Now the wait for our wise apologists here and in all the Really Wise Blogspace and Commentariat, (sorry, Bill, for typing "secretariat" rather than "directorate" in the comment that triggered your last impeachment riposte -- keeping track of all Milbabble and Defspeak and Secnoise is not my stock in trade) who tell us they know what is going on "on the ground" over there, and all the reasons why staying the course is the one and only RIGHT thing to do. And of course why Droning on and on and on is also just a Really Smart Tactic in a Really Smart Strategy under Really Smart Doctrines of Forever War.
All us aging hippies don't know squat, of course, and any source that does not agree with the Narrative is ipso facto WRONG, as in LEFT, as in SINISTER...
And in this alternative universe, of course, Hellfire drone strikes and "unarmed [spy?] [provocative?] flights" that might according to some cramped logical twister argument have been "acceded to" by the silence or absence of one part of some nominal central government, or are done in disregard of such inconvenient niceties, are A-OK?
Would it be different if the Iranian aircraft that apparently shot at the drone was one of Iran's US-sourced F-14s, rather than an Evil Commie SU-25?
"Serious aspect," hey? "Gulf of Tonkin"-"Yellowcake"-kind-of-serious?
I think I read in Aviation Week&Space Technology that hypocrisy-powered Reapers fly higher, and faster, and farther too...
What's the big deal? We are assured that it's all "perfectly legal" and "in accordance with international law." And the subsumed subtext is that the Grown.Ups are in charge, and what they do (like invading Iraq and Afghanistan and picking a war with Iran and droning and "[using] all necessary and appropriate force" any- and everywhere, damn the cost in dollars, death and instability, and who cares about unknown unknowns, anyway?) is fully vetted and carefully controlled and all-wise, right?
Some smarty-pants Ivory Tower law student offers this notion:
This congressional authorization gave the president the authority to use force against those involved in the 9/11 attacks and their allies, but the war on terror has moved beyond this mandate. In 2001, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Osama bin Laden were clearly the “enemy.”3 The AUMF addressed this threat by providing domestic authorization for the use of force against all entities closely tied to 9/11. However, ten years after the attacks, bin Laden is dead and the Taliban is a shadow of its former self.4 Yet the United States still uses the AUMF to justify the use of force against new terrorist and extremist groups, many of which were not closely involved in 9/11 and may not have even existed in 2001. Given this disconnect, politicians have advocated amending, scrapping, or reaffirming the AUMF to have it reflect the present reality of the conflict.
The Obama administration argues that the AUMF should remain the same and has taken pains to expand the authorization to cover new terrorist threats from organizations unrelated to al-Qaeda.5 However, this ten-year old authorization must be revised. The United States is facing a new and still evolving enemy; our law on conflict must evolve with it. We should not expect the President to simply reinterpret or stretch statutory language when considering such fundamentally important issues as national security, deadly force, and indefinite detention. This “stretching” out of the statute will create significant questions of legality and authorization in times when we cannot afford to hesitate or second-guess. The President and the armed forces need an updated, clear, and explicit authorization to execute this war effectively and know the limits of their power. In short, Congress must amend or update the AUMF to reflect the current reality of conflict and guide the President’s prosecution of this war.
But that kind of flies in the face of the Imperial Presidency, doesn't it? I mean, isn't the "right" way to run a country just to have it that whatever the President says (or his nominal underlings can stick him with) just, you know, GOES?
You got to love the "business model" for all these dictatorial kleptocrats: Steal big, as fast as you can, as long as you can, enjoy the adulation and clout at home, but have a nice bolt-hole ready for when things start to get a little unpleasant. The Mubarak clan, Yasser Arafat, some guy named Batista, a fella named Reza Pahlavi, people like Marc Rich and a host of others, sponsored largely (in all senses) by "our government."
Says the author, "Talking to The National, asset recovery expert Eric Lewis said that the action needed to be spearheaded by a ‘powerful and focused executive branch.’" Like THAT is going to happen.
Has anyone offered a massively comfortable retirement to that Assad guy, at all?
Bill sez, "Anyone who disagrees with him is stoopid or lying."
