Bill criticizes others for, ah, "not reading" the links they post. This Economist article, from a source with shall one say a conservative bias, actually says, in part:
One man from South Waziristan heatedly told her that he and his family approved of the remote-controlled aircraft and wanted more of them patrolling the skies above his home. Access to the tribal regions is very difficult for foreign journalists; but several specialists and researchers on the region, who did not want to be identified, say there is at least a sizeable minority in FATA who share that view.
Surveys are also notoriously difficult to carry out in FATA. A 2009 poll in three of the tribal agencies found 52% of respondents believed drone strikes were accurate and 60% said they weakened militant groups. Other surveys have found much lower percentages in favour. But interviews by The Economist with twenty residents of the tribal areas confirmed that many see individual drone strikes as preferable to the artillery barrages of the Pakistani military.
MOST FATA residents? Maybe not, eh? And there's a whole lot of complexities that branch off from the central misrepresentation that one hopes might appear in our Rulers' briefings on "ground truth," though that won't change their behavior, just the propaganda...
...and " for now" is all Dick Cheney and Lloyd Blankfein and probably even Barack H. Obama and of course all those rake-it-in TV preachers, along with too many of the rest of us, actually cares about. Middle finger to the planet and any posterity, with a hearty "What ya gonna do about it? Huh, bubbie? I'll be gone!"
Try googling (or your favorite less evil browser) "double-tap drone strikes." Not too hard to find, eh? Hundreds of entries, with lots of outward links, from a lot of sources, not all of which are self-referential, with and without outrage au jus...
Of course, one can diffuse and defuse the controversy by claiming that "security elements" of the array of bits called, clumsily and incompletely, "the government" of Pakistan are all okay with this, supposedly (so what if the elected Ministries are, ah, NOT okay), without bothering to cite any basis. And blow further past the fundamental question of "Basic Idiocy and Breach of Sovereignty and even Moral Badness" by spending hours debating whether the CIA's "own drone program" (bought by us idiot taxpayers) is doing this, or the military's own drone program (also bought by us idiot taxpayers). Both of which, of course, are "security elements" of the array of bits called, clumsily and incompletely and in a fog of deniability, "the government" of the US Empire....
They might make him actually pay for them (if they had them to sell, and wanted to stir the pot.) Hey, the NYT/Congressional hearing routine works for Yahoo -- why not for other client states? And besides, Boeing and the mechanisms of "sale" of these sexy war toys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofgWvKNEZqs, always manage to add a little sweetener, a little dash of baksheesh, to every transaction.
Anyone else sick unto death of the depth of the corruption? The idiocy of all this?
But, and it's a big BUT, as you do note, "we" do indeed have a "horrible history of American corporate imperialism," a big part of which is the whole "War is nothing but a racket" theme that actually people seem to be starting to recognize as a pretty good descriptor of the whole Milo Minderbinder Enterprise. Where "everyone has a share" of the costs, and a tiny set has the assets and income of the whole. And where, as with our corporate War Machine that happily sells weapons and the other toys of war to pretty much anyone all over the planet, the "syndicate" will happily bomb its own troops for cost plus 15% (plus unauditable "other expenses...")
Does that the moral vacuum and horror of all that other stuff get erased because in your estimation ignoring the Palestinians (and so many others, or actively abusing them) "does not prove racism"? (For all you charming "Call of Duty" freaks, here's a nice entry point for some Really Cool Video of Action! (tm) Wonder how many GIs with combat experience tune in to "Call of Duty" and similar obscenities?)
What a masterful misdisplay of ratiocination. What's the logical flaw here? I'm sure you know...
One has to ask how pristine one's past and present behaviors are, or what one's past and/or present anonymous but implicitly important position is, that the kind of scrutiny that gets so variously applied by State Security to the rest of us gives no qualms and makes such facile false analogies so easy to emit...
"no competent intelligence organization..." Looks like, on the basis of this little episode and a whole century of mostly idiocy, that one little adjective, "competent," is the root of the whole problem.
What are these self-serving, self-aggrandizing a__holes SUPPOSED to be doing, to "keep us safe?" What are they ACTUALLY doing, with all the money and clout? Making a nice safe playpen for a bunch of idiots who are playing games that would make even Dan Brown or Clancy, let alone John le Carré, wince and duck for cover. Aren't "we" proud of what "we" have managed to wreak?
The first rule of "intelligence" is that there are no rules.
Welcome to the best of what humans do, at the end of consequences, at the end of Empire...
...and Brian demonstrstes so aptly the belief structure and level of information that kind of guarantees that a few of us humans will live in the crassest of self-indulgent opulence for their lifetimes, free of the consequences that the rest of us, and any future generations, will have to try to survive...
Yep, if anything is going to happen, it's gonna be way up North...
Bill has a ready answer for every critique of pretty much any part of this Imperial serial idiocy.
Which part of that phlogiston you denominate hypostatizationalistically as "the Taliban" "knew" that "they" were " hosting" those " training camps?" So as to justify (yeah, you have reservations about COIN and nation building) all the crap that thanks to the way our Empire is structured was and is pretty much inevitable?
Seems to me that the narrow pseudo-legalisms just provide convenient cover for some pretty huge horrors.
Don't forget the divorces, and the really sad instances when the vets are somehow driven to "light up" their families before they "take out" themselves... But the Big Sh_ts, who administer all this Bitter Medicine of Necessariness To Protect And Advance US Security and Interests, pretty obviously are a callous bunch, who can weep the crocodile tears at the funerals and on TV, while ripping our limbs off, hiding our carcasses in some noisome hole under a bank, and gulping down and digesting the corpse at their leisure...
"Nation-building," as defined by a Policy Colonel in the US Army:
The United States has conducted nation-building operations since 1898 and does so in a uniquely American way. Nation-building is the intervention in the affairs of a nation-state for the purpose of changing the state’s method of government and when the United States pursues these efforts there is one goal – democratization.
The command structure grows out of the force structure, and vice versa, and out of the "inspirations" of all those smart people who design weapons and uniforms and transport and the whole flux of DogmaBabble.
And, it's not news, I think, that being able to kick ass and take names in tactical warfare (once you bribe enemy warriors to drive your trucks full of fuel and munitions to the Battlespace instead of blowing them up), kicking in doors and whupping up on dudes with funny hats and individually operated weapons gets bragging rights and unit citations and medals and weepy funerals. But it doesn't mean that what your force structure can do is in any way lined up with any of the useful human activities that even serve the purpose of advancing Imperial dominion. Let alone pacification.
Really beautiful hammer. Totally the wrong tool for any kind of useful work, except breaking things...
Gotta love the expression of "our national interest, as so woefully displayed here and in so many other places. 51,000 x 2.1 million = a giant middle finger extended by the likes of Petraeus and Clapper and even Saints Hillary and Barack, right in the faces of all the rest of us.
But not to worry: these tapeworms and tumors are only killing those of us they don't blast dierctly very slowly. So we won't fail to fund them and their perversions and predations with our loyal or subservient multiple tithes and offerings, including our bodies and those of our children, before they reach their own comfortable ends... and le delugewon' t occur, they expect, until the clock reads "apres them..."
I hate to break character, but I think there is a little hope for our species.
Not that there's any great reason to root and cheer for "US," since the misfortunes of random biology built on the genetic base we inherit will always produce human tapeworms and liver flukes and other parasites, and of course the predators, that always glom onto power. And no amount of tinkering by "really smart people" who only know just enough to be profitably dangerous will fix that genetic inheritance.
But a lot of "ordinary people" have started to heal the wounds the Kleptosociopathicrats have slashed in that complexity that "we" reductio-ad-absurdam as "the economy." And in smallness and in odd corners of the planet, quite a few of us are looking for ways to build ourselves into a different, healthier and sustainable presence.
The plutokleptocrats are all "Apres moi le deluge" pathogens, who could care less if the planet, and the human overpresence thereon that they suck off of, dies off. The Kochs and Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein and Nioxon and Cheney and the Bush League and even Obama, like Stalin and Pol Pot and Leona Helmsley and William Casey and the Shah and many, many others, get to live high, abuse others big-time, and die in comfort and ease. The whole fundamental problem, from my little perspective, is lack of consequences that matter. Unlike our individual bodies, there are no sufficient immune systems in place, no homeostatic mechanisms to speak of, to drive the soma in the direction of survival and health. There are no consequences, since the "healthy tissue" is led to believe first that the tumor cells and pathogens are no threat, and second that "the rule of law" will eventually result in policing up the disease processes. A vain belief, a naive hope, when the disease process, like many cancers and various auto-immune disorders, co-opts the immune system to help them swing the wrecking ball and pick through the rubble for edible bits. And eventually, the larger body's resources are exhausted, so even the energy to renew and refresh is gone into gluttony and titillation of the parasites.
When I worked for the EPA, decades ago, there was a report of a village in some "undeveloped" estuarine place where a post-national giant chemical corporation's "suits" bribed "the government" to allow construction of a big chemical plant, unburdened by even rudimentary "externality controls." The result was gross pollution, with multiple persistent toxins, of the ecology from which the inhabitants had been drawing their sustenance for millennia. Multiple pleas to "the government" to stop the killing resulted in deferral, delay and deception, a downward cascade of bribes to buy off the nascent leaders, goons in action, all that stuff. Eventually, the "locals" did the other thing, broke into the plant one balmy subtropical night and burnt it to the ground. (Any idea what happens under the TPP if something like that happens in the future? The locals have to pay to rebuild, and eat the toxins, right?)
But there are some of us (now well identified in the Overlord databases, of course) who do wish and work for Better, as opposed to MORE... Hence that crippling bit of Hope that we ain't headed for a Overlord-triggered K-T-class (now "K-Pg") event... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event
"Radical?" Labels are such delicate and dangerous things -- this aging curmudgeon would offer that the thoughts of Dr. Cole are right in line with what used to be called "conservatism." Even Burke might agree with the observations in Dr. Cole's post.
Any votes on a label, neologistical or traditional, that might more accurately describe our faux "patriots" and "capitalists?"
And I have to observe that there ain't ANYTHING IMAGINARY about the infestation of the planet by the Matrix-ites and their grim (Mr. Bill) or smug (Joe from Wherever) apologists. Who will insist that the headline terminology above is inappropriately inaccurate, according to the definitions they insist upon in order to win their points, to describe Our Great Democracy, that is, after all, only trying to ensure the necessary and appropriate upward flood of wealth to plenish, and re-plenish, and re-re-plenish the armories, and induce the lower orders to enlist and be one of The Few and The Strong, to muster and step out smartly to manifestly spread more of its exceptional "democratic" self all over the planet: "Terris est omnis divisa in partes sex..." http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/africacommand.htm (let's remember that sex sells ANYthing)
When it comes to killing civilians and that huge military part of our Imperium, I kind of question the "U.S." personification. Maybe many US citizens, both civilians and many GIs, don't want to have Our Forces kill "civilians" (though they have no problem killing, or nodding at the killing of, "Unlawful Enema Combatants" or other fellow humans, referred to as "bugsplat" by the cognoscenti, whether fellow citizens or not, for whom the propaganda groundwork "supporting" that killing has been well laid, or just out of indifference.)
The fact remains indisputable, that for all the thin patina of red-white-and-blue high ideals we let ourselves believe forms our true colors, there are plenty of folks among "us" who think nothing of killing others, for sport as well as "in war" as we want to think of it, the hot "Call of Duty" combat. Spend some time with youtube helmet-cam and Apache and Hellfire videos if you disagree, for just one source. When stressed and threatened GIs are sent on fools' errands into other people's terrain, and can't easily tell "civilians" from "Taliban" and other fine distinctions, or are sitting at the pilot's console of a Reaper or Predator, it's all too easy to just "light 'em up," and there are more than sufficient examples to show this ain't always just some "fog of war" savagery, but callous and intentional whoopery.
The cynical "generals" and rulers who run all this know very well that "we" are nothing like our comforting propaganda tells us we are. Far from it. So they, as you say, "get away with murder," because the legalists and "Realists" define such killing as "not murder," and most of the rest of us are befuddled and/or morally compromised ourselves. With no consequences, so nothing will change.
Aside from that cramped and narrow and dishonest John Yoo-style reading-out of "international law and the Law of War," bearing in mind that "the law" in that whole arena is subject to US claims of convenient (in)applicability (including reserving all discretion, and not even being signatories to a lot of the salient documents), and that of course it's possible to come to the exact opposite conclusion with a much clearer logical pathway, and conscience too -- dare one point out that not even the "tests" of "legality" prescribed here ("as long as appropriate measures were taken to minimize civilian casualties, and as long as such casualties are proportionate to the military objective achieved") can even arguably be said to have been met? Or maybe the puny "military objectives," very questionably "achieved" except by limiting definitions, when measured "proportionately" to the expenditures, let alone the significance of results, lead to "justification" on the ground that only a "puny" number of civilians have been killed.
Completely ignoring the damage done to any hope of actually advancing any kind of "international law and order," by the arrogance, and invitation to emulation by other nasty, greedy, dishonest, sneaky, violent humans, of "our" rulership. But then the whole nub of the Game is domination, extraction, decimation, from a nice safe smug smarmy position, immune to consequences -- right? All part of "the national interest" in "maximum freedom of action," right? 'Cuz we cain't do nothin' else, right? And besides, when it really starts hitting the fan, "I'll be gone and you'll be gone," right? Comfortably consequence-free?
Gee, I guess we can dismiss the notion that blasting people with Hellfires launched from our increasingly autonomous Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace Procured And Turned Loose "Terminator" devices might have elements of "illegality" and "war crime" status attached to them, because the credibility of all those who have pointed out the idiocy and frank badness of the "policy" and the arrogant Imperialism and freakish hypermilitarization behind it hinges on and is destroyed by Bill's characterization of one comment about one "68-year-old grandmother" who happened to be on one person's mind when interviewed.
And what is that noise about how those wanting to report and reveal the killings are a sneaky, suspect, "self-selected group with an agenda"? So the report "cannot be considered completely unbiased"? How about the reports generated by the guys who run the drone and Special Ops programs? Proven not only biased, but deceptive and full of lies? Put that with your recent contention that "security elements" of the "regime" in Pakistan were in cahoots with our war managers, so any complaints, about "the US" fracturing Pakistani sovereignty or making murderous trouble via droning 'n stuff, by elected officials or other parts of the executive there, are thereby rendered meaningless...
There's a thin reed waving in the wind here, but it's not the killing and reporting of the death of Manama Bibi.
But don't let any of that deter you from trying to distract the rest of us and steer the discussion off the edge, while persisting in trying to make a case for our present and past rulers and their short-term-personally-profitable if idiotic games...
