemony, of all dimensions.
Argue all you want about how "realists" and "neocons" have this or that niggling little difference on certain "macropolicies." There were plenty of "realists" urging on all the grandiose plans and illusions of the "neocons," and they all go to the same clubs and speak the same language, one that sure looks and sounds like Orkish. "Realism" seems like "economics" to me: a bankrupt set of notions, unable to actually predict or offer guidance or pathways to positive-sum outcomes, but full of grand concepts and complex vocabularies that for some reason always almost exclusively support the triumph of the privileged and the personalities that are calibrated to acquire. Power. and. wealth.
But hey, what do people like me know, right? All we got is pretensions to Morality, like some folks are playing on now as the mandate to blast Syrian terrain because Chemical Weapons are a universal no-no except when the "national interest" that everybody knows what it is says "do it," and some 3 x 5 cards... hardly a white paper or dogma document between us.
Anybody remember the lessons of "The Selling of the President?"
How Washington REALLY works, for those who think "the world's greatest deliberative body" will be taking on any real "constitutional" function in this "debate:"
"Arm twisting in Washington before Syria Strike Vote"
No personal consequences, of course, for the folks selling or buying in that incestuous marketplace. If kicking the hornet's nest produces lots of angry hornets, well hey, other people will pay, and the tax dollars will keep rolling in, and out...
Tapeworms and tumor cells just can't help themselves, they just gotta do what they gotta do...
In litigation or debate, assigning who gets the burden of proof and burden of going forward usually determines the outcome. All the more so, if the assigner also controls the definitions, terms and allowable framing of the argument.
It seems that "Washington" has assembled an impressive and expensive and shiny set of hammers and is arguing only about when to swing back and pound something and which hammer to use. What seems to be weak is attention to the complexity of the thing that's getting pounded, and its environment. Some military officers and analysts are offering nervous disclaimers about the unaccountable catalytic effects of "pinprick diplomacy." One does not repair the fuel control unit on a Lycoming T-53 turbine engine, with its 11,000 interoperating parts, with a 4-pound sledge, or even a tack hammer and a little cold chisel. One does not dispose of unexploded ordnance by striking the fuse with a glancing blow.
There's any number of examples of hammer-blows knocking stuff so far askew that the machinery starts tearing itself up or explodes. And of course there's the common experience of whacking one's own hand in the process. As to boys who cry wolf, there are other illustrative fables, including ones about people who search for gas leaks with a cigarette lighter, or smoke in a powder magazine because they so desperately need a cig.
Chemical weapon use is bad. So was (and still is, from one who is among the many exposed and affected) Agent Orange, so are cluster munitions and fuel-air explosives and nuclear weapons and antipersonnel mines and DU munitions, so is dumping AK-47s and RPGs and 120-mm mortar rounds and "training missions" and stuff into places where people are descending into anomie. http://syriavideo.net/ No amount of self-proclaimed "authoritative" misdirection, augmented by dogged repetition and presumptive assignment of the burdens, should obscure the proper assignment of those burdens of going forward and of proof that a hammer blow isn't going to detonate or ignite stuff that will demolish the house, firestorm the neighborhood, and have the neighbors coming around to do vengeance on you... Unless the new First Rule is no longer "do no harm," but "do what we are armed to do and can get away with behind some faux justification because who are these pipsqueaks to challenge the Juggernaut's might, stand against even an idiotic set of 'national interests,' and aspire to reduce its Freedom of Action (tm)?"
Nothing new under the sun, just jaded and stupefied amazement at the scale of it all:
When I was a clerk in the Admin Company of the 2nd Armored Div. ("Hell On Wheels!") at Ft. Hood, TX in 1969, the Army contracted to set up a computerized, mainframe-centric, tape-and-punch card-based system to "more efficiently" run finance, personnel, inventory and supply functions. One contractor dude arranged to "pay" himself several million payroll bucks, delivered to an offshore account. He then removed his foot- and fingerprints from tape and card stacks. The Army eventually paid him another couple of million, and gave immunity from prosecution, to show how he did it.
While with the US EPA in the early 1980s, I got to see the Justice Department steal millions from the "Superfund" hazardous-site cleanup fund to buy their house data base and computer system, which was supposed to be a shared system with EPA to assist with environmental-law enforcement but quickly got closed off for exclusive dedication to "other DOJ purposes."
True vampire bats are great at draining blood from the stupefied sleeping cow or pig. They have specialized sensors to detect spots where the blood flows strongest and nearest to the skin, components in their saliva that keeps the blood flowing, and those always-razor-sharp incisors to make those productive little cuts. Occasionally, they drain so much blood that the host mammal dies outright, or transmit some awful, fatal-if-not-treated bloodborne disease, like rabies...
Nothing new under the various large public-private rocks one might occasionally turn over, either.
Hey, those things happened way away over there. And OUR congresscritter not only brings home the bacon, s/he has really good TV ads that speak right to our gut issues.
Chemical warfare is already on the world scene, there's no gang of 240 lining up in this instance to give a drubbing to a particular miscreant, and it is the falsest kind of logic to try to lay that at the altar of some set of self-interested, mutually dishonest and hypocritical national rulerships' "failure" to buy into the very current and dishonest meme about "having to punish and deter Assad."
It would be wonderful if this instance were to catalyze a real "league of nations" that were joined to deal with crap like, oh, petrocombustion and its problems, something other than the coming 'Rape of the Arctic/Antarctic/Ocean Floor.' And the ever-popular sovereignty-and-human-rights-crushing Trans-Wherever Partnership scams... Don't think that in the air, on the land or under the sea likely to happen. Do you?
Seems to me that whole continued "mark my words" argument at this point is just about how to save a muscle-bound Obamadom's face from a deserved dose of banana-republic creme pie... complete with ornamental "Red Line" and pink-rose decorations...
We pretend there are rules, but this is what we preach among ourselves:
The goal of diplomacy is to further the state's interests as dictated by geography, history, and economics. Safeguarding the state's independence, security and integrity is of prime importance; preserving the widest possible freedom of action for the state is nearly as important. Beyond that, diplomacy seeks maximum national advantage without using force and preferably without causing resentment.
There's lots more at the link for the person trying to understand the current behavior of "states" and seeking clues to other ways to "do business." Other than stuff like "preserving the widest possible freedom of action."
The Golden Rule, of course, really only applies, as a guide to behavior, to people pretty much with the same level of Projectable Power who have to look each other in the eye and face, and are more mutually vulnerable.
Maybe the Great Bully, that complexity of military and industrial interests, might be running up against some natural limits to "widest possible freedom of action?" Then again, "we" have all those thousands of nuclear warheads, and other stuff...
Maybe less the boy who cried wolf, who per the fable at least the last time was not lying, and in most versions paid a penalty for his idiocy.
Maybe more "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ME."
Considering what a "muscular foreign policy" has cost us and the rest of the world, a quarter of our wealth and more and millions dead, displaced and demoralized, with zero promise of any improvements to the General Welfare, maybe it's time the "sword of state" gets at least half beaten into plowshares, and reduced to more of a Bowie or even Swiss Army Knife...
As B a FD as a" war of choice" run on an idiot grandiose policy and sold via a ration of fraud? As fake baby steps in the supposed direction of " doing something" about greenhouse gases? As creation and implementation of a world-girdling permanent-war AllHailTheGenerals Global Network-Centric Interoperable Vastly Expensive Murderously intrusive Panoptocon Thingie?
Does that suggested norm apply across the board, so that predictions, deductions and pronouncements about all matters of state, and "misstatements of fact," get the same deductions from credibility or doses of humility, "going forward?"
Language controls, as propagandists and politicians know. Now we are going to "retaliate against Saddam."
'Retaliate: v. tr.: To return like for like, especially evil for evil; To pay back (an injury) in kind.'
It's a strong word that lets the hearer think he is on the side of "right." What's the "kind" Saddam "liked" us with, that we will justify "pinprick bombing" as just "returning evil for evil?"
I would consider following VA Red Senator Scott Rigell, who authored the letter to the Admin signed on to by how many now, 116 members of Congress of mostly Red but some from both parties in both houses, telling our imperial ruler that he at least ought to go through the formality of advice and consent before lighting the fuses on those Tomahawk skyrockets, or playing that wonderful tune, "Send In The Drones." http://blogs.rollcall.com/goppers/87-house-members-sign-syria-letter-to-obama/
Not that an exercise demanding a little A&C really means much to us ordinary people, when made by the Congresscritters who also feed at the MIIC trough and for decades have never met a war they didn't love or were too timid to resist Caesar on. Rome and Byzantium and Berlin were filled with Crackpot Realists and rent seekers and lobbyists and militarists too, and it might bear reviewing a bit of wikihistory for context in what invariably, with minor detail changes, happens to Skyrocket Empires...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire
Second verse, see WW II. Both of which ended with the Bad guys running away wit all the loot they could carry, some to be embraced warmly by our OSS-CIA-ETC., some to retire comofortably to South America...
It appears some actual, honest Serious Observer of our Empire at work and play have distilled out most of the essence of "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb -- Bomb, Bomb Anywhere-ism:"
The benefit of crackpot realism is that the ordinary prudence of advocating avoidance of war can be depicted either as sloppy and unrealistic sentimentalism or as the irresponsible avoidance of the burdens and duties of a superpower in a dangerous world. In its refined form, crackpot realism wears the camouflage of idealism: military invasions are really aimed at humanitarian rescue, spreading democracy, or peacekeeping. In those cases, the crackpot realist can even affect a morally censorious tone: How can any serious person be in favor of letting Saddam Hussein remain president of Iraq? Or Bashir al Assad in Syria? Or whoever the Hitler du jour might be.
Maybe worth a read, and some remarks on how "we" can escape the seductions of the seeming logic and actual disingenuous or just plain dishonest blandishments of "crackpot realists?"
And a lot of avatars saying a lot of "same texts" about all the reasons why "we" have to "retaliate against Assad." For disobeying the command of the Commander in Red Line Chief.
Fun, isn't it, to make a lot of people believe in connections and rationales and linkages and Great World Order Rules That Only Apply Sometimes as excuses, once again, to do what the Rulers want to do anyway...?
For all their logic-chopping and justifications, the apologists for Acting Without Really Thinking have a nice skill at deferring and deflecting and changing the subject...
But there's this big thumping similarity: An enormous war machine, wanting, inter alia, the opportunity to test and deploy and use up various bits of inventory, and novel tactics, and Grand Network-Centric Strategies, and there are MEDALS and COMMENDATIONS and PROMOTIONS to be "earned" for "Managing the Battlespace," and who knows what-all is going on in Obama's (and the rest of his entourage's) head, and whether it was anything like what former CIA boss George Bush and later Blue Dress Willie were thinking.
For context, for anyone who cares, here is a timeline of that bit of MIIC activity in Central Europe, just 25 years ago, at about the same time the US was assisting Saddam to use chemical weapons on Iran and his own people, from PBS:
How about if the World Bank and IMF put up a good-sized fund to hand out to "authoritarians" who've outstayed the tolerance of the populations they prey on? Any thoughts on what would be a "fair" inducement? Arafat kept about $4 billion on ice, as I recall, against his "retirement." To avoid a bad incentive, it might ought to only be applied to those currently in power...
