Always picking up the biggest hammer in the drawer, when there's not a nail in sight. Just because a bunch of war wimp chicken hawk talking heads do blah-blah-blah on the Ridiculous Rodeo Circuit. Why not try hammering the heads of that batch of nails, for a change? What's wrong with us, or at least our Beloved Leaders?
Down here in Tampa, FL, as the people who used to holler "Better Dead Than Red" are ramping up their Red States Convention down here, and there's a huge influx of State Security Personnel to be sure that none of the *delegates* has to be troubled in the slightest by expressions of anything other than admiration and praise from "their fellow Americans." So there's gonna be a "First Amendment Park," miles from anywhere, where anyone attempting to "petition for redress of grievances" can do their Commie, hippie thing, and lots of head-busting and eye-spraying and fully-charged Tazing all ready for any "irrational exuberance."
And Bradley Manning is still held, somewhere beyond the reach of the dead hand of habeus corpus, in the Land of Rule By Law.
Want a side of Freedom Fries with your main course of hypocritical jumping-up-and-down cake, Mr. President and all you "democratically elected beloved leaders?"
Anyone else remember when women said they did not want to be just like men, and that if they ran the show the world would be a better place?
Why, when "combat" these days is just Imperial Troopers beating up on, and occasionally getting blown away by, people in countries where Our Beloved Leaders have Decided to operate War Rackets of Choice, would there be this "equality" attraction to the Thrill of Combat, the "right" to snipe or kick in doors or "go out on patrol" under Orders of futility, to invite someone to shoot at you so you have an excuse to "turn their heads into pink mist?" What's with this vestigial notion of "equality?"
What's the new nomenclature equivalent for the enfolding lovingkindness of the Band of Brothers, that new substitute for the esprit and mythos that used to kind of apply in most people's minds to all Americans (except for Them, of course)? Band of Siblings? Given Green-on-Green rape and other crimes, that's not even a universal, either, now is it? What's happening, to all those X-chromosomals? Too much Call of Duty and "NCIS?"
I would ask if we can do better, but I guess the answer has to be ... ???
Anyone talk about "asymmetry" any more? And the fundamental and usual complete and total mismatch between stated mission and means, and available Great Big MFin' Hammer ends? And the re-re-re-proven truthism that Imperial Troopers just cannot "defeat" indigenous, dedicated nationalist-tribalist-nativist people, short of "turning the terrain to radioactive glass?" Most "terror plots" are intercepted by police work, not Boots On The Neck. Why do the Brass always insist on seeing everything as a nail, again? And then putting their clumsy thumb, aka "troops," square on the head of the nail, before swinging that huge hammer at it?
All that War Department Pentragrammatical complexity. All the millions of reports and orders and directives and definitions and Powerpoints and doctrines and the rest, all the "contracts" that never seem to be enforceable or enforced when the contractors blow them off, all the procurements of Really Cool Weapons 'n stuff. All for a Racket that don't do a lick, actually quite the opposite as every new sortie seems to sow its share of dragon's teeth, toward actually Increasing Our Security, or Protecting Our Way Of Life, except in the sense that a parasite like the Strangler Fig, http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/4h/strangler_fig/stranfig.htm, creates its own self-sustaining Way of Life by sucking the life out of its host.
I know, I know -- too much momentum in the Juggernaut, we have to protect all those Well-Paid Middle Class Careers, and all those Contracts, and all that money flowing to all those dead-end Congresscritters and their buddies... Which I guess is a succinct way of saying, more honestly and accurately, Our Sacred Way Of Life.
So yeah, put another carrier in the Persian Gulf, so those guys (and gals) with all those hair-trigger weapons can fire up the adrenalin on constant High Alert, just itching for the tiniest sign that there's some incoming anti-ship munitions, so they can loose Hellfire and Damnation on somebody or other, all in accordance with their training and indoctrination...
Too bad that almost all the "thinking" about Geopolitical Jerkmeatery is about applications of all the Really Cool Tools of Violence to, or creation of, this, that, or the other "crisis" and "conflict," and so little is given to the kinds of influence and encouragement and incentive that can be applied to salve the angry sores and eruptions, and keep More Of The Stupid Same from happening again and again and again. Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets battle flags and ribbons or any of these Really Prestigious Awards, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awards_and_decorations_of_the_United_States_government#Senior_Executive_Service, for doing stuff that educates, placates, calms, joins, or palliates, rather than "taking advantage of nominal sovereignty" and doing what the CIA and now so many other Shadowlands Creeps have done, so busily and successfully, for so many years, adding to the vast and geometrically growing collection once known as the "Family Jewels." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA#Immediate_predecessors.2C_1946.E2.80.9347
Until the blessed peacemakers come to direct the Directorates, all you are going to have is more of the stupid same. A change that's not sufficient, of course, but sure as hell is necessary.
Oh, goody, says the little demon in so many of us. Now it starts. Now we are finally getting somewhere. Mormons and Christianists and neocons all in places of authority and policy, various warlords and dictators ensconced behind their more-or-less reliable armies, a profitable flood of the toys and tools of war flushed into the mix, little sneaks padding around stirring up the masses, and folks in Amarillo at Pantex busy overhauling the US nukular arsenal, going to church every Sabbath and praying for the Armageddon. Time to get in there and Kick some serious A$$! We got us a Casus Bellie!
So many people still not clear on the concept. "The Country," as should be clear to anyone who reads the stuff posted here and in TomDispatch and even military.com, exists to generate money and manpower and machinery for The Military, that parasite with no real constraints on its growth except the death of the host, to consume. And that's also true of other nations that are further along the path to DeadEndism than our increasingly Imperial State. And The Military, for its part, is supposed to do stirring parades and fly-overs and simulated assaults at Patriootic Events, and to demonstrate its really sexy hardware for gaping senators, and to sucker, browbeat, terrorize or simply beat The Country into continuing to do its wealth-generating duty. So that The Brass can collect medals and think deep complicated thoughts about how to dominate the whole freakin' planet via every possible kind of weapon, from pico-bots toting poison to scramjets that can "project power" anywhere on the Networked Battlespace Spheroid in an hour or so, and go to golf tournaments and have comfortable gigs in "security" and the Machinery part of The Economy and as pundit-o-whores for The Media that shill for The Pentagram.
The only part about "protecting the country" any more seems pretty much to be the bit in the Soldier's Oath about "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Which now includes spying on all of us workers, to keep us in line, and grabbing us off the street if they deem us a "threat" to their Racket.
At some point, the "bad stuff happens in wartime" excuse just sort of totally loses even the last tiny vestiges of "moral authority," or at least cover-and-concealment.
Yeah, that Taliban is a real enemy we need to destroy, or negotiate with, or bribe, or something. Put somebody on a PowerPoint to tell us what and how and where the money will be going.
On the other hand, everyone loves a unitary enemy, so keep harping on "Taliban" that "everybody knows exists and is really bad," and "al Quaeda" which sounds really sinister and "everybody knows is like kudzu or zebra mussels, just itching to Take Over or End Our Sacred Way of Life As We Know It. And it's really telling that there are so many different, sinister ways to spell Al Quaida or el Quadia, or ooooh, especially al Qu'aida, but everybody knows what you mean...
Still asking for some direction to a Trusted Source that lays out the "al Quaeda" threat in any way that makes even a particle of sense for "us" to be tossing trillions of dollars around like confetti.
I guess this is where the Experienced Players cue up the "Impeachment by Disgruntled Ex-Employee" refrain, to reassure the rest of us that really, REALLY, they've got the whole thing handled.
Having worked 13 years in a large federal bureaucracy, including "interfacing" with various other "enforcement" parts of the federal structure, I can offer my little bit of a view that indeed there are a lot of scared little functionaries who, like the subjects of the Milgram experiments, http://www.myspace.com/video/james/the-milgram-experiment/5512184, will go on following orders, administering pain and fear, all the easier to do from a comfortable cubicle inside the comfortable Beltway. People immersed in the details of their little obscure cultural buckets, lives directed and constrained by "guidances" and "policies" and "delegations manuals" and "initiatives," every day a reinforcement of the need to adhere to the "directives." And some of them will rise in the system, because that's what's rewarded: "loyalty," and inventive moral silence, and adherence to "the plan," whatever freakin' idiocy is at the heart of it.
Even the author of this piece, in the depths of his mea culpa, is still Superglued to the main deadly theme: He seems to believe that "We coulda WON this thing, if only (this or that)..." Maybe half-blinded by years of "sipping the Kool Aid and keeping one's head down," along with a steady drumbeat diet of the internal, infernal propaganda within the walls of our Imperial government.
Some say that "1984" was just satire, just black comedy, not a blueprint for what's becoming. It has sure looked to me like total prescience regarding the nature of inevitable structure and behavior in the complex modern state, and intense sensitivity to the nature of human nature...
I recently attended a large Israel Bonds event. Between awards to significant contributors and active members of the local community were numerous multimedia bits on what the Bonds funding means to Israel. Light rail and roads and schools and huge, successful desalinization plants and other infrastructure improvements, of the type that are dead in the water here, funded by bond purchases that according to the program's website are very popular with even many US state governments here. Since they are backed by the full faith and credit of Israel, which in turn is backed by the full faith and credit of the US. And with that kind of backing, they have never defaulted on interest or principal, and pay an attractive (in the present market) "spread" above what US treasuries pay
Here's part of the statement by the incoming director of the fund:
Finally, Israel bonds are a heartfelt means of building a better Israel. There is an emotional element to this investment that cannot, and should not, be ignored. In fact, U.S. Senator Ben Cardin recently said Congress carefully watches the level of bond sales as a key indicator of American Jewish support for Israel and acts accordingly. It can also be assumed that Middle East regimes that consider themselves still in conflict with Israel, as well as those organizations that are boycotting Israel’s goods and services, understand that with the capital-raising capabilities of the Bonds organization, Israel remains not only militarily secure, but safe and sound on the economic front as well.
The main speaker added multiple remarks about the great things that all this money, a billion and more a year, means to Israel. Almost all of the marvelous commercial successes he mentioned were by various startups and small companies who are developing ever more lethal, agile and weird weapons, or the various systems that support the further militarization of that economy, which makes a pretty good chunk of the NGDP selling weapons and technology here, there and everywhere.
No ruling elite in the world has clean hands when it comes to killing real security of persons and places in the name of "protecting" security by imposing "security states" backed by militarized industrial, economic and social structures. It just seems a little odd that a national military that once prided itself on "purity of arms" has found the wherewithal to become what it is today, and will morph into tomorrow. And it's even odder that "we" here in America should find our ship of state being piloted, remotely, drone-like, by people in trailers on various "bases" in Israel.
Is it just me, or is all this "activity" just pretty much totally death-wish-y insane? And the best that we humans can do?
Well see there, now, it's working! We're WINNING! I suddenly feel so much better about the whole MIC thing! Trillions of dollars are finally beginning to pay off! What a deal! And the bean counters in the Pentagram even have a cute little re-name for what used to be called "collateral damage:" It's now, archly, called "bugsplat!" http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2012/03/bugsplat.html What you get on the windscreen (in milbabble, that's "transparent armor," and here's more milbabble from the marketing side of the MIC: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/glass-laminate-cover-adapted-by-defense-logistics-agency-saves-money-protects-mrap-windows-141043673.html) when you thrash an M-RAP along a Hajji Highway, with your vision being slowly obscured by the accumulated drooling slime of Hajjibug protoplasm...
Seriously, Professor, is there any place one can look to get some reality to check on the actual present nature of that "thing" that everybody yaks about so glibly and facilely, "al Quaeda?" As in, behind the myths that everybody on the MIC and New American Century side conflates and inflates and profits from, their own little bubble economy and "growth engine," is there actually a "franchise operation" or even "affinity group" that could honestly be called "al Quaeda," in the way the lazy chickenhawks and hyperpatriots and warmongers use the term? And what is the real nature and size and shape of the "threat" that is used to justify the cramming down of a Security State into what was once a "republic, if you can keep it," and the insistent and persistent destabilization of the whole earth's economy and society?
I know, "it's complicated." Especially when the Experienced Players put their propagandists to work selling the notion and the "products" that go with. Does that relieve us of any obligation to eschew sloppy simplistifalsifications, and insist that those who rule us do better than just say "that's the way it really is, trust us, would we lie to you, my little Yellowcake"?
Yes, let us all keep hoping, and if we are in a position to tilt the table, keep working, to peddle the old Narrative, like little snippets of "they said" impeachment, and thus ensure more of "business as usual," so as not to waste all that hard-developed set of skills for playing the Great Game.
Maybe the problem is in fact that the herd of aging zebras, with their coterie of Jackals, are so attached to their stripes that they will strangle or dirk anything different and new and closer to the Golden Rule, so as not to lose the rank and privileges that come with all those carefully accreted stripes.
Reagan said "the Mujahedin are the moral equivalent of [America's] Founding Fathers," on the way to dumping a wide variety of "arms" into the hands of certain of the self-loyal, self-interested, shifting-loyalty groups that made up the mythical reification We All Believed In, the Unitary Holy Fighters Against The Soviets.
Why does the "Syrian opposition" sort of sound like the same thing all over again? Small arms, Dragons and Javelins and Claymores and all those other artfully named devices? How about a bunch of MANPADs? Oh wait, somebody is going to be paying "salaries" to some of the Oppositionistas, so they can buy some of the missing and disappeared ones that Gadaffyduck's forces piled up and left out in the desert.
Why so much effort and "intelligence" spent on little tactical and logistical details of Great Gamery, and so little on setting conditions and momentums in place that would do away with a lot of that shattery-bloodshed stuff? You know, effectuating the mindsets and behaviors that might follow from internalizing and acknowledging the two most-blown-away truths: First, that like it or not, for good and for obvious ill, we are all inextricably, via the most exquisite and complex mutual vulnerability, in this mess together. And Second, that there is more than enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, as long as we can keep the greedheads in suits and shoulder-boards and faux tribal dress from grabbing all but one of the chops and all but one of the cookies and then suckering us into fighting over the scraps.
We could actually do better, if it weren't for the Experienced Players...
The problem too many of us have is that we buy into the melodramatic, surficial myths, organize our thinking and beliefs around them, and blind ourselves to the crap that's going on behind the scenes and beneath the stage and out in the wings.
Ask Bill how it really works. If he'll share all that with you.
You can't go too far wrong, in trying to figure it all out, if you just try to follow the money. i know, it ain't easy.
Otherwise, there's plenty of stuff in the Untrustworthy Internetspace to give you lots of reasoned reasons not to sleep well at night, and to wonder what kind of world your grandkids' grandkids will be living in.
If you want him to Live Large, that would likely be good advice. And for a lucrative career path, maybe encourage the New Liberal Arts Equivalent, a degree in Organizational, Software and Homeland Security, with a minor in Dutch Rubbing and Partial Drowning. Better to be the torturER, than the torturEE. Though we are told that the inflicter of pain suffers too... Bwahahahahaha!
As a Boomer and Vietvet, my money is on the reality conveyed by Joseph Heller via "Catch-22:" for the most part, there ain't no such things as "integrity" and "honor." Not even between thieves, or Players. It's all about the Main Chance, and the Bigger Better Deal.
This is all because they won’t take their country’s defense into their own hands, using affordable, reliable, technology that could negate their historic conventional military disadvantages.
Wow. Who do you work for, again?
Is it not obvious that the whole stupid tail-chasing, circular-firing-squad, asymptotically wasteful idiocy of the global MIC "thing" is what's dragging us all down into a fool's endgame?
Which "affordable, reliable technology" are you referring to? Nukular weapons? You think the Right People here in Amurica, who invent a desire by Iran to build bombs as a casus belli, and assist the Israeli warlords to have their own little stockpiles and delivery systems, are going to just say "OK, Stash, you start enriching uranium and neutroning up some plutonium, we think you need to be able to DEFEND yourself. And I'm sure the Russians think so too."
Gee, as a practical matter, is there a substantive difference in that picayune distinction that the "renditioned" would notice? Or the fellas and gals administering the "enhanced" treatments?
And I wonder, maybe others do to, whether any useful "intelligence" came from any of those exercises in "sovereignty over the persons to be treated," or whether the whole exercise is just fun for the abusers, with a vain hope that the threat that one will be "renditioned" would somehow deter a person who might contemplate what our Experienced Persons consider to be "terroristic." And gee, also, do I have this wrong or is it the case that most interceptions of "terroristic" activities are accomplished by plain old police work (when the police aren't militarizing themselves and availing themselves of "State Security" toys like tracking GPSs in cell phones and trying to draw potentially weak-willed people into 'terrorist plots')?
Of course, "we'll never know how much the Players have done for (or is it TO?) us," now will we? We are supposed to just be grateful, to shut up and keep generating Real Wealth for the Players to Experience with, and pay no mind to the screams from down the corridor. I think the Professor had it right, as written. Whatever the Security Dictionary has to say about "precise definitions."
But the Experienced Players know they are immune, and just too big for anyone to rein in.