One has to admire the tenacity and disingenuity of the rear guard in fighting off any attacks on or challenges to or even questions about the indisputable US (actually, largely post-US these days) plutokleptocracy and their various forces and presences. Pick a paragraph from the pending post and try to make it sound risibliculous via straw men, red herrings, subtle ad hominems and the other tools of bloggerimpeachment, together with little condescending pats on the back like "undermines any positive things he may have to say." Backed up by unsupported and often insupportable "authoritative assertions."
The Chinese may be doing a better job of gutting Africa than "we" are, but it's only because "we" are lumbering idiots trying to force-fit the tools of militarization and "our" affection for sneaky-petery and skulduggery onto the hubs and levers of those too corrupt, arbitrarily Imperially defined, "nation-states" over there...
Maybe if our Crackpot Realists and inveterate invertebrate Great Gamers who could or could not care less about degrading the habitability of the Game Board (except as an extractable profit center and Taken Teritory) could be brought around to declaring Climate Change and its agents and agencies to be Unlawful Enemy Combatant Terrorist Insurgent Revolutionaries, we all might learn What Is To Be Done to rectify It-All... though without those satisfying videos of people being shot in the head or blown up, and vehicles being reduced to blood-and-tissue-smeared scrap metal, and cities rubble-ized, and all the chest-thumping-and-bumping and back-slapping and fanny-patting and grim satisfaction stuff, it's obviously a hard sell.
It's like "the national interest:" means whatever the speaker means by it. O forget which Lewis Carroll character said it, Bill knows of course, but as with a lot of us who can get derailed over definitions of words like "genocide," and look away from all the corpses, "Words mean exactly what I want them to mean." Couple that with the way we critters think and assess and emote, and you have people wearing made-in-China nylon US Flag-motif panties all hot to amend the Constitution to supet-duper outlaw "Flag burning." Leaving skid marks is apparently true-red-white-and-blue.
Who is "our?" Lots of GIs and "Christians" hold to the tenet that "The only good Arab/Muslim/Librul/whatever is a dead one." Ask a Native American how it worked, for (economic) reasons...
You are never, ever going to stop lying about that " theory" you keep trying to hang on me. Goes to credibility, right? Anonymity is a great place to snipe from, isn't it? Why so important to spend such efforts to ad-hom impeach this little person? Concerned about being caught in other misrepresentations?
"Some of them even have the gall to come on television from time to time to urge more killing."
Hey, you do what you know how to do and what you're good at and what you get paid for, all right? A guy (or gal) has to make a living, okay?
One wonders how many deaths and how much illness and suffering in Iran (other than assassinations, of course) are traceable to "US" blockade and embargo. The faux moralists will point out that it's only the common people who suffer -- their elite (like ours) is immune, as Saddam and the Ba'athists were, to the actions and imposts and assaults that are supposed to result in regime (or at least behavior) change...
/waiting now for the Crackpot Realists to tell "us" why the "gradualism" and "verification" and "segue" they espouse in removing "UN sanctions" and US-initiated economic and cyber warfare against the presumed entity they call "Iran" are "wise policy," and of course all "legal" under the "international law" that "we" turn to occasionally, when it suits some momentary undefined "national interest" or other...Anything other than "because," or "that's just the way we play the Game"?/
No obsession, Joe, now or the last time you tossed that canard.
It just seems to me, on some observation, that you are among the set of subtle, sneaky apologists for Empire, particularly the Present President and his people ("Syria? Worked out just how he planned it!"), an anonymous guy who makes presumptively "authoritative" assertions without support, probably was on the debate team, and knows a lot of tricks when it comes to nudging and warping the discourse in this and other forums. Like throwing past apologists and imperialists under the bus, retreating to "goodness" from time to time, showing crocodilian compassion when it suits...
You claim serious interest in "policy" discussions? Looks more like long, careful efforts to steer the discussion to favor How It's Being And Been Done, adding a dash, for us unbeneficed rabble, of learned and induced hopelessness that anything can be changed. There's already more than enough "lean and hungry men" dishonesty in the world not to try to call it out, and as you might say, it's "patently, inarguably, obviously clear" that subtle and covert and anonymous people, coupled with a carefully cultivated bovine incuriosity and placidity or xenophobia for most, and vulpine cupidity and disingenuity for the few (see Koch, et al.), have turned the sum of human interactions into a pretty horrific game that is wasting the planet Somebody gave us, and helping us kill and gas and concuss and maim and poison each other on an industrial scale. For personal profit? Out of meanness? Hard to tell, with the anonymous deliverers of so many apothegms...
But who's counting? See how the "plausible excusability" defense is built right into the statements of "fact?" This guy is almost as good as the post-coaching Oliie "Don't cry for me, America" North...
Those "obstructionists" are actually enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. They know how to leave the impression they are just abiding by "the rules," which obviously can easily be gamed. Those folks know that unlike them, the rest of are dependent in so many ways on the belief in the legitimacy of our rulership and the existence of an ordered system of laws. It's one of the horrible weaknesses of ordinary people that leaves them subject to stripping and robbing, by parasites and predators who know there are no consequences for them...
I guess sponsoring a nuclear power plant for the Shah "we" installed, and selling weapons to both sides in the Gulf tinderbox, were some of those "friendly actions" toward Iran you snarked about above...
It's hard to tell with Joe, he's as subtle and diverse as George Will, but I took his comment to be /snark./ Since while the Hezbollahans may have a lot of mostly unguided rockets, they don't appear to have any helicopters. And of course Joe would know that smaller choppers generally have skids, not wheels (hence no "brake pads"), and larger ones don't put much stress on their wheeled landing gear unless they have to "land hot" due to something like a recoverable tail rotor failure. Unlike F-4s and F-14s that we sold to Iran back in the day, that "our" war industry actually arranged to build IN IRAN, on nice profitable assembly lines set up there. The F-4s and -14s land at around 125 knots, and have to bring 15 or 20 tons of metal and weapons and fuel to a stop in 8,000 feet or so, so brake pads get used up and are very flight-critical.
Multi-variate, all right, mostly about money, and human venality, and stupidity. But deadly serious.
Maybe they should have sent him a Bible with a handsome inscription by Obama. And some Hawk missiles, 'n stuff.
Lest anyone forget or not learn how the Great Game is played, there's a whole literature on the "Iran-Contra Affair," so-called. Of which this is just one little unintentionally humorous snippet:
"MCFARLANE TOOK CAKE AND BIBLE TO TEHERAN, EX-C.I.A. MAN SAYS"
This is how the "grown-ups" conduct "policy." The folks with purely economic interests, the MIIC for example, are a whole lot more focused, skilful and diligent in "Never Forgetting Who They Are Working For."
"Hamas government devotes massive resources..." Huh? Oh, I get it now, Grady. That was a bit of "heavy" irony, right?
A bit of a dense pun?
Not real easy to figure out pricing FOB Gaza, but concrete in the US gets delivered for a couple of hundred bucks a ton. Even if it's US$1000, that's $50,000. Compared to the concrete the US taxpayer pays for to build all those walls and other "exfrastructure" into the occupied territories, and even compared to the tiny national wealth of Gaza as limited by "Israeli wrongs," it's a drop in the bucket.
You got any "pre-stressed" proof that that tunnel was part of some murderous plot? Other than op-eds and MSM articles here and there? Presuming "dual use" is supposed to be a no-no... Just curious, I am not an Insider.
And of course many "terrorist organizations" morph, over time, into "legitimate" political and social participants. Take Irgun and Likud, for instance... er, maybe some other examples...? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
Ah, yes, "there is no hard evidence," but "common sense suggests." And "common sense" suggested Saddam had WMD, and was "supporting terrorists..." And lots of other stuff, like how "austerity" will save the world's economies from something or other...
Did I not read that the flow of "economic migrants" from Mexico and points south into the US fell off dramatically with two changes: The massive theft of real wealth that was the 2008 economic dump, and the increase in healthy economic activity and opportunity in Those Little Countries? Not a perfect and universal phenomenon, but a set of reasons for measurable change in body counts across the Rio Grande...
But there's a ready prescription, of course, in the form of jolly avuncular advice to those little nations over there in the EU to "tighten up their laws..."
Interesting how the burden of proof is dropped so glibly and primly and heavily on the backs of anyone pointing out that the Surveillance State is, on its face and as applied, a very bad idea. One would think that this kind of blanket and covert "adhesion" revision to the social contract ought to be justified, with massive proofs of utility, by those who are forcing it on us...
I am shocked, shocked I say, to hear that our fellow humans are capable of such predatory and short sighted perfidy! That continent is manifestly destined to be OURS to despoil!
All this effort by a few to actually try to "make the world a better place," so easily undone by the Kochs of every ethnicity and "race." I guess the smart money is on grabbing all I can for myself NOW, knowing I'll then be comfortably and " successfully" dead before the rest of you run out of Soylent Green... all the rest of this is just chin music and window dressing.
Our guys study Sun Tzu, then pretty much do the opposite, behind a flood and smokescreen of Milbabble very-expensive pseudo-Dogmatic justification. Because MONEY, and position, and tradition...
And let me add that when there was active criminal enforcement of environmental and public health laws (most of which have since been Changed to "soften" them, by a variety of mechanisms that are all part of "regulatory capture"), one could actually perceive a real change (even if marginal) in the behavior of corporate Suits whose lawyers had not figured out how to corrupt and evade the "immune system" yet. Once they did, well hey, it's just like cancer or Staph infections: the immune system goes "poot," the patient dies...
Thanks for that, MaryMac. As a former federal environmental enforcement attorney (13 years with the EPA), I can only vigorously second what you say here. And add that a whole lot of the people doing this, out of habit and that "profit" thing that "everyone knows" is "good," are murderers too -- they know what they are up to will kill and sicken people, most of whom have no clout to protect them, including a "regulatory structure" that mostly and simply adjusts claims between "big economic actors." There are even people who happily apologize for the predation, saying that "it protects our sacred way of living."
From the size of the response to this post, among other indicia, you can get a little sense of how likely it is that any of this s__t will Change...
(Interesting that an anagram of "sacred" is "scared...")
Once again, some informed people might disagree with that claim of subservience of SOCOM -- maybe that's just a definition thing again, though, if the claim is limited only to the lines on the organizational chart.
It's nothing but a pretext to claim that all the stuff the Gamers do, ours and theirs and the other guys over there, behind a shallow screen of "legality" and "good sense," and consistency with the surficial notions of "patriotic and constitutional rightness," or just because Power, is "under control."
Until and unless enough of the people who pay for all this start to get it, that they are being "had," once again, by would-be and actual feudal monarchs and barons who take full advantage of the weaknesses of our emotions and motivations, until we learn some healthier ways to accumulate and direct and discharge the "power" that inheres in any system, maybe just by institutionalizing the Golden Rule (and I have no idea how humans will do that, since the "religious" powers qnd "economists" have so corrupted the moral impulses of so many), it's going to be More Of The Same. How do we de-fund and de-fang the Beast, when it controls the channels of commerce and uses our deep, ordinary-person need for "law and order" against us?
Not many people want to see how their hamburger is butchered, or step out of Plato's Cave, or peer into the darkness of the East and West Wings of the Oval Office Theatre and its equivalents. What's the old verse? "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in nature that is ours./We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon."
There is a voice from the grave, one Joe tried to hijack not so long ago, Wilfred Owen, the Brit poet who died in the effing trenches of WW I:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
[It is sweet and fitting to die for the Homeland.]
Nobody makes you read, DMOL. I just write what seems correct to me. Everyone has an opinion, and that other thing too (unless one has had an ostomy.)
Costa Rica is in there purely because the country supported a very decent, socially kind, well educated culture (with the usual but sparse warts) without a standing army or "national" police force from 1948 after yet another coup. Until, of course, the US Marines, with its proud history of defending corporatokleptocracy ("War is nothing but a racket," again) in Those Little Countries, once again landed an "anti-drug" Expeditionary Force of 7,000 troops and 40-plus "littoral combat vessels," supposedly "at the invitation of" a government and population that HAS no army and does not see the utility in one, and where an opposition party that will kick the US out if they are voted in.
Of course, the True Believer/Apologist response is that they HAVE an army -- the US, which supposedly supplies "security umbrellas" to countries all over the place, whether they like it or not, the opening of which releases all kinds of "anti-democratic" lightning and rain ... all part of MAKING the world a place that is dangerous and drug-threatened and therefore "needs" a Kelley-Bloomberg-thinking "policeman"... talk about deals with the Devil...
DMOL, there from two Authoritative Sources is the answer to your questioning the question I posed, "WHAT Libyan government?" Getting "elected" in some way or other, reported widely as signaling "democracy in action," surprisingly often does not mean you actually get to run things. Opportunities for corruption and a nice retirement, and attention from Great Gamers, well, of course.
Does "armed extremism in Libya" include the "polite" attack on the CIA/Embassy persons in Benghazi?
Glad Zeidan has "made bail," or whatever the equivalent is. Here's some context for Zeidan's "arrest," that seems related to having some US Special Ops or whoever ABDUCT a Libyan citizen (though US media are calling that an "arrest," too, though by what "legal authority" is not clear -- maybe "Might Makes Right?"):
And how many US-ans have any awareness, in a world pastiched with US "Areas of Operations" and "Commands" under the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace that covers all, and thousands of "bases" and "sites," of places like Wheelus AFB near Tripoli, a nice place for Air Force Forces and their families from 1945 to 1969?
"The Years of Wheelus
By Walter J. Boyne
Recent events spark memories of what had been USAF’s jewel in North Africa."
Two interesting notions: "The government did not move fast enough to train a new nationalist military." And, "Oddly, it seemed to get little help with training from the US and Western Europe."
First, re the "it" called Libya, "WHAT government?" Following that, are there examples of "nationalist militaries" in other itNations that have 'brought (or imposed) calm and order' to those places (absent a basic underlying comity and stability and functioning set of economic relationships?) The Neocon (or Soviet?) notion is that you smash the existing order (or insert "US Interests" into one that's already inchoate or shattered, bring in Halliburton and Erik Prince and the Spooks, and voila! after a few trillion dollars, you have a "trustworthy, loyal, [omit "helpful, friendly, courteous and kind"] obedient, cheerful, [omit "thrifty"] brave, clean and reverent" 'national' military and 'national' police. Where has that happened? It's a persistent policy Pollyanna-ism, or maybe just propaganda smokescreen to keep the Game going... [long, with disturbing images] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3keRxRbso
"Nationalist militaries" seems a bit of an oxymoron, since large militaries have their own dynamics and interests (see, e.g., Egypt, Japan, the US, even Canada) and are built on obedience to a strong authoritarian structure. The chimaerical, miasmic, phantasmagorical "goal" is "democracy," but what possible model is there for "imposing democracy" by "encouraging a nationalist or even national military?" And modern "national police forces" are long on force and pseudo-militarianism, short on protecting any "rights" other than the Sacred Right to Property (of the Owners, that is.)