What has Kerry's current hyperbolic hypocrisy got to do with whether he worked for "Reagan" (and the Bush League?) The point you're trying to obscure is that the US government aided, abetted, and was dirt-deep demonstrably involved in chemical warfare (via convenient and eventually disposable and deposable proxy), many times in the "90 year norm." When "the national interest" made it A-OK, of course...
Yet as noted here in this thread, the US had no problem helping Saddam use chemical weapons against them rotten Iranians, nor really even "his own Kurdish people," nor did "we" make a big noise about Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan. Setting this up as some kind of moral mandate just reeks of hypocrisy, and other stuff.
And some folks have noted that "we" actually helped Saddam, at least, build the Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities: I'm sure this stuff is just D F Hippie CT, right? http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/17/how-reagan-armed-saddam-with-chemical-weapons/ Looks like the profit-takers and geopoliticians in all of NATO and allied colonial-imperial powers had a hand in making the mucking fess, and now want to reposition their halos, and to have the rest of us pay to "stop the evil" that they engendered...
I think Joe is just wrong on this one, and why does he think it necessary to discount or obscure the potential findings of provenance here? Lay aside the degree of "heavy bombardment" he wants to be presumed, which would not be 155mm shells on 5-foot centers in any event: even after the munitions' remains are worked over and displaced, they will be recognizable. I'm not the only one who has seen, up close, an area that has been "worked over" by HE, including ammo dump explosions, and it would be a careful forensic job, of course, to separate out the nasty and telling parts. But with what is riding on an honest finding of source and responsibility, one has to ask why that effort should be discouraged, disparaged or aborted. Even buildings that are rubble-ized by HE still have recognizable bits, and re-bar and rocket parts are steel and hard alloys and are not reduced to invisibility.
A hundred of those "expended," at a million or more a pop? That will be a nice "procurement authorization" to Raytheon to buy replacements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_%28missile%29 Not on the order of the F-35, of course... All part of your Grand Global Interoperable Network-Centric Everywhere All The Time Battlespace, that by definition seeks all available "intelligence" and "information" (see, "NSA Interoperability") to let the ergonomic-chair "warfighters" mess up anywhere, any time...
"Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran --
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand."
And apparently, along with the rest of the World Community, did not have much to say about Soviet-Empire chemical weapon use in Afghanistan, and maybe Chechnya... http://digitaljournal.com/blog/19257
Sounds really impressive: being on the Inside, with "access to intelligence." That "access" would just guarantee a proper, honest, wise determination of facts, options and actions.
On the other hand, it ought to be clear from any number of prior events, on the Great World Stage and in its wings, that "access to intelligence" too often means exactly ZERO, or a significant negative number, to the "implementation of policy." And even the cognoscenti know and have to acknowledge the weaknesses and frauds inherent in "intelligence."
I don't know about "destroyed." As I understand the chemistry and the nature of the munitions, there will be chemical signatures that modern detectors honestly used can mark, and the ironmongery might be scattered, but the forensic tools out there have done a lot of pinpointing in more "scattered" scenes...
As to ungulates, if they can't be monetized, they have no value. Maybe you could come up with a futures contract on the date of last living wild Peary caribou? Maybe the moral hazard machinations would encourage some bettor to at least prolong the species beyond the exercise date...
The Mil-Mil MIIC-MIIC is busily and profitably producing kilotons of weapons of all types that are happily and profitably being delivered to "gunmen," whether you call them 'militants' or the formerly popular 'insurgents' or of course Terraists and other friendly and foe-ish nomenclature. The dudes in Syria now really seem like a bunch of anomic nihilists, and there's plenty of video evidence to show that they will shoot anything at anyone in a kind of free-for-all game of Capture The Flag. Here's one recent pic allegedly of "irregulars" plopping mortar rounds into "civilian" areas: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/26/320560/mortar-shells-wound-three-in-syria/
Note that the tube ain't even your standard military-issue and in this and other visual evidence, these dudes don't bother with sighting even, since the rickety launchers have no sights and no base plate or precision-adjustable legs. They just sort of point and shoot. Note how the round is dropped down the tube, using a string as a trigger. Mil-spec cord, no doubt.
There's no brakes on the fright (not sic) train, and it's running downhill and picking up speed...
If you google "other options for Syria," you get 229 million hits. The first four pages are mostly about what Dempsey and others are advising Obama to arm or blow up or shoot down, or not, as if B.H. Obama has the actual power to autonomously decide. Get back to page 5 and you start to run across some articles on stuff that falls outside the usual range of tactical options that generations of Idiotic policies and related stratagems have helped build on top of the immensely strong foundation of basic all-too-humanity. Here's the first one I found: http://raleightelegram.com/201306175405
I'm sure there are thinkers out there, with some depth of knowledge of human behavior and the details of culture and history and current issues and technology, who might have the exact prescription for how to wiggle a butterfly wing in Damascus or Teheran or Foggy Bottom to accomplish some sea change, eventually, after more blood and treasure are wasted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect But nobody with any influence listens, when the excitement of planning a big operation, overt or covert, is in the air, with naming rights and career boosts on the table, and the financial interests of those who make and peddle weapons and certain noisy personality types are yapping for their favorite Continued and Extended Idiocy. What someone else here reminded us was identified by Barbara Tuchman as the inevitable ingredients of "folly."
As I recall, even in this space, it is the apologists who invoke "law," Imperial and international, to justify the use of drone launched weapons, more so than "self-proclaimed progressives." What's the phrase? "Unlawful Enema Combatants," decreed to be thus by recourse to something called "AUMF" and some bit of the UN Charter? So "we" invade a place, people shoot back, and all of a sudden, if you follow the published videos, anyone moving around outside, or showing up as a hazy IR image inside a tent or mud building, is a "target" or is "deplorable bugsplat..."
As to Revulsion Weapons and the "Chemical Ali" arguments used selectively to justify favorite Imperial activities like shooting up Syria maybe, including pre-emptive verbal strikes against anyone arguing that chemical weapons kill people just like explosives, our Imperial rulers have no qualms about adding far worse things to the Imperial arsenal, on the argument that the sickos who think and act like them, in fact on behavior are virtually indistinguishable from them, over there amongst The Present or Potential Enemy: http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/20100928/NEWS01/309289982/ct-consortium-developing-nano-weapons
But then stuff like that is like the Security State: developed and grown essentially out of sight, by persons with ugly motives, unremarked except by a few Alarmists with in their tinfoil hats, then slowly sprung on the populace that paid unknowingly for their own shackles and nooses... what does the word "inhuman" actually mean? http://www.noblesandcourtiers.org/elizabethan-executions.htm
That's the cool thing about colonialism and the Great Game -- you get to kick down other people's doors, steal their stuff, boss them around, trash their societies, carry off their women and children, crap in their living rooms and then guess what? no consequences, 'cuz the dudes that did it all are long gone when Current Events heat up: "IBG-YBG," and now there's talk about the best way to "recycle" dictators: Qaddaffyduck/Mussolini fashion, or let them slink away on their private jets (that are nice little sales coups for certain corporations all in themselves), with billions in stolen wealth or payoffs from Great Geoployitical Entities to play with in their dotage. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201104/lonely-planet-guide-for-disposed-dictators#slide=1
Dare one question the initial premise, that "Obama," as the personification of our Empire, has to Do Something About Syria? Or do we leap over that, right to diddling and dabbling over which are the least bad options?
It's obvious that "he," nominally on our behalf and "for the greater good," will "do something," actually a whole lot of somethings, that are applauded by Apologists as Appropriate Engagement in the Current Round of the Great Game. What's the test of reason that will be applied to these many somethings, like open-checkbook military procurement and deployment and sales/gifts, privatization of "security," encouraging "friendly" autocrats, lining up "Cover" for Imperial Action by getting tame fellow potentates to affirm the planned actions, making sure Raytheon stockholders are protected by rolling over the inventory of cruise missiles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_%28missile%29 and http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57599944/u.s-preps-for-possible-cruise-missile-attack-on-syrian-govt-forces/, the whole train of idiot stuff that Seems All Serious And Well-Thought-Out? And, of course, the mostly out-of-control, blowback-inducing initiatives and stratagems of our Sneaky Petes with their own little plots and intentions and "needs" for off-the-books funding sources 'n 'stuff. Oh wait, because "the Empire" is itself just a convenient reification made up of so many oddly assembled parts, and acts through so many different, disparate, largely independent rulerships and constituencies all drawing off the Imperial treasury that the rest of us create out of what could go to feeding and housing and healing ourselves, and because the commercial interests that get to whisper in the Imperial Ear 24/7 and have the Important Numbers on speed-dial, there is no "test of reason" that applies. Just a general trend of Generals' Behaviors, all in the direction of growing and metastasizing the malignancy.
Don't ask me, then, what "we" should be doing. The folks, generally the Apologist breeed, who make those kinds of challenges know that the Juggernaut is crushing its way ahead, and that any ideas about even marginal changes to the overall behavior of the Mil-Mil Aristocracy and its feedlot partners have exactly zero chance of effecting any change in the vector of velocity or the momentum of the mass... My answer is "dismantle the whole thing," which like a lot of complex Rube Goldbergian machinery it is, and we are, inevitably doing to itself and ourselves, thanks to Murphy, FUBAR and entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics Must Be Obeyed -- too bad for the crush-ees in the path, so nice, however, for those who Live So Large and get their jollies and livelihoods out of the Ineluctable Inexorability of Service to Moloch... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch
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The really fun ones, PW, are where "we," meaning the sneaky-petes and SOPs that operate nominally as elements of "US" Force Projection and Manipulation (but "have their own agendas," as has been the case since the first warrior castes in the first mud-walled towns,) manage to create, or fertilize and encourage, BOTH "sides," and then have "US" weapons sold to and "technical assistance" provided to both, to the occasional point that some of "our" guys kill some of "our" guys, in the "heat of battle," and in the "fog of war," and beneath the Floods of Money, and the flux of ponderous and pedantic and dysingenuous (sic intended) BS...
Hammer, meet hammer. Laudable statement of faith that more of the same will produce some kind of healthy result. "The operation was a success, madam, but unfortunately the patient died. Your co-pay is $4 trillion. You can pay at the window on your way out."
Interesting. In the slow progress from whatever Israel was in 1948 to whatever it is now, there was, for a time, some emphasis given to something called "purity of arms:" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purity_of_arms
Which is part of the "Ethics" part of something called the "Israeli Defense Force Doctrine:" http://web.archive.org/web/20060430031938/http://www1.idf.il/dover/site/mainpage.asp?sl=EN&id=32
And here is the salient text, maybe, with respect to dispossessing Others and face-planting little insufficiently "diplomatic" feisty French females:
If you read the whole IDF set of pages, and they contain a lot more illuminating bits, it looks like all the "questionable" behaviors turn on both hair-splitting or hypocritical moral relativism, and as with the US Imperial Force, the definition of "THE MISSION."