Well, I guess the unimpeachable outside-the-internet sources just have to confirm the truthiness of those assertions you make. And no, I don't believe everything I read on the 'net. Nice assertion, though. And I wonder if you can actually prove the negative you assert here, that bit about "there's no evidence."
And one party to a discussion may want to avail themselves of a stab at impeachment of the other, via a carefully insinuendo'd (http://variousmiseries.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_archive.html -- down the page, under "Richard J. Daley") false syllogism ("roosters crow, sun rises, therefore roosters obviously don't cause the sun to rise") but there are other aphorisms in the lexicon too: "Where there's smoke, and a long history of similar conduct, there's a pretty good chance there's fire."
In old wooden warships, there were severe penalties for taking an "open light," candle or match or lamp or whatever, into the gunpowder magazines. In this circumstance, thanks to the smug SOBs who play the Great Game and are so nicely and largely immune to the immense and painful consequences, dumping weapons and "advisers" and jackals of various breeds into a politispace that's built on a structure not unlike sodium azide, http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9927588 ("Highly explosive in the presence of shocks," and toxic and corrosive to boot) for personal (ego or monetary) gain or corporate gain or pseudo-national-interest gain. And who get to be condescending and patronizing and smug about their maybe, maybe, more detailed, if not enlightened, knowledge of what's up, what's doing, and what's been done, and by whom to whom. Say it ain't so, PLEASE? http://www.masterjules.net/ciadrug.html
And what's the point, whether it's Kurdish parts of Iraq or Azerbaijan? Experienced Players are "digging for facts" to support the Narrative, and if the past is any kind of prologue, will make them up out of whole cloth, or yellowcake, if the Real World does not provide them, on the decreed timeline.
"Patronizing:" that's the word I've been groping for. I'll cop to "obnoxious," myself. Along with "Hoping my grandchildren will live in a space and time less tortured, and always on the ragged point of detonation, by the Experienced Players."
There you go again, Bill. Nothing "arrogant?" The notion that true sovereignty belongs to the City on the Hill, that "we" on the basis of some presidential fiat can go kill anyone anywhere on the planet because "we" determine that they constitute some kind of "threat?" Yah, and "the US" has done such a bang-up job of "disposing of the Taliban," and you tell us Al Quaeda is alive and well all over the planet. "Mission Accomplished!"
Look, of course this is a waste of time. You speak for the Narrative, of American hegemony, and have all the talking points and puffed history ready to hand. Imply that I would want some squishy ""negotiating process" with the Taliban and Al Quaeda"? It ain't even worth calling that a "straw man." And one has to love the line about "every nation has the right to take out ('take out,' hey? that's really TOUGH sounding) a serious threat existing in another country, if that country will not do anything about it." Does that include all the Dirty Tricks and Secret Squirrel Strategems that the Experienced Players are always cooking up, "regime change" and undermining other economies, surrounding other nations with tiny-target-time weapons of mass destruction? How about the CIA's poisoned cigars and other assassination attempts aimed at Fidel Castro? Did he "take out" JFK, via that Commie stooge, L.H. Oswald? By your logic, he had the RIGHT to do that.
But you know that's the way the world is, or the way the Experienced Players cause it to be.
Actually, I did read the book, one of them at least: Gary Schroen's "First In: How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror in Afghanistan."
It's hard to read stuff like that, which lays out so clearly, if inadvertently, how foolish the whole endeavor was and is, and how every "fail" right up to the present stuttering and staggering toward "exfiltration" was presaged by Schroen's inadvertent, all-unaware send-up of the bits of Afghanity (Teflon "loyalties," avarice, incompetence, tribal drives, etc.) he thought he was "managing" and of his own mission. Which was "about" a whole heck of a lot more than "very light," and it was interesting that Schroen would have been so unhappy about how poorly "targeted" so many of the Washington-vetted, Doctrine-driven actual power projections (including, of course, dropping GPS-guided "smart bombs" on "American Assets") actually were -- relative even to what he was nominally to accomplish, the renascence of the Northern Alliance, that ill-fitted patchwork of shifting self-interests. Along with a bunch of less avowable "geopolitical" goals.
And another one: Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory." Or get killed by "friendly fire," that murderous oxymoron. Again highlighting the massive fraud and incompetence that are so much of the substance of the whole Global Power Projection. A few little PowerPoint headings, crafted to hornswoggle the Patriotic Masses and keep the money flowing, concealing so much theft and corruption and dysfunction.
Do you remember who captured Saigon? Hint: Not American or Australian or South Korean troops. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
Do people in the ranks of Experienced Players vie for "naming rights" on various Pronouncements of Policy? Who gets the rights for this arrogant bit of "we reserve the right" aggressivism?
The minute we perceive a terrorist threat developing in either country [and per the larger doctrine, anywhere else in the world], we reserve the right to hit it and hit it hard, with drones, missiles, and even the insertion of special forces.
Is that the "Cheney Doctrine?" The "Wolfowitz Doctrine?" It's not your own, since it's been in the air for quite a while now, demonstrating the moral vacuity, the intellectual poverty and the coming economic bankruptcy of "our" play in the Great Game.
And it's just a cliche, but why is it that there's so much "intelligence" to be gathered, and so little "intelligence" in what's done with it?
And a dialectologist just has to love "exfiltration," what a rich cover word for a multitude of sins...
Not to worry, though, sir, people in the ranks you indicate you belong to are well provided for, and very secure.
Too bad the "going in" part was not tailored to effect the nominal excuse, "crushing al Quaeda," which trillions of dollars and millions of tons of ordnance and materiel and huge "bases" and "doctrines" as barren as the rocky valleys and shifting as the dust and sands in that place have not managed, if you believe the Quaedahype.
But then that's never been what the whole exercise was all about, if you dig down, has it?
That's a tautology, right? Even our generals know that "the ANA" is a meaningless reification.
And do you really think you or the rest of us will ever know "the facts" for sure, or that it matters in the playing of the Great Game? But let us keep manufacturing "reasonable doubt," as a cover for the inevitable "strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions," an old Mil-def for the word "retreat," which was never to be uttered...
I think Sgt. Bales is the one who jumped the gun, on the way to jumping the shark for the rest of us.
Would you feel better, in advancing the Narrative's obscuration of Sgt. Bales' "losing it," if the word used was "homicide" instead of "murder?" What word would you use to describe the mechanism of Pat Tillman's death, and what happened next?
And no, I very clearly do not scarcely ever believe "the government," which as you maybe know is made up of a whole bunch of different parts that each have their designated lies and liars and spinners and, thank G_d, a few brave souls who are still capable of being outraged and blowing the whistle, even though it lands them in naked solitary lockdown. Do you approve of how "the government," the part I bet you have an affinity for, has treated Bradley Manning, for example?
And on any occasion where you’re dealing with an insurgency and where you’re also growing an indigenous force which ultimately will be the principal opposition to that insurgency, the enemy’s going to do all that they can to disrupt both the counterinsurgency operations, but also disrupt the integrity of the indigenous forces that developed.
Oh, lookie -- something between milbabble, and geopolitibabble!
Gee, sometimes, since "we" so blandly assume that there's an "enemy" "we" have to be "victorious" over, sometimes it's just so dang hard to figure out just who or what the "enemy" is. Or what the "mission" is. Other than playing the game of war, and transferring a huge amount of wealth.
And what's with the Current Big General marking a difference between other "insurgencies," and presumably in another category, "Vietnam?" Speaking of "enemies," and the labeling on clothes in Walmart, so much of which is "Made in Vietnam"? Blah blah stay the course we're winning just a few trillion more dollars victory is within our grasp...
The Qu'ran burning might have been one trigger event, as with the Bales murders, but every door kicked down, every water bottle thrown through a "Hajji" window, every checkpoint degradation, every "troop" telling a villager it's his DUTY, consistent with the Latest Doctrine, to move back into a ghost market town (anyone remember "strategic hamlets?") where the "NATO" force will "protect" his family, who responds "With all your guns and technology you cannot even protect yourselves from the fighters. How are you going to protect me?", every bribe to this or that warlord for this or that tiny "tactical" reason, every pretense that there's a "nation" there that "we" can deal with or are obliged to feed and grow, all of that, every one of them, are "triggering events" that not only are predictable in advent and effect but are geometrically cumulative.
"We," the "US" MIC, that post-national Beast with its fake patina of "patriotism," sell weapons all over the planet, even gift them to various "factions," which are then turned against our troops and clients. "We" pay warlords and "insurgents" to drive the trucks and NOT to attack the convoys hauling fuel and munitions to the latest Khe Sanh or Pork Chop Hill that is called "the key to victory in the whole Battlespace." How is this different from the mythical but trenchant tale of Milo Minderbinder, who chartered Army Air Corps planes and crew to the Germans to bomb the US base for "cost plus six percent," because it benefitted the "syndicate" Milo built, in which "everybody has a share"?
And only now is it becoming apparent that the myths the US public has been sold, about how this has all been "vital to our security and national interests," and now will be paying for into the far future, the whole raison de guerre, are unreal, fraudulent, a throw-away waste (well, to be fair, a huge profit to a few people) of $4 trillion and counting.
I'm a nurse, who also qualifies for Medicare and VA care. I've experience as a patient and nurse in several settings, office and hospital and "nursing home." And with VA and MEdicare. Yeah, there are weaknesses in furrin' universal medical care. But there are other, sometimes huge, weaknesses and institutionalized cruelties in the US "system." A huge amount of "health care" in the US is of course "handed over to the national government." There are many models to pick from, among the more enlightened "advanced nations," as pointed out above, that would not stick us with a quarter of the population without health care (especially preventive, regular type) and the ridiculous complexity and plethorization of UNsurers and Coverage Deniers and Prior De-Authorizers who award themselves huge bonuses for dysmanagement of one of our nation's most important assets -- healthy people.
I've experienced enough of VA and Medicare to see the virtues of "government medicine," compared to the greed-driven patchwork of Puritan-ethic rot that's the Sickness Unsurance Industry.
Do you carry one of those signs that says "Keep your stinking Government hands off my Medicare!"? Maybe a bumper sticker?
Since when is Costa Rica "poor?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica Americans are choosing, or being compelled by their health UNsurance companies, to travel as "medical tourists" to Costa Rica and other places where there's "socialized medicine" for elective surgery and not so elective too. A hip or knee arthroplasty is seldom "elective." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism#Costa_Rica
Costa Rica has been smart enough to put national money into education and NOT into the military-industrial idiocy. (Their reward was to be invaded by 7,000 Marines on "some kind" of mission related to "the Drug War," along with some 40 "Littoral Combat Vessels."
Interesting how many doctors in America have their training and education stamped "Made In Socialized Medicine Atrabaland," people who somehow still manage to get licensed to practice here, and from my own experience as patient and nurse are both (not uniformly, of course) caring and competent, often more so than profit-driven good old Americans.
It's interesting how the claims of bias and prejudgment and encouragement to "wait for all the facts" seem to come mostly from the shall one say more reactionary side of the spectrum? From people who as a general rule, when the First Facts are reversed, are more than happy to form up a mob and hang first, ask questions later?
The sick part of all of it is the degree to which tribal polarization is getting stronger, not weaker, and the amount of spinnery and trollery that is polluting what's left of civic sensibilities and discourse. (Interesting how many comments at places like dKos are all about "Don't judge Dick "I had other priorities at draft time, America First After Halliburton" Cheney," and how he DESERVES a new heart.) Maybe it's getting close to the time when the magnetic poles of the planet swap ends...
Well, maybe. That's kind of how it started in America, back in the late '50s-early'60s. Dozens, then hundreds, then...
But of course America in the Hippie-Dippie days was a very different place from Israel in the now. Middle class people did not like the draft. Now they don't even feel the hint of a draft, from any of the registers of the overheated Military Industrial Hegemony Machinery, and have the satisfactions of pseudo-righteous violence on Others being effectuated on their remote behalf.
Wow. "Anti-imperialism" is now a "revolutionary doctrine?" I'm SHOCKED! and Marxism too! One has to wonder which of many definitions of those terms were in mind. In the same vein, one might wonder (if only the accounting could be honestly and accurately done) whether "imperialism" or "anti-imperialism," both breathtakingly sweeping generalizations in their own right, produced more pain and corpses and damage to the planet.
I guess I don't read in the right places, where apparently Radic-Libs, maybe, commit the jejune hypocrisy charged to them here. T. Jefferson -- wasn't he some kind of Perpetual (slave-owning) Reolutionary? Thank G_d for Hamilton...
One hopes with the Professor that the stuff that's going on in several nations, surprisingly Arab and Muslim, of all things, mostly, is in fact a work in progress, on the way to Something Better. Not likely, if the powers that be have anything to say about it. The largely Imperial powers that be.
My late friend and fellow sailor, Herb Weichmann, an engineer, inveterate optimist, and good guy, had this to say about corrosion, and corruption: "Rust always wins." It's a good thing that biological critters can sometimes reverse the flow of entropy in smaller domains. It's a bad thing that biological critters can also accelerate the oxidation process, both locally and globally.
Well, if nothing else I got to learn a new word today: milbabble. Understood the concept, but thanks to google I now have a label for it, along with this interesting observation on one of the many sicknesses at the heart of our Imperial Forces: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/87142
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward,[a] they found a plain in Shinar[b] and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel[c]—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
So much "interoperability," so little "intelligence."
Sorry if my contribution is hard to follow. The current state of the world is not particularly linear, and the blog-comment format is too compartmentalized to often make for clarity, unless all the important detail is whited out.
Maybe seeing the kind of stuff Army aircrews sometimes did in the Fog of War, Vietnam version, and what happens when jet jockeys fly through the cables supporting cable cars in Italy, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm , and YouTube videos of guys pooching Hellfires into family gatherings with a whoop and a holler, and stuff like that, did something to my little psychobrain. Yeah, I know: "[Stuff] happens, fog of war," all that. Not much of an excuse, in my mind, but I guess that's what humans do.
I'm dumb enough to actually still keep hoping that "we" can do better than buying hundreds of $3 or $60 million hammers to knock the heads off carpet tacks and silk pins, and applying "tactical moves" and Grand Strategies and Doctrines that have not a prayer, from the git-go, of accomplishing any sensible goal or mission, other than "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some different people over there, so they kill some of us downrange..." And the MIC participants get richer...
Don't hear anything, because "the US" AIN'T at war in Notagainistan.
A tiny little bit of "our" kleptocracy, using a quarter of our net national wealth, and a minuscule fraction of the populusque, has opened up a franchise from Milo Minderbinder Enterprises, buying billion-dollar faux "game changers" and $400-a-gallon gasoline (maybe the accounting includes bribes to "the enemy" to let the fuel and materiel migrate to "the front" before burning and destroying it?) with money borrowed from Chinese plutocrats against the possible future tax revenues on whatever Real Wealth that "ordinary Americans" might create) to send young volunteers (with myraid, mostly unhealthy motivations) to do stuff like that dumb-$hit helicopter crash (if you want more of same, go to Youtube and search for "military fails") and Kill Teams and Kill Bills. Doing what they know how to do, which unfortunately for them, being subject to Doctrine and Orders, has not a freakin' prayer now, any more than it did Way Back When in 1968, of moving hearts and minds in any direction but into more virulent opposition to "us." Even killing off the residue of world affection that used to exist (without regard to the things people like Smedley Butler and IBM were up to) for the "Shining City on a Hill." "We," or the militokleptocrats pretending to speak and act for us, under a fraudulent claim of power of attorney, have blown through all our savings, all our earnings for maybe centuries to come, and set the stage for a weaponization of the whole stupid planet that stands fair to jump us into a parallel universe where the Terminators and Bolos are our only legacy. The press, as you know, is nothing but cheerleaders under orders to sell, sell, sell the whole stupid sheaf of fasces that is their stock footage and stock in trade.
"We" are a careless, heedless, feckless, shiftless, sorry excuse for a citizenry of a nominal democracy (sic.) This would be a great point at which to be able to us the "f" word...
It would be so nice if the cynical critters who manage the Great Game, on all the various "sides," would say stuff like this over and over, get it through their lizard heads that that is kind of what the best of life is, and stop doing the Ohsonecessary-not! chicanery and charlatanry that kills so many kids and wakes the beast in the breast of way too many others...
Zoom in and check out places like Liberty County, FL, the dark bit about where the trigger pivot would be if you visualized Florida as a concealed-carry, Stand Your Ground, .32 cal pocket pistolero, butt down of course, locked and loaded...
The only candidate who currently SAYS he would reduce military spending. Does Paul have some magic wand that will wave away the potent forces of all that MIC thing? Not gonna happen...
Awww, c'mon, Perfesser -- let me keep doing what I want that makes me richer than the next guy and really tickles my fancies. The change is slow enough that I'll be dead and buried before it starts to get really ugly, and in the meantime, well hey, you every drive a Ferrari California with a blonde babe in the second seat, flat out on I-4 with a PO-lice chopper straining to keep up? Or swim in your own heated Olympic-sized pool, without having to think about other people peeing, etc., in YOUR water? Or zoom off to Bali in your Gulfstream IV, for a little beach time?