As to the "failure" of the West to bring "training" to somehow meld or weld the disparate and often warring bits of an itNation ("Libya does or thinks this," "Israel does or thinks that," "the US is behind the other thing,) where is the exemplar of Western involvement or intervention that's led to the presumed functioning of a "nationalist military" in anything other than the worst ways? Egypt? Iraq? Afghanistan? Yemen? The Phillipines? Argentina? Costa Rica? Seems to me the model itself is just smoke and mirrors to distract from the shall we say downsides of global militarization, where the rest of us are cannon fodder, "bugsplats," or "guest workers" in our own itNations, just working to support and feed and grow the military culture? Like this? "Herding Aphids: How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071009212548.htm
The evil of overbearing patriarchalism is everywhere, it would seem. (Women do it too, of course, maybe less often and virulently, under other names.) Too bad we humans way too often give in to and join on to the notion that G_D mandates all the crap that Pastor/Imam/Rebbi Billy Joshua Achmed say has been REVEALED to them, laid on their obedient hearts, all that stuff.
Thanks, Dr. Cole, for so many things that appear and get noticed here. Thanks today for that wonderfully succinct skewering of "neoliberalism," that sick misnomer.
One wonders if a big part of the orchestrated drum-pounding and chest-thumping noise about "Sharia Law," in addition to plain old xenomiseophobia, is the Islamic version of the Uniform Commercial Code. That apparently outlaws and applies various penalties to the kinds of behaviors that have created such a large part of the "economies" of all our Western debtor nations and the huge and apparently uncontrollable supra- and post-national "financial industry" kleptocracy, nations subject to the "ownership societies" that, with covert Koch-urging, Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, the Bush League and now even the Obamites and Merkel GmBH and that British boika have forced on the rest of us. Prohibitions and penalties of the sort that our rentiers and interest-gatherers and peddlers of debt and eaters of common resources could not endure. And have been so very successful at closing off, regulatorily capturing or simply sneering at, having stripped the cojones and more skilled enforcers out of the various governments, one way or another. http://www.islamicinvestmentnetwork.com/sharialaw.php
This is just one little part of the stuff that lies behind the Potemkin facade of the Great Patriotic Game that so many tapeworms live off of while bush-wah-ing and rah-rah-ing the rest of us into tribal frenzies.
Quite an effectively subtle riposte, Joe. Might one turn the question around and ask you the same thing? And what the internal moral (il)logic of your analogy is supposed to be?
Maybe we are jealous because the terrorist salient carried out by the US-sponsored Contras in Nicaragua didn't work out as well? Or UNITA's gentle ministrations? Lots of other examples to pick from, on all "sides..."
And for people interested in context and detail, beyond the usual everyone-ought-to-know Authoritative Assertions, there's a lot to ponder. Here's just one example of maybe more comprehensive analysis of Who Shot Ahmad Who Shot Mohammed Who Shot Ahmal, from googling "al quaeda's role in iraq sectarian violence"...
Repeat it often enough, and it becomes the "truth." Right? And I see, under the heading of "unconventional weapons," that the Assad forces are now using fuel-air explosives to fry and blast school children. Is that going to raise a similar hue and cry with raised Tomahawks?
Interesting how a relatively few human critters can create so much Grim And Serious-Sounding Idiocy, and so much misery for so many others, so many of whom, blessed with the brains and souls G_D gave them, seem just unable to do anything other than just go along...
As I recall it, this kind of language is just a part of the lexicon and arsenal of the Great Game. Tit, "axis of evil, " for tat, " the great Satan. You Players, who so shamelessly whip up tribal Furors with your propaganda and "wars of choice, " ought to pipe down about now, since the whole system you have set up is near to strangling the planet. You "grown-ups" who have been using the world's lunch money, breathable air and potable water, and our ordinary-person muscles and blood, as the markers and Monopoly Money of your so-Serious Game, and are such prideful masters of deception, skuduggery, overthrow and undermining and installation of "friendly" dictators, might ought to eschew hypocritical false equivalences in pitching for your team...
People hang in groups. Groups tend to change, membership, motivations, all that stuff. One pathway for so many, where the groundwork is in place, thanks to history or intervention, is "militant nationalism." One expression of that might be some small part of what's going on in Syria, and elsewhere. Maybe this little report is part of it:
"A Syrian solution to civil conflict? The Free Syrian Army is holding talks with Assad's senior staff -- Secret approach to the President could reshape the whole war"
Super, for what it's worth, a family member has a pre-existing condition, a potentially fatal one if treatment is not continuous, and one that requires daily meds that are expensive only because the manufacturer makes a huge profit off un-negotiable pricing. She fortunately can still work, and has currently affordable employer-managed coverage. Her employer has just been bought by a HUGE national "health UNsurance" monster, that of course operates under the US Business Model of More Work And Less Pay For Fewer Benefits, so who knows how long that will last. But under the ACA, if she loses coverage for any of the possible reasons, she and others in her situation have to first apply for and then be denied coverage by an existing for-profit monstrosity, then GO WITHOUT MEDICAL COVERAGE ENTIRELY, and that includes COBRA "extensions," for at least SIX MONTHS before even starting the process of getting the "benefit" of boughten "coverage" under the ACA. In my book, that ain't making it easier or affordable for several million people to go see a doctor. (She did have COBRA "coverage" briefly not too long ago, for $640 a month, with a big deductible and co-pays and all that.)
I, on the other hand, have both VA medical benefits, thanks to another kind of "pre-existing condition," including NO-COST medications to the extent of the VA formulary, and am now enrolled in Medicare, that costs, with the AARP supplemental coverage, $177 a month (no meds, thanks to the Part D "deal")-- due to simple survival to a certain age.
"National Security" is one of those phrases like "National Interest." And maybe "National Velvet." Bill knows what they mean, but it's apparently a state secret not to be shared except by "traitors" like Snowden, or to be damaged by maybe more closer to that mark, people like Novak and Pollard and the people who are driving the Bus of State over the prostrate bodies of the Undeserving Poor...
So much of "National Security," when a little light and air gets to it, turns out to be fraud and Folly and cigars laced with enzymes to make Castro's beard fall out. All so terribly Serious, and of course infinitely Expensive. Strong medicine, with the excuse that it was all necessary to save the patient, even if it killed her...
Too bad, for so many reasons, that "the US," as the whole lumbering thing is so Informedly and Seriously called, may be functionally incapable of what might be called "leadership."
"We" have been pretty good at playing the bully, and helping a few of us take the lunch money and blacken the eyes of other kids and strut around the block. We had a "socially impaired" teenager in my young neighborhood who did that, until one day us little kids mobbed him thanks to the leadership of one of us (not me), shamed him, and that was the end of that. That leader kid had a goal of peace in the neighborhood, at least as far as the Big Kid bullying went, and concentrated on achieving it. That ain't what "our" rulers (not leaders) are all about.
Super390 castigates some on the "Left" for simplistic cheering at the pounding and shaming of the bully, and posits the inability of the Great Game world structure to operate without some Big Kid around to twist arms up behind backs and make the little kids say "Uncle (Sam)." Agreed that there are wishful and mean idiots of all stripes, especially in an environment where the Rulers so blatantly are stealing and beating down left, right and center. "We" don't seem to have the power of actual leadership any more, since for too many years "we" have been a shallowly self-interested bully-of-many-parts, one too venal and arch in many ways and idiotic in others, just clumsy and stupid, if muscularly ponderous, to avoid being activated and directed by people like Kissinger and Netanyahoo and Karzai. "We" never seem to be "sophisticated" enough to perceive the deeper levels and chutes and ladders of the Game, let alone direct them, and the folks who seek and get power in the Bullydom game have no interest in changing the larger behaviors or rules of play.
And now "we" are discovering that all that seemingly crushing military power, from nukes to networkcentricity to nanodevices, might not be able to "defeat" those 4th Generation warriors, whether they are acting singly or in a reaction-driven bunch.
Too bad "we," all the individuals and corporate entities (including military Commands) don't have much of any interest in, or incentive to be working on, leading from real intelligence and wisdom and strength, the kind that keeps the whole tribe alive and fed, so creatures like Cheney, and elsewhere Yahoo and even Arafat, get to rise to the top and twist, and twist, and twist those little kids' arms...
What facts are those, Joe? Other than some bare assertions, that is, and a snip and a link to an article datelined June 21, 2012, regarding a place and conflict that even Martin Dempsey describes cautiously as "fluid."
I'm really curious how sending arms and ammo into a chaotic situation, where affiliations and loyalties and 'hoods reformulate faster than high-school cliques, can be "managed" to be sure only "moderates" (sic) get 'em. One has to wonder what this all means:
WSJ 9/02/13,
"US Still Hasn't Armed Syrian Rebels,"
In June, the White House authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to help arm moderate fighters battling the Assad regime, a signal to Syrian rebels that the cavalry was coming. Three months later, they are still waiting.
The delay, in part, reflects a broader U.S. approach rarely discussed publicly but that underpins its decision-making, according to former and current U.S. officials: The Obama administration doesn't want to tip the balance in favor of the opposition for fear the outcome may be even worse for U.S. interests than the current stalemate. [See how smart Obama is?]
U.S. officials attribute the delay in providing small arms and munitions from the CIA weapons program to the difficulty of establishing secure delivery "pipelines" to prevent weapons from falling into the wrong hands, in particular Jihadi militants also battling the Assad regime.
"US Weapons Reaching Syrian Rebels
...
Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who has pressed the Obama administration to do more to help the rebels, said he felt embarrassed when he met with Syrians along the Turkish border three weeks ago.
“It was humiliating,” he said in an interview Wednesday night. “The president had announced that we would be providing lethal aid, and not a drop of it had begun. They were very short on ammunition, and the weapons had not begun to flow.”
(looks like Sen. Corker wants to be the Charlie Wilson of this war) Any of the same actual terrorists that McCain so buoyantly met with?
Please reassure us that those 'pipelines,' made up of stealthy, 'clandestine,' bribe-greased air and water and truck deliveries, via what are usually described as "shadowy intermediaries," are at least as leakproof as a Deep Well in the Gulf of Mexico...
And all kinds of other stuff reported to the same effect. Over at Syriacomment.com one can find lots of stuff on how "easy" it is (not) to distinguish, day to day, "bad guys" from good guys. Almost as easy as it was in the spoooks' involvement in and the still current idiotic war in Afghanistan.
Yeah, viz. Hillary: Timmy Geithner and the rest had both "experience" and "expertise." Knowing how a bank is laid out and the mechanisms of the vault door and security systems is gained by "experience" and in certain contexts is useful "expertise..." Not necessarily a hiring recommendation.
That budgetary tap dance all makes some kind of sense if you just start the discussion way past the point where a "national actual health care rather than paying for tests, procedures and drugs and C-Suite overhead" would be considered. Which it sure seems when the actual analysts lay out the numbers would be a whole lot cheaper not only for businesses (other than "medical insurance," that is) but the rest of us too. And if people were not so damn dishonest and greedy. To the point where there are these kinds of discussions that assume that everyone ought to have to go through the idiot pain and complexity and dealing with the "Hi, my name is Suzie in the Claims Denial Department! How may I not help you today?", because hey, "Medical UNsurance" is just another consumer product, right? Subject to the normal gouging and markups and price games and "features and benefits" fol-de-rol? And anyone who resists Bidness as Usual is just a Taker, looking for a Socialist Free Ride...
Medicare, surprisingly, actually seems to "work," despite the fraud and idiotic incentives that are built, and lobbied, into the mix. Too bad about that "Part D" long-running ripoff, of course... Even VA care, hobbled by politics as it is, "works" better than the private UNsurance I once had and see in dys-operation every day as a nurse (the one group with the most insight into all this that was so pointedly kicked out of the smoke-filled rooms and lobbies.)
Can't find the link maybe both of us remember, to War Department simulations that show our vaunted military getting smacked down by "little countries," in part because of "our" clumsiness and procedure-blindness and being glued to procurement-created sets of war toys and techniques and tactics. The link's out there. No, I don't take pleasure in the discomfiture of US Might. Just sorrow at all the enormous waste and idiocy and foolish killing, to what end, again?
The term is much richer than that, and being one, I would accede to the notion that soldiers and vets are very much fall guys, under several of the flavors of that term:
You've been talking to Joseph Heller again, right? Was Will Rodgers part of the conversation too? Now, if you could only conference in George Carlin, you would really be humming on all eight cylinders...
The horror here is that those three, and you, all love the potential goodness of what we were born into. Cruz, as a momentary personification of the other sort of "citizen," is just a tapeworm.
Care to take a shot at "Freedom," and "Liberty," and "Victory!," and "Patriot," and "National Interest"? Maybe even "Terrorist/Insurgent/Rebel/Fighter (see "Freedom")/Etc."?
I actually love this American country. Particularly the version of it I learned about in civics and US History classes and Boy Scouts and even 1966-stage Army indoctrination, and stuff like that. I personally have about zero use for the Current Rulers and their apologists and troubadors.
Hiro has laid out a bunch of instances where all that Bully Power in the World does not avail those Rulers one little whit in their desire to Make Things Go Their Way and Make Everyone Else Say "Uncle-Sam." Joe picks an "impeachment" example that appears by happenstance to have "come out" in a way that actually seems to be for the greater good, albeit in spite of all the worst that active management and actual Force Placement by our Muscularists could do. And Joe applies a rather huge angular momentum to the picture. "Y'See? That was our goal all along!"
You know, there are times when it's ok to acknowledge that Bidness as Usual is just Idiotic Stupid, and it might be better, if at all possible, to recast the bureaucratic processes that attract and select and promote the people and dogmas that get advanced through the ranks to High Policy and Force Projection positions, people e.g. like Tapper and Petraeus and McChrystal and Kissinger and so forth.
There really are some existential human threats, but so far no one has come up with an Obviously Plausible Calculus that shows "more nuclear or conventional weapons, more studied camouflage on yet another billion-dollars-a-career-boosting-replacement set of BDUs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Dress_Uniform), more Navy ships, more intrusive peeping-tom-ism, more promotion of corporate greed and futility, more skulduggery, more 13,000-MPH Bomb Delivery Craft or autonomous or nanotech war toys, will "defeat" global climate change or co-opt religious fundamentalism, either here or there. Let alone defeat IEDs or "succeed" or "win" in 4th Gen warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Though the Players are pretty good at gaming the wealth-collection machinery of that country I once read about into dumping untold and unaudited common wealth into fewer and nastier pockets...