There are folks who post here, and in the "policy community" and among the Beltway Bandits in all branches of The Government, who have lots of facts and factoids at their ready command, along of course with Talking Points to hammerhammerhammer on to "establish the Truth." In the same way medieval physicians had lots of "everyone knows" to work from in diagnosing and treating illness: that Humors controlled the balance of the body, that bleeding and blistering and shaving and cold baths and various toxins employed on the Truth that "like cures like," so near-killing someone who was vomiting by loading them up with strong emetics was the Way To Go. My bet is that a lot of those practitioners knew they were trampling on that silly notion of "first, do no harm," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primum_non_nocere, in pursuit of their holy Fee.
And all these Really Smart People, having mastered the lexicon of "Realism" and/or Neoconism or whatever the current cant is, seeing as they do that they themselves are pretty much immune to any negative consequences for doing some really serious but heavily fee-generating harm, are happy to administer fatal doses of toxic and explosive and socially destructive dogma and brutality.
Medical science and practice has moved on to much less "unenlightened" approaches, and its alchemists have actually found cures for some of mankind's pains and plagues (while setting "industry" up for profit-making stuff like stuffing cows with antibiotics and all that is following that short-term-profit-maximizing idiocy.) Pedantic and subtle and anonymously persistent people, with their fixed set of Great Game/Cold Warrior tests and tools that support and reinforce the idiocy of stuff like the Global Interoperable Rules-Everything Network-centric Battlespace thingie, and support the recent machinations prescribing a "measured" dose of Tomahawk to "retaliate" for this mean guy killing some people over there, trumped, apparently, by small bits of common decency and sense, sure seem to not have a freakin' clue or tiny incentive to aim for what it would take to actually keep the body of humanity stable and healthy, let alone the health of its global house, its oikos.
Because it fits with the narrow worldview they have worked so hard to master and which enables the worst to do the worst then can. Think Netanyahoo and Gadaffyduck and Jonas Savimbi and the rest. Because they can get away with it, and force us to pay them to "treat" the rest of us thusly, even if it's killing us and our loved ones.
One wonders if we will get smart enough to refuse the doses they want to stuff us up with before they kill us off.
Joe, you know, that is just about enough. Defending Assad? That is a flat out bald-faced scurrilous lie. I won't even give you the courtesy Joseph Welch accorded Bomber Joe McCarthy. You have no decency, sir, and no shame, and that goes nicely with your indecent disingenuous anonymous persistence.
But then as such a busy player, you know the subtleties of the blogspace game really well, now don't you? How to get away with crap like the above (and the below) snideries?
One might ask how it advantages you, in your quest for blanket credibility and so very subtle and sometimes abusive efforts to skew and direct the flow and content of discourse here, and at the other places you post, to lay out patent lies like the one above.
Seems to me I don't hate you at all, just see you as a symptom and manifestation of a particularly pernicious disease.
It's hard to keep track of Anonymous Joe's Anonymous Predictions and Pontifications, like the absolute necessity to Protect the World Order by blasting the heck out of something or other RIGHT NOW in Syria to Stop The Use of Chemical Weapons, because the evidence of the actual weapons used was destroyed totally by "massive bombardment."
And the steady drumbeat of usually one-sentence claims applause and assertions that "See? Obama Was Right Again, see how he has achieved his Foreign Policy Goal for this or that thing?"
Maybe somebody else can recall some of them? Or maybe he has always been "right," or at least able to offer some facile two-sentence explanation for why complex behaviors have turned out, for the apparent moment, or as characterized and constrained by him for the sake of argument or attacking someone else's credibility, a particular way...
Mattea and Miriam ought to be careful what they wish for.
The military mindset is, by my lights, evil and persistent and reduces everything to threats and counters and is infinitely inventive in creating both. "Green" is not a threat; at best it's a procurement buzzword.
You want to see what the Reeally Smart People who work for the War Department every day have come up with for how to address, confront and defeat the environmental threat of maybe human extinction that is off there somewhere, in part because the entire world economy is built mostly on combusto-consumption that "the military" runs on and is in large measure all about protecting? Here's the .pdf planning document:
"Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and
International Security"
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
Big parts of it are extablishing interlocking militaries to "control" the whole world, and creating markets, "as has been done for US military products," for US-made (by multi- and post-national corporations) construction and farming equipment. A long and sickening read, for a DFH...
And for those unclear on how the military mind works, the Defense Science Board that authored the above document has a whole lot more advice on all kinds of topics, like "21st Century Strategic Technology Vectors, Volume IV: Accelerating the Transition of Technologies into U.S. Capabilities" and "Creating an Effective National Security Industrial Base for the 21st Century: An Action Plan to Address the Coming Crisis," and "Unconventional Operational Concepts and the Homeland (2007 Summer Study)" and "Air Force Nuclear Enterprise Follow-On Review," and "The Role of Autonomy in DoD Systems," and "Counterinsurgency (COIN) Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations," and "Science and Technology Issues of Early Intercept Ballistic Missile Defense Feasibility," and hundreds more from just this one source:
http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports2010s.htm
And there are hundreds of other sources of similar import and gravamen spewed from other orifices of the Pentagram, costing hundreds of billions of dollars to "manage," produce and publish. Like the contributions of the "Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force" (colloquially the "JIEDDO Knights") that concluded "you can't, really..." after billions in studies, designs, tests, meetings, all that crap. And simulations, pointed out elsewhere, show that a US "war" in the Med and ME would almost invariably result in a massive DEFEAT, like the thing I keep talking about, Lt. Gen. Van Riper's "Red Force" sinking the whole US fleet and decimating "the troops." Even the Israelis come to the same conclusion, and any bets whether Yahoo and his so-serious clowns would blow up the whole dang place if things got "uncomfortable," with all those NUKES.?
That is just one small piece of a huge Juggernaut made up of mostly nice people in and out of uniform who go to church, love their kids, hold doors for each other, maybe plot how to get a bigger office or chair or arrange the "defeat" of a competing colonel's weapons system procurement, that thinks and believes and acts in ways that are totally antithetical to "green-ness," except as "green" stuff like PV panels and fuel cells 'n stuff are "useful for the mission." Whatever the hell the "mission" is... maybe just "fight in every clime and place where we could take a gun, or send a drone or missile or enhanced energy beam..." To do (at the risk of snipes about "repeating myself") what Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler did for a generation and a half: Make the world safe for the United Fruit Company.
Green bananas don't taste very good...
"This analysis suffers from treating “the US” as a single entity with a unified political outlook, instead of recognizing the different factions in our foreign policy thinking."
Interesting, given all the "analysis" of "policy" by certain people here who talk in almost all other contexts as if the personifications disdained, in this particular piece of the running argument here, are reality..
Presume you meant the "bottom lines..."
Question: if only 3 of the Dolphin class are able to get to sea with their 4 tubes each stuffed with a cruise missile, and if per the estimates, the Israeli MIIC has figured out how to stick a nuke in the nose of each, and if each nuke is kind of conservatively figured at 100KT of "yield" (I hate that word -- should be limited to food crop descriptions, but there's the linguistics), what is left of any "civilization" in that part of the world, and would the Armageddonists in the US various-parts entity called the Nuclear Strike Force be able to resist activating all those pre-targeted nukes that WE have paid for?
Anyone interested in context might do well to read up on the "School of the Americas," which has provided all kinds of "technical assistance" to what are kindly called "authoritarians" in this polite space. One running tally is kept at http://www.soaw.org/
Bill, Anonymous Bill, has implied he was in Chile and has direct knowledge of what transpired during that "victory for Western Democracy." Huh.
The CIA is more like an immune-system problem, where the killer T-cells kind of run wild, attack healthy tissue, and leave the rest of the body open to various nasty infections...
"the likely cancellation would not have any impact on Brazil-US relations or on US security and surveillance policies."
Bury the lede at the end of the story, of course. More of the same, and worse to come.
You can see why some folks curry favor with the Beast... kind of like David Spade in "Coneheads"...
A little context, to go with the condescending, lighthearted sarcasm:
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/the-story-of-syrias-chemical-artillery-15935885?src=rss
Another little example of what Game of RISK! (tm) more-of-the-same can and will bring. "Another gift that keeps on giving..."
As to a critical ability to distinguish one group of people from another, one wonders if Anonymous Joe is "on the ground" and able, with the CIA and other dudes who ARE "on the ground," to distinguish, between posts, all these people in their many bands, and various "local" bands too, for purposes of figuring out how to just "arm moderates:" http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/09/16/324193/100000-militants-active-in-syria-study/
Quick: Which ones are the "moderates" on THIS ground? http://syriavideo.net/
Oh, Look! for you people who said looking for remains of the munitions used to deliver the Sarin was a waste of effort, because Heavy Bombardment had "destroyed all the evidence!" The UN guys, who were not supposed to even be worrying about Who Shot Ahmed, actually found rounds sufficiently intact to tell the types of rockets used, and a whole lot about their provenance!
So now you can go off on how condign must be the punishment of the Syrian Regime for Violating the HaHa Norm, via blowing more stuff and people up with Our Great Big Mutha-__kin' Made-Mostly-In-The-USA Hammer-Blow Cruise Missiles, or Arming the Sacred Allahu-Akhbar Gunman Rebels so as to Totally Level The Playing Field By Demolishing Every Standing Structure And All Comity ("Allahu Akhbar" http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UuQu0mwnJAw ), or whatever.
Nothing about stepping back and examining the Folly of our profit centers and Game of RISK! Assumptions and Operating Rules of play that in the world of US-Imperial-Supremacist or Bi-Polar or Trigeminal Hegemoniacal Idiocy gets all of us to where we are, loaded down with weapons of all types and calibers, and myths of Battlespace Management, http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2002/october/mainfeature.html, and eating ourselves out of a home, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/09/16/2623241/times-earth-carrying-capacity-climate-change/.
Too bad Collective Punishment for Kleptocrats' Guilt only gets visited on the Wretched of the Earth...
Serious? You're joking, right? Grenada? Operation "Urgent Fury?" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/reagan-grenada/ (The foregoing link also covers "successes" in Panama and of course Lebanon.)
As to the Operation "Just Cause," which included Operation "Nifty Package," that "regime change" in Panama to slap down "Our CIA Asset Noriega," with, as in Grenada, all those units and troops from different branches getting all those medals 'n stuff? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panama#Major_operations_and_U.S._units_involved
Or, is it fair to ask how the word "won" is being used and defined in this particular context?
One little picture is worth a thousand words, even without subtitles and context. What "intervention" is supporting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=7vh2mKi5cOw
Joe's unsupported and humorous claim that US players are somehow keeping US-source-involved weapons out of "al Quaeda"/Crazy Islamist hands is a fraud. Even the organs of state propaganda can't obscure the fact that delivering weapons and 'nonlethal aid' into the chaos of Syria can't be "controlled." http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-11/world/41972742_1_lethal-aid-syrian-rebels-chemical-weapons
Once again, " the troops are being sent to do a task that is both wrong and impossible. There is no numder of troop that is either right or large enough to build a village, let alone a nation. Mechanized and electronicized warriors may have, individually, insights and moments of humility and comity that let them reach across the US-THEM divide. But the institutional idiocy of that colonel who, before jumping in his Black hawk and flying away to his air conditioned billet, tells the Troops that going into Wardak and kicking ass and taking names was going to be the linchpin of the way and they would all be proud to tell their grandkids that they had been there and been a part of the great decisive battle blahnlahblah.