MY little contribution to pollution is TINy compared to All Those Other People... And besides, Whatchagonnadoaboutit, huh? Any idea what our Military runs on, and how much of it, and what its general mission is?
And plants and factories across the planet continue to churn out various kinds of explosives, and pre-explosives, crowing about how their industry is one of the only ones showing "healthy growth." And their products get scattered abroad by Very Wise Experienced Players playing Very Important Survival Zero-Sum Games, or just little weevil "arms dealers," and some of our fellow "Our Tribe's No. 1!" humans, for all kinds of Really Important Reasons, get to do what lots of grubby young males get off on doing, the latter-day, bigger-bang equivalent of sticking a cherry bomb or M-80 in a frog's mouth or tied to an alley cat's tail.
And then Smart People come along and try to "explain" this or that random bit of destruction, to find meaning or significance or rationale or justification for blowing crap and people up. Hey, it's just what some, too many, of us ordinary humans do. Tit for tat, and yet it all seems so very, aaahh, compelling, while we're carrying on and detonating stuff and bragging and crowing and popping off whole 30 round clips of 7.62x39 ammo... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNAohtjG14c
How interesting that this list, and others like it, refer to "alleged attacks." Maybe understandable, given the contributors to the article, one weakness of Wiki that I would grant you, and the pleasure with which certain sociopaths are happy to claim "credit" for the madness of others. Yes, there are bad people, e.g. Timothy McVeigh and old whatshisname, bin Ladin. Does it take the present huge and growing bureaucracy and wealth drain to address the problem? Do the stratagems and actions create still more of the same stuff?
Is it so nice to have an Evil Terrorist Hypostatization to which to attribute some of the violence in the world (the part not committed by OUR folks, or at their instigation or behest -- which NEVER happens, now does it, and if it does, it's always justifiable, or plausibly deniable)? How many drone strikes, and Special Ops, and etcetera, make up our "NATO" Baker's dozen?
I mean, like, after all, Afghanistan is not VIETNAM, after all. Altogether different. Thousands of miles away. "Towelheads" instead of "slanty-eyes." Totally, like, more perfectly compelling geopopulatsitical justificalimiation.
Went to local department stores for some new shoes and a dress shirt and slacks. Amazing how much stuff at Beall's and Steinmart is artfully labeled "Made (by Commies) In Vietnam."
How many years will it be, before it will be asked about Notagainistan, "What was that all about, again, Stan?"
Think the hypergolic mixture "we" insist on calling the ANA is bad? Even the Vaunted US Uniformed Military is not a perfectly cohesive entity. There's more than enough Green-on-Green violence and predation and rape, and instances of GIs getting it on with mere US civilians. At higher levels, the intramural warfare over position and procurements and who writes the Doctrine is pretty fierce. I bet the Drone-ers are all about getting rid of unreliable fleshly Troops in favor of career-boosting, "mission-dedicated" "power-projecting" "product deployments."
Not wise to reify or personify either "our" military, or the thing our Brass has decided to label the ANA. History is way against that. Again, for an insider's view of what's likely next, you could do worse than read CIA paramilitary Gary Schroen's "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan." The CIA's tunnel-vision, "Yeah, We're Cool" take on the book: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm But the inadvertent highlighting of the tribalist, individualist culture of shifting loyalty, violence and venality ought to inform our "citizens" of what a Tarbaby "our" Rough Men have suckered us into one-two punching, kicking with both feet, and now head-butting...
Bingo! Hammers, and nails... Armies and State Security Apparatus folks are the Right Kind of People, people the Serious Experienced Players can, you know, DEAL with... fellow players in the Great Game.
Wonder when more people will wake up to the fact that the Kleptocrats and their officer corps are pounding all us round pegs down into their framework of square holes?
That's so beautiful it almost made me want to cry...
And over time, things will, thanks to the soaring spirits and Herculean efforts of a modicum of Ordinary People, somehow reach another point of meta-stability, just awaiting some new input of "projected force" from the Experienced Players and Serious People (or another crazy-Bob homegrown warlord) to knock the ball off the tee again...
Ask Joseph Campbell how myths grow and take root. A grain of insight, inspiration or truth, and then all these people come along and fertilize it with their Serious Poop and water it with others' tears and blood, until what grows bears dang all little connection to the little grain.
The Experienced Players have blown what, $4 or $8 or $12 trillion of Real Wealth, to chase down how many "al Quaedans," again? And on the way, sown how many dragons' teeth, in the Fertile Crescent and neighboring fields? And most of the actual "terrorist plots" have been stopped by cheap, old-fashioned POLICE work?
And the dead GIs' "buddies" will then go kill a bunch of random "Hajjis" to satisfy THEIR bloodlust on behalf of THEIR bandofbrothers fellows, right? See a pattern developing?
The Experienced Players feed off this kind of cycle, and a bunch of others. Too bad ordinary folks don't get how there's zero correspondence between the high priests' Myth-management and what really happens. On the ground.
The Experienced Players are the ones in the (unfortunately higher-order) alternate universe. Sucking the rest of us, ever so Seriously, down a Gravity well of their digging.
It's not like the same crap has not played out, time after time, or that the Experienced Players aren't all over how to maximize their individual and clan gains and continue the Game.
See: the Roman "provinces," late-Imperial style.
And see the wonderfully precious, unintentionally revealing self-paean by CIA Experienced Player Gary Schroen, "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan." Which is all about the dysjuction between tactical trickery and the myth-dependent aspirations of the Imperial Capitol-istas in DC. And which, if read with an honest eye, makes it absolutely clear that everything "we" have forced in Notagainistan was, is, and will be a freakin' fool's errand. The neophyte sailor's search for "100 feet of shore line..."
Viagra-on-tap, and cubic feet of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, do not buy "pacification" or "loyalty" of warlords steeped in Pashtunwali and analogous codes. What a surprise. Anybody remember the "Tarbaby" fable? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbaby
GIVE that guy some F-16s and "Attack Helicopters." The "Wogs" have various MANPADs and "people" happy to show how to use them. More MIC sales opportunities there. Love the myth that "we" control anything. More than enough reasons to call "us" "Uncle Sucker..."
One wonders if the indigenous people of "Taiwan" have anything to say on the subject, as opposed to the "friendly" successors of the Kuomintang who, following long tradition, stole most of "China's" portable art treasures (now housed in the National Museum in Taipei), glommed all the wealth of the island by invading in force, declaring martial law, "nationalizing" (where have we heard that before, again) 90% of everything, and bleeding it for all their miserable rapacious hearts were worth? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan (My grandmother claimed to have known Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and thought the world of her. We disagreed.)
And now, as happens, after a few generations the Goths and Visigoths have become "respectable," and are to be "protected" for what reason, again?
Biden is no Prometheus, and that look on his face (zoom, above) tells most of what's needed. One wonders if he, or any of them, know a strategic way to effectuating what good might come from internalizing and acting on two little notions:
1. Like it or not, we humans are all in this together, for better or worse, sickness and health, until we are parted by death, and
2. There's more than enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, if we can just keep the pigs in suits from eating everything but the last chop and the last cookie and then suckering the rest of us into fighting over the remaining scraps.
"Taiwan" sure looks like a retro-reactionary hot button notion to me, but then I'm just a little old unhappy fella...
But hey, to some people, that's a feature, not a bug, including the terminal optimists who think
"This side effect could potentially be beneficial as well. By lubricating fault lines and inducing microseismicity, you could be releasing built up pressure and preventing a larger more damaging earthquake.
Reagan was going to send in the grunts to "do something" in Lebanon, and as usual the Brass screwed it all up nicely, for the best doctrinal reasons. "Mistakes were made," Ronnie said, and "we" forgave him for bravely seeming to absorb "responsibility." And then Sabra and Shatila... What "intervention" there? I don't know how "stable" Lebanon and its parts are these days, or how powerful the vengeance drive in the culture is, but it sure seems like the people of Beirut, the "Paris of the East," are doing sort of well again.
Germans and French and English are, for the present, getting along -- the people have enough recall and historical sense of the futility of war to see virtues in trading Blutwurst for Roquefort for Stilton. Conflicts have their arcs, and people seem over time to learn acceptance and accommodation, if you can keep the Great Game $hites out of the room. Millions of little daily trans- and inter-actions make up the epoxy that ends up gluing local "civilization" back together, molecule by molecule, until the next "charismatic leader," or some induced or natural shortage, sets them off again.
The urge of some to intervene, catalyzed and promoted by Experienced Players or yes, "corporate interests" like arms makers, and the Likudniks and Hezbollah and our neocons, might have some bits of nobility and altruism. But there's a lot of cynical SOBs behind the "backdrop" offering cues and stage-whispered dialogue to the heros and heroines.
"Something must be done!" but what, of course, is that? Aye, there's the rub...
"I have seen nothing to indicate such activity" maybe this time, possibly, and nobody in Bill's World can't even say it unless one has at least three sources, one of which can't be Wiki -- pedia, or Leaks...
Of course there's different, less rosy, less high-speed-pan views, even among those who are all in favor of the "neo-liberal" approach, like this "It's maybe not as bad as one might think, even though the IMF interventions and race-to-the-bottom predatory 'free-market capitalism' have raised Cain, it could be worse" piece by Leslie Evans: http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4026
And I personally find a lot of substance and wisdom in the observations of David Graeber. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/301265-1 , and his recent "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." The Jackals are not only guys with guns and daggers and skills at overthrowing governments, vi et armis. They are also Banksters doing the knee-capping for the IMF and central and "private" banks
Might one observe that maybe in a bubble, which many see inflating over those countries noted above, certain parts and classes of S. and C. America are "doing very well, thank you," in Evans' quizzical formulation, but how about that there rain forest "world resource" being converted to "efficient" slash-and-burn "agriculture" and "proper pasture" for McCattle, in an Enclosure of a Commons on a really grandiose scale? And it's a good thing that all these external encouragements to follow the successful American path are making the world safe for 7,000 Marines and 40+ US warships to be "invited" to Army-less Costa Rica?
"Precisely" seems a little broad-brush for such a pointilist canvas.
Have you read or run across "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by David Graeber? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt Lays it all out, and also writes a prescription for what is killing us. I wish there were Cliffnotes, but there's not much fat in that fat volume.
Interesting side note re Adam Smith: seems scholarship reveals that many, maybe most, of his "Wealth of Nations" and "Morality" insights and pronouncements were cadged from Persian (as in "Iranian") source materials from a prior age. "Greed is very definitely BAD."
Maybe the reason the Kochs and Blankfeins and even Obama are all exercised about "Sharia law" and Islam is that the whole usury and slavery thing is seriously not allowed, and the social structures that make living in such a world possible are anathema to Kleptocapitalism and its religiosifiers.
Not to do that burden of persuasion thing again, but in light of long-running intelligence support, something like a trillion dollars in direct and indirect arms transfer to the IDF, many black ops missions on behalf of the Board of Directors in Israel, several little deals like the Iran-Iraq War that "we" had nothing to do with, right, or any of those other "Gulf wars" that were not in aid of the Israeli position in the world, is it so inaccruate to state that "we" have provided "military support?"
And probable cooperation by some part of "our" state security apparatus in providing the seed corn for the Israeli nuke program? "We" don't give them mines and cluster bombs and Willy Peter (white phosphorus) and now "bunker-busters" and such, now do we?
And of course when "we" have dared to even try to peek behind the curtains the IDF pulls around its nastiest little excesses, "we" get events like the shooting-up and near-sinking of the USS Liberty, and further thanks in the form of ongoing, deep espionage into all "our" plans and activities and secrets by the likes of "Let Him Go Now! He's a Hero!" Jonathan Pollard.
And what has Obama been saying about backing Likud/Israel's Iran play (if it's not completely off the wall)? Or maybe, "Nothing is off the table," going first?
When does it become apparent that there's a set of humans whose motives and actions, conscious or not, threaten every one of the rest of us? That they share a deadly symbiosis with each other, behind the fogs of "patriotic drivel?" That these critters are "embedded" in every political division on the planet? That their ruling passions and pleasures are the power that comes from destruction and force? (Henry Kissinger said it right out loud: "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.")
The MIC-political-religious "thing" is a planet-wide entity addicted to perfecting the lethality of every kind of technology, from poison-pissing nano-ants to Stealth everything to planet-busting thermonukes. On the ground that "those guys over there are possibly thinking about maybe doing it first, and No More Pearl Harbors!" and "WE are sent by G_D to WIN IT ALL, or blow up and burn down the house!" All being paid for by parasitic, cancerous, daily-increasing theft from the 'ordinary civilian economy' created and maintained by the rest of us. Dimona is the perfect poster child for the reality.
Yeah, at the lower fractal levels it's more complicated and inter-related than that, for sure (consider all the US startups fighting viciously and inventively over slices of the War Department 'budget' (sic)), but the big pattern seems absolutely clear.
Wishful thinking, but it seems to me that "we, humanity," needs maybe some surgery, an immune system boost, and a good worming, to get rid of all the growing, malignant, pathological bits that are killing our grandchildren and theirs before they are even born.
Just in case you've forgotten how the military Brass actually operates (see, e.g., Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch), or what "we" ought to have learned from stuff like the Pentagon Papers and any number of equally futile, ultimately, glimpses of the truths behind the Potemkin Village pasteboard of "game-changing weaponry" and Light at the End of the Tunnel...
Just think about what $8 or $10 or $20 trillion could buy, in health and education and infrastructure and all the rest of that squishy stuff that the Military is supposed to be "protecting," but actually is sucking the wealth and life right out of to protect the officers' perks and contractors' profits.
But---! Perpetual War is just so darn much profitable FUN! It's not like the careerists, contractors and Networked Battlespace Managers can claim ignorance of the framework of failure modes that is "War, American-Style." They have tons of briefings by people who are often frustrated at the dumb indifference of the Brass. Even silly spots like globalsecurity.com, a great wannabe resource with links to post-service job opportunities in "security," have articles like this, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/pakistan/pashtunwali.htm, to explain parts of the invaded culture that might affect an invader's behavior and "likelihood of victory," or kick his a$$ out of country...
For the literarily challenged needing context, there are resources like these: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Vietnam%20War\c%201961-1975&rh=n%3A4366%2Ck%3AVietnam%20War\c%201961-1975&page=1 And I haven't found a link to the little comic book each GI got in "processing in," explaining 3,000 years of history and culture in 40 pages of simplistic images. I doubt the "indoctrination" has really improved much in quality. Certainly not in effect. Here's the current hooker page designed to suck in new recruits: http://americasarmy.com/
My First Sergeant in 1968, an avid Christianist, once explained while in lugubrious liquor that everything he needed to know about the world, about life, was in "the Book." I thought he meant the Bible. Turns out he was referring to the Army Manual. Undo that set of thought processes, if you can...
C'mon, man: Resistance is pretty much futile! It's what we do, who we are, how we feeeeel in our bones.
Looking over the photos from the Afghanpaper above:
For me, the most striking are the sixth from the bottom, and the last. A little kid in pure white "tribal" dress, standing with that kind of universal, shoulders-back, hands-on-hips pose that looks (absent facial cues) like a "What the hell do you idiots want?" to the tough-heavily-armed-but-look-so-confused GIs. And a "troop," apparently in one of the Commonwealth Forces from the insignia, doing what, again? Helping, laughing out loud, with the poppy harvest, as a way of building solidarity with the people of Kandahar?
Another reminder of Vietnam, this time in the place I call "Notagainistan." As to the things "we" did in Vietnam, review the tender mercies and distant echoes of the Phoenix Program:
I, and I'm sure many other ex-GIs, thank all who have made recurrence of recurring nightmares possible, again and again and again, with each new re-proof of the stupidity and venality of the whole USS Enterprise we call "war."
And a trade balance of -$13 billion in 2011? "Made in Vietnam" stuff for sale at Walmart, which of course is a post-national corporate entity just like Northrop "We never forget who we're working for" Grumman, and General Atomic and the rest?
And our apparently fu##ed-up, can't-keep-the-Enemies-straight MIC, that sells weapons to the "Commie gooks" and engages in joint maneuvers with the same navy that they claimed to have attacked a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin? http://www.asianews.it/news-en/South-China-Sea:-Hanoi-and-Washington-to-hold-joint-naval-drill-21823.html (Oh yeah, that's all about "pivoting to the threatening of "China." Since our rulers are running out of scarecrows and boogeymen...)
And yet all these seemingly intelligent humans want to keep on keeping on with their silly Game of RISK! as if that's the best that humanity can do -- stage-managed "conflict" with nice Manichaean Players, while in the wings and in the bowels below the stage is the real reality, where all the money flows...
Does "fedayeen" equal "jihadist?" Maybe where all distinctions go to die, the Elephant Graveyard of Symbolic Smearing and Cognitive Clarity.
"Fedayeen" may be an awkward choice also, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Fedayeen, but I read nothing in the lexicon or the text above that says anything about these fellas aspire to be "holy warriors who are willing to die for victory."