But short term "wisdom," of course, would be to suck up to the Rulers and bail out all you can, while the "gravy trickle" is still set on "10,000-year FLOOD"...
Not so long ago, someone was shouting that the US should unilaterally be blasting SOMEthing in Syria to "retaliate" presumably on behalf of the honorable Great Nations of the World and all the Little People, because SOMEone had dared to breach the sacrosanct Norm Against The Use (Though Not Apparently The Sale Of Precursor Chemicals or Gas-Making Plants Or Continued Possession) of Chemical Weapons (not much mention of biological weapons at the time).
Too bad there's not another "choice" on the blinkin' menu, like the one that thanks to age and endurance I get to make:
MEDICARE
And thanks to youthful patriotic enthusiastic idiocy and the stuff that happened to me while I was learning the Milo Minderbinder REALITY behind the BS about "Serving My Country," major service-connected disability! so, I have a backup, too:
VA HEALTH CARE
Plus a nice tiny burial allowance, and a spot in one of our national cemeteries if my loved ones want it for me. What a deal!
Nice sidestep. Seems to me and a lot of people that the TRILLIONS flowing in such a broad, deep river to the MIIC are justified by our rulers as "the price of freedom," which the threats supposedly to are an amorphous blob of Terrorists and Others. No doubt you have some accounting entry that holds the "lol War on Al Qaeda" to a puny $10 billion a year. The conduct of any of that depends on the whole Global Battlespace Thingie, with all the procurements and logistics and "intelligence" and the rest.And of course I was not writing about "just Al Quaeda," but about the whole idiotic monstrosity of Cold Warriorism.
Apologists also have nice, constantly repeated, heavily reinforced versions of "Winners' Serious History" that conveniently leave out a whole lot of embarrassing and stupid and venal and evil reality-based detail and flavor, in favor of "What we did was right and justified."
That, of course, was the Bush League THEN. As we all very well know, this is the NewObamaNO?W. And one has to acknowledge the inexorable power of bueacratic momentum-building, and the clout that all those war dollars (our only real :"jobs program) and those Hooverian dossiers makes available to the personalities that produce the endlessly repeated behaviors and End-of-Empire outcomes us ordinary people are saddled with, crushed under, and Peeping-Tom'd by.
A lot of really sharp, very self-interested people have made and kept the petro-standard dollar as the reserve currency. Human lifespans being still delimited, many of those folks will die, "Apres moi me deluge IBG/YBG" fashion, rich as Croesus on ill-gotten gains, careless of a ravaged planet. Anyone know what the next crop of Vampire Squids and Koch-ers are banking on, as their escalator to obscene wealth?
Dr. Cole, the "hawks" sure seem a lot more persistent than offered. You know about past empires, and what the militarianist cultists did to help finish off what was left of the subset of "ordinary shopkeeper and farmer albeit nationalist and Jingoist and Chauvinist civilization" that of course "served" and paid for the Krupps' 305 and 420 guns, all those Spandaus and Hotchkisses and Sacred French 75s, and "Gas! Quick boys!," and later U-boats to make new waves in the annals of interhuman over-humanity, and to spirit a set of "hawk" Nazis to South America and elsewhere with the portable stealable treasury of Europe when the crap started hitting their fan. And Hiro-saki, of course. These folks are predators with much shorter reflex times than most of us, so they are always "ahead."
Some people posting here seem committed to continuing the Game Play that appears to only have a negative-sum overall end, though personally profitable. The "hawks" seem to be doing just fine, thanks, rich and shameless and with inexhaustible patronage. The habits of thought and action of too many of us are 'invested' in More Of The Same.
It would be nice if niceness would overwhelm them, swords into Teslas and wind turbines and all that -- any way you see that happening?
What was the most obvious explanation for why the CIA tried to fill Castro's humidor with cigars laced with a substance that was supposed to make his beard fall out?
You've heard the expression, "like herding cats," right? Ever been to a gathering of do-gooders? Lots of self-esteem, flip charts and markers, horse-trading tiny bits of cooperation in ad-hoc "coalition building" between passionately committed persons each with their own little plan to save something or other.
There's a reason the effing Kochs eat caviar whenever they want to, and laugh at people who think that "stopping Keystone XL" will somehow stop the flow of that nasty PAH-laden sh__ called "tar sands oil," via OTHER piplelines or barge or truck or train. The Kochs are ORGANIZED and GREED-DRIVEN, and the other folks are too often like the parodies portrayed on "Portlandia.." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8SjkDq2ZwI
GWC: Broken record time for me again -- here's a link to what the War Department has in mind for how to "address" those nearly infinitely large problems you highlight so passionately:
Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Trends and Implications of Climate Change for National and
International Security -- October 2011
Made me sick to read it, to see what it reveals about the way our rulers view what they have set in motion, what is coming at us so quickly. Sales opportunities for US products -- weapons, and farm and construction equipment, among other wisdom. "Realists." My a__.
Bill, you are getting better at the misdirection-redirection-impeachment game.
Still wondering if you have anything to support your Obviousness = Everyone Ought To Know claim.
Sure looks from what I read like a lot of young bristly males, with their mouths full of the profanity of the invocation of G_D's greatness as they get off shooting and blowing everything up, have, as a principal part of their motivation in destroying civil society in Syria, just plain old paychecks that apparently come from various "outside sources." Including, of course, our own beloved national institutions...
"Dreadful blunders?" That characterization sort of depends on one's personal calculus of values.
It helps to "follow the money." Who gets rich and famous off the "policies?" For example: Part of US "strategy" (sic) was to pay local warriors not to shoot at "us." In A'stan it was direct: "we" wanted truck-delivered fuel and munitions at "the front," in a frontless 4th Generation war. So "we" paid warlords to pay their warriors not to attack our idiot convoys, and paid other warriors to drive the trucks. "We" paid one set of troublesome warriors in Iraq to stand down or at least attack others, a "surge" of unaccounted cash among other magical disappearances of huge amounts of wealth. "Our" great plan to Pacify and Build Nations involves paying lots more money (including to corrupt politicians and our corrupt and corrupting "training and arming contractors," that bland little phrase that obscures such ugly reality) to inhabitants of "those little countries over there" to become "national police" and "national armies" which for some reason never "works out" as advertised (though maybe as intended.)
In our own country, our own fundamentalist radicals have gained power and prominence and infiltrated and occupied our military and civilian-corporate leadership by being On Task and On Message with a limited set of appealing, quasi-religious idiocies and a strong organizing and warfare-oriented approach to politics.
Some nominal "Americans" have learned very well a whole profitable set of lessons from earlier salients and strategems. You maybe assume, Munir, that "we US Imperial Citizens" collectively are actually at all interested in "doing good," as ordinary people elsewhere, who themselves I might add have their own imperfections, might understand the term...
And rafts of other digested (and otherwise) source items. Which might not altogether comport with the Serious Obvious Explanation. How to stop it? kind of like trying to stop the heating and dispersion of the melted nuclear fuel out there at Fukushima...
But... but... what's the big deal? Isn't the It Thing called Iran our Sworn Enemy, currently? And since when is it not ok to do anything we want to Our Enemy? We have been assured that all that suffering and death, after all ,snark, snigger, by Other People at least, was "worth it."
The US has a nuclear WEAPONS program, an enormous one, and "leads" (very, very sic) the world in arms sales and military expenditures. And exports "race to the bottom, steal all you can" corporate behaviors, and "world economic collapse" financial-industry moral-risk-rich "technology."
What does that say about OUR identity, and the incredible haughty disingenuous arrogance of dictating to others, by blockade, stealth, skulduggery, and threats and actual kinetic applications of violence, what their identities are supposed to look like?
(Must start adding snark tag to sarcastic comments). I personally think the UN has a chance at becoming the Hope of Nations, and maybe even the skeleton of a newer and healthier human body politic. That of course would mean a bunch of mean, selfish, violent, sneaky SOBs abandoning all the skulduggery and hypocrisy and rent- and advantage-seeking that characterizes the Crapola mess that the "Realists" have wrought, so exceedingly finely detailed and vicious.
One sort of has to admire the tenacity of the Apologists and Anonymous Apparent Insiders Ashamed To State Their Resumes who post here so persistently, in favor of More Of The Same and with a heavy message that the way it's being done is the best we can do. They and their subtle and overbearing efforts show how strong is the seductive power of adherence to the idiotic, planet-burning Empire-After-Empire, with its inherent short-term and long-term and short-sighted advantages and benefits for the Krupps and Kochs and Adelsons and Netanyahoos and McChrystals and suchlike and a death watch for the rest of us.
What a gullible bunch we are. So the guy made a speech at the UN. It's not like nobody else has ever done that, and lied through their carefully polished teeth with just about every word they uttered. This is the UN, fer crissake! Don't you know what a den of snakes that is? We should have gotten out decades ago (though you have to acknowledge that if managed properly, it does provide some cheap convenient moral cover and pseudo-legality for stuff we really want to do.)
Seems the Wiki notion is that a kind of intellectual sandpaper will get applied to a handy accumulation of mofre or less "scholarly" statements of this or that fact or notion. Facts and notions that, as in all the more traditionally published and vicious word wars between "experts" and "scholars" of all kinds, whose arrogant insistences that they or their school are sole holders of the Truth, so often prove to be, ahem, "crap." Wiki invites anyone with useful knowledge and expertise to fill in the blanks, add the caveats, present the countervailing bits, and other parts of the running debate that is scholarship.
And it's not perfect, because as anyone who looks at personalities and issues knows, people like, say, I don't know, maybe Joe, will take the opportunity to "edit," and not for disinterested scholarship reasons, particular articles to favor particular viewpoints. Libertarians and, ah, "conservatives" and those who, er, "favor" the "administration" of our increasingly ratty Empire in all its Kleptocratic, Leviathan, Panopticon, Juggernautian parts, seem to be among the most common players in that game. And of course entries on stuff like "Israel" and other stuff that lives on various misrepresentations get their share of polishing.
Wiki is not perfect, but most articles include a set of links that let the Careful, Serious Historian or Scholar dig a little deeper into the topic. And it's one frustration for the folks who claim to have the exclusive Truth, based on their Serious version of the world and its events and unfortunate inhabitants -- the Serious ones who maybe know about those events from "participation," and for various reasons want or need to color them to fit a particular Narrative. While insisting they are the only ones who are "serious historians," versus anyone extracting a different story from a different, maybe larger and more complete, maybe less colored and biased, set of facts. Since despite claims to the contrary, "history" is still "the story told by the winners," and way too many cases, in service to the "winners."
C'mon, Bill -- The only people who get to play that "we have to behave that way on account of internal politics" card is of course US. And let us gloss right over, in the smug comment-erie floating up off this "diplomatic slight," that Obama's the titular head of an Empire that so very clearly has been planning what its own planners say, sub silentio, would be a disastrous (to US) massive "kinetic" war against a country that the US is already attacking via cyberspace and the trenches and battlements of "the world economy."
Oh, pshaw -- it's all too complicated to sort out. Where's the TV remote, honey?
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
Bill criticizes others for, ah, "not reading" the links they post. This Economist article, from a source with shall one say a conservative bias, actually says, in part:
MOST FATA residents? Maybe not, eh? And there's a whole lot of complexities that branch off from the central misrepresentation that one hopes might appear in our Rulers' briefings on "ground truth," though that won't change their behavior, just the propaganda...
...and " for now" is all Dick Cheney and Lloyd Blankfein and probably even Barack H. Obama and of course all those rake-it-in TV preachers, along with too many of the rest of us, actually cares about. Middle finger to the planet and any posterity, with a hearty "What ya gonna do about it? Huh, bubbie? I'll be gone!"
Not just "first responders," how about hitting funeral processions too?
One, of many many, bits of context: http://www.businessinsider.com/us-drone-tweets-reveal-double-tap-plan-2012-12
Try googling (or your favorite less evil browser) "double-tap drone strikes." Not too hard to find, eh? Hundreds of entries, with lots of outward links, from a lot of sources, not all of which are self-referential, with and without outrage au jus...
Of course, one can diffuse and defuse the controversy by claiming that "security elements" of the array of bits called, clumsily and incompletely, "the government" of Pakistan are all okay with this, supposedly (so what if the elected Ministries are, ah, NOT okay), without bothering to cite any basis. And blow further past the fundamental question of "Basic Idiocy and Breach of Sovereignty and even Moral Badness" by spending hours debating whether the CIA's "own drone program" (bought by us idiot taxpayers) is doing this, or the military's own drone program (also bought by us idiot taxpayers). Both of which, of course, are "security elements" of the array of bits called, clumsily and incompletely and in a fog of deniability, "the government" of the US Empire....
They might make him actually pay for them (if they had them to sell, and wanted to stir the pot.) Hey, the NYT/Congressional hearing routine works for Yahoo -- why not for other client states? And besides, Boeing and the mechanisms of "sale" of these sexy war toys, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofgWvKNEZqs, always manage to add a little sweetener, a little dash of baksheesh, to every transaction.
Anyone else sick unto death of the depth of the corruption? The idiocy of all this?
Touched a nerve, did he?
But, and it's a big BUT, as you do note, "we" do indeed have a "horrible history of American corporate imperialism," a big part of which is the whole "War is nothing but a racket" theme that actually people seem to be starting to recognize as a pretty good descriptor of the whole Milo Minderbinder Enterprise. Where "everyone has a share" of the costs, and a tiny set has the assets and income of the whole. And where, as with our corporate War Machine that happily sells weapons and the other toys of war to pretty much anyone all over the planet, the "syndicate" will happily bomb its own troops for cost plus 15% (plus unauditable "other expenses...")
Does that the moral vacuum and horror of all that other stuff get erased because in your estimation ignoring the Palestinians (and so many others, or actively abusing them) "does not prove racism"? (For all you charming "Call of Duty" freaks, here's a nice entry point for some Really Cool Video of Action! (tm) Wonder how many GIs with combat experience tune in to "Call of Duty" and similar obscenities?)
What a masterful misdisplay of ratiocination. What's the logical flaw here? I'm sure you know...
One has to ask how pristine one's past and present behaviors are, or what one's past and/or present anonymous but implicitly important position is, that the kind of scrutiny that gets so variously applied by State Security to the rest of us gives no qualms and makes such facile false analogies so easy to emit...
"no competent intelligence organization..." Looks like, on the basis of this little episode and a whole century of mostly idiocy, that one little adjective, "competent," is the root of the whole problem.