These same O-5s and up who are all studying up on why the Empire cannot and never will "win" any "4th gen" wars. Massive, clumsy, evil incompetent idiocy. Did I say also " grotesquely expensive as well as incompetent"?
Are the commenters above saying "it's not so bad up here in Ft. McMurray, except for the cute giant mosquitoes", https://www.google.com/search?q=ft.+mcmurray+tar+sand+images&client=firefox-a&hs=Bq3&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=th41UrOuFZLi8gTx6oCwBA&ved=0CCwQsAQ&biw=747&bih=373&dpr=1.71, maybe members of the local Chamber of Commerce and/or maybe have a financial interest ("We need this area for the next 10 to 15 years, or the cities will be in trouble.")? What is that supposed to mean, "Ft. McMurray" "in trouble" because the temporary "extraction" boom won't get pumped into the limited hands that always profit from Gold Rushes? See, e.g., the California version, and what has happened to big chunks of East Russia and its former colonies, and now in Africa and the Amazon basin ... http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/rushing-for-gold-and-statehood-in-california.html
Nothing could possibly go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong... http://o.canada.com/2013/06/12/fort-mcmurray-floods-prompt-state-of-emergency-in-photos/
It's a free country, eh? http://o.canada.com/2013/09/10/neil-young-keystone/
"[The US, as just another country] will always act strictly in its own interests...]"
The problem, as always, with personification/reification/hypostatization of the Great Nations, is that there is no perceptible "it" when you get down to it. There are people who claim to be able to perceive some set of "national interests," but what you're really talking about is a large gang of bureaucrats, politicians, thugs, thieves and occasional saints who have a whole large often conflicting set of their own interests that often are completely at odds with what the Narratives tell the rest of us is "the national interest." What, for example, is the "national interest" in having an NSA with all the "capabilities" that are drip, drip, Chinese water torture drip, coming to light, in that so-apt phrase? And thousands of "bases" scattered across the planet, tied together by a gigantic and becoming-infinite Thingie named, in best Milbabble, the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace, that reduces the entire planet to nine, count 'em, "areas of responsibility" presided over by speaking of Mandarins, how 'bout those cosseted General Officers who run the 'COMs that rule these mandates? "Capabilities" defining the "mission." Whatever that is. In a world where some folks have become aware that the history of the military is "Stupid." And now Huge and Voracious and Clumsy.
So I keep asking, can anyone, for purposes of sensible discussion and choice and not just as a shut-up line or a toss-pot line for someone pretending to be all Serious and Wise and In The Loop, define "the national interest(s)"?
Shaun, you touch on one of the key missing elements in all of our current human dysplasia: NO CONSEQUENCES FOR BAD ACTS. Lots of people with lots of explosive and destabilizing and anti-social and personally profitable advice and exhortation, and for those in the right spots, ACTION, suborning governments, "building world militaries," coup-ing elected leaders, blasting stuff, kicking in doors, and tossing bricks of $100 bills and Viagra and weapons around like Warlord Candy, and well-documented et cetera.
But whether it's Sidi or Sisi or Assad or Cheney or Blankfein/Dimon or any of the hundreds of Others who CAUSE all this crap and have no incentives to make it any better for the Ordinary Mortal, rather just the opposite, THERE ARE NO CONSEQUENCES, other than maybe occasional temporary exile from the cocktail party and "eyes only" circuits.
In the meantime, us mopes who fund and staff the mercenary armies of the night and build and struggle to maintain that huge and dying Imperial carcass find ourselves with less and less of the stuff that supposedly makes life worth living, while more and more of "it" flows up and in to people who sneer at us and don't even say 'thanks' because "that's how it's supposed to be."
Five-year-olds know that without consequences, there is no reason to change any behaviors. Whether it's rocks through windows, bullying the girl with pigtails, or sassing teacher or parent with dirty words and blows... Which is why "the US" ain't subject to the ICC, and stuff...
Yeah, and then Red Force unaccountably comes up with tactics that send that "absolutely clear" Blue Force to the bottom of said Persian Gulf, and trash the other elements of that whole Indomitable Force Structure (can you spell "IED made from US-made and -donated artillery shells and bombs?"). (Of course, that not-do-overable event becomes a huge profit opportunity for the Industrial part of the MIIC, which will then have the basis for whole new sales pitches for Better Weapons Systems And C5 Functions and the re-building of the 600-ship, 5,000 aircraft Navy 'n stuff.)
"The only way to win is not to play the Game..."
No, I'm not rooting against the Home Team, in the way the Rulers have so fraudulently been selling it. Since at least Korea, there has not been a "home team." And no, don't "thank us for our service."
Aziz -- so you really want to invite "the US," that congeries of "interests," to come on down to Arab-town and apply some beat-cop nightstick-and-Tazer-and-Glock Force Structure any time that other parts of "the US" and its "policies," along with the pathogenic post-neo-colonial behaviors of our corporatokleptocracy and the interlocking directorates of other post-national "interests," have produced anomic violence? Among and between people armed with weapons "we" sold or gave into the mix? And who the heck is "appeasing" Assad? And do you really think that even "coalition boots on the ground in the millions," let alone a "No-Fly Zone" unilaterally fired up by "the US," would bring Peace In Our Time?
You say this is a "Bosnian" moment? not even close. It's Iraq and Notagainistan and little echoes of that Vietnam thing and the Shah and et et et et cetera... and even "Sarajevo," with all its meanings... And Something Else altogether, where thanks to all the groundwork laid over all those generations of wealth-building imperialism and the inevitabilities of "civilization," all "options" are bad, and all "outcomes" are imponderable, and the little "benefits" of a World Cop beat-down go to the carrion eaters and tumor cells and maggots.
We got Realists and Apologists stamping their feet, and calling anyone who points to different facts than the factoids the R&As persist so valiantly in shoving so insistently out there, "conspiracy theorists" and "dreamers" and such. And abusing anyone who points to Actual Random Badness by "the US," or those parts of us that are apparently Exceptionally Evil as well as Seemingly Incompetent, and insisting on relativism when it suits the moment of their "case," but otherwise not.
As to chemical and biological weapons culpability, might one suggest this little article from another place some Joe from Lowell frequents? http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/11/1238151/-US-Covered-Up-for-Decades-the-Largest-Use-of-Biological-Chemical-Weapons-in-History
(For a sample of Joe's other work, look here: http://www.dailykos.com/search?comment_type=&search_type=search_comments&text_type=any&text_expand=contains&text=%28text%29&usernames=Joe+from+Lowell&time_type=time_published&time_begin=01%2F01%2F2013&time_end=now&submit=Search Where does he get the time to be so, ah, prolific, I wonder?
So the Realists in the US lined up a bunch of Nazis and adopted them after WW II for their "skills" and "connections," see well-established facts elsewhere, and covered up as best the Brass could the Japanese-perpetrated chemical and biological and surgical and "scientific" horrors of WW II (some of which "our side" worked pretty hard at, too) and also borrowed some skills from some real Dr. No Strangeloves. Relatively BAAAAD? Absolutely BAAAAD? Evidence of the real nature of "Realism" in the context of the effing Great Game that we have the misfortune to be born into? and due to its nature, sweep and momentum, will almost certainly die of, or out of?
"We" could do a whole lot better. "We" won't, far as one can see...
Speaking of false equivalencies....
I would say it's more a case of nailing his own foot to the floor after he stepped on his tongue and then painted himself into the corner behind that Bright Red Line. "He" being a faux-benign personification for The Whole Imperial System, in all its Bismarckian, Richelieuvian, Disraelian, Idiotic, Destructive, Dead-End Grabbery Complexity. Which I guess fortunately has not quite yet achieved that Matrix-level penetration into everything so as to be fully ready to shut all this unSerious Annoying Discussion down so they won't have to listen to and tolerate it any more.
Of course, there is a set of Serious Historians who state that "all available evidence, including more recent scholarship," leads to the opposite conclusion: That the A-bombing was a mix of xenophobic retaliation, message-sending to Stalin and the rest of the world, chest-thumping by the New Olympians, some great career and industrial opportunities for folks like Grove, and even that if the US government had just committed to do what in the end was done, leaving the Emperor in place, the surrender would have happened without opening that fateful "Enola Gay" Pandora's bomb-bay door.
I won't leave it as Bill does, with my comforting bare assertion of "the truth:" Here's just one among many bits of scholarship that belies the jingoist view, the comfortable "received wisdom," that cushions and supports and underlies so much of "our policy:"
http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2012-10-14/real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan
But I will concede that the SHOUTING from the Bomb-Bomb-Bomb side is LOUDER and MORE PERSISTENT and certainly serves to validate the very valid sentiments for revenge on the part of people who suffered the actual pains of war at the hands of Japanese troops and their political machinery. The same sentiments that seem to motivate a lot of people who resent and have suffered from OUR system.
But what does it all MEAN?
http://www.tampabay.com/news/nation/obama-says-threat-of-military-strike-stays-on-table/2141129 (Let's see, it was "remember the women and girls," most recently...)
Wow, stirring words until you look a little ways behind them... Then you have to resist the temptation to just go "BWAAAA-HAAA-HAAAAA-HAAAAAAA!"
US not the world's policeman? Maybe in the same way that a bunch of uniformed officers in Chicago were not the City's policemen: "The Babbling Burglar and the Summerdale Scandal:
http://www.richardlindberg.net/articles/summerdale.html
Remember all the parts: corrupt war contractors, an opportunist officer corps, a pathetically credulous yet cynical public, a fiat rulership whose actual motions belie its rhetoric and image-building and peddling, enormous momentum of "special constituencies," and essentially unlimited access to fiscal resources, all that stuff. That was Chicago, then. Follow the papers and blogs, and take a look at NYPD now. Are those PO-lices what we have in mind when we both embrace the assumption of the role and tell ourselves "that's not US?"
Bigsaf, may I emphasize a bit from your first link?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24039309
It's always amusing, too, to follow an apologist at work. Wonder if his creds will ever be actually displayed, other than with flirtatious displays of Deep Knowledge and coy glimpses of well-turned ankle and Insider petticoat...
"The United States should become militarily involved only when its interests are at stake"
Once again, which and what and where and when are those "interests," and "why," too, and just who are your editorial or imperial "we?" And since, as another person here observed, the history of "military" is the history of "stupid," as so many times and in so many ways demonstrated, with the stupid excuse of the exigiences of hot combat when the biggest part is procurement and logistics and generating Milbabble, maybe "smarter" would be figuring out a way to keep the evil and greed that seem to define or characterize "US (the reification) interests" from giving the Generals a reason to Demonstrate Their Branches' Capabilities...
And gee, how unfortunate, how sad, how almost unfair, how pitiable, how "the US" keeps getting somehow handed, or running up against, these "realities" to "deal with," as if they are landed on Earth from some distant planet, with no relation to anything "we" have been doing in "our interest."