Seems like the notion that real healthy change is only going to come from something other than Great Game Orthodoxy is spreading.
Social animals, with short lifespans, potent desires, and none of the instincts, apparently, that help school fish and ants and bees to survive and prosper.
Ooh! Ooh! I know that one! The money will be borrowed from China! or taken from the "Social Security Trust Fund Current Account!" or maybe we can start the War Bonds thing again!
An attack on Iran would just use money and materiel that's already on board and in the pipeline, so it's not like there's any Present Cost. And then there'd be a Stealth Supplemental, authorizing and appropriating another boatload or three of bullets and baksheesh.
Too bad all most of us see is scenarios in "Call of Duty -- KillKillKill!" or those nice sanitary helmet-cam and gun-camera videos over in YoutubeLand, billions of "hits" on tens of thousands of actual-snuff-porn Dead Enemy vids. None of that complex parallel parasitic tumor of a separate culture, the whole logistics-and-procurement-and-deployment Beast that is the MIC. The thing that so often drives "policy" by happening, seemingly, with lots of PowerPoint Proof, to have Just The Right Weapon readily to hand, to effectuate what they peddle as Just The Right Doctrine, at Just The Right Time.
The purpose of power is power. The purpose of war is war. See how easy it all can be, from an ergonomic chair in a Situation Room far, far away?
Mr. Bill: Speaking of good faith, since when has the US machinery been dealing "in good faith" with the rulers of Iran or any other "trouble spot" one might name on the planet? I guess any efforts, covert and overt, to "accomplish the mission of regime change/destabilization" (without reference to establishing anything stable and secure in the aftermath, see "Afghanistan" and "Iraq") are just fair play in the Game, right?
As to the Brazilian president's initiative, there's obviously several ways to spin the pota(h)to. For any who care to parse it themselves, here's the whole letter, with some interesting commentary: http://www.politicaexterna.com/11023/brazil-iran-turkey-nuclear-negotiations-obamas-letter-to-lula And April Glaspie didn't tell Saddam it was OK with the US Administration if his armies invaded Kuwait, either. My view of history, shows more than enough BS and bad faith on the part of "my government" and its operational activities to choke a very large horse.
Since when do you, or "the administration," get to pronounce that the Players in the government of Iran, a short missile flight from various launch sites in Israel and from the huge US arsenal afloat and otherwise, are "doing wrong" by engaging in enrichment of uranium, by all accounts in accordance with the NPT and its branches?
And you appear to be asserting, sub silentio, that "Iran" is "violating international law, or at least the dictates of our Righteous Rulers," and the burden of persuasion, in debate-ese, is on you to prove the positive, that the Iranian administration is doing something they are not allowed, like other nations, to do. "We don't know what we don't know" does not, or should not, work any more.
"in a game like this..." Yeah, for a few people it's just a game. With the unstated assumption that nobody will do anything stupid enough to, like, y'know, result in the die-off of most or even a lot of our species.
da Silva's effort, of course, was back in 2010, and there are various takes (what a surprise) on what it all meant. Here's one contemporary one, with familiar text, and echoes in the present:
“The most charitable interpretation is that we were naïve,” said Amaury de Souza, a political analyst in Rio de Janeiro. But “in a game like this, being labeled naïve just shows you have a third-rate diplomacy.”
An Obama Letter?
Yet, while the U.S. news media engaged in Brazil-Turkey bashing, little or no attention was paid to a Reuters report from Brasilia that said President Barack Obama had sent a letter to President da Silva encouraging Brazil to move forward on the uranium swap.
"From our point of view, a decision by Iran to send 1,200 kilograms [2,640 pounds] of low-enriched uranium abroad, would generate confidence and reduce regional tensions by cutting Iran's stockpile," Obama said, according to excerpts from the letter translated into Portuguese and seen by Reuters.
Brazilian officials claimed that Obama’s letter was just of one of the signs that dovish officials in Washington and other Western countries had quietly encouraged Brazil to help revive last October’s fuel swap deal.
"We were encouraged directly or indirectly ... to implement the October proposal without any leeway and that's what we did," said Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim.
In other words, Obama may not be enthusiastic about forcing a showdown with Iran, but the policy now appears to be driven by the American hawks and the Israeli government. They behave as if they're spoiling for a fight with another Muslim country that is considered a threat to Israel, despite the fact that Israel has a huge nuclear arsenal of its own, with some 200 to 400 warheads and posssessing missiles and planes to deliver them.
Please don't say that the War to End All Wars was an enterprise that no one wanted. Certain sets of people made a whole hell of a lot of money off the business, and certain Players in the Great Game got some nice entries on their currucula vitae and pushes in the direction of "more power" for themselves. Lots of folks don't much care for Niall Ferguson, but there are a lot of clues and bits of light in his "War Of The World." http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-war-of-the-world/
He also used that big word, "ineluctable," in laying out the intersections and positive-feedback amplifications of many, if not all, of the various interests and forces and powers that conspire to get us where we're at today.
So has Obama (and his military and political cadre) truly given up the dream (another word for "fantasy") of "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran?" I don't see that. And Khameini is a-doubling down on the "enemy-think" thing.
So sad that the lives and livelihoods of so many ordinary people, in the Iranian pseudo-democracy and in the fading American Republic and elsewhere, depend on the durable illusions and macho posturing and punk tough-guyism and simple self-serving greed and ambition of "leaders," or more accurately "rulers," intent on securing their own positions and screwing the real wealth creators and cannon fodder who make their gaming and parasitism possible. Rulers who apparently only know how to play Powerball in the Great Game, that how many times now has resulted, ineluctably, in idiot blood-letting and other ego-satisfying and profitable destruction, with dang-all zero "creation" out of the rubble and body parts except for what the remaining hard workers and irrepressibly hopeful can manage against all the predation.
Such idiot images we are ruled by: "Don't change horses in midstream." "Don't leave the ship without a rudder." "Those people over there want to kill you, and maybe take your stuff if it's not too radioactive. They are your ENEMY! Go get 'em!" "I'm the only [President] [Supreme Ruler] [Beloved Leader] you've got..." "G_d let no new thing arise."
The cool thing about science is that you can always find some kind of dispassionate, careful, well-documented study to support whatever doctrine you are contending for. (And then contend that the other guy's studies are Not Real Science.)
Sorry, Farhang, it's all we, collectively, know how to do. So very sorry.
Per the cliche, all we got is a Big MF Hammer (and an 8 mpg [12.8 km/30.3 l], 6500-pound [2954 kg] SUV to drive it around in.) And a strangler's grip on the knot of a tightening noose of "sanctions that are not a blockade."
Meantime, a few of us live very, very, very well off the fear and sweat of the rest of us. Same like you. We could both do better. We probably won't.
There's a lot of fiction (and unfortunately nonfiction too) grounded in the hubristic and seemingly suicidal idiocy of our various warlords, who have kicked the sachems and Solons to the curb and ramped up the pounding of the human-skin drums and skull rattles to get the natives all restless and angry.
Maybe it's time to biopsy our "leaders'" noggins, to see if there's maybe something biological, obviously pathological, and maybe even treatable, going on in there?
Have Bibi or Avi or any of those folks ever spent much time in the company of cats? I would ask about rats too, but that's a given...
In days gone by, the playground bully would be satisfied giving you a black eye, a bloody lip and pinning you down until you said "Uncle." How can the Iranian leadership do the equivalent, even if they are seemingly the smart kids on the playground? Especially when there's so much clear recent evidence that the bully can eventually be battered down so effectively by a combination of tenacity and terrain?
Obama indicates he understands the power of "legitimacy" (though that doesn't have any apparent effect on expanding the Imperial Presidency.) The Ayatollahs we currently are ministry-of-truthed into hating are sure getting a nice boost in the "legitimacy" department, thanks to those sanctions we are squeezing the great mass of Iranians with.
And that cost us how much again, and it is supposed to do exaclty what? Chase down Iranian Gazelles?
Think that's coool, call up this video showing yet another Really Cool Technological Advance, and be sure to check out all the other videos that are linked to it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
Mindless tailchase, imagined-up Threats that just have to be countered by imagined-up Counter-Threats.
The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would not say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, [bad word].' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people... If Phoenix goes in and murders someone who was not Viet Cong, and they abuse the mother and the sister, well anybody in the family who survives is going to be a card-carrying Viet Cong by the next afternoon."
Nothing new under the sun, or in the dark of night...
Even broken clocks are "right" twice a day. Depending, of course, on how one defines "right." As with "just," and "necessary." As in "Just another war" is "necessary" for the MIC, e.g. Since of course "our" MIC is busily maintaining its hegemony as arms pusher to the 'hoods of the world...
And since precise linguistics are so important, so much turns on just which precise definition of "success" one chooses to work from. Or "victory." Or "winning." Or, compound concept, "Mission Accomplished."
For instance, the latest war, whatever that terms means, on Iraq, has resulted in the transfer of some $1.5 trillion from present and future Real Wealth Creators/taxpayers in the US to the various pieces of the MIC. And you don't have to read very far into the "defence industry" trade press (which trumpets "victories" by one contractor or another in the mostly invisible battles over huge procurement packages) or the WSJ to see just how happy that "success" has made a very few of our fellow humans. While killing (__________: fill in your own non-zero number) people, increasing instability, breeding an Imperial security-state that's killing what's left of the Republic, and all the other patent, devolutionary externalities that are the real substance and nature of "war, the enterprise." Which, as I bet you know, does not give a flying fig for any "moral imperative," having lots of willing Jesuits happy to define what the Battlespace Managers want to do anyway, for personal profitability and ego satisfaction, as "moral."
It's costing "us" what, half a billion to kill each person identified as an "al Quaeda effective?" "Gooks" in my war came cheap -- only a few hundred thousand apiece. And the same class of creatures "won" that "war," big effing time, a "victory" for which the wealth transfers and the interest payments still go on. And on.
Just another aside to your aside that I wholeheartedly second, the myth is that close support, or in the armchair-warrior example in the current sight picture, ground attack, is a "precision" operation.
It takes no serious searching to find even MSM reports "regretting" the many fratricidal and Ooopsie--Sorry! Failed Missions where those tactical dudes with the laser designators and night-vision goggles just fogofwar some heavy ordnance on "friendly" troops or "noncombatant" soft targets.
Let alone that "NATO air asset forces" would lack even that degree of "interoperability" that can't prevent targeting errors even when all the players have practiced together and use the same equipment.
McCain was taught early on that US (oops, now "NATO") aircraft dropping bombs on little Asian people was the way to "victory." How's that been working out? Why can I buy shirts and slacks in Walmart labeled "Made By Commies In Vietnam?" Just because "we didn't bomb them back to the Stone Age," which was one doctrinal strategic theme in the late '60s-early '70s? Many Americans today are still convinced that "losing Vietnam" was all because traitors refused to "bomb the crap" out of North Vietnam. Including failure to use "our" nuclear weapons on the "gooks." A noble sentiment.
What's going on in parts of Syria is not some simulation or the latest "Call of Duty" release. The military types there have some pretty decent air defense weapons, better than Libya's. I doubt that even our smartest Networked Battlespace Managers have a likely scenario to "deploy" any of their really cool war toys in a way that would "save" even one life of a Syrian "we" would find worthy of the effort, which of course would happen only at the cost of killing a whole bunch of "the enemy Syrians."
There's apparently no "Goldeneye," a laser in orbit that could be used to pick off snipers (who likely would not be "on rooftops" in the open, but in cover and concealment, and might as easily be "insurgents" -- who are Good Guys THIS time, showing the comfortable elasticity of "precise" language and thought.) That's a great tag line, a noble thought, but in the world of Experienced Players, it's not even on the long-range tactical radar.
The world is the way it is because arrogant, greedy, dominating people have made it that way. Farmers and shopkeepers and office and factory workers don't generally play negative-sum games, barring "leaders" who amplify and play on their fears and tribal instincts. Syrian kleptocrats and parasitic military types are doing what they do now because the Players have set it up that way, maybe not intentionally but as a necessary excrescence of their self-serving behaviors, focusing on hegemony and controlling the flow of resources and hence lots of pleasure- and power-producing money.
There's oil in them thar hills, and who knows what rare earths in the ground?
Would it be dishonest to observe that nobody taking the "Great American Narrative" position on Good America-Bad Japan has answered Super390's recitation of significant aspects of the history that brought us The Last Just War?
Makes one wonder if we, the species, are capable of anything better than the working out of a giant death wish.
And if it walks like a blockade, quacks like a blockade, and all that, does calling it a "sanctions noose" make it something other than a blockade? Reality trumps words, where real people live. And get killed.
And with our increasing mutual vulnerability, each to each, (kill my nation's children via "sanctions" and I'll litter the Straits with sunken tonnage -- if I can get a line into your webbackbone, I'll kill your electric network or nuclear power plant-- anyone can make a REAL virus with their very own sequencer!) does it make a whole lot of sense to continue to try to force-fit the whole planet into Networked Battlespace Areas of Responsibility, and "analyze" using mental constructs that didn't work for the long haul even back in the Grandest Days of the Great Game?
You gotta love 11-dimensional triangulated chess... But then the military in Israel, and the ruling coalition there, have nukes, and are pretty clear that they are not afraid to use them...
The nice thing about history is that it's full of Narratives, that are tied so closely to "identities" of the selectors and re-casters of Large Events. In the meantime, "little people" live and die under the massive feet and hooves of the elephants and rhinos and Cape buffalos.
Seems to me that it's impossible to capture and subsume the reality of what happened when hegemonists and Kleptocrats in Tokyo and DC and NYC and such places accelerated the pace of industrial militarization, one of the most virulent of metastatic cancers, into the comforting little myths that some in the US (and elsewhere) use to "justify" what happened next. But hey, it's all just a flow of words, isn't it?
Convenient Jesuitical precision in arguing over picayune definitional niceties of terms like "conspiracy" and "sanctions" and "blockade" is so interesting, coming from people who insist on personifying/reifying/hypostatizationalizing whole NATIONS, in aid of playing the Great Game with all us pawns to be mowed down in windrows and fraudulent hecatombs.
There is more than enough, of everything that matters, to go all the way around the table, if we were just smart enough to keep the few pigs, who shortstop the platter and eat everything but one last chop and one last cookie, from tricking the rest of us into ignoring the grotesque theft of the birthright and foolishly fighting over those little crumbs. We are all in this fine pickle together, like it or not.
© 2024 All Rights Reserved
Always picking up the biggest hammer in the drawer, when there's not a nail in sight. Just because a bunch of war wimp chicken hawk talking heads do blah-blah-blah on the Ridiculous Rodeo Circuit. Why not try hammering the heads of that batch of nails, for a change? What's wrong with us, or at least our Beloved Leaders?
Down here in Tampa, FL, as the people who used to holler "Better Dead Than Red" are ramping up their Red States Convention down here, and there's a huge influx of State Security Personnel to be sure that none of the *delegates* has to be troubled in the slightest by expressions of anything other than admiration and praise from "their fellow Americans." So there's gonna be a "First Amendment Park," miles from anywhere, where anyone attempting to "petition for redress of grievances" can do their Commie, hippie thing, and lots of head-busting and eye-spraying and fully-charged Tazing all ready for any "irrational exuberance."
And Bradley Manning is still held, somewhere beyond the reach of the dead hand of habeus corpus, in the Land of Rule By Law.
Want a side of Freedom Fries with your main course of hypocritical jumping-up-and-down cake, Mr. President and all you "democratically elected beloved leaders?"
Anyone else remember when women said they did not want to be just like men, and that if they ran the show the world would be a better place?
Why, when "combat" these days is just Imperial Troopers beating up on, and occasionally getting blown away by, people in countries where Our Beloved Leaders have Decided to operate War Rackets of Choice, would there be this "equality" attraction to the Thrill of Combat, the "right" to snipe or kick in doors or "go out on patrol" under Orders of futility, to invite someone to shoot at you so you have an excuse to "turn their heads into pink mist?" What's with this vestigial notion of "equality?"
What's the new nomenclature equivalent for the enfolding lovingkindness of the Band of Brothers, that new substitute for the esprit and mythos that used to kind of apply in most people's minds to all Americans (except for Them, of course)? Band of Siblings? Given Green-on-Green rape and other crimes, that's not even a universal, either, now is it? What's happening, to all those X-chromosomals? Too much Call of Duty and "NCIS?"
I would ask if we can do better, but I guess the answer has to be ... ???
Anyone talk about "asymmetry" any more? And the fundamental and usual complete and total mismatch between stated mission and means, and available Great Big MFin' Hammer ends? And the re-re-re-proven truthism that Imperial Troopers just cannot "defeat" indigenous, dedicated nationalist-tribalist-nativist people, short of "turning the terrain to radioactive glass?" Most "terror plots" are intercepted by police work, not Boots On The Neck. Why do the Brass always insist on seeing everything as a nail, again? And then putting their clumsy thumb, aka "troops," square on the head of the nail, before swinging that huge hammer at it?