Gee, Bill, so nice to blow right past the obvious and easily obtained debate materials over the "legality" of your beloved drone program, and do your usual flat and unsupported and likely unsupportable assertion that it's all just pattycake and smiles in DroneWorld.
And a whole lot more, no doubt including commentary by folks within the Pentagram's Rings who not only see the dangers of opening doors like this for other "Enemas" to walk through too, but have their own moral and legal-interpretive discomforts with what "we" are up to.
Speaking of revealing one's ignorance or misrepresenting stuff, your flat assertion about the "legality" (I note you don't argue the UTILITY or EFFECTIVENESS -- either cost-effectiveness or tactical and strategic effectiveness, short- or long-term, which both are pretty hotly contested too) is pretty much plain old wrong, for those who live outside your brain.
There ain't a whole lot of evidence that "the US" is in the business of "respecting the rule of law" ANYwhere, now any more than it has done since entering the Imperial Game back toward the end of the 19th Century.
Now don't you dare go poking holes in the hot air balloon that is the Narrative. It's taken as a given that "the surge worked," because it's so easy to pack into a sound bite and so many "experts" with shall we say interests in that theme are happy to repeat it and expand on it.
"Targeted air strike angst?" Moral relativism in service of whatever what "we" are doing is so fetching.
So people we identify as "the Taliban" (a very disparate, non-organized set, by all accounts, that "we" are now sneaking around to try to "negotiate" a safe withdrawal with) have killed a lot of their fellow citizens. How many plain old ordinary people have "the ANA and APolice" killed, not counting "the enemy?" I bet there are "republics" in sub-Saharan Africa where the gunmen and Unlawful Thugs have killed lots more civilians and Unlawful Enema Combatants than all the drone strikes (so far.) And something like 5-10 percent of all death penalties in America apparently are carried out on people innocent of the charged crime, maybe even more, and something like 2/3 of all death penalty cases are so loaded with error that they get reversed or even dismissed, before Oopsie time. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/summary-columbia-university-study-prof-james-s-liebman.
And even in that carefully controlled, multi-level-reviewed, decades-long process of "full due process, judicially imposed" death sentences, a combination of prosecutorial zeal and bias, incompetent counsel (who speaks for the Drone Dead, at trial or during sentencing?) and system prejudices and public and private enthusiasms like our own Prison Industrial Complex's lobbying for more crimes and higher penalties (none of which are of course present in the Matrix Shoot to Kill process, now are they?), there's a buttload of "error."
Maybe some of those wrongfully charged and convicted and even executed were guilty of something else, isn't that the argument? And they had some kind of "process," right? Even if it was wrong? And for the Droned, as with death penalty statutes, if the idea is to produce deterrence (and of course to "wreak justice" and retribution, and for some of us, I bet, just to have some serious unaccountable fun) guess what? People still kill people -- a "husband" down here in FL doused his annoying wife ("allegedly") with gasoline and set her on fire, and she died in horrible pain and fear weeks later. And of course "Talibanners" and ANAers and all the rest of us humans will keep on killing and oppressing.
The CIA secretariat is not and has not been for some time an honest broker and analyst. Those guys and gals, and a lot of people in the various branches and offices, clearly are "players" with their own little mini-games in motion. Not the least of which is the droning noise you hear, coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
And the cool part, in the perverse system of "checks and balances" that now obtains (you, Mr. President, don't mess with our stratagems and money, and we won't depose/bowstring you like the Roman Mercenary Imperial Guard used to do so frequently in that collapsing Empire), is that Big Mo is all on the side of the Serious People.
It's not like there's not been a few astute voices from inside the Rings of Power or that Langley jackaltopolis who didn't pretty clearly state the likely outcomes that mirabile dictu have come to pass. Too bad that the Players, behind the painted flats of the phonied-up America the Exceptional Drama are actually doing something else or a bunch of sneaky something elses altogether. "We" pretend that we are all goody two-shoes, needing to "take care of the women and children" and the Quisling/Vichy types who took and take our money and now have to worry about the post-Saigon scenario. Same song, next verse. You can bet Karzai et al have their exit cues and marks firmly memorized. And gee, what consequences to screw-ups like Petraeus and the other generals and colonels suffer for walking us off the end of the dock? Even a war lover like Thomas Ricks sees that "our war chiefs" can't find their butts with both hands, though they are masters of Milbabble and Pentagrammetonics and all the complexity noises that make up a CAREER. Too bad all that "expertise" is in areas other than the ones the Myths have the rest of us believing are appropriate. Though of course there are those whose elastic notions of imperial goodness, complete with neo-dumbisms like "Unlawful Enema Combatants," who see some kind of personal advantage in The Way Things Have Come To Be Done.