What are these self-serving, self-aggrandizing a__holes SUPPOSED to be doing, to "keep us safe?" What are they ACTUALLY doing, with all the money and clout? Making a nice safe playpen for a bunch of idiots who are playing games that would make even Dan Brown or Clancy, let alone John le Carré, wince and duck for cover. Aren't "we" proud of what "we" have managed to wreak?
The first rule of "intelligence" is that there are no rules.
Welcome to the best of what humans do, at the end of consequences, at the end of Empire...
...and Brian demonstrstes so aptly the belief structure and level of information that kind of guarantees that a few of us humans will live in the crassest of self-indulgent opulence for their lifetimes, free of the consequences that the rest of us, and any future generations, will have to try to survive...
Yep, if anything is going to happen, it's gonna be way up North...
Bill has a ready answer for every critique of pretty much any part of this Imperial serial idiocy.
Which part of that phlogiston you denominate hypostatizationalistically as "the Taliban" "knew" that "they" were " hosting" those " training camps?" So as to justify (yeah, you have reservations about COIN and nation building) all the crap that thanks to the way our Empire is structured was and is pretty much inevitable?
Seems to me that the narrow pseudo-legalisms just provide convenient cover for some pretty huge horrors.
Don't forget the divorces, and the really sad instances when the vets are somehow driven to "light up" their families before they "take out" themselves... But the Big Sh_ts, who administer all this Bitter Medicine of Necessariness To Protect And Advance US Security and Interests, pretty obviously are a callous bunch, who can weep the crocodile tears at the funerals and on TV, while ripping our limbs off, hiding our carcasses in some noisome hole under a bank, and gulping down and digesting the corpse at their leisure...
"Nation-building," as defined by a Policy Colonel in the US Army:
http://www.fas.org/man/eprint/carson.pdf Interesting footnotes and bibliography too.
The Wiki article has an interesting take, as discussed here: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20091002074302AAjnFOq
American Exceptionalism, The Movie: Scene 157, Take 224
It's kind of like the "study of economics."
The command structure grows out of the force structure, and vice versa, and out of the "inspirations" of all those smart people who design weapons and uniforms and transport and the whole flux of DogmaBabble.
And, it's not news, I think, that being able to kick ass and take names in tactical warfare (once you bribe enemy warriors to drive your trucks full of fuel and munitions to the Battlespace instead of blowing them up), kicking in doors and whupping up on dudes with funny hats and individually operated weapons gets bragging rights and unit citations and medals and weepy funerals. But it doesn't mean that what your force structure can do is in any way lined up with any of the useful human activities that even serve the purpose of advancing Imperial dominion. Let alone pacification.
Really beautiful hammer. Totally the wrong tool for any kind of useful work, except breaking things...
Gotta love the expression of "our national interest, as so woefully displayed here and in so many other places. 51,000 x 2.1 million = a giant middle finger extended by the likes of Petraeus and Clapper and even Saints Hillary and Barack, right in the faces of all the rest of us.
But not to worry: these tapeworms and tumors are only killing those of us they don't blast dierctly very slowly. So we won't fail to fund them and their perversions and predations with our loyal or subservient multiple tithes and offerings, including our bodies and those of our children, before they reach their own comfortable ends... and le delugewon' t occur, they expect, until the clock reads "apres them..."
I hate to break character, but I think there is a little hope for our species.
Not that there's any great reason to root and cheer for "US," since the misfortunes of random biology built on the genetic base we inherit will always produce human tapeworms and liver flukes and other parasites, and of course the predators, that always glom onto power. And no amount of tinkering by "really smart people" who only know just enough to be profitably dangerous will fix that genetic inheritance.
But a lot of "ordinary people" have started to heal the wounds the Kleptosociopathicrats have slashed in that complexity that "we" reductio-ad-absurdam as "the economy." And in smallness and in odd corners of the planet, quite a few of us are looking for ways to build ourselves into a different, healthier and sustainable presence.
The plutokleptocrats are all "Apres moi le deluge" pathogens, who could care less if the planet, and the human overpresence thereon that they suck off of, dies off. The Kochs and Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein and Nioxon and Cheney and the Bush League and even Obama, like Stalin and Pol Pot and Leona Helmsley and William Casey and the Shah and many, many others, get to live high, abuse others big-time, and die in comfort and ease. The whole fundamental problem, from my little perspective, is lack of consequences that matter. Unlike our individual bodies, there are no sufficient immune systems in place, no homeostatic mechanisms to speak of, to drive the soma in the direction of survival and health. There are no consequences, since the "healthy tissue" is led to believe first that the tumor cells and pathogens are no threat, and second that "the rule of law" will eventually result in policing up the disease processes. A vain belief, a naive hope, when the disease process, like many cancers and various auto-immune disorders, co-opts the immune system to help them swing the wrecking ball and pick through the rubble for edible bits. And eventually, the larger body's resources are exhausted, so even the energy to renew and refresh is gone into gluttony and titillation of the parasites.
When I worked for the EPA, decades ago, there was a report of a village in some "undeveloped" estuarine place where a post-national giant chemical corporation's "suits" bribed "the government" to allow construction of a big chemical plant, unburdened by even rudimentary "externality controls." The result was gross pollution, with multiple persistent toxins, of the ecology from which the inhabitants had been drawing their sustenance for millennia. Multiple pleas to "the government" to stop the killing resulted in deferral, delay and deception, a downward cascade of bribes to buy off the nascent leaders, goons in action, all that stuff. Eventually, the "locals" did the other thing, broke into the plant one balmy subtropical night and burnt it to the ground. (Any idea what happens under the TPP if something like that happens in the future? The locals have to pay to rebuild, and eat the toxins, right?)
But there are some of us (now well identified in the Overlord databases, of course) who do wish and work for Better, as opposed to MORE... Hence that crippling bit of Hope that we ain't headed for a Overlord-triggered K-T-class (now "K-Pg") event... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event
"Radical?" Labels are such delicate and dangerous things -- this aging curmudgeon would offer that the thoughts of Dr. Cole are right in line with what used to be called "conservatism." Even Burke might agree with the observations in Dr. Cole's post.
Not, of course, what have come to be called "conservatives," part of the triumph of misappropriation and misrepresentation of once-honorable words by oligokleptocrats and their "minions," recently Gingrich, http://www.skilluminati.com/research/entry/newt_gingrich_on_using_language_for_social_control/, and Rove, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/08/1141830/-Karl-Rove-s-Handbook, owned by the likes of the MurdoKochs.
Any votes on a label, neologistical or traditional, that might more accurately describe our faux "patriots" and "capitalists?"
And I have to observe that there ain't ANYTHING IMAGINARY about the infestation of the planet by the Matrix-ites and their grim (Mr. Bill) or smug (Joe from Wherever) apologists. Who will insist that the headline terminology above is inappropriately inaccurate, according to the definitions they insist upon in order to win their points, to describe Our Great Democracy, that is, after all, only trying to ensure the necessary and appropriate upward flood of wealth to plenish, and re-plenish, and re-re-plenish the armories, and induce the lower orders to enlist and be one of The Few and The Strong, to muster and step out smartly to manifestly spread more of its exceptional "democratic" self all over the planet: "Terris est omnis divisa in partes sex..." http://www.history.navy.mil/library/online/africacommand.htm (let's remember that sex sells ANYthing)
When it comes to killing civilians and that huge military part of our Imperium, I kind of question the "U.S." personification. Maybe many US citizens, both civilians and many GIs, don't want to have Our Forces kill "civilians" (though they have no problem killing, or nodding at the killing of, "Unlawful Enema Combatants" or other fellow humans, referred to as "bugsplat" by the cognoscenti, whether fellow citizens or not, for whom the propaganda groundwork "supporting" that killing has been well laid, or just out of indifference.)
The fact remains indisputable, that for all the thin patina of red-white-and-blue high ideals we let ourselves believe forms our true colors, there are plenty of folks among "us" who think nothing of killing others, for sport as well as "in war" as we want to think of it, the hot "Call of Duty" combat. Spend some time with youtube helmet-cam and Apache and Hellfire videos if you disagree, for just one source. When stressed and threatened GIs are sent on fools' errands into other people's terrain, and can't easily tell "civilians" from "Taliban" and other fine distinctions, or are sitting at the pilot's console of a Reaper or Predator, it's all too easy to just "light 'em up," and there are more than sufficient examples to show this ain't always just some "fog of war" savagery, but callous and intentional whoopery.
The cynical "generals" and rulers who run all this know very well that "we" are nothing like our comforting propaganda tells us we are. Far from it. So they, as you say, "get away with murder," because the legalists and "Realists" define such killing as "not murder," and most of the rest of us are befuddled and/or morally compromised ourselves. With no consequences, so nothing will change.
He's proven adept at Ollie-ism -- able to look grim and sincere and lie baldly and with a straight face...
Aside from that cramped and narrow and dishonest John Yoo-style reading-out of "international law and the Law of War," bearing in mind that "the law" in that whole arena is subject to US claims of convenient (in)applicability (including reserving all discretion, and not even being signatories to a lot of the salient documents), and that of course it's possible to come to the exact opposite conclusion with a much clearer logical pathway, and conscience too -- dare one point out that not even the "tests" of "legality" prescribed here ("as long as appropriate measures were taken to minimize civilian casualties, and as long as such casualties are proportionate to the military objective achieved") can even arguably be said to have been met? Or maybe the puny "military objectives," very questionably "achieved" except by limiting definitions, when measured "proportionately" to the expenditures, let alone the significance of results, lead to "justification" on the ground that only a "puny" number of civilians have been killed.
Completely ignoring the damage done to any hope of actually advancing any kind of "international law and order," by the arrogance, and invitation to emulation by other nasty, greedy, dishonest, sneaky, violent humans, of "our" rulership. But then the whole nub of the Game is domination, extraction, decimation, from a nice safe smug smarmy position, immune to consequences -- right? All part of "the national interest" in "maximum freedom of action," right? 'Cuz we cain't do nothin' else, right? And besides, when it really starts hitting the fan, "I'll be gone and you'll be gone," right? Comfortably consequence-free?
Gee, I guess we can dismiss the notion that blasting people with Hellfires launched from our increasingly autonomous Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace Procured And Turned Loose "Terminator" devices might have elements of "illegality" and "war crime" status attached to them, because the credibility of all those who have pointed out the idiocy and frank badness of the "policy" and the arrogant Imperialism and freakish hypermilitarization behind it hinges on and is destroyed by Bill's characterization of one comment about one "68-year-old grandmother" who happened to be on one person's mind when interviewed.
And what is that noise about how those wanting to report and reveal the killings are a sneaky, suspect, "self-selected group with an agenda"? So the report "cannot be considered completely unbiased"? How about the reports generated by the guys who run the drone and Special Ops programs? Proven not only biased, but deceptive and full of lies? Put that with your recent contention that "security elements" of the "regime" in Pakistan were in cahoots with our war managers, so any complaints, about "the US" fracturing Pakistani sovereignty or making murderous trouble via droning 'n stuff, by elected officials or other parts of the executive there, are thereby rendered meaningless...
There's a thin reed waving in the wind here, but it's not the killing and reporting of the death of Manama Bibi.
But don't let any of that deter you from trying to distract the rest of us and steer the discussion off the edge, while persisting in trying to make a case for our present and past rulers and their short-term-personally-profitable if idiotic games...
One has to admire the tenacity and disingenuity of the rear guard in fighting off any attacks on or challenges to or even questions about the indisputable US (actually, largely post-US these days) plutokleptocracy and their various forces and presences. Pick a paragraph from the pending post and try to make it sound risibliculous via straw men, red herrings, subtle ad hominems and the other tools of bloggerimpeachment, together with little condescending pats on the back like "undermines any positive things he may have to say." Backed up by unsupported and often insupportable "authoritative assertions."
The Chinese may be doing a better job of gutting Africa than "we" are, but it's only because "we" are lumbering idiots trying to force-fit the tools of militarization and "our" affection for sneaky-petery and skulduggery onto the hubs and levers of those too corrupt, arbitrarily Imperially defined, "nation-states" over there...
Maybe if our Crackpot Realists and inveterate invertebrate Great Gamers who could or could not care less about degrading the habitability of the Game Board (except as an extractable profit center and Taken Teritory) could be brought around to declaring Climate Change and its agents and agencies to be Unlawful Enemy Combatant Terrorist Insurgent Revolutionaries, we all might learn What Is To Be Done to rectify It-All... though without those satisfying videos of people being shot in the head or blown up, and vehicles being reduced to blood-and-tissue-smeared scrap metal, and cities rubble-ized, and all the chest-thumping-and-bumping and back-slapping and fanny-patting and grim satisfaction stuff, it's obviously a hard sell.
It's like "the national interest:" means whatever the speaker means by it. O forget which Lewis Carroll character said it, Bill knows of course, but as with a lot of us who can get derailed over definitions of words like "genocide," and look away from all the corpses, "Words mean exactly what I want them to mean." Couple that with the way we critters think and assess and emote, and you have people wearing made-in-China nylon US Flag-motif panties all hot to amend the Constitution to supet-duper outlaw "Flag burning." Leaving skid marks is apparently true-red-white-and-blue.
Who is "our?" Lots of GIs and "Christians" hold to the tenet that "The only good Arab/Muslim/Librul/whatever is a dead one." Ask a Native American how it worked, for (economic) reasons...
You are never, ever going to stop lying about that " theory" you keep trying to hang on me. Goes to credibility, right? Anonymity is a great place to snipe from, isn't it? Why so important to spend such efforts to ad-hom impeach this little person? Concerned about being caught in other misrepresentations?
"Some of them even have the gall to come on television from time to time to urge more killing."
Hey, you do what you know how to do and what you're good at and what you get paid for, all right? A guy (or gal) has to make a living, okay?
One wonders how many deaths and how much illness and suffering in Iran (other than assassinations, of course) are traceable to "US" blockade and embargo. The faux moralists will point out that it's only the common people who suffer -- their elite (like ours) is immune, as Saddam and the Ba'athists were, to the actions and imposts and assaults that are supposed to result in regime (or at least behavior) change...
/waiting now for the Crackpot Realists to tell "us" why the "gradualism" and "verification" and "segue" they espouse in removing "UN sanctions" and US-initiated economic and cyber warfare against the presumed entity they call "Iran" are "wise policy," and of course all "legal" under the "international law" that "we" turn to occasionally, when it suits some momentary undefined "national interest" or other...Anything other than "because," or "that's just the way we play the Game"?/
No obsession, Joe, now or the last time you tossed that canard.