All that War Department Pentragrammatical complexity. All the millions of reports and orders and directives and definitions and Powerpoints and doctrines and the rest, all the "contracts" that never seem to be enforceable or enforced when the contractors blow them off, all the procurements of Really Cool Weapons 'n stuff. All for a Racket that don't do a lick, actually quite the opposite as every new sortie seems to sow its share of dragon's teeth, toward actually Increasing Our Security, or Protecting Our Way Of Life, except in the sense that a parasite like the Strangler Fig, http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/4h/strangler_fig/stranfig.htm, creates its own self-sustaining Way of Life by sucking the life out of its host.
I know, I know -- too much momentum in the Juggernaut, we have to protect all those Well-Paid Middle Class Careers, and all those Contracts, and all that money flowing to all those dead-end Congresscritters and their buddies... Which I guess is a succinct way of saying, more honestly and accurately, Our Sacred Way Of Life.
So yeah, put another carrier in the Persian Gulf, so those guys (and gals) with all those hair-trigger weapons can fire up the adrenalin on constant High Alert, just itching for the tiniest sign that there's some incoming anti-ship munitions, so they can loose Hellfire and Damnation on somebody or other, all in accordance with their training and indoctrination...
Too bad that almost all the "thinking" about Geopolitical Jerkmeatery is about applications of all the Really Cool Tools of Violence to, or creation of, this, that, or the other "crisis" and "conflict," and so little is given to the kinds of influence and encouragement and incentive that can be applied to salve the angry sores and eruptions, and keep More Of The Stupid Same from happening again and again and again. Nobody (well, almost nobody) gets battle flags and ribbons or any of these Really Prestigious Awards, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Awards_and_decorations_of_the_United_States_government#Senior_Executive_Service, for doing stuff that educates, placates, calms, joins, or palliates, rather than "taking advantage of nominal sovereignty" and doing what the CIA and now so many other Shadowlands Creeps have done, so busily and successfully, for so many years, adding to the vast and geometrically growing collection once known as the "Family Jewels." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA#Immediate_predecessors.2C_1946.E2.80.9347
Until the blessed peacemakers come to direct the Directorates, all you are going to have is more of the stupid same. A change that's not sufficient, of course, but sure as hell is necessary.
Oh, goody, says the little demon in so many of us. Now it starts. Now we are finally getting somewhere. Mormons and Christianists and neocons all in places of authority and policy, various warlords and dictators ensconced behind their more-or-less reliable armies, a profitable flood of the toys and tools of war flushed into the mix, little sneaks padding around stirring up the masses, and folks in Amarillo at Pantex busy overhauling the US nukular arsenal, going to church every Sabbath and praying for the Armageddon. Time to get in there and Kick some serious A$$! We got us a Casus Bellie!
"Top of the world, Ma!" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzD-zGIJkbY&feature=endscreen&NR=1
"the country that it is supposed to defend."
So many people still not clear on the concept. "The Country," as should be clear to anyone who reads the stuff posted here and in TomDispatch and even military.com, exists to generate money and manpower and machinery for The Military, that parasite with no real constraints on its growth except the death of the host, to consume. And that's also true of other nations that are further along the path to DeadEndism than our increasingly Imperial State. And The Military, for its part, is supposed to do stirring parades and fly-overs and simulated assaults at Patriootic Events, and to demonstrate its really sexy hardware for gaping senators, and to sucker, browbeat, terrorize or simply beat The Country into continuing to do its wealth-generating duty. So that The Brass can collect medals and think deep complicated thoughts about how to dominate the whole freakin' planet via every possible kind of weapon, from pico-bots toting poison to scramjets that can "project power" anywhere on the Networked Battlespace Spheroid in an hour or so, and go to golf tournaments and have comfortable gigs in "security" and the Machinery part of The Economy and as pundit-o-whores for The Media that shill for The Pentagram.
The only part about "protecting the country" any more seems pretty much to be the bit in the Soldier's Oath about "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Which now includes spying on all of us workers, to keep us in line, and grabbing us off the street if they deem us a "threat" to their Racket.
What else did the US lose? Jeez, how about this little collection of images? http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/04/hbc-90008515
At some point, the "bad stuff happens in wartime" excuse just sort of totally loses even the last tiny vestiges of "moral authority," or at least cover-and-concealment.
Yeah, that Taliban is a real enemy we need to destroy, or negotiate with, or bribe, or something. Put somebody on a PowerPoint to tell us what and how and where the money will be going.
On the other hand, everyone loves a unitary enemy, so keep harping on "Taliban" that "everybody knows exists and is really bad," and "al Quaeda" which sounds really sinister and "everybody knows is like kudzu or zebra mussels, just itching to Take Over or End Our Sacred Way of Life As We Know It. And it's really telling that there are so many different, sinister ways to spell Al Quaida or el Quadia, or ooooh, especially al Qu'aida, but everybody knows what you mean...
Still asking for some direction to a Trusted Source that lays out the "al Quaeda" threat in any way that makes even a particle of sense for "us" to be tossing trillions of dollars around like confetti.
"Follow the money?" Kind of impossible, ain't it?
I guess this is where the Experienced Players cue up the "Impeachment by Disgruntled Ex-Employee" refrain, to reassure the rest of us that really, REALLY, they've got the whole thing handled.
Having worked 13 years in a large federal bureaucracy, including "interfacing" with various other "enforcement" parts of the federal structure, I can offer my little bit of a view that indeed there are a lot of scared little functionaries who, like the subjects of the Milgram experiments, http://www.myspace.com/video/james/the-milgram-experiment/5512184, will go on following orders, administering pain and fear, all the easier to do from a comfortable cubicle inside the comfortable Beltway. People immersed in the details of their little obscure cultural buckets, lives directed and constrained by "guidances" and "policies" and "delegations manuals" and "initiatives," every day a reinforcement of the need to adhere to the "directives." And some of them will rise in the system, because that's what's rewarded: "loyalty," and inventive moral silence, and adherence to "the plan," whatever freakin' idiocy is at the heart of it.
Even the author of this piece, in the depths of his mea culpa, is still Superglued to the main deadly theme: He seems to believe that "We coulda WON this thing, if only (this or that)..." Maybe half-blinded by years of "sipping the Kool Aid and keeping one's head down," along with a steady drumbeat diet of the internal, infernal propaganda within the walls of our Imperial government.
Some say that "1984" was just satire, just black comedy, not a blueprint for what's becoming. It has sure looked to me like total prescience regarding the nature of inevitable structure and behavior in the complex modern state, and intense sensitivity to the nature of human nature...
I recently attended a large Israel Bonds event. Between awards to significant contributors and active members of the local community were numerous multimedia bits on what the Bonds funding means to Israel. Light rail and roads and schools and huge, successful desalinization plants and other infrastructure improvements, of the type that are dead in the water here, funded by bond purchases that according to the program's website are very popular with even many US state governments here. Since they are backed by the full faith and credit of Israel, which in turn is backed by the full faith and credit of the US. And with that kind of backing, they have never defaulted on interest or principal, and pay an attractive (in the present market) "spread" above what US treasuries pay
As noted elsewhere here, the Israeli government, and most significantly the military, receives a major and always-growing subsidy from "Uncle Sucker's" treasury every year, freeing the very successful and innovative Israeli economy to be ever more aggressive and front-line in the Flat World competition. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/britain-s-royal-air-force-considering-purchase-of-israeli-unmanned-aerial-vehicle-1.422901 (The same issue of Ha'aretz had this interesting little "untrustworthy unsubstantiated internet article on Mossad meddling in Iran: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-israel-s-mossad-scales-back-covert-operations-in-iran-1.421776 )
Here's part of the statement by the incoming director of the fund:
http://www.israelbonds.com/About/From-the-CEO.aspx Might I encourage the reader to link up and read the whole statement? It's got a lot of food for thought.
The main speaker added multiple remarks about the great things that all this money, a billion and more a year, means to Israel. Almost all of the marvelous commercial successes he mentioned were by various startups and small companies who are developing ever more lethal, agile and weird weapons, or the various systems that support the further militarization of that economy, which makes a pretty good chunk of the NGDP selling weapons and technology here, there and everywhere.
No ruling elite in the world has clean hands when it comes to killing real security of persons and places in the name of "protecting" security by imposing "security states" backed by militarized industrial, economic and social structures. It just seems a little odd that a national military that once prided itself on "purity of arms" has found the wherewithal to become what it is today, and will morph into tomorrow. And it's even odder that "we" here in America should find our ship of state being piloted, remotely, drone-like, by people in trailers on various "bases" in Israel.
Is it just me, or is all this "activity" just pretty much totally death-wish-y insane? And the best that we humans can do?
Well see there, now, it's working! We're WINNING! I suddenly feel so much better about the whole MIC thing! Trillions of dollars are finally beginning to pay off! What a deal! And the bean counters in the Pentagram even have a cute little re-name for what used to be called "collateral damage:" It's now, archly, called "bugsplat!" http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/2012/03/bugsplat.html What you get on the windscreen (in milbabble, that's "transparent armor," and here's more milbabble from the marketing side of the MIC: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/glass-laminate-cover-adapted-by-defense-logistics-agency-saves-money-protects-mrap-windows-141043673.html) when you thrash an M-RAP along a Hajji Highway, with your vision being slowly obscured by the accumulated drooling slime of Hajjibug protoplasm...
Seriously, Professor, is there any place one can look to get some reality to check on the actual present nature of that "thing" that everybody yaks about so glibly and facilely, "al Quaeda?" As in, behind the myths that everybody on the MIC and New American Century side conflates and inflates and profits from, their own little bubble economy and "growth engine," is there actually a "franchise operation" or even "affinity group" that could honestly be called "al Quaeda," in the way the lazy chickenhawks and hyperpatriots and warmongers use the term? And what is the real nature and size and shape of the "threat" that is used to justify the cramming down of a Security State into what was once a "republic, if you can keep it," and the insistent and persistent destabilization of the whole earth's economy and society?
I know, "it's complicated." Especially when the Experienced Players put their propagandists to work selling the notion and the "products" that go with. Does that relieve us of any obligation to eschew sloppy simplistifalsifications, and insist that those who rule us do better than just say "that's the way it really is, trust us, would we lie to you, my little Yellowcake"?
Depends on how much of a "threat" (or annoyance) them pesty FirstAmendmenters might be perceived to be to the comfortable parasitism of the Few.
Yes indeed, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Glad some fraction of us humans kind of gets that, and rises up to the goodness of it and drinks deep. http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-thing-of-beauty-endymion/
Yes, let us all keep hoping, and if we are in a position to tilt the table, keep working, to peddle the old Narrative, like little snippets of "they said" impeachment, and thus ensure more of "business as usual," so as not to waste all that hard-developed set of skills for playing the Great Game.
Maybe the problem is in fact that the herd of aging zebras, with their coterie of Jackals, are so attached to their stripes that they will strangle or dirk anything different and new and closer to the Golden Rule, so as not to lose the rank and privileges that come with all those carefully accreted stripes.
So would the next episode finally be called "Notagainistan"?
Hmmm. That looks like a reply, to me anyway... Good to know the posts get read, though.
It's not just the name, it's the implied superior and more complete and secret knowledge that the name associates itself with.
Reagan said "the Mujahedin are the moral equivalent of [America's] Founding Fathers," on the way to dumping a wide variety of "arms" into the hands of certain of the self-loyal, self-interested, shifting-loyalty groups that made up the mythical reification We All Believed In, the Unitary Holy Fighters Against The Soviets.
Why does the "Syrian opposition" sort of sound like the same thing all over again? Small arms, Dragons and Javelins and Claymores and all those other artfully named devices? How about a bunch of MANPADs? Oh wait, somebody is going to be paying "salaries" to some of the Oppositionistas, so they can buy some of the missing and disappeared ones that Gadaffyduck's forces piled up and left out in the desert.
Why so much effort and "intelligence" spent on little tactical and logistical details of Great Gamery, and so little on setting conditions and momentums in place that would do away with a lot of that shattery-bloodshed stuff? You know, effectuating the mindsets and behaviors that might follow from internalizing and acknowledging the two most-blown-away truths: First, that like it or not, for good and for obvious ill, we are all inextricably, via the most exquisite and complex mutual vulnerability, in this mess together. And Second, that there is more than enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, as long as we can keep the greedheads in suits and shoulder-boards and faux tribal dress from grabbing all but one of the chops and all but one of the cookies and then suckering us into fighting over the scraps.
We could actually do better, if it weren't for the Experienced Players...
The problem too many of us have is that we buy into the melodramatic, surficial myths, organize our thinking and beliefs around them, and blind ourselves to the crap that's going on behind the scenes and beneath the stage and out in the wings.
Ask Bill how it really works. If he'll share all that with you.
You can't go too far wrong, in trying to figure it all out, if you just try to follow the money. i know, it ain't easy.
Otherwise, there's plenty of stuff in the Untrustworthy Internetspace to give you lots of reasoned reasons not to sleep well at night, and to wonder what kind of world your grandkids' grandkids will be living in.
Gee, it's kind of like living in a cave. Maybe Plato's version of it... http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
If you want him to Live Large, that would likely be good advice. And for a lucrative career path, maybe encourage the New Liberal Arts Equivalent, a degree in Organizational, Software and Homeland Security, with a minor in Dutch Rubbing and Partial Drowning. Better to be the torturER, than the torturEE. Though we are told that the inflicter of pain suffers too... Bwahahahahaha!
As a Boomer and Vietvet, my money is on the reality conveyed by Joseph Heller via "Catch-22:" for the most part, there ain't no such things as "integrity" and "honor." Not even between thieves, or Players. It's all about the Main Chance, and the Bigger Better Deal.
Wow. Who do you work for, again?
Is it not obvious that the whole stupid tail-chasing, circular-firing-squad, asymptotically wasteful idiocy of the global MIC "thing" is what's dragging us all down into a fool's endgame?
Which "affordable, reliable technology" are you referring to? Nukular weapons? You think the Right People here in Amurica, who invent a desire by Iran to build bombs as a casus belli, and assist the Israeli warlords to have their own little stockpiles and delivery systems, are going to just say "OK, Stash, you start enriching uranium and neutroning up some plutonium, we think you need to be able to DEFEND yourself. And I'm sure the Russians think so too."
My ever-loving G_d.
Gee, as a practical matter, is there a substantive difference in that picayune distinction that the "renditioned" would notice? Or the fellas and gals administering the "enhanced" treatments?
And I wonder, maybe others do to, whether any useful "intelligence" came from any of those exercises in "sovereignty over the persons to be treated," or whether the whole exercise is just fun for the abusers, with a vain hope that the threat that one will be "renditioned" would somehow deter a person who might contemplate what our Experienced Persons consider to be "terroristic." And gee, also, do I have this wrong or is it the case that most interceptions of "terroristic" activities are accomplished by plain old police work (when the police aren't militarizing themselves and availing themselves of "State Security" toys like tracking GPSs in cell phones and trying to draw potentially weak-willed people into 'terrorist plots')?
Of course, "we'll never know how much the Players have done for (or is it TO?) us," now will we? We are supposed to just be grateful, to shut up and keep generating Real Wealth for the Players to Experience with, and pay no mind to the screams from down the corridor. I think the Professor had it right, as written. Whatever the Security Dictionary has to say about "precise definitions."
But the Experienced Players know they are immune, and just too big for anyone to rein in.
Pedantry trumps propriety, every time.
Well, I guess the unimpeachable outside-the-internet sources just have to confirm the truthiness of those assertions you make. And no, I don't believe everything I read on the 'net. Nice assertion, though. And I wonder if you can actually prove the negative you assert here, that bit about "there's no evidence."
Might one say "incorrigible?" Here's the link: http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/12/should-the-west-intervene-in-syria/
Correlation and causation. I remember those notions.
A quick Google search on "Israeli bases in Kurdish Iraq" sure turns up a whole lot of fairly significant "rumors," here's a quick sampler:
http://intelnews.org/2012/03/26/01-955/, and
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/report-israel-using-n-iraq-base-for-spying-on-iran.aspx?pageID=238&nID=16835&NewsCatID=352, and
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2012/3/state6026.htm, and a whole bunch of others.
And one party to a discussion may want to avail themselves of a stab at impeachment of the other, via a carefully insinuendo'd (http://variousmiseries.blogspot.com/2005_04_01_archive.html -- down the page, under "Richard J. Daley") false syllogism ("roosters crow, sun rises, therefore roosters obviously don't cause the sun to rise") but there are other aphorisms in the lexicon too: "Where there's smoke, and a long history of similar conduct, there's a pretty good chance there's fire."