Query: Is sticking one's arm into a running wood chipper a "disaster," or a "stupid?"
It's the myth of "understanding" and supposed wisdom that I react to. Since when have the US rulers or any other invader in situations like Iraq (which, do I have it right, you thought was a bad idea from the git-go?) and Afghanistan (after US and Soviet and British and other incursions) and (oops, don't say it, Vietnam,) been accomplished so as to leave "stability" behind, whether done fast or slow? What does one see when one follows the money?
What "we" have done is very complicated, involving troops and bribes and sneaky-petes and corporate interests very much at odds with the nominal expressions of "national interest" (which again, no one seems to want to hang out a definition of for some reason). You care to offer how the "NATO" activities on the ground have increased security and stability over there? I don't see many folks offering up examples of that, as part of some kind of success story for this round of the Great Game. "The Taliban" in all its little and large parts is resurgent, our generals and DoS people are trying to figure out how or whether (realpolitiking) to try to "negotiate" with the masters of the byzantine shifting relations and double cross.
As to answers to complicated questions, what are the questions? How to "make a strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions?" How not to set up a photo op of a Blackhawk with one wheel on the pinnacle of the US Embassy in Kabul, with "our people" clambering to get on board, or the CIA guy face-punching "gooks" trying to get on a transport plane out of Cam Ranh? You think our leaders have any clear vision of human behavior that is most likely to follow what they and their predecessors have triggered? I don't think so, but then as you point out, by your lights people like me don't know anything about anything.
On the other hand, from watching and reading and even participating in some of that kind of stuff, I have a pretty strong feeling that control is a myth, that a lot of stuff just happens, chaotically, and the people who initiate invasions (like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and the rest, and whichever Soviet dorks thought a land war in Notagainistan was just a great idea!) may have a lot of detailed bits of information but do not have even a ghost of understanding of what they really are playing at and with. Except for maybe some major self-advancement?
Interesting how everything turns personal and critical, isn't it? Grades, and 3x5 cards and all that?
What do you want or hope for the world to look like at the next "ten year gut check?" I, personally, with my tiny little window into the Great Game, got a pretty strong feeling that, barring some sudden massive increase in general wisdom, my grandkids are not going to like it very much.
As Bill would say, "Correct, Joe!" Gold star on the grade book page for you today!
Isn't it interesting how "normalcy" can often occur without the "benefit" of US involvement, aka meddling in, or invasion of, or otherwise stomping around in, the middle of other people's bidness...
But of course it's always possible to have recourse to that old "but for" argument that gives rise to the joke about the guy with the elephant gun, stalking around Times Square, getting stopped by a cop who asks what the hell he's doing, responds "Keeping the wild elephants away!" and the cop says, "Buddy, there ain't a wild elephant within 7,000 miles of here!" and the fella beams triumphantly and says, "SEE, IT WORKS! Now let me get back to my patrolling."
"American capability?" Recall the villager, confronted by a Marine E-6 telling him he "has" to move back into a market town vacated due to "Taliban" attacks and that the US troops would "protect him," responding, "You Americans, with all your weapons and technology, cannot even protect YOURSELVES: how can you say you are going to protect US?"
Maybe by leaving the US checkbook lying open, with all the checks signed, to bribe the "Unlawful Enema Combatants" not to shoot up the place? that would work, right? It kept a few of them from attacking "our" convoys hauling fuel and ammo to "the front..."
Yep, if "we" weren't "patrolling," even though most of our "patrolling" has zero or negative effects on stability and security, the place would be overrun with wild elephants...