It just seems to me, on some observation, that you are among the set of subtle, sneaky apologists for Empire, particularly the Present President and his people ("Syria? Worked out just how he planned it!"), an anonymous guy who makes presumptively "authoritative" assertions without support, probably was on the debate team, and knows a lot of tricks when it comes to nudging and warping the discourse in this and other forums. Like throwing past apologists and imperialists under the bus, retreating to "goodness" from time to time, showing crocodilian compassion when it suits...
You claim serious interest in "policy" discussions? Looks more like long, careful efforts to steer the discussion to favor How It's Being And Been Done, adding a dash, for us unbeneficed rabble, of learned and induced hopelessness that anything can be changed. There's already more than enough "lean and hungry men" dishonesty in the world not to try to call it out, and as you might say, it's "patently, inarguably, obviously clear" that subtle and covert and anonymous people, coupled with a carefully cultivated bovine incuriosity and placidity or xenophobia for most, and vulpine cupidity and disingenuity for the few (see Koch, et al.), have turned the sum of human interactions into a pretty horrific game that is wasting the planet Somebody gave us, and helping us kill and gas and concuss and maim and poison each other on an industrial scale. For personal profit? Out of meanness? Hard to tell, with the anonymous deliverers of so many apothegms...
Interesting how Anonymous Joe can, with a turn of a phrase, turn policy points into putative personal failings of others.
Didn't it used to be that people actually were prosecuted and went to jail for lying to the World's Greatest Deliberative Body?
"NSA Director Admits He Lied About Surveillance Thwarting 54 Terror Plots"
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/10/15/1247400/-NSA-Director-Admits-He-Lied-About-Surveillance-Thwarting-54-Terror-Plots
But who's counting? See how the "plausible excusability" defense is built right into the statements of "fact?" This guy is almost as good as the post-coaching Oliie "Don't cry for me, America" North...
Those "obstructionists" are actually enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else. They know how to leave the impression they are just abiding by "the rules," which obviously can easily be gamed. Those folks know that unlike them, the rest of are dependent in so many ways on the belief in the legitimacy of our rulership and the existence of an ordered system of laws. It's one of the horrible weaknesses of ordinary people that leaves them subject to stripping and robbing, by parasites and predators who know there are no consequences for them...
"Without remedies, there are no rights..."
Hmmm: where can we find the key that authoritatively tells us which is which?
I guess sponsoring a nuclear power plant for the Shah "we" installed, and selling weapons to both sides in the Gulf tinderbox, were some of those "friendly actions" toward Iran you snarked about above...
It's hard to tell with Joe, he's as subtle and diverse as George Will, but I took his comment to be /snark./ Since while the Hezbollahans may have a lot of mostly unguided rockets, they don't appear to have any helicopters. And of course Joe would know that smaller choppers generally have skids, not wheels (hence no "brake pads"), and larger ones don't put much stress on their wheeled landing gear unless they have to "land hot" due to something like a recoverable tail rotor failure. Unlike F-4s and F-14s that we sold to Iran back in the day, that "our" war industry actually arranged to build IN IRAN, on nice profitable assembly lines set up there. The F-4s and -14s land at around 125 knots, and have to bring 15 or 20 tons of metal and weapons and fuel to a stop in 8,000 feet or so, so brake pads get used up and are very flight-critical.
Multi-variate, all right, mostly about money, and human venality, and stupidity. But deadly serious.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/14/nuclear-weapons-accident-waiting-to-happen
http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear_weapons_and_global_security/nuclear_weapons/policy_issues/us-nuclear-weapons-policy.html
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2013/08/26/nuclear-tipped-missiles-posed-for-nightmare-holocaust/VZ3KQOUsAUFm4qfuchjmCI/story.html
Maybe they should have sent him a Bible with a handsome inscription by Obama. And some Hawk missiles, 'n stuff.
Lest anyone forget or not learn how the Great Game is played, there's a whole literature on the "Iran-Contra Affair," so-called. Of which this is just one little unintentionally humorous snippet:
"MCFARLANE TOOK CAKE AND BIBLE TO TEHERAN, EX-C.I.A. MAN SAYS"
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/01/11/us/mcfarlane-took-cake-and-bible-to-teheran-ex-cia-man-says.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
This is how the "grown-ups" conduct "policy." The folks with purely economic interests, the MIIC for example, are a whole lot more focused, skilful and diligent in "Never Forgetting Who They Are Working For."
"Hamas government devotes massive resources..." Huh? Oh, I get it now, Grady. That was a bit of "heavy" irony, right?
A bit of a dense pun?
Not real easy to figure out pricing FOB Gaza, but concrete in the US gets delivered for a couple of hundred bucks a ton. Even if it's US$1000, that's $50,000. Compared to the concrete the US taxpayer pays for to build all those walls and other "exfrastructure" into the occupied territories, and even compared to the tiny national wealth of Gaza as limited by "Israeli wrongs," it's a drop in the bucket.
You got any "pre-stressed" proof that that tunnel was part of some murderous plot? Other than op-eds and MSM articles here and there? Presuming "dual use" is supposed to be a no-no... Just curious, I am not an Insider.
And of course many "terrorist organizations" morph, over time, into "legitimate" political and social participants. Take Irgun and Likud, for instance... er, maybe some other examples...? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irgun
Ah, yes, "there is no hard evidence," but "common sense suggests." And "common sense" suggested Saddam had WMD, and was "supporting terrorists..." And lots of other stuff, like how "austerity" will save the world's economies from something or other...
Did I not read that the flow of "economic migrants" from Mexico and points south into the US fell off dramatically with two changes: The massive theft of real wealth that was the 2008 economic dump, and the increase in healthy economic activity and opportunity in Those Little Countries? Not a perfect and universal phenomenon, but a set of reasons for measurable change in body counts across the Rio Grande...
But there's a ready prescription, of course, in the form of jolly avuncular advice to those little nations over there in the EU to "tighten up their laws..."
Interesting how the burden of proof is dropped so glibly and primly and heavily on the backs of anyone pointing out that the Surveillance State is, on its face and as applied, a very bad idea. One would think that this kind of blanket and covert "adhesion" revision to the social contract ought to be justified, with massive proofs of utility, by those who are forcing it on us...
I am shocked, shocked I say, to hear that our fellow humans are capable of such predatory and short sighted perfidy! That continent is manifestly destined to be OURS to despoil!
All this effort by a few to actually try to "make the world a better place," so easily undone by the Kochs of every ethnicity and "race." I guess the smart money is on grabbing all I can for myself NOW, knowing I'll then be comfortably and " successfully" dead before the rest of you run out of Soylent Green... all the rest of this is just chin music and window dressing.
Our guys study Sun Tzu, then pretty much do the opposite, behind a flood and smokescreen of Milbabble very-expensive pseudo-Dogmatic justification. Because MONEY, and position, and tradition...
And let me add that when there was active criminal enforcement of environmental and public health laws (most of which have since been Changed to "soften" them, by a variety of mechanisms that are all part of "regulatory capture"), one could actually perceive a real change (even if marginal) in the behavior of corporate Suits whose lawyers had not figured out how to corrupt and evade the "immune system" yet. Once they did, well hey, it's just like cancer or Staph infections: the immune system goes "poot," the patient dies...
Thanks for that, MaryMac. As a former federal environmental enforcement attorney (13 years with the EPA), I can only vigorously second what you say here. And add that a whole lot of the people doing this, out of habit and that "profit" thing that "everyone knows" is "good," are murderers too -- they know what they are up to will kill and sicken people, most of whom have no clout to protect them, including a "regulatory structure" that mostly and simply adjusts claims between "big economic actors." There are even people who happily apologize for the predation, saying that "it protects our sacred way of living."
From the size of the response to this post, among other indicia, you can get a little sense of how likely it is that any of this s__t will Change...
(Interesting that an anagram of "sacred" is "scared...")
Once again, some informed people might disagree with that claim of subservience of SOCOM -- maybe that's just a definition thing again, though, if the claim is limited only to the lines on the organizational chart.
http://books.google.com/books?id=HqF-xDqPntQC&pg=PT170&lpg=PT170&dq=socom+as+independent+entity&source=bl&ots=wfHxzAyI0C&sig=V6bMjDKJ_Bjl86pg6TwFPtmdZaw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=6g1YUofFDYi69QTAgYHABQ&ved=0CFYQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=socom%20as%20independent%20entity&f=false with attention to Chapter 4.
It's nothing but a pretext to claim that all the stuff the Gamers do, ours and theirs and the other guys over there, behind a shallow screen of "legality" and "good sense," and consistency with the surficial notions of "patriotic and constitutional rightness," or just because Power, is "under control."
About all I got is "education." We are taught to believe incredible BS by a steady diet of propaganda, funded by people who profit from the incipient and current degradation of society and planet. http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html
Until and unless enough of the people who pay for all this start to get it, that they are being "had," once again, by would-be and actual feudal monarchs and barons who take full advantage of the weaknesses of our emotions and motivations, until we learn some healthier ways to accumulate and direct and discharge the "power" that inheres in any system, maybe just by institutionalizing the Golden Rule (and I have no idea how humans will do that, since the "religious" powers qnd "economists" have so corrupted the moral impulses of so many), it's going to be More Of The Same. How do we de-fund and de-fang the Beast, when it controls the channels of commerce and uses our deep, ordinary-person need for "law and order" against us?
Not many people want to see how their hamburger is butchered, or step out of Plato's Cave, or peer into the darkness of the East and West Wings of the Oval Office Theatre and its equivalents. What's the old verse? "Getting and spending we lay waste our powers/Little we see in nature that is ours./We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon."
There is a voice from the grave, one Joe tried to hijack not so long ago, Wilfred Owen, the Brit poet who died in the effing trenches of WW I:
[It is sweet and fitting to die for the Homeland.]
Maybe it would help to draw a picture the of "American stability assistance" you apologize for:
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/04/03/top_five_reasons_we_keep_fighting_all_these_wars
There's one pixel, among millions.
And of course you (and DMOL) once again completely misrepresent what I wrote.
Nobody makes you read, DMOL. I just write what seems correct to me. Everyone has an opinion, and that other thing too (unless one has had an ostomy.)
Costa Rica is in there purely because the country supported a very decent, socially kind, well educated culture (with the usual but sparse warts) without a standing army or "national" police force from 1948 after yet another coup. Until, of course, the US Marines, with its proud history of defending corporatokleptocracy ("War is nothing but a racket," again) in Those Little Countries, once again landed an "anti-drug" Expeditionary Force of 7,000 troops and 40-plus "littoral combat vessels," supposedly "at the invitation of" a government and population that HAS no army and does not see the utility in one, and where an opposition party that will kick the US out if they are voted in.
Here's a nice little explanation, with a lot of reasons and history and context, just WHY Costa Rica does not have a standing army, and spends its "national security" dollars on stuff like EDUCATION and health care. http://www.coha.org/costa-rica-an-army-less-nation-in-a-problem-prone-region/
Of course, the True Believer/Apologist response is that they HAVE an army -- the US, which supposedly supplies "security umbrellas" to countries all over the place, whether they like it or not, the opening of which releases all kinds of "anti-democratic" lightning and rain ... all part of MAKING the world a place that is dangerous and drug-threatened and therefore "needs" a Kelley-Bloomberg-thinking "policeman"... talk about deals with the Devil...
DMOL, there from two Authoritative Sources is the answer to your questioning the question I posed, "WHAT Libyan government?" Getting "elected" in some way or other, reported widely as signaling "democracy in action," surprisingly often does not mean you actually get to run things. Opportunities for corruption and a nice retirement, and attention from Great Gamers, well, of course.
Does "armed extremism in Libya" include the "polite" attack on the CIA/Embassy persons in Benghazi?
Glad Zeidan has "made bail," or whatever the equivalent is. Here's some context for Zeidan's "arrest," that seems related to having some US Special Ops or whoever ABDUCT a Libyan citizen (though US media are calling that an "arrest," too, though by what "legal authority" is not clear -- maybe "Might Makes Right?"):
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2013/10/libyan-pm-ali-zeidan-kidnapped-by-armed-men-2013101042630477468.html
As to other "politeness," here are a few more bits of context:
"Two years after Libya’s revolution, government struggles to control hundreds of armed militias"
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-06/world/41833837_1_armed-militias-libya-s-revolution
and
"Libya Since Gaddafi — Where Has It Been, Where Will It Go?"
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?id=162428
And how many US-ans have any awareness, in a world pastiched with US "Areas of Operations" and "Commands" under the Global Interoperable Network-Centric Battlespace that covers all, and thousands of "bases" and "sites," of places like Wheelus AFB near Tripoli, a nice place for Air Force Forces and their families from 1945 to 1969?
"The Years of Wheelus
By Walter J. Boyne
Recent events spark memories of what had been USAF’s jewel in North Africa."
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2008/January%202008/0108wheelus.aspx
Yes, it is surely multi-variate complicated. Some get dead, and some get rich...
Two interesting notions: "The government did not move fast enough to train a new nationalist military." And, "Oddly, it seemed to get little help with training from the US and Western Europe."
First, re the "it" called Libya, "WHAT government?" Following that, are there examples of "nationalist militaries" in other itNations that have 'brought (or imposed) calm and order' to those places (absent a basic underlying comity and stability and functioning set of economic relationships?) The Neocon (or Soviet?) notion is that you smash the existing order (or insert "US Interests" into one that's already inchoate or shattered, bring in Halliburton and Erik Prince and the Spooks, and voila! after a few trillion dollars, you have a "trustworthy, loyal, [omit "helpful, friendly, courteous and kind"] obedient, cheerful, [omit "thrifty"] brave, clean and reverent" 'national' military and 'national' police. Where has that happened? It's a persistent policy Pollyanna-ism, or maybe just propaganda smokescreen to keep the Game going... [long, with disturbing images] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3keRxRbso
"Nationalist militaries" seems a bit of an oxymoron, since large militaries have their own dynamics and interests (see, e.g., Egypt, Japan, the US, even Canada) and are built on obedience to a strong authoritarian structure. The chimaerical, miasmic, phantasmagorical "goal" is "democracy," but what possible model is there for "imposing democracy" by "encouraging a nationalist or even national military?" And modern "national police forces" are long on force and pseudo-militarianism, short on protecting any "rights" other than the Sacred Right to Property (of the Owners, that is.)