If the CIA and other US players are moving arms onto Syrian "sovereign terrain," and the "rebels" or "insurgents" or more neutrally or applaudingly, if you happen to like the particular image of a particular bunch, "gunmen" or "fighters" consist of anomic bunches of fluid membership under grandiose names dreamed up by "charismatic" warlords and bosses and "preachers," and these critters morph and "ally" and re-cast themselves dozens of times weekly, and there are supply lines delivering truck and planeloads hither and yon, well then, it would seem to be hard to say with any confidence that the CIA or whoever is signing the chits for them has even the slightest bit of control of who gets "armed." And we used to police up the battlefield arms from killed "gooks," who were even more efficient about policing up the ones laying around dead GIs, and about cleaning out "bases" and "camps" and "LZs" they overran.
Has anything changed in the Practice of War since Achilles stripped Hector's corpse and dragged it around the walls of Troy?
On the other hand, "First Syria rebels armed and trained by CIA 'on way to battlefield'
The first cell of Syrian rebels trained and armed by the CIA is making its way to the battlefield, President Barack Obama has reportedly told senators...."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10283758/First-Syria-rebels-armed-and-trained-by-CIA-on-way-to-battlefield.html (3 Sep 2013)
"Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid From C.I.A."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/25/world/middleeast/arms-airlift-to-syrian-rebels-expands-with-cia-aid.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (24 Mar 2013)
"U.S. Begins Shipping Arms for Syrian Rebels
CIA Aims to Vet and Train Fighters With New Weapons for Deployment by August; Saudi Antiaircraft Missiles Expected"
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323419604578569830070537040.html (26 June 2014)
And a whole lot more, of course.
Oh, you were only talking about that limited set, "al Quaeda forces." Is there a McCainDetector that distinguishes one bearded dude with an AK or RPG and a copy of the Qu'ran yelling "Allahu Akhbar!" over and over from another, so readily? Like, the CIA has such a great track record of Arming The Right People And Teaching Them To Shoot Straight. Maybe that's why "Pentagon may help arm Syrian rebels instead of CIA
US officials mull increased push for moderate opposition to be armed, trained via special operations"
http://www.timesofisrael.com/pentagon-may-help-arm-syrian-rebels-instead-of-cia/
It is SO hard to know what the heck is actually going on over there, isn't it? Even the people that are supposedly "in the loop" don't seem to know... Except that guns&money are changing hands, and sneaky-petes are "building relationships" with "Freedom Fighters!"
Why, after the CIA "successes" in places like Notagainistan, would one possibly doubt the premise of the article cited?
Sometimes credible diplomacy is backed by moral force and the ability to attract enough humans to a position based not on fear, threats, and money (and careers) on the simpler ground that it's the right thing to do -- maybe fortuitously consistent with a "national interest," and that sick chestnut about all actions are based on "self-interest."
But in the Game Frame, that's not possible, given the immutable definition and reality of how, pace Wikileaks, "diplomacy" is imagined and conducted. Per the Serious Players, that is, who bamboozle and cozen the rest of us, and profit personally from stirring up the flames of the ancient seductions of tribalism...
Gulf of Tonkin -- even the reported and discredited version showed warships versus torpedo boats, hardly a significant "naval battle." Unbiased view? See http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2008-02/truth-about-tonkin What a former President had to say:
http://millercenter.org/president/speeches/detail/3998
And let us not forget the lessons taught by one Lt. Gen. Paul van Riper, USMC (Ret.), during a relatively recent simulation of naval, etc. war in the Persian Gulf, in which the Evil Red Force under his command sank most of the Great Force Projecting US Capital And Other Ships and did such other havoc that the Pentagram had to stop the Games, re-spool, and basically force a happier (for the MIIC) outcome: http://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/01/14/millennium-challenge/ $250 million, 13,500 players, 18 Navy ships sunk, the Blue Force routed, and in the real world there is no "do-over." See, e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan. Fog of war, my backside --- one ought to watch where one steps, and not take reassurances from ergonomic-chair "battlespace manager warfighters" and their Policy Cheerleaders that "We got it right NOW, $7 trillion later."
Of course inconsiderable Arabs, old in war and politics, would never 'get it right' like that... http://fabiusmaximus.com/2007/01/04/why-we-lose-at-4gw/
Obligatory plug for another Gen., Smedley Butler: "'War' is nothing but a racket."
For what it's worth, on the quality and strength and tactics of some of the players in this latest or at least currently topmost horror brought to us by the proponents and beneficiaries of the continuation of the Great Game:
From a recent article in Syria Comment, "
Jabhat al-Nusra and Other Islamists Briefly Capture Historic Christian Town of Ma’loula," at http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/jabhat-al-nusra-and-other-islamists-briefly-capture-historic-christian-town-of-maloula/
One might ask what Anonymous Joe is selling.
Not so very long ago, here in this very blogspace, Joe, whoever he is, was castigating and impeaching others for daring to use unsupported phrases in argument like "Everybody knows" and "it is a well-known fact" and "it is well established," I guess like the Moon landing, which happened, so that means irrefutably that whatever Joe says also happened, or exists, according to his repeatedly repeated narrative. A "foolish consistency..."
Re that observation that total dominance can't and won't remain uncontested, see, eg, "history," and on a smaller scale, the vain effort to create a perfect unchanging Kentucky bluegrass monoculture lawn around one's McMansion. Salafis got nothing on crabgrass and dollar weed and suchlike, despite largely unconstrained chemical warfare and wholesale deportation, transplantation and as with the West Bank and Gaza, "settlements."
You think that divide, that distaste, is bad, you ought to learn what the members of the Second Baptist Church think about the members of the Third Baptist Church. http://www.cybersalt.org/pearly-gates-jokes/deciphering-baptist-church-names
Welcome to humanity's end-game...
Being a "constitutional lawyer" and even a "professor of constitutional law" means exactly nothing in terms of application of those principles. Those charmers on the Supreme Court, Scaly-a, and Roberts, and "Pubic Hair" Thomas, and near-miss Robert Bork, are well versed in the lexicon and precedents and how The Rule Of Law can be invoked, seemingly plausibly and irrefutably, to screw over the General Welfare. Ever hear of "substantive due process," freedom of contract and child labor?
There are a lot of "experts" in the world -- a set of skills, like how to manufacture chemicals, or nasty inorganic or complex organic molecules, or invent "nanotubes" that will kill you quicker than asbestos, is morally indifferent. It's all the intent and application that counts, to the people who suffer from same...
Don't be thinking that since Obama is credited with deep learning on "The Constitution" that he will have any dedication to making it work the way We All, with our varying own interpretations of what Should Be, might Wish It Would...
Got any cites to support that "very small number of people"? Polling, maybe? Does the universe include people outside the MSMiasma? And it appears that a "very large number of people" as you put it "opposed strikes on Syria." but keep hammering those talking points... Maybe repetition will make up for idiocy.
That was after the US helped build the Taliban, right?
If I recall correctly, there are supposed to be organs of the US government, State, CIA, FBI, et cetera, that analyze commerce, even deals that don't on their face require licenses for technology transfer or because the items being sold for a profit have military applications. In the Modern Environment of "NSA Panopticonia" there's even more of that. As with 9/11, an ounce of prevention would have been worth the "pound of pretend cure" you want to credit the US Government with. Cat out of bag, bag in jail for a little while? Horse out of barn, barn door locked for 9 months? Oh, and a $3,000 or even $30,000 fine?
People who want context on this one particular incident can look here, for contemporary reporting. http://www.mathaba.net/news/?x=287388 Or just search on the company name for more.
This is only one of hundreds of instances of this kind of behavior, ignored, overlooked, winked at, or actively encouraged by the complex Behemoth personification that is the "US Government."
Short Bill: "Comfort ye, my people...sleep, baby sleep..." Short JTM: "Why, again?"
Silly little article in the NYT:
BAAAD SYRIA, BAAD BAAD SYRIA! Go lie down!
[That headline and various sidetracks in the article are just a little misleading: a good part of "the world" was making a profit and furthering their "national interests" and knocking pawns off the Great Game board.
Isn't it just fascinating to look behind the BS Mythscreen at what the Great Game actually involves, includes, incurs? One wonders what stake the apologists and other Players might have in continuing the Idiocy of all those little sales transaction that happen because of wink, winkery, and the global and profitable and career-boosting amassing and distribution of weapons of retail, wholesale and MASS destruction.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/world/middleeast/with-the-world-watching-syria-amassed-nerve-gas.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
BAAAD SYRIA! BAAAD BAAD SYRIA! Go lie down! ("Syria" = Assadalawite + Deplorable Bugsplat??)
You got to love stuff like this:
http://www.usatoday.com/media/cinematic/video/2775541/open-season-on-drones-usa-now-video/
Mr. Steel might be a backwoods survivalist America-Firster militiaman, we might disagree on lots of stuff, I don't know or care -- he's come up with an interesting virus to combat the runaway tumor of Surveillancism...
In other news, "SWAT officers kill man, 107, in standoff." Makes you wonder what that was all about, proportionality and reality-checking and all that...
http://www.thenewsstar.com/viewart/20130908/NEWS01/130908003/SWAT-officers-kill-man-107-standoff-
Maybe liberals need to take some refresher courses in Big Bidness, from maybe a gonif-handler like Sheldon Adelson? http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2012/12/06/sheldon-adelson-super-pac-casino/1751305/
Yes, indeed, if that includes the people whose motions you represent. Not that it will make the slightest difference to the Game play over time, as you full well know...
The decision to launch "something explosive" at "some part of Syria" has long been taken. Now it's just a matter of finding something other than quicksand and eyewash to provide the Casus Idioticus to Just Do It...
Which population would that be: the Vietnamese, with Agent Orange and spare the crap about how in some tiny definition it's not a chemical weapon? The Iranians gassed with US connivance and "Western" sourcing of the chemicals and munitions and "battlefield intelligence (sic)?" The Kurds, with the same? The Afghans?
Professor, your acute observations must be cutting close to the quick, given how suddenly and subtly or not so subtly the apologists have been popping up or off on the recent "crisis" of idiocy...
Not clear which you want:
This, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/29/international/europe/29casualties.html
or this: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/08/the-u-s-and-israel-have-used-chemical-weapons-within-the-last-8-years.html
or this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_use_in_Iraq,
which latter text includes this snippet:
No emphasis added, or needed...
We must remember the Rules:
Agent Orange and depleted uranium and white phosphorus and such things are not "chemical weapons."
Under Drone Rules, there are no "innocent civilians." Their bad, for being stupid or unfortunate enough to be "in proximity to Unlawful Enema Combatants."
"Everything is also sui generis," whatever Bad was done has nothing to do with Bad that is about to be done.
Let Reagan be Reagan -- Obama is Different, the MIIC is filled with beneficent do-gooders just aching to "retaliate" for evil done to and by somebody or other.
The function of the world economy is to build out the entirety of the Grand Global Interoperable Network-Centric Panopticonal Battlespace, which actually has no determinate function or end point except More of Itself. And is always Under Construction, Addition, Design Revision, and Repair.
See how pleasingly simple it all can be, if you just let yourself be carried by the flow of false logic?