And it's still the case that most "terrorist" activity, along with other kinds of criminal activity (other than huge movements of "Unlawful" drugs, it seems) is caught and avoided by plain old-fashioned POLICE work, not by the trillions of dollars of "matrix" gaming by our MIC.
You gotta just love the way the Great Game operates. And of course the blinders that keep most of us from seeing what "War, the Great Wealth Transfer," really looks like. Half a billion in "gratuities" to let the US ("NATO or whatever") military truck their tools and toys relatively unhindered from Dumbistan to NeverNeverLand. Where's the Glory and Victory and "success" etc. in that?
Of course, say the Players, it's all the fault of naysayers who dared to point out over decades the utter futility of those ol' "land wars in Asia," even ones in places long denominated as the Graveyard of Empires for some reason or another. On the RISK! board of our planet, there's no little flap of skin on the back of the arms of all those "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" that our Really Smart Generals (huh? see here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/) can clamp down on, like the schoolyard bully, and pinch and twist until the Lower Orders say "Uncle!"
In the meantime, the great lumbering incompetent inflexible bureaucracy-with-dozens-of-littler-but-equally-incompetent-bureaucracies-sticking-out-of-it-and-greedy-"industries"-sucking-off-it stumbles along, with more of the same in the Great Procurement Jobs Program Weapons That Will Likely Never Be Used But Have Such Vast Constituencies Game: http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_09_24_2012_p24-497815.xml
There's WAR in them thar Pentagram Rings, all right, and the tiny chance that there might be a tiny reduction in even the rate of growth of the Great Wealth Transfer has all the players sharpening their daggers and looking around for some Unlawful Competing Procurement to stab in the kidney or heart...
Maybe the dust from all the explosions of all those smart weapons "bringing heat on" and "lighting up" the heads and bodies of all those "wogs" will create a cloud high enough and large enough to increase the albedo, http://www.ask.com/wiki/Albedo?o=2799&qsrc=999, of Planet War-th, and counterbalance and cure the inexorable buildup of heat from our vast consumption of combustibles down here at ground level. And maybe do enough destruction to the infrastructure of Petro-world that the rate of oxidation of all that carbon will also slow.
Or maybe we are all just f___ed as a species, because of all the people who suck up real wealth and spit out and otherwise excrete this kind of techno-sh(p)_t.
Professor, as you know, O'Reilly could not care less about what you (or the rest of us) think about him. He's got a nice payday, and lots of nice places to live and hang out, and eats like a Saudi prince and has "people" to take care of his "stuff." Not as big as Limbaugh, that pig of pigs, but right up there.
He's a nice demon demonstrator, but the problem is not individual personalities, it's the disease of Stupid and Greedy, and the MORE-mon cult-think, that's running us ever deeper into the ditch.
Regarding those paymasters, one wonders if the Kochs and the other Black Paymasters will be sending some guy named Guido and his buddy 'Fredo to have a little talk with Mittsy and Rove and those guys about failing to deliver what was paid for. I mean, the Mexican mobs will kill you, your family and everyone in your neighborhood for shorting them a half a gram in a coke deal... What's the penalty for failing to deliver a whole fucking nation?
Hey, if you're the "Leader of the Free World" (sic sic sic) you have to do SOMEthing about controlling EVERYthing, right? To make it all come out in accordance with the Narrative and the Received Myths?
Just think of all the briefing documents and white papers and advisers and lobbyists and generals all clamoring for Caesar to place his imprimatur on their thick sheafs of obscure importantia...
And there are things that happen in the world in spite of the actions of "the United States," or the fraction of "the United States" that is so busy stirring the big pot, in hopes of picking all the best bits out for themselves...
The important thing to remember, Bill, about our various views, most certainly including yours, and mine too, is that they don't mean squat. The machinery is in motion, building its own idiot momentum.
It's so satisfying to think you (or any of us) are part of the "winning team," and to feel so smart and potent and all that, and lined up with the Great Exceptionalist Manifest Destiny Forces of History. But unless you are part of the ruling in-group, the Fraction-of-One-Percenters, your pronuniamentos and pontifications mean less than the stream of exhaust from the rocket motor pushing a Hellfire warhead and its "smart" electronics into the house or car or back yard of one of your "Unlawful Enemy Combatants." You (and I) are nothing but a bunch of wealth-generating-but-not-retaining, tax-paying saps and cannon fodder, pushed around or worse, simply ignored, by Big Gamers.