In old wooden warships, there were severe penalties for taking an "open light," candle or match or lamp or whatever, into the gunpowder magazines. In this circumstance, thanks to the smug SOBs who play the Great Game and are so nicely and largely immune to the immense and painful consequences, dumping weapons and "advisers" and jackals of various breeds into a politispace that's built on a structure not unlike sodium azide, http://www.sciencelab.com/msds.php?msdsId=9927588 ("Highly explosive in the presence of shocks," and toxic and corrosive to boot) for personal (ego or monetary) gain or corporate gain or pseudo-national-interest gain. And who get to be condescending and patronizing and smug about their maybe, maybe, more detailed, if not enlightened, knowledge of what's up, what's doing, and what's been done, and by whom to whom. Say it ain't so, PLEASE? http://www.masterjules.net/ciadrug.html
And what's the point, whether it's Kurdish parts of Iraq or Azerbaijan? Experienced Players are "digging for facts" to support the Narrative, and if the past is any kind of prologue, will make them up out of whole cloth, or yellowcake, if the Real World does not provide them, on the decreed timeline.
"Patronizing:" that's the word I've been groping for. I'll cop to "obnoxious," myself. Along with "Hoping my grandchildren will live in a space and time less tortured, and always on the ragged point of detonation, by the Experienced Players."
There you go again, Bill. Nothing "arrogant?" The notion that true sovereignty belongs to the City on the Hill, that "we" on the basis of some presidential fiat can go kill anyone anywhere on the planet because "we" determine that they constitute some kind of "threat?" Yah, and "the US" has done such a bang-up job of "disposing of the Taliban," and you tell us Al Quaeda is alive and well all over the planet. "Mission Accomplished!"
Look, of course this is a waste of time. You speak for the Narrative, of American hegemony, and have all the talking points and puffed history ready to hand. Imply that I would want some squishy ""negotiating process" with the Taliban and Al Quaeda"? It ain't even worth calling that a "straw man." And one has to love the line about "every nation has the right to take out ('take out,' hey? that's really TOUGH sounding) a serious threat existing in another country, if that country will not do anything about it." Does that include all the Dirty Tricks and Secret Squirrel Strategems that the Experienced Players are always cooking up, "regime change" and undermining other economies, surrounding other nations with tiny-target-time weapons of mass destruction? How about the CIA's poisoned cigars and other assassination attempts aimed at Fidel Castro? Did he "take out" JFK, via that Commie stooge, L.H. Oswald? By your logic, he had the RIGHT to do that.
But you know that's the way the world is, or the way the Experienced Players cause it to be.
Actually, I did read the book, one of them at least: Gary Schroen's "First In: How The CIA Spearheaded The War On Terror in Afghanistan."
It's hard to read stuff like that, which lays out so clearly, if inadvertently, how foolish the whole endeavor was and is, and how every "fail" right up to the present stuttering and staggering toward "exfiltration" was presaged by Schroen's inadvertent, all-unaware send-up of the bits of Afghanity (Teflon "loyalties," avarice, incompetence, tribal drives, etc.) he thought he was "managing" and of his own mission. Which was "about" a whole heck of a lot more than "very light," and it was interesting that Schroen would have been so unhappy about how poorly "targeted" so many of the Washington-vetted, Doctrine-driven actual power projections (including, of course, dropping GPS-guided "smart bombs" on "American Assets") actually were -- relative even to what he was nominally to accomplish, the renascence of the Northern Alliance, that ill-fitted patchwork of shifting self-interests. Along with a bunch of less avowable "geopolitical" goals.
And another one: Krakauer's "Where Men Win Glory." Or get killed by "friendly fire," that murderous oxymoron. Again highlighting the massive fraud and incompetence that are so much of the substance of the whole Global Power Projection. A few little PowerPoint headings, crafted to hornswoggle the Patriotic Masses and keep the money flowing, concealing so much theft and corruption and dysfunction.
Do you remember who captured Saigon? Hint: Not American or Australian or South Korean troops. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose...
Do people in the ranks of Experienced Players vie for "naming rights" on various Pronouncements of Policy? Who gets the rights for this arrogant bit of "we reserve the right" aggressivism?
Is that the "Cheney Doctrine?" The "Wolfowitz Doctrine?" It's not your own, since it's been in the air for quite a while now, demonstrating the moral vacuity, the intellectual poverty and the coming economic bankruptcy of "our" play in the Great Game.
And it's just a cliche, but why is it that there's so much "intelligence" to be gathered, and so little "intelligence" in what's done with it?
And a dialectologist just has to love "exfiltration," what a rich cover word for a multitude of sins...
Not to worry, though, sir, people in the ranks you indicate you belong to are well provided for, and very secure.
Too bad the "going in" part was not tailored to effect the nominal excuse, "crushing al Quaeda," which trillions of dollars and millions of tons of ordnance and materiel and huge "bases" and "doctrines" as barren as the rocky valleys and shifting as the dust and sands in that place have not managed, if you believe the Quaedahype.
But then that's never been what the whole exercise was all about, if you dig down, has it?
That's a tautology, right? Even our generals know that "the ANA" is a meaningless reification.
And do you really think you or the rest of us will ever know "the facts" for sure, or that it matters in the playing of the Great Game? But let us keep manufacturing "reasonable doubt," as a cover for the inevitable "strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions," an old Mil-def for the word "retreat," which was never to be uttered...
I think Sgt. Bales is the one who jumped the gun, on the way to jumping the shark for the rest of us.
Would you feel better, in advancing the Narrative's obscuration of Sgt. Bales' "losing it," if the word used was "homicide" instead of "murder?" What word would you use to describe the mechanism of Pat Tillman's death, and what happened next?
And no, I very clearly do not scarcely ever believe "the government," which as you maybe know is made up of a whole bunch of different parts that each have their designated lies and liars and spinners and, thank G_d, a few brave souls who are still capable of being outraged and blowing the whistle, even though it lands them in naked solitary lockdown. Do you approve of how "the government," the part I bet you have an affinity for, has treated Bradley Manning, for example?
Says the General, reportedly,
Oh, lookie -- something between milbabble, and geopolitibabble!
Gee, sometimes, since "we" so blandly assume that there's an "enemy" "we" have to be "victorious" over, sometimes it's just so dang hard to figure out just who or what the "enemy" is. Or what the "mission" is. Other than playing the game of war, and transferring a huge amount of wealth.
And what's with the Current Big General marking a difference between other "insurgencies," and presumably in another category, "Vietnam?" Speaking of "enemies," and the labeling on clothes in Walmart, so much of which is "Made in Vietnam"? Blah blah stay the course we're winning just a few trillion more dollars victory is within our grasp...
The Qu'ran burning might have been one trigger event, as with the Bales murders, but every door kicked down, every water bottle thrown through a "Hajji" window, every checkpoint degradation, every "troop" telling a villager it's his DUTY, consistent with the Latest Doctrine, to move back into a ghost market town (anyone remember "strategic hamlets?") where the "NATO" force will "protect" his family, who responds "With all your guns and technology you cannot even protect yourselves from the fighters. How are you going to protect me?", every bribe to this or that warlord for this or that tiny "tactical" reason, every pretense that there's a "nation" there that "we" can deal with or are obliged to feed and grow, all of that, every one of them, are "triggering events" that not only are predictable in advent and effect but are geometrically cumulative.
"We," the "US" MIC, that post-national Beast with its fake patina of "patriotism," sell weapons all over the planet, even gift them to various "factions," which are then turned against our troops and clients. "We" pay warlords and "insurgents" to drive the trucks and NOT to attack the convoys hauling fuel and munitions to the latest Khe Sanh or Pork Chop Hill that is called "the key to victory in the whole Battlespace." How is this different from the mythical but trenchant tale of Milo Minderbinder, who chartered Army Air Corps planes and crew to the Germans to bomb the US base for "cost plus six percent," because it benefitted the "syndicate" Milo built, in which "everybody has a share"?
And only now is it becoming apparent that the myths the US public has been sold, about how this has all been "vital to our security and national interests," and now will be paying for into the far future, the whole raison de guerre, are unreal, fraudulent, a throw-away waste (well, to be fair, a huge profit to a few people) of $4 trillion and counting.
I'm a nurse, who also qualifies for Medicare and VA care. I've experience as a patient and nurse in several settings, office and hospital and "nursing home." And with VA and MEdicare. Yeah, there are weaknesses in furrin' universal medical care. But there are other, sometimes huge, weaknesses and institutionalized cruelties in the US "system." A huge amount of "health care" in the US is of course "handed over to the national government." There are many models to pick from, among the more enlightened "advanced nations," as pointed out above, that would not stick us with a quarter of the population without health care (especially preventive, regular type) and the ridiculous complexity and plethorization of UNsurers and Coverage Deniers and Prior De-Authorizers who award themselves huge bonuses for dysmanagement of one of our nation's most important assets -- healthy people.
I've experienced enough of VA and Medicare to see the virtues of "government medicine," compared to the greed-driven patchwork of Puritan-ethic rot that's the Sickness Unsurance Industry.
Do you carry one of those signs that says "Keep your stinking Government hands off my Medicare!"? Maybe a bumper sticker?
Since when is Costa Rica "poor?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica Americans are choosing, or being compelled by their health UNsurance companies, to travel as "medical tourists" to Costa Rica and other places where there's "socialized medicine" for elective surgery and not so elective too. A hip or knee arthroplasty is seldom "elective." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism#Costa_Rica
Costa Rica has been smart enough to put national money into education and NOT into the military-industrial idiocy. (Their reward was to be invaded by 7,000 Marines on "some kind" of mission related to "the Drug War," along with some 40 "Littoral Combat Vessels."
Interesting how many doctors in America have their training and education stamped "Made In Socialized Medicine Atrabaland," people who somehow still manage to get licensed to practice here, and from my own experience as patient and nurse are both (not uniformly, of course) caring and competent, often more so than profit-driven good old Americans.
It's interesting how the claims of bias and prejudgment and encouragement to "wait for all the facts" seem to come mostly from the shall one say more reactionary side of the spectrum? From people who as a general rule, when the First Facts are reversed, are more than happy to form up a mob and hang first, ask questions later?
The sick part of all of it is the degree to which tribal polarization is getting stronger, not weaker, and the amount of spinnery and trollery that is polluting what's left of civic sensibilities and discourse. (Interesting how many comments at places like dKos are all about "Don't judge Dick "I had other priorities at draft time, America First After Halliburton" Cheney," and how he DESERVES a new heart.) Maybe it's getting close to the time when the magnetic poles of the planet swap ends...
Well, maybe. That's kind of how it started in America, back in the late '50s-early'60s. Dozens, then hundreds, then...
But of course America in the Hippie-Dippie days was a very different place from Israel in the now. Middle class people did not like the draft. Now they don't even feel the hint of a draft, from any of the registers of the overheated Military Industrial Hegemony Machinery, and have the satisfactions of pseudo-righteous violence on Others being effectuated on their remote behalf.
Wow. "Anti-imperialism" is now a "revolutionary doctrine?" I'm SHOCKED! and Marxism too! One has to wonder which of many definitions of those terms were in mind. In the same vein, one might wonder (if only the accounting could be honestly and accurately done) whether "imperialism" or "anti-imperialism," both breathtakingly sweeping generalizations in their own right, produced more pain and corpses and damage to the planet.
I guess I don't read in the right places, where apparently Radic-Libs, maybe, commit the jejune hypocrisy charged to them here. T. Jefferson -- wasn't he some kind of Perpetual (slave-owning) Reolutionary? Thank G_d for Hamilton...
One hopes with the Professor that the stuff that's going on in several nations, surprisingly Arab and Muslim, of all things, mostly, is in fact a work in progress, on the way to Something Better. Not likely, if the powers that be have anything to say about it. The largely Imperial powers that be.
My late friend and fellow sailor, Herb Weichmann, an engineer, inveterate optimist, and good guy, had this to say about corrosion, and corruption: "Rust always wins." It's a good thing that biological critters can sometimes reverse the flow of entropy in smaller domains. It's a bad thing that biological critters can also accelerate the oxidation process, both locally and globally.
Well, if nothing else I got to learn a new word today: milbabble. Understood the concept, but thanks to google I now have a label for it, along with this interesting observation on one of the many sicknesses at the heart of our Imperial Forces: http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi/noframes/read/87142
Thirteen years with the US EPA exposed the seductions of Neologisms, Acronyms, Argottery Of All Sorts [NAAOAS], and of course there's always this, if one is confused by parts of the mil.lingo: http://ra.defense.gov/documents/rtm/jp1_02.pdf which also requires this, http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/usaf/afdd1-2.pdf and of course since interservice rivalry is dead, but rules us from its grave, you need this, http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/ar310-25.pdf, etc, and this, http://ciehub.info/ref/JP/ADA541070.pdf.
And maybe this:
So much "interoperability," so little "intelligence."
Sorry if my contribution is hard to follow. The current state of the world is not particularly linear, and the blog-comment format is too compartmentalized to often make for clarity, unless all the important detail is whited out.
Maybe seeing the kind of stuff Army aircrews sometimes did in the Fog of War, Vietnam version, and what happens when jet jockeys fly through the cables supporting cable cars in Italy, http://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/04/world/20-die-in-italy-as-us-jet-cuts-a-ski-lift-cable.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm , and YouTube videos of guys pooching Hellfires into family gatherings with a whoop and a holler, and stuff like that, did something to my little psychobrain. Yeah, I know: "[Stuff] happens, fog of war," all that. Not much of an excuse, in my mind, but I guess that's what humans do.
I'm dumb enough to actually still keep hoping that "we" can do better than buying hundreds of $3 or $60 million hammers to knock the heads off carpet tacks and silk pins, and applying "tactical moves" and Grand Strategies and Doctrines that have not a prayer, from the git-go, of accomplishing any sensible goal or mission, other than "We kill some of them, so they kill some of us, so we kill some different people over there, so they kill some of us downrange..." And the MIC participants get richer...
Don't hear anything, because "the US" AIN'T at war in Notagainistan.
A tiny little bit of "our" kleptocracy, using a quarter of our net national wealth, and a minuscule fraction of the populusque, has opened up a franchise from Milo Minderbinder Enterprises, buying billion-dollar faux "game changers" and $400-a-gallon gasoline (maybe the accounting includes bribes to "the enemy" to let the fuel and materiel migrate to "the front" before burning and destroying it?) with money borrowed from Chinese plutocrats against the possible future tax revenues on whatever Real Wealth that "ordinary Americans" might create) to send young volunteers (with myraid, mostly unhealthy motivations) to do stuff like that dumb-$hit helicopter crash (if you want more of same, go to Youtube and search for "military fails") and Kill Teams and Kill Bills. Doing what they know how to do, which unfortunately for them, being subject to Doctrine and Orders, has not a freakin' prayer now, any more than it did Way Back When in 1968, of moving hearts and minds in any direction but into more virulent opposition to "us." Even killing off the residue of world affection that used to exist (without regard to the things people like Smedley Butler and IBM were up to) for the "Shining City on a Hill." "We," or the militokleptocrats pretending to speak and act for us, under a fraudulent claim of power of attorney, have blown through all our savings, all our earnings for maybe centuries to come, and set the stage for a weaponization of the whole stupid planet that stands fair to jump us into a parallel universe where the Terminators and Bolos are our only legacy. The press, as you know, is nothing but cheerleaders under orders to sell, sell, sell the whole stupid sheaf of fasces that is their stock footage and stock in trade.
"We" are a careless, heedless, feckless, shiftless, sorry excuse for a citizenry of a nominal democracy (sic.) This would be a great point at which to be able to us the "f" word...
JamesL, you do know that the 2.9% number is not a monthly rate, but year-over-year for the period Feb 2011 to Feb 2012, don't you? http://www.rateinflation.com/inflation-rate/usa-inflation-rate.php, http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/
We are a long way from Jimmy Carter, and from double digits, unless you count the ones to the right of the decimal point.
Good observation, Bill. Legitimacy is getting to become a limiting factor in the human political world.
It would be so nice if the cynical critters who manage the Great Game, on all the various "sides," would say stuff like this over and over, get it through their lizard heads that that is kind of what the best of life is, and stop doing the Ohsonecessary-not! chicanery and charlatanry that kills so many kids and wakes the beast in the breast of way too many others...
"Politics must be replaced with democracy."
Hey, Mr. Ron Paul man, you got any idea how many things are wrong with those six words, in that order, in the same sentence?
You got any idea what "democracy" is, other than maybe the Full Libertarian Agenda? Of which Part I of V is here, if you haven't read it already: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/journey-into-a-libertarian-future-part-i-%E2%80%93the-vision.html And wait! There's more! the links are at the bottom of Article I...
(Psst, Super -- they're not just in Utah... http://www.slate.com/articles/life/map_of_the_week/2012/02/mormon_population_in_the_u_s_an_interactive_map.html)
Zoom in and check out places like Liberty County, FL, the dark bit about where the trigger pivot would be if you visualized Florida as a concealed-carry, Stand Your Ground, .32 cal pocket pistolero, butt down of course, locked and loaded...
The only candidate who currently SAYS he would reduce military spending. Does Paul have some magic wand that will wave away the potent forces of all that MIC thing? Not gonna happen...
Just who is that guy with the ears, again? "The only President we've got?"
My bet is that with the way the world is, you ain't seen nuthin' yet... Sick trumps Sane, every day of the week.