As to the "failure" of the West to bring "training" to somehow meld or weld the disparate and often warring bits of an itNation ("Libya does or thinks this," "Israel does or thinks that," "the US is behind the other thing,) where is the exemplar of Western involvement or intervention that's led to the presumed functioning of a "nationalist military" in anything other than the worst ways? Egypt? Iraq? Afghanistan? Yemen? The Phillipines? Argentina? Costa Rica? Seems to me the model itself is just smoke and mirrors to distract from the shall we say downsides of global militarization, where the rest of us are cannon fodder, "bugsplats," or "guest workers" in our own itNations, just working to support and feed and grow the military culture? Like this? "Herding Aphids: How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food" http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071009212548.htm
Sez you, Joe. Sez many others, including this one:
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2010/january/obama-should-seize-moment-to-push-for-medicare-for-all-doctors-group-says
Too bad the "realists" had no intention of even trying to make the pitch. No money in that, of course...
For a short taste of the multi-variate complexity beyond the zingers here, try this:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2013/09/23/its-official-obamacare-will-increase-health-spending-by-7450-for-a-typical-family-of-four/
The evil of overbearing patriarchalism is everywhere, it would seem. (Women do it too, of course, maybe less often and virulently, under other names.) Too bad we humans way too often give in to and join on to the notion that G_D mandates all the crap that Pastor/Imam/Rebbi Billy Joshua Achmed say has been REVEALED to them, laid on their obedient hearts, all that stuff.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/176528/no-country-young-women-americas-war-girls-bodies
Thanks, Dr. Cole, for so many things that appear and get noticed here. Thanks today for that wonderfully succinct skewering of "neoliberalism," that sick misnomer.
One wonders if a big part of the orchestrated drum-pounding and chest-thumping noise about "Sharia Law," in addition to plain old xenomiseophobia, is the Islamic version of the Uniform Commercial Code. That apparently outlaws and applies various penalties to the kinds of behaviors that have created such a large part of the "economies" of all our Western debtor nations and the huge and apparently uncontrollable supra- and post-national "financial industry" kleptocracy, nations subject to the "ownership societies" that, with covert Koch-urging, Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, the Bush League and now even the Obamites and Merkel GmBH and that British boika have forced on the rest of us. Prohibitions and penalties of the sort that our rentiers and interest-gatherers and peddlers of debt and eaters of common resources could not endure. And have been so very successful at closing off, regulatorily capturing or simply sneering at, having stripped the cojones and more skilled enforcers out of the various governments, one way or another. http://www.islamicinvestmentnetwork.com/sharialaw.php
It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings:
"Oil industry ‘will get access’ with or without Keystone XL, Suncor CEO says"
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/11/oil-industry-will-get-access-with-or-without-keystone-xl-suncor-ceo-says/?__lsa=9730-9f0e
And in case anyone is unclear how "governance, US-style" actually "works" (cough, cough),
"Lobbyists cash in as Keystone XL pipeline slugfest enters sixth year"
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/09/17/fight-over-keystone-xl-pipeline-enters-its-sixth-year/?__lsa=0534-a0c0
And is there reason for Hope in situations like this?
"How Can NSA Protect Our Power Grid from Cyberattack When It Can’t Keep Its Own Power On?" - See more at:
http://www.emptywheel.net/2013/10/07/how-can-nsa-protect-our-power-grid-from-cyberattack-when-it-cant-keep-its-own-power-on/?utm_source=feedly
Part of the reason why "it" is so hard and "it" can get so much worse is "institutional" stuff like this:
"Supreme Owner Made a Billionaire Feeding U.S. War Machine," a clumsy headline at best, if you read the story--
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-06/supreme-owner-made-a-billionaire-feeding-u-s-war-machine.html
This is just one little part of the stuff that lies behind the Potemkin facade of the Great Patriotic Game that so many tapeworms live off of while bush-wah-ing and rah-rah-ing the rest of us into tribal frenzies.
And for some more context, including bits of "law," one might check this out:
"Selective Disclosure About Targeted Killing"
http://justsecurity.org/2013/10/07/selective-disclosure-targeted-killing/
Quite an effectively subtle riposte, Joe. Might one turn the question around and ask you the same thing? And what the internal moral (il)logic of your analogy is supposed to be?
Maybe we are jealous because the terrorist salient carried out by the US-sponsored Contras in Nicaragua didn't work out as well? Or UNITA's gentle ministrations? Lots of other examples to pick from, on all "sides..."
And for people interested in context and detail, beyond the usual everyone-ought-to-know Authoritative Assertions, there's a lot to ponder. Here's just one example of maybe more comprehensive analysis of Who Shot Ahmad Who Shot Mohammed Who Shot Ahmal, from googling "al quaeda's role in iraq sectarian violence"...
http://www.opendemocracy.net/zana-khasraw-gul/who-is-responsible-for-iraq%E2%80%99s-sectarian-violence
Repeat it often enough, and it becomes the "truth." Right? And I see, under the heading of "unconventional weapons," that the Assad forces are now using fuel-air explosives to fry and blast school children. Is that going to raise a similar hue and cry with raised Tomahawks?
What they do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf7m7hN5Szc
What they apparently did: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/846e3599724e
End Of Empire might have produced this:
"Sense Of Unease Growing Around The World As U.S. Government Looks Befuddled"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/05/world-us-government_n_4047613.html
Some would say "FUBAR."
Interesting how a relatively few human critters can create so much Grim And Serious-Sounding Idiocy, and so much misery for so many others, so many of whom, blessed with the brains and souls G_D gave them, seem just unable to do anything other than just go along...
As I recall it, this kind of language is just a part of the lexicon and arsenal of the Great Game. Tit, "axis of evil, " for tat, " the great Satan. You Players, who so shamelessly whip up tribal Furors with your propaganda and "wars of choice, " ought to pipe down about now, since the whole system you have set up is near to strangling the planet. You "grown-ups" who have been using the world's lunch money, breathable air and potable water, and our ordinary-person muscles and blood, as the markers and Monopoly Money of your so-Serious Game, and are such prideful masters of deception, skuduggery, overthrow and undermining and installation of "friendly" dictators, might ought to eschew hypocritical false equivalences in pitching for your team...
People hang in groups. Groups tend to change, membership, motivations, all that stuff. One pathway for so many, where the groundwork is in place, thanks to history or intervention, is "militant nationalism." One expression of that might be some small part of what's going on in Syria, and elsewhere. Maybe this little report is part of it:
"A Syrian solution to civil conflict? The Free Syrian Army is holding talks with Assad's senior staff -- Secret approach to the President could reshape the whole war"
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/a-syrian-solution-to-civil-conflict-the-free-syrian-army-is-holding-talks-with-assads-senior-staff-8847615.html
Query whether what is going on in Syria, and proposing to spread more widely, is a "war," or something else even more ugly...
One has to wonder what actually motivates a creature like Bashar Assad and the creatures he surrounds himself with or inherited...
Super, for what it's worth, a family member has a pre-existing condition, a potentially fatal one if treatment is not continuous, and one that requires daily meds that are expensive only because the manufacturer makes a huge profit off un-negotiable pricing. She fortunately can still work, and has currently affordable employer-managed coverage. Her employer has just been bought by a HUGE national "health UNsurance" monster, that of course operates under the US Business Model of More Work And Less Pay For Fewer Benefits, so who knows how long that will last. But under the ACA, if she loses coverage for any of the possible reasons, she and others in her situation have to first apply for and then be denied coverage by an existing for-profit monstrosity, then GO WITHOUT MEDICAL COVERAGE ENTIRELY, and that includes COBRA "extensions," for at least SIX MONTHS before even starting the process of getting the "benefit" of boughten "coverage" under the ACA. In my book, that ain't making it easier or affordable for several million people to go see a doctor. (She did have COBRA "coverage" briefly not too long ago, for $640 a month, with a big deductible and co-pays and all that.)
I, on the other hand, have both VA medical benefits, thanks to another kind of "pre-existing condition," including NO-COST medications to the extent of the VA formulary, and am now enrolled in Medicare, that costs, with the AARP supplemental coverage, $177 a month (no meds, thanks to the Part D "deal")-- due to simple survival to a certain age.
Makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
"National Security" is one of those phrases like "National Interest." And maybe "National Velvet." Bill knows what they mean, but it's apparently a state secret not to be shared except by "traitors" like Snowden, or to be damaged by maybe more closer to that mark, people like Novak and Pollard and the people who are driving the Bus of State over the prostrate bodies of the Undeserving Poor...
So much of "National Security," when a little light and air gets to it, turns out to be fraud and Folly and cigars laced with enzymes to make Castro's beard fall out. All so terribly Serious, and of course infinitely Expensive. Strong medicine, with the excuse that it was all necessary to save the patient, even if it killed her...
Too bad, for so many reasons, that "the US," as the whole lumbering thing is so Informedly and Seriously called, may be functionally incapable of what might be called "leadership."
"We" have been pretty good at playing the bully, and helping a few of us take the lunch money and blacken the eyes of other kids and strut around the block. We had a "socially impaired" teenager in my young neighborhood who did that, until one day us little kids mobbed him thanks to the leadership of one of us (not me), shamed him, and that was the end of that. That leader kid had a goal of peace in the neighborhood, at least as far as the Big Kid bullying went, and concentrated on achieving it. That ain't what "our" rulers (not leaders) are all about.
Super390 castigates some on the "Left" for simplistic cheering at the pounding and shaming of the bully, and posits the inability of the Great Game world structure to operate without some Big Kid around to twist arms up behind backs and make the little kids say "Uncle (Sam)." Agreed that there are wishful and mean idiots of all stripes, especially in an environment where the Rulers so blatantly are stealing and beating down left, right and center. "We" don't seem to have the power of actual leadership any more, since for too many years "we" have been a shallowly self-interested bully-of-many-parts, one too venal and arch in many ways and idiotic in others, just clumsy and stupid, if muscularly ponderous, to avoid being activated and directed by people like Kissinger and Netanyahoo and Karzai. "We" never seem to be "sophisticated" enough to perceive the deeper levels and chutes and ladders of the Game, let alone direct them, and the folks who seek and get power in the Bullydom game have no interest in changing the larger behaviors or rules of play.
And now "we" are discovering that all that seemingly crushing military power, from nukes to networkcentricity to nanodevices, might not be able to "defeat" those 4th Generation warriors, whether they are acting singly or in a reaction-driven bunch.
Too bad "we," all the individuals and corporate entities (including military Commands) don't have much of any interest in, or incentive to be working on, leading from real intelligence and wisdom and strength, the kind that keeps the whole tribe alive and fed, so creatures like Cheney, and elsewhere Yahoo and even Arafat, get to rise to the top and twist, and twist, and twist those little kids' arms...
What facts are those, Joe? Other than some bare assertions, that is, and a snip and a link to an article datelined June 21, 2012, regarding a place and conflict that even Martin Dempsey describes cautiously as "fluid."
I'm really curious how sending arms and ammo into a chaotic situation, where affiliations and loyalties and 'hoods reformulate faster than high-school cliques, can be "managed" to be sure only "moderates" (sic) get 'em. One has to wonder what this all means:
WSJ 9/02/13,
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324202304579051280341316034.html
WaPo, 9/11/13 -
(looks like Sen. Corker wants to be the Charlie Wilson of this war) Any of the same actual terrorists that McCain so buoyantly met with?
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-09-11/world/41972742_1_lethal-aid-syrian-rebels-chemical-weapons
Please reassure us that those 'pipelines,' made up of stealthy, 'clandestine,' bribe-greased air and water and truck deliveries, via what are usually described as "shadowy intermediaries," are at least as leakproof as a Deep Well in the Gulf of Mexico...
The Telegraph, 10/03, "First Syria rebels armed and trained by CIA 'on way to battlefield'", http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/10283758/First-Syria-rebels-armed-and-trained-by-CIA-on-way-to-battlefield.html
And all kinds of other stuff reported to the same effect. Over at Syriacomment.com one can find lots of stuff on how "easy" it is (not) to distinguish, day to day, "bad guys" from good guys. Almost as easy as it was in the spoooks' involvement in and the still current idiotic war in Afghanistan.
Who says Great Gamesmanship can't be entertaining?
http://politicalvelcraft.org/2013/06/14/800-man-mercenary-force-heads-to-the-middle-east-former-blackwater-ceo-billionaire-erik-prince-hires-colombian-military-troopshh/
On the more somber side,
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Prince_Erik
And even the WSJ has something to say:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324763404578428141862143714.html
Yeah, after all, this ain't just another episode of "Jerry Springer." There's National Interests here, folks...
Yeah, viz. Hillary: Timmy Geithner and the rest had both "experience" and "expertise." Knowing how a bank is laid out and the mechanisms of the vault door and security systems is gained by "experience" and in certain contexts is useful "expertise..." Not necessarily a hiring recommendation.
That budgetary tap dance all makes some kind of sense if you just start the discussion way past the point where a "national actual health care rather than paying for tests, procedures and drugs and C-Suite overhead" would be considered. Which it sure seems when the actual analysts lay out the numbers would be a whole lot cheaper not only for businesses (other than "medical insurance," that is) but the rest of us too. And if people were not so damn dishonest and greedy. To the point where there are these kinds of discussions that assume that everyone ought to have to go through the idiot pain and complexity and dealing with the "Hi, my name is Suzie in the Claims Denial Department! How may I not help you today?", because hey, "Medical UNsurance" is just another consumer product, right? Subject to the normal gouging and markups and price games and "features and benefits" fol-de-rol? And anyone who resists Bidness as Usual is just a Taker, looking for a Socialist Free Ride...
Medicare, surprisingly, actually seems to "work," despite the fraud and idiotic incentives that are built, and lobbied, into the mix. Too bad about that "Part D" long-running ripoff, of course... Even VA care, hobbled by politics as it is, "works" better than the private UNsurance I once had and see in dys-operation every day as a nurse (the one group with the most insight into all this that was so pointedly kicked out of the smoke-filled rooms and lobbies.)
Here's a few:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB207/index.htm
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&ved=0CHMQFjAJ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsmallwarsjournal.com%2Fdocuments%2Flind.pdf&ei=VQlMUrmGG5GI9AS42IHIAw&usg=AFQjCNFFa2DaL5O48UtnBjRNFVD6OAWYOA&sig2=XPdrEh1ufFjNxok_dcD5jA&bvm=bv.53371865,d.eWU
Can't find the link maybe both of us remember, to War Department simulations that show our vaunted military getting smacked down by "little countries," in part because of "our" clumsiness and procedure-blindness and being glued to procurement-created sets of war toys and techniques and tactics. The link's out there. No, I don't take pleasure in the discomfiture of US Might. Just sorrow at all the enormous waste and idiocy and foolish killing, to what end, again?
The term is much richer than that, and being one, I would accede to the notion that soldiers and vets are very much fall guys, under several of the flavors of that term:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_guy
You've been talking to Joseph Heller again, right? Was Will Rodgers part of the conversation too? Now, if you could only conference in George Carlin, you would really be humming on all eight cylinders...