I understand a lot of Great Gamers are also inveterate bridge players. One thing an inveterate and masterful bridge player hates is when someone else at the table asks to "review the bidding."
But the world of humans is so complex, and there's so much going on, and the lies are so difficult to sort from the truths and of course since "We" are at perpetual war now, and as Churchill famously observed, that crap about how "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies," maybe it would be helpful to review the bidding on chemical weaponry bidding by the US of A, about whom one is not supposed to make Random Bad Observatons, and other players, Here's one interesting source, that kind of gives the lie to all that noise about 90 years of "norms:"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/04/1236329/-Bugs-and-Bombs-A-History-of-the-Chemical-and-Biological-Arms-Race
It's part of a series, here's page 2:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/09/07/1236342/-History-of-Chemical-Biological-Arms-Race-Chapter-Two
For those who are so exercised about chemical weapons, you got any idea about what pathogen warfare, and its successors that the MIIC is so diligently moving toward deployability, might be like? Want to lose some sleep, even over a somewhat dated (2004) observation of potential uses and "legalities" that surround them? Lookie here (.pdf):
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1271&context=bjil
Smart people are bringing incredible death to you, behind the promise of "incredible benefits," by the playing of their close-to-the-vest cards, according to the rules of their idiot Game... Is that the future we are paying for?
Interesting. No comments on, possibly no interest in, an article that carries the seeds of what might become the antibiotic and insect - and nematocide so badly needed to relieve the human population of that post-Industrial Revolution set of plagues that's killing so many and our f fragile planet...
That "subsidy" notion only persists at all if one accepts the notion of some "necessity" for all the patently idiotic and expensive and self-promoting and self-defeating MIICcrap, like NATO and all those generals and the rest of the structure that takes all tat wealth that might be used for General Welfare rather than the welfare of the Generals...
Follow the money. And which careers get the big rewards. "National security" is a great career path these days. Look how teachers and social workers and nurses are treated in the US. Those items, and the general bloody-mindedness of an unfortunately tenacious and destructive fraction of humanity. "Allahu Akhbar!" "U-S-A! U-S-A!"
"Nous sommes fous..."
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder...
No cites, then, to support the Authoritative Assertion?
And I've read a lot of stuff, too, over the years, that purports to justify all kinds of crap that our rulers and military leaders have put out that would, if you bought into it, "make a case" for all kinds of idiocy. "Light at the end of the tunnel" being only one tiny example. And of course if one succeeds in limiting the frame of the argument to "where are the minuscule set of Big Bad Quada-men at at the moment," to justify the legalistically questionable justificationalism, from the Company, or whoever runs it all these days, and get everyone arguing about that, and not recalling and accounting for and talking about trillions of dollars disappearing down MIIC rat and snake holes, and the futility of the whole apparatus in delivering "victory" or even "security", or having an honest "mission" or even taxpayers' Return On Investment (sic), while Creeps are peering down and up and around and at and into every freaking thing we ordinary schleps do or say or think while paying for all this, and what about the future of the species, if you can manage that, well, there you are! "Success!"
So glad you are comfortable that "the terrorists" have been "vastly diminished." When do we get to stand down, sir? The troops are tired, the nation is drained, and for some reason, blowing all those people up and playing the Game the way "we" do just makes MORE of what we call "terrorists..."
I would have to agree that there is a dearth of "personal judgment," on the Predator/Reaper/PRISMorwhatever side... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner
For more fun, there's this: http://prisoner.gigacorp.net/
People who castigate others with claims that they make broad assertions without benefit of any authoritative support other than such a bare "authoritative" or maybe authoritarian assertion ought to consider their own conduct. Got some cites for all that? Or just personal judgment?
Have we citizens all gotten to the apparently usual and inevitable point yet that the "droning" noise in the background has become such a usual and inevitable part of the way "we" do bidness that nobody notices, nobody cares, hardly anybody pays any attention any more?
Settled comfortably in our myths, happy with the gentle fog of war...
On the other hand, Real Christians like Pat Robertson, James Robinson, Tedd Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell could not give a fig for those Apostates Over There who are not part of the Confession. Except as bit players in the Great Leviticus-to-Revelation Romp that they pretend will bring Rapture to the Elect, lots of sucker money to their various PACs and perversions, and all that Seven Seals crap to be visited on the rest of us UNBELIEVERS...
There actually are "dominoes" in the Great Game. The actions that result in tipping them are nothing like as carefully scripted and well planned and controlled and based on minute placement and cooperation as this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9403404/Guinness-World-Record-for-human-mattress-dominoes-toppled-in-China.html *
*(No humans were materially hurt in the achievement of this notable if likely short-lived world record.)
Anyone want to start a pool on when the first weapon from whatever nonsense ooops!-erational acronym and "coalition" cover name will be given to "distinguish" US warcraft-launched or -delivered explosives lands in Damascus or other Syrian territory? I claim Tuesday, 9/10 at 0800... first prize is a piece of shrapnel from the site. Grand prize is a piece of shrapnel with body parts and blood smears, maybe even HAIR! suitable for framing or mantelpiece mounting.
"A US attack on Syria will Prolong the War"
Bug, or feature and benefit?
You're the one perceiving a "Preferred Narrative," Bill. I did read what you wrote, several times. Dare one react to moral-relativistic statements like "Compared to the Germans, the US was a piker in its use of landmines"? And efforts to divert the conversation away from current bad behaviors by Empires that pretend to Higher Moral Purposes in the face of some pretty amoral/immoral (by the standards applied for convenience to others) behaviors?
Joe extracts an interesting and limited moral from Wilfred Owen's poetry. The gas shells in the poem were "friendly fire," for starters, "short rounds" as they say. My notion of the message is that once again, we are being told that the remedy for any chemical weapon use is bombing SOMEbody with SOMEthing, to do what, preserve the face of the Imperial President? Seems to me Owen was trying to tell the rest of us (he himself died in the trench warfare-of-attrition that was the current idiocy in 1914-18) to not be so stupid as to keep peddling the notions of glory and valiant death "for the Homeland" to each succeeding generation. And speaking to the idiot futility of the Great Game, and all it meant and continues to mean.
As to the distractions some put up about US involvement in chemical weapons use not being relevant to the NOW, there's this: http://www.infowars.com/bombshell-syrias-chemical-weapons-turn-out-to-be-sodium-fluoride-used-in-the-u-s-water-supply-and-sold-at-wal-mart/ Regarding repeated assertion that Agent Orange is not a chemical weapon, the effects it is having in people, the cancer, the birth defects, the heart disease and diabetes and prostate problems and neuropathies result from chlorinated dioxins and dibenzofurans in the soup that was sprayed so liberally over so much of SE Asia by none other than US. One among thousands of sources: http://www.globalresearch.ca/agent-orange-the-deadly-legacy-of-chemical-warfare/32418
Bill would say the only land mines that count, apparently, are the German ones, forget about the "piker" distribution by the Allies, still killing and maining, and more important, forget about the US use of mines of all kinds of interesting types, including undetectable ones with plastic shrapnel that can't be located with diagnostic x-rays. It's hardly worth entering a debate. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/01/opinion/la-oe-williams1-2009dec01 I guess we are supposed to take comfort in stuff like this: http://www.state.gov/t/pm/wra/c11735.htm
Yeah, "we" will take long strides to "get rid of" PERSISTENT and NON-DETECTABLE mines. The other ones? Well, there's a Military Need, anyone who plays "Call of Duty" knows that... Speaking of moral high ground...
But wait! THIS time "we" are only Upholding The 90-Year-Old International Norm That Says Nobody Is Supposed To Use Or Encourage Or Allow The Use Of Chemical Weapons Except If It Happens To Be In Some National Interest Grand Global Geopolitical Gizmo Whizbang Blowback Inducement! No, really! This time "we're" serious! Really! "We" are doing the best "we" can in a bad situation! Do not weaken the Presidency! It's NOT OUR FAULT!
Shootin' wars produce wealth transfer. Getting ready for shootin' wars transfers a lot more wealth. Setting up a Global Network with the idea of, well, just what is the idea again behind the Network-Centric Interoperable Battlespace with all its Panopticonial explosive deadly clumsy idiotic parts, again, is infinitely expensive -- "all the wealth you have." Kerry, we might recall, went to Sweden to negotiate with the Pope, or somebody, about how to divvy up the "hidden riches" of the Arctic and Antarctic, which are becoming visible thanks to all that heat that our common culture generates. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnkerry/climate-change-and-the-fu_b_3272250.html?utm_hp_ref=world The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement and its Atlantic equivalent are plowing ahead, which will put paid to national limits on corporate rapine -- not a "race to the bottom," but us being DRIVEN to the bottom by kleptocrats with whips. http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/07/will-snowden-revelations-about-spying-on-foreign-governments-undermine-the-european-and-pacific-trade-talks.html
And soon this site may feature a post that may be headlined, based on the Beltway Ba__tards doing the only stuff they know how to do and what's being reported about the 'negotiations,' advance the Imperium by blowing things up with little nods to "legalisticationalism," just like in 1914, PROUDLY we hail that "IT"S WAR!" having no eefffeeeng idea what that all means...
Seems a pretty fair conflation to me.
I know, pedantic definitionalists would love to lay a net of split hairs between carefully delineated and manufactured categories. But looking at the big picture, neither "realists" nor neocons nor Wahabbists nor any other Big-ists have any defense against the observation that NONE of them know how to manage and direct the enormous blessing of a planet that we humans fell into, a whole long while ago. ALL of them are simply about very parochial and tribal and egocentric "advantages" and "benefits" and "interests." Cf. all the wars since Sun Tzu, especially the industrialized wars of the last 200 years or so.
To put it another way, all the rulers, and the little and big men and women behind them pulling strings and propping up and engineering hegemony and "change" and "growth," have managed mostly to do, in pursuit of short-term apparent gain, is put all of the rest of us on a perpetual knife edge of wholesale destruction. And they keep adding weights to the backs of those of us with our feet perched anxiously on the blade's edge. On the US side, ALL the potentates, of whatever uniform or stripe, are all about hegemony, of all dimensions.
Argue all you want about how "realists" and "neocons" have this or that niggling little difference on certain "macropolicies." There were plenty of "realists" urging on all the grandiose plans and illusions of the "neocons," and they all go to the same clubs and speak the same language, one that sure looks and sounds like Orkish. "Realism" seems like "economics" to me: a bankrupt set of notions, unable to actually predict or offer guidance or pathways to positive-sum outcomes, but full of grand concepts and complex vocabularies that for some reason always almost exclusively support the triumph of the privileged and the personalities that are calibrated to acquire. Power. and. wealth.
But hey, what do people like me know, right? All we got is pretensions to Morality, like some folks are playing on now as the mandate to blast Syrian terrain because Chemical Weapons are a universal no-no except when the "national interest" that everybody knows what it is says "do it," and some 3 x 5 cards... hardly a white paper or dogma document between us.
That is a truly ingenious mischaracterization of Bodden's post and point.
"If firing weapons of war from warships to cause severe destruction in another country is not an act of war, then what is?"
Anyone? Joe? Bill? Any choices for music to go with the tap-dance around this one?