Awww, c'mon, Perfesser -- let me keep doing what I want that makes me richer than the next guy and really tickles my fancies. The change is slow enough that I'll be dead and buried before it starts to get really ugly, and in the meantime, well hey, you every drive a Ferrari California with a blonde babe in the second seat, flat out on I-4 with a PO-lice chopper straining to keep up? Or swim in your own heated Olympic-sized pool, without having to think about other people peeing, etc., in YOUR water? Or zoom off to Bali in your Gulfstream IV, for a little beach time?
MY little contribution to pollution is TINy compared to All Those Other People... And besides, Whatchagonnadoaboutit, huh? Any idea what our Military runs on, and how much of it, and what its general mission is?
And plants and factories across the planet continue to churn out various kinds of explosives, and pre-explosives, crowing about how their industry is one of the only ones showing "healthy growth." And their products get scattered abroad by Very Wise Experienced Players playing Very Important Survival Zero-Sum Games, or just little weevil "arms dealers," and some of our fellow "Our Tribe's No. 1!" humans, for all kinds of Really Important Reasons, get to do what lots of grubby young males get off on doing, the latter-day, bigger-bang equivalent of sticking a cherry bomb or M-80 in a frog's mouth or tied to an alley cat's tail.
And then Smart People come along and try to "explain" this or that random bit of destruction, to find meaning or significance or rationale or justification for blowing crap and people up. Hey, it's just what some, too many, of us ordinary humans do. Tit for tat, and yet it all seems so very, aaahh, compelling, while we're carrying on and detonating stuff and bragging and crowing and popping off whole 30 round clips of 7.62x39 ammo... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNAohtjG14c
Is this an index of the "al Qaeda" activities in your parallel universe? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_al-Qaeda_attacks
How interesting that this list, and others like it, refer to "alleged attacks." Maybe understandable, given the contributors to the article, one weakness of Wiki that I would grant you, and the pleasure with which certain sociopaths are happy to claim "credit" for the madness of others. Yes, there are bad people, e.g. Timothy McVeigh and old whatshisname, bin Ladin. Does it take the present huge and growing bureaucracy and wealth drain to address the problem? Do the stratagems and actions create still more of the same stuff?
Is it so nice to have an Evil Terrorist Hypostatization to which to attribute some of the violence in the world (the part not committed by OUR folks, or at their instigation or behest -- which NEVER happens, now does it, and if it does, it's always justifiable, or plausibly deniable)? How many drone strikes, and Special Ops, and etcetera, make up our "NATO" Baker's dozen?
And trillions of taxpayer dollars to chase down how many "terraists," again? http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/11/does_the_tsa_ever_catch_terrorists.html?from=rss
Very impressive Wikilist. Maybe I'll take some time to pick apart some of the entries, to do the feckless task of parsing their provenance...
I mean, like, after all, Afghanistan is not VIETNAM, after all. Altogether different. Thousands of miles away. "Towelheads" instead of "slanty-eyes." Totally, like, more perfectly compelling geopopulatsitical justificalimiation.
Went to local department stores for some new shoes and a dress shirt and slacks. Amazing how much stuff at Beall's and Steinmart is artfully labeled "Made (by Commies) In Vietnam."
How many years will it be, before it will be asked about Notagainistan, "What was that all about, again, Stan?"
Think the hypergolic mixture "we" insist on calling the ANA is bad? Even the Vaunted US Uniformed Military is not a perfectly cohesive entity. There's more than enough Green-on-Green violence and predation and rape, and instances of GIs getting it on with mere US civilians. At higher levels, the intramural warfare over position and procurements and who writes the Doctrine is pretty fierce. I bet the Drone-ers are all about getting rid of unreliable fleshly Troops in favor of career-boosting, "mission-dedicated" "power-projecting" "product deployments."
Not wise to reify or personify either "our" military, or the thing our Brass has decided to label the ANA. History is way against that. Again, for an insider's view of what's likely next, you could do worse than read CIA paramilitary Gary Schroen's "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan." The CIA's tunnel-vision, "Yeah, We're Cool" take on the book: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol49no4/War_on_Terror_9.htm But the inadvertent highlighting of the tribalist, individualist culture of shifting loyalty, violence and venality ought to inform our "citizens" of what a Tarbaby "our" Rough Men have suckered us into one-two punching, kicking with both feet, and now head-butting...
Bingo! Hammers, and nails... Armies and State Security Apparatus folks are the Right Kind of People, people the Serious Experienced Players can, you know, DEAL with... fellow players in the Great Game.
Wonder when more people will wake up to the fact that the Kleptocrats and their officer corps are pounding all us round pegs down into their framework of square holes?
That's so beautiful it almost made me want to cry...
And over time, things will, thanks to the soaring spirits and Herculean efforts of a modicum of Ordinary People, somehow reach another point of meta-stability, just awaiting some new input of "projected force" from the Experienced Players and Serious People (or another crazy-Bob homegrown warlord) to knock the ball off the tee again...
Ask Joseph Campbell how myths grow and take root. A grain of insight, inspiration or truth, and then all these people come along and fertilize it with their Serious Poop and water it with others' tears and blood, until what grows bears dang all little connection to the little grain.
The Experienced Players have blown what, $4 or $8 or $12 trillion of Real Wealth, to chase down how many "al Quaedans," again? And on the way, sown how many dragons' teeth, in the Fertile Crescent and neighboring fields? And most of the actual "terrorist plots" have been stopped by cheap, old-fashioned POLICE work?
How many "villagers" will now, and from other heedless, needless, nugatory idiocies, be seeking and wreaking vengeance on everyone in a Really Cool BDU or ACU? Here's an example of the wealth transfer that is the REAL MIC in action: http://www.stripes.com/blogs/stripes-central/stripes-central-1.8040/so-long-acu-new-army-uniforms-on-the-horizon-1.121775
And the dead GIs' "buddies" will then go kill a bunch of random "Hajjis" to satisfy THEIR bloodlust on behalf of THEIR bandofbrothers fellows, right? See a pattern developing?
The Experienced Players feed off this kind of cycle, and a bunch of others. Too bad ordinary folks don't get how there's zero correspondence between the high priests' Myth-management and what really happens. On the ground.
The Experienced Players are the ones in the (unfortunately higher-order) alternate universe. Sucking the rest of us, ever so Seriously, down a Gravity well of their digging.
It's not like the same crap has not played out, time after time, or that the Experienced Players aren't all over how to maximize their individual and clan gains and continue the Game.
See: the Roman "provinces," late-Imperial style.
And see the wonderfully precious, unintentionally revealing self-paean by CIA Experienced Player Gary Schroen, "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan." Which is all about the dysjuction between tactical trickery and the myth-dependent aspirations of the Imperial Capitol-istas in DC. And which, if read with an honest eye, makes it absolutely clear that everything "we" have forced in Notagainistan was, is, and will be a freakin' fool's errand. The neophyte sailor's search for "100 feet of shore line..."
Viagra-on-tap, and cubic feet of shrink-wrapped $100 bills, do not buy "pacification" or "loyalty" of warlords steeped in Pashtunwali and analogous codes. What a surprise. Anybody remember the "Tarbaby" fable? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarbaby
GIVE that guy some F-16s and "Attack Helicopters." The "Wogs" have various MANPADs and "people" happy to show how to use them. More MIC sales opportunities there. Love the myth that "we" control anything. More than enough reasons to call "us" "Uncle Sucker..."
Of course, Carol, there's a little more to it than that. Here's a 5 mb .pdf -- http://www.firstload.com/?uniq=1744f668cdf9dc29&log=47382&fn=catholic+catechism+pdf -- with some of the details.
And of course there's some recent noise in the Vatican on the subject of "Vatileaks:" http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-vatican-corruption-idUSTRE81E17E20120215
And of course in more popular form: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/02/15/us-vatican-corruption-idUSTRE81E17E20120215
You decide: one google hit is http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/101420/santorums-church-opus-dei
But then Opus Dei is just an innocuous little confrerie... unrelated to anything worldly...
"Selling out Taiwan to China." Hmm.
One wonders if the indigenous people of "Taiwan" have anything to say on the subject, as opposed to the "friendly" successors of the Kuomintang who, following long tradition, stole most of "China's" portable art treasures (now housed in the National Museum in Taipei), glommed all the wealth of the island by invading in force, declaring martial law, "nationalizing" (where have we heard that before, again) 90% of everything, and bleeding it for all their miserable rapacious hearts were worth? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Taiwan (My grandmother claimed to have known Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and thought the world of her. We disagreed.)
And now, as happens, after a few generations the Goths and Visigoths have become "respectable," and are to be "protected" for what reason, again?
Biden is no Prometheus, and that look on his face (zoom, above) tells most of what's needed. One wonders if he, or any of them, know a strategic way to effectuating what good might come from internalizing and acting on two little notions:
1. Like it or not, we humans are all in this together, for better or worse, sickness and health, until we are parted by death, and
2. There's more than enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the table, if we can just keep the pigs in suits from eating everything but the last chop and the last cookie and then suckering the rest of us into fighting over the remaining scraps.
"Taiwan" sure looks like a retro-reactionary hot button notion to me, but then I'm just a little old unhappy fella...
No panaceas anywhere. Some geothermal projects have "aurprisingly" been related to "sudden release of stored litho-energy," aka earthquakes, bad enough to cause some significant damage. http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-03/does-geothermal-power-cause-earthquakes
But hey, to some people, that's a feature, not a bug, including the terminal optimists who think
Woohoo! Fifteen minutes of flame!
"The horror! The horror!"
Reagan was going to send in the grunts to "do something" in Lebanon, and as usual the Brass screwed it all up nicely, for the best doctrinal reasons. "Mistakes were made," Ronnie said, and "we" forgave him for bravely seeming to absorb "responsibility." And then Sabra and Shatila... What "intervention" there? I don't know how "stable" Lebanon and its parts are these days, or how powerful the vengeance drive in the culture is, but it sure seems like the people of Beirut, the "Paris of the East," are doing sort of well again.
Germans and French and English are, for the present, getting along -- the people have enough recall and historical sense of the futility of war to see virtues in trading Blutwurst for Roquefort for Stilton. Conflicts have their arcs, and people seem over time to learn acceptance and accommodation, if you can keep the Great Game $hites out of the room. Millions of little daily trans- and inter-actions make up the epoxy that ends up gluing local "civilization" back together, molecule by molecule, until the next "charismatic leader," or some induced or natural shortage, sets them off again.
The urge of some to intervene, catalyzed and promoted by Experienced Players or yes, "corporate interests" like arms makers, and the Likudniks and Hezbollah and our neocons, might have some bits of nobility and altruism. But there's a lot of cynical SOBs behind the "backdrop" offering cues and stage-whispered dialogue to the heros and heroines.
"Something must be done!" but what, of course, is that? Aye, there's the rub...
"I have seen nothing to indicate such activity" maybe this time, possibly, and nobody in Bill's World can't even say it unless one has at least three sources, one of which can't be Wiki -- pedia, or Leaks...
Still operating a "listening post?"
None so blind as those who will not see...
Of course there's different, less rosy, less high-speed-pan views, even among those who are all in favor of the "neo-liberal" approach, like this "It's maybe not as bad as one might think, even though the IMF interventions and race-to-the-bottom predatory 'free-market capitalism' have raised Cain, it could be worse" piece by Leslie Evans: http://www.international.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=4026
And I personally find a lot of substance and wisdom in the observations of David Graeber. http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/301265-1 , and his recent "Debt: The First 5,000 Years." The Jackals are not only guys with guns and daggers and skills at overthrowing governments, vi et armis. They are also Banksters doing the knee-capping for the IMF and central and "private" banks
Might one observe that maybe in a bubble, which many see inflating over those countries noted above, certain parts and classes of S. and C. America are "doing very well, thank you," in Evans' quizzical formulation, but how about that there rain forest "world resource" being converted to "efficient" slash-and-burn "agriculture" and "proper pasture" for McCattle, in an Enclosure of a Commons on a really grandiose scale? And it's a good thing that all these external encouragements to follow the successful American path are making the world safe for 7,000 Marines and 40+ US warships to be "invited" to Army-less Costa Rica?
"Precisely" seems a little broad-brush for such a pointilist canvas.
Have you read or run across "Debt: The First 5,000 Years," by David Graeber? http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6617037-debt Lays it all out, and also writes a prescription for what is killing us. I wish there were Cliffnotes, but there's not much fat in that fat volume.
Interesting side note re Adam Smith: seems scholarship reveals that many, maybe most, of his "Wealth of Nations" and "Morality" insights and pronouncements were cadged from Persian (as in "Iranian") source materials from a prior age. "Greed is very definitely BAD."
Maybe the reason the Kochs and Blankfeins and even Obama are all exercised about "Sharia law" and Islam is that the whole usury and slavery thing is seriously not allowed, and the social structures that make living in such a world possible are anathema to Kleptocapitalism and its religiosifiers.
Not to do that burden of persuasion thing again, but in light of long-running intelligence support, something like a trillion dollars in direct and indirect arms transfer to the IDF, many black ops missions on behalf of the Board of Directors in Israel, several little deals like the Iran-Iraq War that "we" had nothing to do with, right, or any of those other "Gulf wars" that were not in aid of the Israeli position in the world, is it so inaccruate to state that "we" have provided "military support?"
And probable cooperation by some part of "our" state security apparatus in providing the seed corn for the Israeli nuke program? "We" don't give them mines and cluster bombs and Willy Peter (white phosphorus) and now "bunker-busters" and such, now do we?
And of course when "we" have dared to even try to peek behind the curtains the IDF pulls around its nastiest little excesses, "we" get events like the shooting-up and near-sinking of the USS Liberty, and further thanks in the form of ongoing, deep espionage into all "our" plans and activities and secrets by the likes of "Let Him Go Now! He's a Hero!" Jonathan Pollard.
And what has Obama been saying about backing Likud/Israel's Iran play (if it's not completely off the wall)? Or maybe, "Nothing is off the table," going first?
When does it become apparent that there's a set of humans whose motives and actions, conscious or not, threaten every one of the rest of us? That they share a deadly symbiosis with each other, behind the fogs of "patriotic drivel?" That these critters are "embedded" in every political division on the planet? That their ruling passions and pleasures are the power that comes from destruction and force? (Henry Kissinger said it right out loud: "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.")
The MIC-political-religious "thing" is a planet-wide entity addicted to perfecting the lethality of every kind of technology, from poison-pissing nano-ants to Stealth everything to planet-busting thermonukes. On the ground that "those guys over there are possibly thinking about maybe doing it first, and No More Pearl Harbors!" and "WE are sent by G_D to WIN IT ALL, or blow up and burn down the house!" All being paid for by parasitic, cancerous, daily-increasing theft from the 'ordinary civilian economy' created and maintained by the rest of us. Dimona is the perfect poster child for the reality.
Yeah, at the lower fractal levels it's more complicated and inter-related than that, for sure (consider all the US startups fighting viciously and inventively over slices of the War Department 'budget' (sic)), but the big pattern seems absolutely clear.
Wishful thinking, but it seems to me that "we, humanity," needs maybe some surgery, an immune system boost, and a good worming, to get rid of all the growing, malignant, pathological bits that are killing our grandchildren and theirs before they are even born.
Pssst -- Spread the word: Dereliction of Duty II Senior Military Leaders' Loss of Integrity Wounds Afghan War Effort http://strategist-7777.blogspot.com/2012/02/dereliction-of-duty-ii-senior-military.html The text of the whole paper is at http://www1.rollingstone.com/extras/RS_REPORT.pdf That's a .pdf.
Just in case you've forgotten how the military Brass actually operates (see, e.g., Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch), or what "we" ought to have learned from stuff like the Pentagon Papers and any number of equally futile, ultimately, glimpses of the truths behind the Potemkin Village pasteboard of "game-changing weaponry" and Light at the End of the Tunnel...
Just think about what $8 or $10 or $20 trillion could buy, in health and education and infrastructure and all the rest of that squishy stuff that the Military is supposed to be "protecting," but actually is sucking the wealth and life right out of to protect the officers' perks and contractors' profits.
But---! Perpetual War is just so darn much profitable FUN! It's not like the careerists, contractors and Networked Battlespace Managers can claim ignorance of the framework of failure modes that is "War, American-Style." They have tons of briefings by people who are often frustrated at the dumb indifference of the Brass. Even silly spots like globalsecurity.com, a great wannabe resource with links to post-service job opportunities in "security," have articles like this, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/pakistan/pashtunwali.htm, to explain parts of the invaded culture that might affect an invader's behavior and "likelihood of victory," or kick his a$$ out of country...
For the literarily challenged needing context, there are resources like these: http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&keywords=Vietnam%20War\c%201961-1975&rh=n%3A4366%2Ck%3AVietnam%20War\c%201961-1975&page=1 And I haven't found a link to the little comic book each GI got in "processing in," explaining 3,000 years of history and culture in 40 pages of simplistic images. I doubt the "indoctrination" has really improved much in quality. Certainly not in effect. Here's the current hooker page designed to suck in new recruits: http://americasarmy.com/
My First Sergeant in 1968, an avid Christianist, once explained while in lugubrious liquor that everything he needed to know about the world, about life, was in "the Book." I thought he meant the Bible. Turns out he was referring to the Army Manual. Undo that set of thought processes, if you can...