The horror here is that those three, and you, all love the potential goodness of what we were born into. Cruz, as a momentary personification of the other sort of "citizen," is just a tapeworm.
Care to take a shot at "Freedom," and "Liberty," and "Victory!," and "Patriot," and "National Interest"? Maybe even "Terrorist/Insurgent/Rebel/Fighter (see "Freedom")/Etc."?
I actually love this American country. Particularly the version of it I learned about in civics and US History classes and Boy Scouts and even 1966-stage Army indoctrination, and stuff like that. I personally have about zero use for the Current Rulers and their apologists and troubadors.
Hiro has laid out a bunch of instances where all that Bully Power in the World does not avail those Rulers one little whit in their desire to Make Things Go Their Way and Make Everyone Else Say "Uncle-Sam." Joe picks an "impeachment" example that appears by happenstance to have "come out" in a way that actually seems to be for the greater good, albeit in spite of all the worst that active management and actual Force Placement by our Muscularists could do. And Joe applies a rather huge angular momentum to the picture. "Y'See? That was our goal all along!"
You know, there are times when it's ok to acknowledge that Bidness as Usual is just Idiotic Stupid, and it might be better, if at all possible, to recast the bureaucratic processes that attract and select and promote the people and dogmas that get advanced through the ranks to High Policy and Force Projection positions, people e.g. like Tapper and Petraeus and McChrystal and Kissinger and so forth.
There really are some existential human threats, but so far no one has come up with an Obviously Plausible Calculus that shows "more nuclear or conventional weapons, more studied camouflage on yet another billion-dollars-a-career-boosting-replacement set of BDUs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Dress_Uniform), more Navy ships, more intrusive peeping-tom-ism, more promotion of corporate greed and futility, more skulduggery, more 13,000-MPH Bomb Delivery Craft or autonomous or nanotech war toys, will "defeat" global climate change or co-opt religious fundamentalism, either here or there. Let alone defeat IEDs or "succeed" or "win" in 4th Gen warfare. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
Though the Players are pretty good at gaming the wealth-collection machinery of that country I once read about into dumping untold and unaudited common wealth into fewer and nastier pockets...
But short term "wisdom," of course, would be to suck up to the Rulers and bail out all you can, while the "gravy trickle" is still set on "10,000-year FLOOD"...
Not so long ago, someone was shouting that the US should unilaterally be blasting SOMEthing in Syria to "retaliate" presumably on behalf of the honorable Great Nations of the World and all the Little People, because SOMEone had dared to breach the sacrosanct Norm Against The Use (Though Not Apparently The Sale Of Precursor Chemicals or Gas-Making Plants Or Continued Possession) of Chemical Weapons (not much mention of biological weapons at the time).
How many RPMs can you spin that thing?
Too bad there's not another "choice" on the blinkin' menu, like the one that thanks to age and endurance I get to make:
MEDICARE
And thanks to youthful patriotic enthusiastic idiocy and the stuff that happened to me while I was learning the Milo Minderbinder REALITY behind the BS about "Serving My Country," major service-connected disability! so, I have a backup, too:
VA HEALTH CARE
Plus a nice tiny burial allowance, and a spot in one of our national cemeteries if my loved ones want it for me. What a deal!
Nice sidestep. Seems to me and a lot of people that the TRILLIONS flowing in such a broad, deep river to the MIIC are justified by our rulers as "the price of freedom," which the threats supposedly to are an amorphous blob of Terrorists and Others. No doubt you have some accounting entry that holds the "lol War on Al Qaeda" to a puny $10 billion a year. The conduct of any of that depends on the whole Global Battlespace Thingie, with all the procurements and logistics and "intelligence" and the rest.And of course I was not writing about "just Al Quaeda," but about the whole idiotic monstrosity of Cold Warriorism.
Apologists also have nice, constantly repeated, heavily reinforced versions of "Winners' Serious History" that conveniently leave out a whole lot of embarrassing and stupid and venal and evil reality-based detail and flavor, in favor of "What we did was right and justified."
That, of course, was the Bush League THEN. As we all very well know, this is the NewObamaNO?W. And one has to acknowledge the inexorable power of bueacratic momentum-building, and the clout that all those war dollars (our only real :"jobs program) and those Hooverian dossiers makes available to the personalities that produce the endlessly repeated behaviors and End-of-Empire outcomes us ordinary people are saddled with, crushed under, and Peeping-Tom'd by.
A lot of really sharp, very self-interested people have made and kept the petro-standard dollar as the reserve currency. Human lifespans being still delimited, many of those folks will die, "Apres moi me deluge IBG/YBG" fashion, rich as Croesus on ill-gotten gains, careless of a ravaged planet. Anyone know what the next crop of Vampire Squids and Koch-ers are banking on, as their escalator to obscene wealth?
Dr. Cole, the "hawks" sure seem a lot more persistent than offered. You know about past empires, and what the militarianist cultists did to help finish off what was left of the subset of "ordinary shopkeeper and farmer albeit nationalist and Jingoist and Chauvinist civilization" that of course "served" and paid for the Krupps' 305 and 420 guns, all those Spandaus and Hotchkisses and Sacred French 75s, and "Gas! Quick boys!," and later U-boats to make new waves in the annals of interhuman over-humanity, and to spirit a set of "hawk" Nazis to South America and elsewhere with the portable stealable treasury of Europe when the crap started hitting their fan. And Hiro-saki, of course. These folks are predators with much shorter reflex times than most of us, so they are always "ahead."
Some people posting here seem committed to continuing the Game Play that appears to only have a negative-sum overall end, though personally profitable. The "hawks" seem to be doing just fine, thanks, rich and shameless and with inexhaustible patronage. The habits of thought and action of too many of us are 'invested' in More Of The Same.
It would be nice if niceness would overwhelm them, swords into Teslas and wind turbines and all that -- any way you see that happening?
What was the most obvious explanation for why the CIA tried to fill Castro's humidor with cigars laced with a substance that was supposed to make his beard fall out?
"We" humans pretend that we are so very smart...
"Anything for a buck, right?"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/15/child-eats-laundry-detergent-pod_n_3764770.html
You've heard the expression, "like herding cats," right? Ever been to a gathering of do-gooders? Lots of self-esteem, flip charts and markers, horse-trading tiny bits of cooperation in ad-hoc "coalition building" between passionately committed persons each with their own little plan to save something or other.
There's a reason the effing Kochs eat caviar whenever they want to, and laugh at people who think that "stopping Keystone XL" will somehow stop the flow of that nasty PAH-laden sh__ called "tar sands oil," via OTHER piplelines or barge or truck or train. The Kochs are ORGANIZED and GREED-DRIVEN, and the other folks are too often like the parodies portrayed on "Portlandia.." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8SjkDq2ZwI
GWC: Broken record time for me again -- here's a link to what the War Department has in mind for how to "address" those nearly infinitely large problems you highlight so passionately:
http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/dsb/climate.pdf
Made me sick to read it, to see what it reveals about the way our rulers view what they have set in motion, what is coming at us so quickly. Sales opportunities for US products -- weapons, and farm and construction equipment, among other wisdom. "Realists." My a__.
"Happy" is apparently inconsistent with Rich&SeeminglyPowerful...
Speaking of motivations, one more interesting tidbit, not widely reported:
Report: Saudis sent death-row inmates to fight Syria http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/01/21/saudi-inmates-fight-syria-commute-death-sentences/1852629/
Bill, you are getting better at the misdirection-redirection-impeachment game.
Still wondering if you have anything to support your Obviousness = Everyone Ought To Know claim.
Sure looks from what I read like a lot of young bristly males, with their mouths full of the profanity of the invocation of G_D's greatness as they get off shooting and blowing everything up, have, as a principal part of their motivation in destroying civil society in Syria, just plain old paychecks that apparently come from various "outside sources." Including, of course, our own beloved national institutions...
More random linkage, for those who want a little broader read: http://www.thedailysheeple.com/terrorists-wage-war-on-each-other-in-syria-new-round-of-propaganda-begins_092013
"Dreadful blunders?" That characterization sort of depends on one's personal calculus of values.
It helps to "follow the money." Who gets rich and famous off the "policies?" For example: Part of US "strategy" (sic) was to pay local warriors not to shoot at "us." In A'stan it was direct: "we" wanted truck-delivered fuel and munitions at "the front," in a frontless 4th Generation war. So "we" paid warlords to pay their warriors not to attack our idiot convoys, and paid other warriors to drive the trucks. "We" paid one set of troublesome warriors in Iraq to stand down or at least attack others, a "surge" of unaccounted cash among other magical disappearances of huge amounts of wealth. "Our" great plan to Pacify and Build Nations involves paying lots more money (including to corrupt politicians and our corrupt and corrupting "training and arming contractors," that bland little phrase that obscures such ugly reality) to inhabitants of "those little countries over there" to become "national police" and "national armies" which for some reason never "works out" as advertised (though maybe as intended.)
In our own country, our own fundamentalist radicals have gained power and prominence and infiltrated and occupied our military and civilian-corporate leadership by being On Task and On Message with a limited set of appealing, quasi-religious idiocies and a strong organizing and warfare-oriented approach to politics.
Some nominal "Americans" have learned very well a whole profitable set of lessons from earlier salients and strategems. You maybe assume, Munir, that "we US Imperial Citizens" collectively are actually at all interested in "doing good," as ordinary people elsewhere, who themselves I might add have their own imperfections, might understand the term...
Nice set of unsupported assertions. Got anything that shows that Obviousness?
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/News/2188/19/Who%E2%80%99s-fighting-in-Syria-.aspx
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/saudi-arabia/130312/saudi-youth-fighting-assad-regime-syria
And rafts of other digested (and otherwise) source items. Which might not altogether comport with the Serious Obvious Explanation. How to stop it? kind of like trying to stop the heating and dispersion of the melted nuclear fuel out there at Fukushima...
But... but... what's the big deal? Isn't the It Thing called Iran our Sworn Enemy, currently? And since when is it not ok to do anything we want to Our Enemy? We have been assured that all that suffering and death, after all ,snark, snigger, by Other People at least, was "worth it."
The US has a nuclear WEAPONS program, an enormous one, and "leads" (very, very sic) the world in arms sales and military expenditures. And exports "race to the bottom, steal all you can" corporate behaviors, and "world economic collapse" financial-industry moral-risk-rich "technology."
What does that say about OUR identity, and the incredible haughty disingenuous arrogance of dictating to others, by blockade, stealth, skulduggery, and threats and actual kinetic applications of violence, what their identities are supposed to look like?
(Must start adding snark tag to sarcastic comments). I personally think the UN has a chance at becoming the Hope of Nations, and maybe even the skeleton of a newer and healthier human body politic. That of course would mean a bunch of mean, selfish, violent, sneaky SOBs abandoning all the skulduggery and hypocrisy and rent- and advantage-seeking that characterizes the Crapola mess that the "Realists" have wrought, so exceedingly finely detailed and vicious.
One sort of has to admire the tenacity of the Apologists and Anonymous Apparent Insiders Ashamed To State Their Resumes who post here so persistently, in favor of More Of The Same and with a heavy message that the way it's being done is the best we can do. They and their subtle and overbearing efforts show how strong is the seductive power of adherence to the idiotic, planet-burning Empire-After-Empire, with its inherent short-term and long-term and short-sighted advantages and benefits for the Krupps and Kochs and Adelsons and Netanyahoos and McChrystals and suchlike and a death watch for the rest of us.
But of course the US uses the UN like Kleenex (tm) and toilet tissue... http://shine.yahoo.com/fashion/toilet-paper-wedding-dress-contest-crowns-winner-144139476.html
What a gullible bunch we are. So the guy made a speech at the UN. It's not like nobody else has ever done that, and lied through their carefully polished teeth with just about every word they uttered. This is the UN, fer crissake! Don't you know what a den of snakes that is? We should have gotten out decades ago (though you have to acknowledge that if managed properly, it does provide some cheap convenient moral cover and pseudo-legality for stuff we really want to do.)
As should be obvious from millennia of statecraft, lying Big for some supposed advantage or devious goal or profitable plan or idiotic plot or just out of languid invulnerable habit is nothing new under the TV lights... http://www.fair.org/blog/2012/05/14/newsweek-enables-colin-powells-iraq-war-revisionism/
Seems the Wiki notion is that a kind of intellectual sandpaper will get applied to a handy accumulation of mofre or less "scholarly" statements of this or that fact or notion. Facts and notions that, as in all the more traditionally published and vicious word wars between "experts" and "scholars" of all kinds, whose arrogant insistences that they or their school are sole holders of the Truth, so often prove to be, ahem, "crap." Wiki invites anyone with useful knowledge and expertise to fill in the blanks, add the caveats, present the countervailing bits, and other parts of the running debate that is scholarship.
And it's not perfect, because as anyone who looks at personalities and issues knows, people like, say, I don't know, maybe Joe, will take the opportunity to "edit," and not for disinterested scholarship reasons, particular articles to favor particular viewpoints. Libertarians and, ah, "conservatives" and those who, er, "favor" the "administration" of our increasingly ratty Empire in all its Kleptocratic, Leviathan, Panopticon, Juggernautian parts, seem to be among the most common players in that game. And of course entries on stuff like "Israel" and other stuff that lives on various misrepresentations get their share of polishing.
Wiki is not perfect, but most articles include a set of links that let the Careful, Serious Historian or Scholar dig a little deeper into the topic. And it's one frustration for the folks who claim to have the exclusive Truth, based on their Serious version of the world and its events and unfortunate inhabitants -- the Serious ones who maybe know about those events from "participation," and for various reasons want or need to color them to fit a particular Narrative. While insisting they are the only ones who are "serious historians," versus anyone extracting a different story from a different, maybe larger and more complete, maybe less colored and biased, set of facts. Since despite claims to the contrary, "history" is still "the story told by the winners," and way too many cases, in service to the "winners."
C'mon, Bill -- The only people who get to play that "we have to behave that way on account of internal politics" card is of course US. And let us gloss right over, in the smug comment-erie floating up off this "diplomatic slight," that Obama's the titular head of an Empire that so very clearly has been planning what its own planners say, sub silentio, would be a disastrous (to US) massive "kinetic" war against a country that the US is already attacking via cyberspace and the trenches and battlements of "the world economy."
Oh, pshaw -- it's all too complicated to sort out. Where's the TV remote, honey?
Which (or what part of) Israel do you strongly support?
What has all the money and blood spent on futile military activity in that part of the world bought "us," again? Just wondering...