Anybody remember the lessons of "The Selling of the President?"
How Washington REALLY works, for those who think "the world's greatest deliberative body" will be taking on any real "constitutional" function in this "debate:"
"Arm twisting in Washington before Syria Strike Vote"
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/09/david-dayen-arm-twisting-season-in-washington-before-syria-strike-vote.html
No personal consequences, of course, for the folks selling or buying in that incestuous marketplace. If kicking the hornet's nest produces lots of angry hornets, well hey, other people will pay, and the tax dollars will keep rolling in, and out...
Tapeworms and tumor cells just can't help themselves, they just gotta do what they gotta do...
In litigation or debate, assigning who gets the burden of proof and burden of going forward usually determines the outcome. All the more so, if the assigner also controls the definitions, terms and allowable framing of the argument.
It seems that "Washington" has assembled an impressive and expensive and shiny set of hammers and is arguing only about when to swing back and pound something and which hammer to use. What seems to be weak is attention to the complexity of the thing that's getting pounded, and its environment. Some military officers and analysts are offering nervous disclaimers about the unaccountable catalytic effects of "pinprick diplomacy." One does not repair the fuel control unit on a Lycoming T-53 turbine engine, with its 11,000 interoperating parts, with a 4-pound sledge, or even a tack hammer and a little cold chisel. One does not dispose of unexploded ordnance by striking the fuse with a glancing blow.
There's any number of examples of hammer-blows knocking stuff so far askew that the machinery starts tearing itself up or explodes. And of course there's the common experience of whacking one's own hand in the process. As to boys who cry wolf, there are other illustrative fables, including ones about people who search for gas leaks with a cigarette lighter, or smoke in a powder magazine because they so desperately need a cig.
Chemical weapon use is bad. So was (and still is, from one who is among the many exposed and affected) Agent Orange, so are cluster munitions and fuel-air explosives and nuclear weapons and antipersonnel mines and DU munitions, so is dumping AK-47s and RPGs and 120-mm mortar rounds and "training missions" and stuff into places where people are descending into anomie. http://syriavideo.net/ No amount of self-proclaimed "authoritative" misdirection, augmented by dogged repetition and presumptive assignment of the burdens, should obscure the proper assignment of those burdens of going forward and of proof that a hammer blow isn't going to detonate or ignite stuff that will demolish the house, firestorm the neighborhood, and have the neighbors coming around to do vengeance on you... Unless the new First Rule is no longer "do no harm," but "do what we are armed to do and can get away with behind some faux justification because who are these pipsqueaks to challenge the Juggernaut's might, stand against even an idiotic set of 'national interests,' and aspire to reduce its Freedom of Action (tm)?"
Nothing new under the sun, just jaded and stupefied amazement at the scale of it all:
When I was a clerk in the Admin Company of the 2nd Armored Div. ("Hell On Wheels!") at Ft. Hood, TX in 1969, the Army contracted to set up a computerized, mainframe-centric, tape-and-punch card-based system to "more efficiently" run finance, personnel, inventory and supply functions. One contractor dude arranged to "pay" himself several million payroll bucks, delivered to an offshore account. He then removed his foot- and fingerprints from tape and card stacks. The Army eventually paid him another couple of million, and gave immunity from prosecution, to show how he did it.
While with the US EPA in the early 1980s, I got to see the Justice Department steal millions from the "Superfund" hazardous-site cleanup fund to buy their house data base and computer system, which was supposed to be a shared system with EPA to assist with environmental-law enforcement but quickly got closed off for exclusive dedication to "other DOJ purposes."
True vampire bats are great at draining blood from the stupefied sleeping cow or pig. They have specialized sensors to detect spots where the blood flows strongest and nearest to the skin, components in their saliva that keeps the blood flowing, and those always-razor-sharp incisors to make those productive little cuts. Occasionally, they drain so much blood that the host mammal dies outright, or transmit some awful, fatal-if-not-treated bloodborne disease, like rabies...
Nothing new under the various large public-private rocks one might occasionally turn over, either.
Hey, those things happened way away over there. And OUR congresscritter not only brings home the bacon, s/he has really good TV ads that speak right to our gut issues.
Chemical warfare is already on the world scene, there's no gang of 240 lining up in this instance to give a drubbing to a particular miscreant, and it is the falsest kind of logic to try to lay that at the altar of some set of self-interested, mutually dishonest and hypocritical national rulerships' "failure" to buy into the very current and dishonest meme about "having to punish and deter Assad."
It would be wonderful if this instance were to catalyze a real "league of nations" that were joined to deal with crap like, oh, petrocombustion and its problems, something other than the coming 'Rape of the Arctic/Antarctic/Ocean Floor.' And the ever-popular sovereignty-and-human-rights-crushing Trans-Wherever Partnership scams... Don't think that in the air, on the land or under the sea likely to happen. Do you?
Seems to me that whole continued "mark my words" argument at this point is just about how to save a muscle-bound Obamadom's face from a deserved dose of banana-republic creme pie... complete with ornamental "Red Line" and pink-rose decorations...
We pretend there are rules, but this is what we preach among ourselves:
http://www.slideshare.net/leadershipmgtservice/diplomacy-defined
There's lots more at the link for the person trying to understand the current behavior of "states" and seeking clues to other ways to "do business." Other than stuff like "preserving the widest possible freedom of action."
The Golden Rule, of course, really only applies, as a guide to behavior, to people pretty much with the same level of Projectable Power who have to look each other in the eye and face, and are more mutually vulnerable.
Maybe the Great Bully, that complexity of military and industrial interests, might be running up against some natural limits to "widest possible freedom of action?" Then again, "we" have all those thousands of nuclear warheads, and other stuff...
Would Reagan be among the exceptions to that rule that I don't think many here would agree with anyway?
Maybe less the boy who cried wolf, who per the fable at least the last time was not lying, and in most versions paid a penalty for his idiocy.
Maybe more "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ME."
Considering what a "muscular foreign policy" has cost us and the rest of the world, a quarter of our wealth and more and millions dead, displaced and demoralized, with zero promise of any improvements to the General Welfare, maybe it's time the "sword of state" gets at least half beaten into plowshares, and reduced to more of a Bowie or even Swiss Army Knife...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/the-permanent-militarization-of-america.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
and also
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-tyranny-of-defense-inc/308342/3/
As B a FD as a" war of choice" run on an idiot grandiose policy and sold via a ration of fraud? As fake baby steps in the supposed direction of " doing something" about greenhouse gases? As creation and implementation of a world-girdling permanent-war AllHailTheGenerals Global Network-Centric Interoperable Vastly Expensive Murderously intrusive Panoptocon Thingie?
And "the intelligence" so often is just wrong, by incompetence or intent.
Does that suggested norm apply across the board, so that predictions, deductions and pronouncements about all matters of state, and "misstatements of fact," get the same deductions from credibility or doses of humility, "going forward?"
Language controls, as propagandists and politicians know. Now we are going to "retaliate against Saddam."
'Retaliate: v. tr.: To return like for like, especially evil for evil; To pay back (an injury) in kind.'
It's a strong word that lets the hearer think he is on the side of "right." What's the "kind" Saddam "liked" us with, that we will justify "pinprick bombing" as just "returning evil for evil?"
Who gets to define what's "reality?"
There seems to be many versions, and no consensus even.
I would consider following VA Red Senator Scott Rigell, who authored the letter to the Admin signed on to by how many now, 116 members of Congress of mostly Red but some from both parties in both houses, telling our imperial ruler that he at least ought to go through the formality of advice and consent before lighting the fuses on those Tomahawk skyrockets, or playing that wonderful tune, "Send In The Drones." http://blogs.rollcall.com/goppers/87-house-members-sign-syria-letter-to-obama/
Rand and Ron are the worst sort of smarmy opportunists, far as I can see. No sale there, when this is their actual vision of Howitoughtabe: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/01/11/1053654/-The-Libertarian-Agenda
Not that an exercise demanding a little A&C really means much to us ordinary people, when made by the Congresscritters who also feed at the MIIC trough and for decades have never met a war they didn't love or were too timid to resist Caesar on. Rome and Byzantium and Berlin were filled with Crackpot Realists and rent seekers and lobbyists and militarists too, and it might bear reviewing a bit of wikihistory for context in what invariably, with minor detail changes, happens to Skyrocket Empires...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Empire
Second verse, see WW II. Both of which ended with the Bad guys running away wit all the loot they could carry, some to be embraced warmly by our OSS-CIA-ETC., some to retire comofortably to South America...
Professor, there's more discussion about that word "crackpot," joined at the hip to that other word, claimed as self-descriptive by some here, "realist." One piece of that discourse appears here, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/28/1234649/--Crackpot-Realism-and-Military-Intervention-in-Syria#, under the title "'Crackpot Realism' And Military Intervention In Syria.
It appears some actual, honest Serious Observer of our Empire at work and play have distilled out most of the essence of "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb -- Bomb, Bomb Anywhere-ism:"
The original piece is here, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-s-lofgren/syria-and-the-triumph-of-_b_2966541.html. There's a lot more to it, so aptly descriptive of those who claim "normalcy" inheres in displays of Folly.
Maybe worth a read, and some remarks on how "we" can escape the seductions of the seeming logic and actual disingenuous or just plain dishonest blandishments of "crackpot realists?"
And a lot of avatars saying a lot of "same texts" about all the reasons why "we" have to "retaliate against Assad." For disobeying the command of the Commander in Red Line Chief.
Fun, isn't it, to make a lot of people believe in connections and rationales and linkages and Great World Order Rules That Only Apply Sometimes as excuses, once again, to do what the Rulers want to do anyway...?
For all their logic-chopping and justifications, the apologists for Acting Without Really Thinking have a nice skill at deferring and deflecting and changing the subject...
But there's this big thumping similarity: An enormous war machine, wanting, inter alia, the opportunity to test and deploy and use up various bits of inventory, and novel tactics, and Grand Network-Centric Strategies, and there are MEDALS and COMMENDATIONS and PROMOTIONS to be "earned" for "Managing the Battlespace," and who knows what-all is going on in Obama's (and the rest of his entourage's) head, and whether it was anything like what former CIA boss George Bush and later Blue Dress Willie were thinking.
For context, for anyone who cares, here is a timeline of that bit of MIIC activity in Central Europe, just 25 years ago, at about the same time the US was assisting Saddam to use chemical weapons on Iran and his own people, from PBS:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/kosovo/etc/cron.html
How about if the World Bank and IMF put up a good-sized fund to hand out to "authoritarians" who've outstayed the tolerance of the populations they prey on? Any thoughts on what would be a "fair" inducement? Arafat kept about $4 billion on ice, as I recall, against his "retirement." To avoid a bad incentive, it might ought to only be applied to those currently in power...
"Definitive statements" like THESE?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23861895
Where on the fog-of-war timeline are Kerry's and other US and "allied" spokespersons' definitive statements?
What has Kerry's current hyperbolic hypocrisy got to do with whether he worked for "Reagan" (and the Bush League?) The point you're trying to obscure is that the US government aided, abetted, and was dirt-deep demonstrably involved in chemical warfare (via convenient and eventually disposable and deposable proxy), many times in the "90 year norm." When "the national interest" made it A-OK, of course...