C'mon, man: Resistance is pretty much futile! It's what we do, who we are, how we feeeeel in our bones.
Looking over the photos from the Afghanpaper above:
For me, the most striking are the sixth from the bottom, and the last. A little kid in pure white "tribal" dress, standing with that kind of universal, shoulders-back, hands-on-hips pose that looks (absent facial cues) like a "What the hell do you idiots want?" to the tough-heavily-armed-but-look-so-confused GIs. And a "troop," apparently in one of the Commonwealth Forces from the insignia, doing what, again? Helping, laughing out loud, with the poppy harvest, as a way of building solidarity with the people of Kandahar?
Amazing what $8 trillion buys, these days...
Which way was that meant?
A couple of "news cycles," and this "story," this little discrete shot of horror, will all go out in the rinse water from the (white)wash?
Another reminder of Vietnam, this time in the place I call "Notagainistan." As to the things "we" did in Vietnam, review the tender mercies and distant echoes of the Phoenix Program:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
I, and I'm sure many other ex-GIs, thank all who have made recurrence of recurring nightmares possible, again and again and again, with each new re-proof of the stupidity and venality of the whole USS Enterprise we call "war."
Are "we" so hostile to Vietnam, then? http://www.usvtc.org/
And a trade balance of -$13 billion in 2011? "Made in Vietnam" stuff for sale at Walmart, which of course is a post-national corporate entity just like Northrop "We never forget who we're working for" Grumman, and General Atomic and the rest?
And our apparently fu##ed-up, can't-keep-the-Enemies-straight MIC, that sells weapons to the "Commie gooks" and engages in joint maneuvers with the same navy that they claimed to have attacked a US ship in the Gulf of Tonkin? http://www.asianews.it/news-en/South-China-Sea:-Hanoi-and-Washington-to-hold-joint-naval-drill-21823.html (Oh yeah, that's all about "pivoting to the threatening of "China." Since our rulers are running out of scarecrows and boogeymen...)
And yet all these seemingly intelligent humans want to keep on keeping on with their silly Game of RISK! as if that's the best that humanity can do -- stage-managed "conflict" with nice Manichaean Players, while in the wings and in the bowels below the stage is the real reality, where all the money flows...
Does "fedayeen" equal "jihadist?" Maybe where all distinctions go to die, the Elephant Graveyard of Symbolic Smearing and Cognitive Clarity.
"Fedayeen" may be an awkward choice also, http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Fedayeen, but I read nothing in the lexicon or the text above that says anything about these fellas aspire to be "holy warriors who are willing to die for victory."
Seems like the notion that real healthy change is only going to come from something other than Great Game Orthodoxy is spreading.
Amen, brother.
We could do better, but we won't.
Social animals, with short lifespans, potent desires, and none of the instincts, apparently, that help school fish and ants and bees to survive and prosper.
Ooh! Ooh! I know that one! The money will be borrowed from China! or taken from the "Social Security Trust Fund Current Account!" or maybe we can start the War Bonds thing again!
An attack on Iran would just use money and materiel that's already on board and in the pipeline, so it's not like there's any Present Cost. And then there'd be a Stealth Supplemental, authorizing and appropriating another boatload or three of bullets and baksheesh.
Too bad all most of us see is scenarios in "Call of Duty -- KillKillKill!" or those nice sanitary helmet-cam and gun-camera videos over in YoutubeLand, billions of "hits" on tens of thousands of actual-snuff-porn Dead Enemy vids. None of that complex parallel parasitic tumor of a separate culture, the whole logistics-and-procurement-and-deployment Beast that is the MIC. The thing that so often drives "policy" by happening, seemingly, with lots of PowerPoint Proof, to have Just The Right Weapon readily to hand, to effectuate what they peddle as Just The Right Doctrine, at Just The Right Time.
The purpose of power is power. The purpose of war is war. See how easy it all can be, from an ergonomic chair in a Situation Room far, far away?
Mr. Bill: Speaking of good faith, since when has the US machinery been dealing "in good faith" with the rulers of Iran or any other "trouble spot" one might name on the planet? I guess any efforts, covert and overt, to "accomplish the mission of regime change/destabilization" (without reference to establishing anything stable and secure in the aftermath, see "Afghanistan" and "Iraq") are just fair play in the Game, right?
As to the Brazilian president's initiative, there's obviously several ways to spin the pota(h)to. For any who care to parse it themselves, here's the whole letter, with some interesting commentary: http://www.politicaexterna.com/11023/brazil-iran-turkey-nuclear-negotiations-obamas-letter-to-lula And April Glaspie didn't tell Saddam it was OK with the US Administration if his armies invaded Kuwait, either. My view of history, shows more than enough BS and bad faith on the part of "my government" and its operational activities to choke a very large horse.
Since when do you, or "the administration," get to pronounce that the Players in the government of Iran, a short missile flight from various launch sites in Israel and from the huge US arsenal afloat and otherwise, are "doing wrong" by engaging in enrichment of uranium, by all accounts in accordance with the NPT and its branches?
And you appear to be asserting, sub silentio, that "Iran" is "violating international law, or at least the dictates of our Righteous Rulers," and the burden of persuasion, in debate-ese, is on you to prove the positive, that the Iranian administration is doing something they are not allowed, like other nations, to do. "We don't know what we don't know" does not, or should not, work any more.
Beware the lean and hungry men...
"in a game like this..." Yeah, for a few people it's just a game. With the unstated assumption that nobody will do anything stupid enough to, like, y'know, result in the die-off of most or even a lot of our species.
da Silva's effort, of course, was back in 2010, and there are various takes (what a surprise) on what it all meant. Here's one contemporary one, with familiar text, and echoes in the present:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/052510.html
Not much is ever what it seems, in the Great Game. Or is it?
Please don't say that the War to End All Wars was an enterprise that no one wanted. Certain sets of people made a whole hell of a lot of money off the business, and certain Players in the Great Game got some nice entries on their currucula vitae and pushes in the direction of "more power" for themselves. Lots of folks don't much care for Niall Ferguson, but there are a lot of clues and bits of light in his "War Of The World." http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/the-war-of-the-world/
He also used that big word, "ineluctable," in laying out the intersections and positive-feedback amplifications of many, if not all, of the various interests and forces and powers that conspire to get us where we're at today.
Of course, "Hope Springs Eternal..."
So has Obama (and his military and political cadre) truly given up the dream (another word for "fantasy") of "Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran?" I don't see that. And Khameini is a-doubling down on the "enemy-think" thing.
So sad that the lives and livelihoods of so many ordinary people, in the Iranian pseudo-democracy and in the fading American Republic and elsewhere, depend on the durable illusions and macho posturing and punk tough-guyism and simple self-serving greed and ambition of "leaders," or more accurately "rulers," intent on securing their own positions and screwing the real wealth creators and cannon fodder who make their gaming and parasitism possible. Rulers who apparently only know how to play Powerball in the Great Game, that how many times now has resulted, ineluctably, in idiot blood-letting and other ego-satisfying and profitable destruction, with dang-all zero "creation" out of the rubble and body parts except for what the remaining hard workers and irrepressibly hopeful can manage against all the predation.
Such idiot images we are ruled by: "Don't change horses in midstream." "Don't leave the ship without a rudder." "Those people over there want to kill you, and maybe take your stuff if it's not too radioactive. They are your ENEMY! Go get 'em!" "I'm the only [President] [Supreme Ruler] [Beloved Leader] you've got..." "G_d let no new thing arise."
Things always seem rosier in the Spring...
The cool thing about science is that you can always find some kind of dispassionate, careful, well-documented study to support whatever doctrine you are contending for. (And then contend that the other guy's studies are Not Real Science.)
http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/LifeSciences27.html
Ooh! Ooh! Discontinuities! Explain THAT, you Unbelievers!
Sorry, Farhang, it's all we, collectively, know how to do. So very sorry.
Per the cliche, all we got is a Big MF Hammer (and an 8 mpg [12.8 km/30.3 l], 6500-pound [2954 kg] SUV to drive it around in.) And a strangler's grip on the knot of a tightening noose of "sanctions that are not a blockade."
Meantime, a few of us live very, very, very well off the fear and sweat of the rest of us. Same like you. We could both do better. We probably won't.
There's a lot of fiction (and unfortunately nonfiction too) grounded in the hubristic and seemingly suicidal idiocy of our various warlords, who have kicked the sachems and Solons to the curb and ramped up the pounding of the human-skin drums and skull rattles to get the natives all restless and angry.
One example: "Sense of Obligation," by Henry Maxwell Dempsey http://www.freefictionbooks.org/books/s/23450-sense-of-obligation-by-henry-maxwell-dempsey
Maybe it's just a disease state?
It's not like there's no science behind the theme, either:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fatal-attraction
and http://www.livescience.com/7019-mind-control-parasites.html
Maybe it's time to biopsy our "leaders'" noggins, to see if there's maybe something biological, obviously pathological, and maybe even treatable, going on in there?
Have Bibi or Avi or any of those folks ever spent much time in the company of cats? I would ask about rats too, but that's a given...
In days gone by, the playground bully would be satisfied giving you a black eye, a bloody lip and pinning you down until you said "Uncle." How can the Iranian leadership do the equivalent, even if they are seemingly the smart kids on the playground? Especially when there's so much clear recent evidence that the bully can eventually be battered down so effectively by a combination of tenacity and terrain?
Obama indicates he understands the power of "legitimacy" (though that doesn't have any apparent effect on expanding the Imperial Presidency.) The Ayatollahs we currently are ministry-of-truthed into hating are sure getting a nice boost in the "legitimacy" department, thanks to those sanctions we are squeezing the great mass of Iranians with.
And that cost us how much again, and it is supposed to do exaclty what? Chase down Iranian Gazelles?
Think that's coool, call up this video showing yet another Really Cool Technological Advance, and be sure to check out all the other videos that are linked to it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBMU6l6GsdM
Mindless tailchase, imagined-up Threats that just have to be countered by imagined-up Counter-Threats.
You mean this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
Which includes this, from a participant:
Nothing new under the sun, or in the dark of night...
Even broken clocks are "right" twice a day. Depending, of course, on how one defines "right." As with "just," and "necessary." As in "Just another war" is "necessary" for the MIC, e.g. Since of course "our" MIC is busily maintaining its hegemony as arms pusher to the 'hoods of the world...
And since precise linguistics are so important, so much turns on just which precise definition of "success" one chooses to work from. Or "victory." Or "winning." Or, compound concept, "Mission Accomplished."
For instance, the latest war, whatever that terms means, on Iraq, has resulted in the transfer of some $1.5 trillion from present and future Real Wealth Creators/taxpayers in the US to the various pieces of the MIC. And you don't have to read very far into the "defence industry" trade press (which trumpets "victories" by one contractor or another in the mostly invisible battles over huge procurement packages) or the WSJ to see just how happy that "success" has made a very few of our fellow humans. While killing (__________: fill in your own non-zero number) people, increasing instability, breeding an Imperial security-state that's killing what's left of the Republic, and all the other patent, devolutionary externalities that are the real substance and nature of "war, the enterprise." Which, as I bet you know, does not give a flying fig for any "moral imperative," having lots of willing Jesuits happy to define what the Battlespace Managers want to do anyway, for personal profitability and ego satisfaction, as "moral."
It's costing "us" what, half a billion to kill each person identified as an "al Quaeda effective?" "Gooks" in my war came cheap -- only a few hundred thousand apiece. And the same class of creatures "won" that "war," big effing time, a "victory" for which the wealth transfers and the interest payments still go on. And on.
Just another aside to your aside that I wholeheartedly second, the myth is that close support, or in the armchair-warrior example in the current sight picture, ground attack, is a "precision" operation.
It takes no serious searching to find even MSM reports "regretting" the many fratricidal and Ooopsie--Sorry! Failed Missions where those tactical dudes with the laser designators and night-vision goggles just fogofwar some heavy ordnance on "friendly" troops or "noncombatant" soft targets.
Let alone that "NATO air asset forces" would lack even that degree of "interoperability" that can't prevent targeting errors even when all the players have practiced together and use the same equipment.
Two stupids do not make a smart.
For those concerned about the niceties of international law, such as it is, maybe one should be aware of yet another Obama-sanctioned set of exceptions (under the rubric of the Imperial Presidency, "justified" by the Doctrine of "Prez Knows Best," in the context of the exists-by-fiat "Perpetual Eternal War On Terrorists.) Per AG Holder, it is now just peachy for "our side" to murder anyone that the State Security Apparatus deems oughta be murdered: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/03/guest-post-attorney-general-holder-says-murder-is-legal.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29
Or abducted and held forever until dead. See above.
Resistance is on the way to being futile...
McCain was taught early on that US (oops, now "NATO") aircraft dropping bombs on little Asian people was the way to "victory." How's that been working out? Why can I buy shirts and slacks in Walmart labeled "Made By Commies In Vietnam?" Just because "we didn't bomb them back to the Stone Age," which was one doctrinal strategic theme in the late '60s-early '70s? Many Americans today are still convinced that "losing Vietnam" was all because traitors refused to "bomb the crap" out of North Vietnam. Including failure to use "our" nuclear weapons on the "gooks." A noble sentiment.
What's going on in parts of Syria is not some simulation or the latest "Call of Duty" release. The military types there have some pretty decent air defense weapons, better than Libya's. I doubt that even our smartest Networked Battlespace Managers have a likely scenario to "deploy" any of their really cool war toys in a way that would "save" even one life of a Syrian "we" would find worthy of the effort, which of course would happen only at the cost of killing a whole bunch of "the enemy Syrians."
There's apparently no "Goldeneye," a laser in orbit that could be used to pick off snipers (who likely would not be "on rooftops" in the open, but in cover and concealment, and might as easily be "insurgents" -- who are Good Guys THIS time, showing the comfortable elasticity of "precise" language and thought.) That's a great tag line, a noble thought, but in the world of Experienced Players, it's not even on the long-range tactical radar.
The world is the way it is because arrogant, greedy, dominating people have made it that way. Farmers and shopkeepers and office and factory workers don't generally play negative-sum games, barring "leaders" who amplify and play on their fears and tribal instincts. Syrian kleptocrats and parasitic military types are doing what they do now because the Players have set it up that way, maybe not intentionally but as a necessary excrescence of their self-serving behaviors, focusing on hegemony and controlling the flow of resources and hence lots of pleasure- and power-producing money.
There's oil in them thar hills, and who knows what rare earths in the ground?
Would it be dishonest to observe that nobody taking the "Great American Narrative" position on Good America-Bad Japan has answered Super390's recitation of significant aspects of the history that brought us The Last Just War?
Makes one wonder if we, the species, are capable of anything better than the working out of a giant death wish.
Follow the effing money.
And if it walks like a blockade, quacks like a blockade, and all that, does calling it a "sanctions noose" make it something other than a blockade? Reality trumps words, where real people live. And get killed.
And with our increasing mutual vulnerability, each to each, (kill my nation's children via "sanctions" and I'll litter the Straits with sunken tonnage -- if I can get a line into your webbackbone, I'll kill your electric network or nuclear power plant-- anyone can make a REAL virus with their very own sequencer!) does it make a whole lot of sense to continue to try to force-fit the whole planet into Networked Battlespace Areas of Responsibility, and "analyze" using mental constructs that didn't work for the long haul even back in the Grandest Days of the Great Game?
You gotta love 11-dimensional triangulated chess... But then the military in Israel, and the ruling coalition there, have nukes, and are pretty clear that they are not afraid to use them...
The nice thing about history is that it's full of Narratives, that are tied so closely to "identities" of the selectors and re-casters of Large Events. In the meantime, "little people" live and die under the massive feet and hooves of the elephants and rhinos and Cape buffalos.
Seems to me that it's impossible to capture and subsume the reality of what happened when hegemonists and Kleptocrats in Tokyo and DC and NYC and such places accelerated the pace of industrial militarization, one of the most virulent of metastatic cancers, into the comforting little myths that some in the US (and elsewhere) use to "justify" what happened next. But hey, it's all just a flow of words, isn't it?
Convenient Jesuitical precision in arguing over picayune definitional niceties of terms like "conspiracy" and "sanctions" and "blockade" is so interesting, coming from people who insist on personifying/reifying/hypostatizationalizing whole NATIONS, in aid of playing the Great Game with all us pawns to be mowed down in windrows and fraudulent hecatombs.
There is more than enough, of everything that matters, to go all the way around the table, if we were just smart enough to keep the few pigs, who shortstop the platter and eat everything but one last chop and one last cookie, from tricking the rest of us into ignoring the grotesque theft of the birthright and foolishly fighting over those little crumbs. We are all in this fine pickle together, like it or not.