Some of us act as if we are really plugged into the Great Game, by our superior lights, but all that tough-guy, self-justifying stuff that you applaud is not doing a damn thing to make the world a more tolerable or even long-haul survivable place for humans, including my grandchildren of whom I am inordinately fond. Far as I can see, Professor Bill, that condescending grading ("Correct!" or "3x5!") of everyone else's opinions here is quaint, but naught but sadly humorous. But I bet your ego saves you any sense of meaningless and futility.
Gee, too bad you and people who think the way you do didn't acknowledge the futile nature of the Big Great Networked Battlespace Game from the git-go. It would have saved the rest of us maybe $3 or $4 trillion, and thousands of Our Troops' lives, not to mention all those "wogs," and gee, there's this thing about history, the sandpaper of time, that will wear down and soften the Taliban thing like it has done so many times in so many places before. Without the "intervention" of people who think like you and have the power if not the wisdom to act on that "inspiration." (Hint: Notagainistan does not need to "devolve" into those "satrapies:" that condition sure appears never to have changed, in all the time "we" have been paying your "Unlawful Baddies" not to attack "our" fuel and munition convoys, and have been delivering large blocks of used, non-sequential $100 bills to various loading docks and dark corners as part of your idiot Game. And what "law" says those people we kill so blithely are "Unlawful," again?)
One hopes that whatever future government obtains in the US, there will be some more honest and realistic assessment of the "threats" that are trumpeted to justify your droning and the whole other clumsy, incompetent apparatus of MilitoGeopoliltics that neither protects "us" nor serves OUR interests (that you never have deigned to define for the rest of us.) And more realistic appreciations of the limits of Empire, and devotion to keeping our country alive for the long term rather than spending its virtues and fading resources in idiot "power projections."
And did you see the recent "Atlantic" article by military camp follower Thomas E. Ricks, titled "General Failure"? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/ Sure comforting to see the real nature of our military leadership, our generals in action or is it inaction, explored in such painful detail. Not that the author ever asks the question, "Is this (or any other) war necessary?" And don't forget that retired Marine general that sunk most of the 6th Fleet in that Millenium challenge war game back in 2002: http://www.armytimes.com/legacy/new/0-292925-1060102.php Even though the "Blue Force" called "cancel cancel" after losing, and cooked the results after cooking the rules in "our" favor.
Not much hope of "honest" leadership or statecraft here, now is there?
The thing to remember about the barracudas and vampire squids is that they have no reason to fear any consequences. First, humans live maybe 80-odd years, and once they're dead they are immune to any retribution or restitution. So these folks just have to maintain their pre-eminence, and deflect the righteous anger of the REAL wealth generators, for the 50-odd years they are in full predator-and-parasite mode.
There are lots of "people" more than happy to sign on to protect their masters' sorry arses and advance their masters' interests via lobbying and all the elements of kleptocratic hegemony, buying the "law" that suits them and so forth. They are without empathy (spare me any crap about the self-serving "generosity" of Bill'n'Melinda and such-like).
And why the foolish belief that these people are in any way aligned with any "national interest?" They are post-national people, at the top of the world food chain, unconcerned that their pleasure-and-power-seeking behaviors threaten the life of everything and everyone else, who have prepared nice places to jet off to, like the former war chief of Iraq who took off on his private paid-for-by-US-taxpayers jet, to where, Dubai maybe, with billions in US dollars and "his people's" wealth when it appeared he might be indicted for excessive corruption. so reminiscent of the Roman senators and the Bourbons and the Nazis and the Romanovs, who, if and when the crap actually hits the fan and their "people" lose their grip on the myths and machinery that keep the proles in their places, run off to Argentina and Bali with everything of value they can carry or keep covert in the banking system.
In case any of you with short-term memory deficits have already forgotten, the catch phrase amongst the Bankstas (remember THEM? speaking of immunity from consequences) was AND IS "IBG-YBG." Simply, "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," so screw the Dumb Money Muppets they take full leveraged advantage of.