Now THAT is one concise rendition of The Narrative. Very good! Complete with fist-into-palm, table-thumping conclusion!
Yet as noted here in this thread, the US had no problem helping Saddam use chemical weapons against them rotten Iranians, nor really even "his own Kurdish people," nor did "we" make a big noise about Soviet use of chemical weapons in Afghanistan. Setting this up as some kind of moral mandate just reeks of hypocrisy, and other stuff.
And some folks have noted that "we" actually helped Saddam, at least, build the Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear capabilities: I'm sure this stuff is just D F Hippie CT, right? http://www.counterpunch.org/2004/06/17/how-reagan-armed-saddam-with-chemical-weapons/ Looks like the profit-takers and geopoliticians in all of NATO and allied colonial-imperial powers had a hand in making the mucking fess, and now want to reposition their halos, and to have the rest of us pay to "stop the evil" that they engendered...
I think Joe is just wrong on this one, and why does he think it necessary to discount or obscure the potential findings of provenance here? Lay aside the degree of "heavy bombardment" he wants to be presumed, which would not be 155mm shells on 5-foot centers in any event: even after the munitions' remains are worked over and displaced, they will be recognizable. I'm not the only one who has seen, up close, an area that has been "worked over" by HE, including ammo dump explosions, and it would be a careful forensic job, of course, to separate out the nasty and telling parts. But with what is riding on an honest finding of source and responsibility, one has to ask why that effort should be discouraged, disparaged or aborted. Even buildings that are rubble-ized by HE still have recognizable bits, and re-bar and rocket parts are steel and hard alloys and are not reduced to invisibility.
"Cease-fire?" If one believes the press reports, the target coordinates have already been programmed into the Tomahawks... http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/syria-obama-cruise-missile/2013/08/27/id/522393?s=al&promo_code=14A8A-1
A hundred of those "expended," at a million or more a pop? That will be a nice "procurement authorization" to Raytheon to buy replacements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_%28missile%29 Not on the order of the F-35, of course... All part of your Grand Global Interoperable Network-Centric Everywhere All The Time Battlespace, that by definition seeks all available "intelligence" and "information" (see, "NSA Interoperability") to let the ergonomic-chair "warfighters" mess up anywhere, any time...
A little more detail on the hypocrisy in action:
"Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran --
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand."
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/08/25/secret_cia_files_prove_america_helped_saddam_as_he_gassed_iran
And apparently, along with the rest of the World Community, did not have much to say about Soviet-Empire chemical weapon use in Afghanistan, and maybe Chechnya... http://digitaljournal.com/blog/19257
Sounds really impressive: being on the Inside, with "access to intelligence." That "access" would just guarantee a proper, honest, wise determination of facts, options and actions.
On the other hand, it ought to be clear from any number of prior events, on the Great World Stage and in its wings, that "access to intelligence" too often means exactly ZERO, or a significant negative number, to the "implementation of policy." And even the cognoscenti know and have to acknowledge the weaknesses and frauds inherent in "intelligence."
I don't know about "destroyed." As I understand the chemistry and the nature of the munitions, there will be chemical signatures that modern detectors honestly used can mark, and the ironmongery might be scattered, but the forensic tools out there have done a lot of pinpointing in more "scattered" scenes...
Bearing in mind what has always happened to "Frontiers," I guess that does not bode well for the last relatively unstripped part of the planet.
Here's what we're in for:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-22528594
Here's Kerry's disgusting (or delightful, if you happen to be a Taker of Frontier Wealth) pronouncement, in case you missed it the first time around:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johnkerry/climate-change-and-the-fu_b_3272250.html?utm_hp_ref=world
As to ungulates, if they can't be monetized, they have no value. Maybe you could come up with a futures contract on the date of last living wild Peary caribou? Maybe the moral hazard machinations would encourage some bettor to at least prolong the species beyond the exercise date...
Or this: http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Environment/Pix/columnists/2013/8/5/1375711270382/A-male-Polar-Bear-Ursus-m-013.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/06/starved-polar-bear-record-sea-ice-melt&h=276&w=460&sz=38&tbnid=TUUTmJeYJdftkM:&tbnh=74&tbnw=123&zoom=1&usg=__YFgdwoBbFhFBPpuPWzI4bqUGE_o=&docid=8QIjTtrGRIVNDM&sa=X&ei=b8EbUofSKeXn2wWI3IGgBg&ved=0CEsQ9QEwCQ&dur=6487
The Mil-Mil MIIC-MIIC is busily and profitably producing kilotons of weapons of all types that are happily and profitably being delivered to "gunmen," whether you call them 'militants' or the formerly popular 'insurgents' or of course Terraists and other friendly and foe-ish nomenclature. The dudes in Syria now really seem like a bunch of anomic nihilists, and there's plenty of video evidence to show that they will shoot anything at anyone in a kind of free-for-all game of Capture The Flag. Here's one recent pic allegedly of "irregulars" plopping mortar rounds into "civilian" areas: http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/26/320560/mortar-shells-wound-three-in-syria/
Note that the tube ain't even your standard military-issue and in this and other visual evidence, these dudes don't bother with sighting even, since the rickety launchers have no sights and no base plate or precision-adjustable legs. They just sort of point and shoot. Note how the round is dropped down the tube, using a string as a trigger. Mil-spec cord, no doubt.
Lots more of anomic violence at http://syriavideo.net/
And this is the acme, the pinnacle, the apogee-whiz, of "civilization, Euphrates-style..."
There's no brakes on the fright (not sic) train, and it's running downhill and picking up speed...
If you google "other options for Syria," you get 229 million hits. The first four pages are mostly about what Dempsey and others are advising Obama to arm or blow up or shoot down, or not, as if B.H. Obama has the actual power to autonomously decide. Get back to page 5 and you start to run across some articles on stuff that falls outside the usual range of tactical options that generations of Idiotic policies and related stratagems have helped build on top of the immensely strong foundation of basic all-too-humanity. Here's the first one I found: http://raleightelegram.com/201306175405
I'm sure there are thinkers out there, with some depth of knowledge of human behavior and the details of culture and history and current issues and technology, who might have the exact prescription for how to wiggle a butterfly wing in Damascus or Teheran or Foggy Bottom to accomplish some sea change, eventually, after more blood and treasure are wasted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butterfly_effect But nobody with any influence listens, when the excitement of planning a big operation, overt or covert, is in the air, with naming rights and career boosts on the table, and the financial interests of those who make and peddle weapons and certain noisy personality types are yapping for their favorite Continued and Extended Idiocy. What someone else here reminded us was identified by Barbara Tuchman as the inevitable ingredients of "folly."
As I recall, even in this space, it is the apologists who invoke "law," Imperial and international, to justify the use of drone launched weapons, more so than "self-proclaimed progressives." What's the phrase? "Unlawful Enema Combatants," decreed to be thus by recourse to something called "AUMF" and some bit of the UN Charter? So "we" invade a place, people shoot back, and all of a sudden, if you follow the published videos, anyone moving around outside, or showing up as a hazy IR image inside a tent or mud building, is a "target" or is "deplorable bugsplat..."
As to Revulsion Weapons and the "Chemical Ali" arguments used selectively to justify favorite Imperial activities like shooting up Syria maybe, including pre-emptive verbal strikes against anyone arguing that chemical weapons kill people just like explosives, our Imperial rulers have no qualms about adding far worse things to the Imperial arsenal, on the argument that the sickos who think and act like them, in fact on behavior are virtually indistinguishable from them, over there amongst The Present or Potential Enemy: http://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/20100928/NEWS01/309289982/ct-consortium-developing-nano-weapons
But then stuff like that is like the Security State: developed and grown essentially out of sight, by persons with ugly motives, unremarked except by a few Alarmists with in their tinfoil hats, then slowly sprung on the populace that paid unknowingly for their own shackles and nooses... what does the word "inhuman" actually mean? http://www.noblesandcourtiers.org/elizabethan-executions.htm
That's the cool thing about colonialism and the Great Game -- you get to kick down other people's doors, steal their stuff, boss them around, trash their societies, carry off their women and children, crap in their living rooms and then guess what? no consequences, 'cuz the dudes that did it all are long gone when Current Events heat up: "IBG-YBG," and now there's talk about the best way to "recycle" dictators: Qaddaffyduck/Mussolini fashion, or let them slink away on their private jets (that are nice little sales coups for certain corporations all in themselves), with billions in stolen wealth or payoffs from Great Geoployitical Entities to play with in their dotage. http://www.gq.com/entertainment/humor/201104/lonely-planet-guide-for-disposed-dictators#slide=1
And it ain't just the guys, either... http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/17/laila-trabelsi-wife-of-tunisias-deposed-dictator.html
And the Game goes on: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/01/17/laila-trabelsi-wife-of-tunisias-deposed-dictator.html
Dare one question the initial premise, that "Obama," as the personification of our Empire, has to Do Something About Syria? Or do we leap over that, right to diddling and dabbling over which are the least bad options?
It's obvious that "he," nominally on our behalf and "for the greater good," will "do something," actually a whole lot of somethings, that are applauded by Apologists as Appropriate Engagement in the Current Round of the Great Game. What's the test of reason that will be applied to these many somethings, like open-checkbook military procurement and deployment and sales/gifts, privatization of "security," encouraging "friendly" autocrats, lining up "Cover" for Imperial Action by getting tame fellow potentates to affirm the planned actions, making sure Raytheon stockholders are protected by rolling over the inventory of cruise missiles, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_%28missile%29 and http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57599944/u.s-preps-for-possible-cruise-missile-attack-on-syrian-govt-forces/, the whole train of idiot stuff that Seems All Serious And Well-Thought-Out? And, of course, the mostly out-of-control, blowback-inducing initiatives and stratagems of our Sneaky Petes with their own little plots and intentions and "needs" for off-the-books funding sources 'n 'stuff. Oh wait, because "the Empire" is itself just a convenient reification made up of so many oddly assembled parts, and acts through so many different, disparate, largely independent rulerships and constituencies all drawing off the Imperial treasury that the rest of us create out of what could go to feeding and housing and healing ourselves, and because the commercial interests that get to whisper in the Imperial Ear 24/7 and have the Important Numbers on speed-dial, there is no "test of reason" that applies. Just a general trend of Generals' Behaviors, all in the direction of growing and metastasizing the malignancy.
Don't ask me, then, what "we" should be doing. The folks, generally the Apologist breeed, who make those kinds of challenges know that the Juggernaut is crushing its way ahead, and that any ideas about even marginal changes to the overall behavior of the Mil-Mil Aristocracy and its feedlot partners have exactly zero chance of effecting any change in the vector of velocity or the momentum of the mass... My answer is "dismantle the whole thing," which like a lot of complex Rube Goldbergian machinery it is, and we are, inevitably doing to itself and ourselves, thanks to Murphy, FUBAR and entropy. The Second Law of Thermodynamics Must Be Obeyed -- too bad for the crush-ees in the path, so nice, however, for those who Live So Large and get their jollies and livelihoods out of the Ineluctable Inexorability of Service to Moloch... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moloch