It's an old story, an old theme, repeated maybe endlessly until the final meltdown. Here's the (short) classicist's view, again, of the antecedents and successive apparitions of "Apres moi le deluge," which is arrogance and unconcern writ really large:
Why is our species stupid and venal enough to go through this same round of misery and loss over and over? We are supposed to be capable of learning -- damn little evidence of it.
For those who believe in the perfect accuracy of anything that the CIA or contractors or the military do, and the perfect consistency of those actions with "policy," and that there's never error or venality or stupidity in the deployment of those "smart weapons," or don't care that there's "collateral damage" to totally (even by your elastic standards) innocent people obviously stupid enough to dare to be in the "kill radius" (love that term) of a weapon we fire, may we hope that there's excuses enough that you won't arbitrarily be excluded from Heaven when the time comes.
It's just BS that drone-fire and the rest are actually aimed at people who are "planning on harming the US or US interests" or are even very capable of any such thing in any significant way. Or that the prescription, death by Hellfire with Bugsplat damages, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/06/drones-pakistan-bugsplats-death?page=1, will in any way cure the supposed disease you say exists.
There's a disease process in action here, all right...
"Peace" is kind of like "Victory" -- an undefined and apparently undefinable aspirational term. One of those flashy distractions that are used so successfully to lead the most of us around like a bunch of, you know, "sheep," critters that actually have a lot more sense than we seem to, at least in their wild, native, un-domesticated condition. It's not surprising that the closest to a definition of "peace" in the DoD Dictionary is
2. peace enforcement
peace enforcement (DOD) Application of military force, or the threat of its use, normally pursuant to international authorization, to compel compliance with resolutions or sanctions designed to maintain or restore peace and order. See also peace building; peacekeeping; peacemaking; peace operations.
Source: JP 3-07.3
The world is blessed with people like Bill, who can conjure up whole realms of freaky thought and dogma to justify just about any old kind of violence. Like his new category of
Unlawful Enemy Compatants [sic] dedicated to harming the United States.
And that "justification" for killing a 16-year-old kid, a US citizen, that's all just A-ok because he was apparently sitting in the same car as someone who was determined somehow to be an "Unlawful Enemy Compatants [sic] dedicated to harming the United States." "HARM us how, exactly? by not getting down on hands and knees and crying "Uncle!"? By being so foolish as to shoot at Americans who were sent to his location to do what, again, exactly?
The degree of idiocy in the asymmetry of the whole imperial (c'mon, guys, deny that what "we" are up to is anything other than imperialism on a global scale, and say why "this time is different," exactly -- something other than a rehash of "American exceptionalism," if you can manage it) ought to cause spiritual and intellectual vertigo in most of us. Our apologists for the 'archyocracy' gloss right over the idiocy of paying some apparently Unlawful Enemy Compatants [sic] dedicated to harming the United States not to attack convoys of tanker trucks delivering $500-a-gallon fuel to "the front," and of course when it comes to drones, there's been some explication here of how inefficient they are and then there's this little reminder, for those who are unclear on tactical secrecy and stuff: "Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds" http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/
You would think that jingoists whose wild imaginations and "threat perceptions" let them attribute to tribalists and warlords such enormous powers to "harm us" from the mountains of Notagainistan or FATA (other than GIs who are sent there to pick fights with them) would be a little concerned about simulcasting unencrypted tactical imagery that kind of breaches even Bill's cramped definition of "covert." But then that's not really an issue for those folks, is it?
Other than continuing to burn carbon for profit, and turn real wealth into war toys and leveraged Funny Munny dollars and mystically generated debt, all of which are a hell of a lot more threatening to "us" than the current boogeymen, what exactly is "the issue?"
(By the way, there are exactly ZERO entries in the DoD dictionary for "victory" or "winning" or "success," or even "accomplish," which maybe hints at something wrong, very wrong? Since there's metrics for every part of the planning-through-deployment-through-withdrawal process, but none at all for the supposed fundamental purpose and meaning of the whole effing exercise...)
Bill's lining up, no doubt, to get the last word here, if he can. But I am just morally sure he would extend the doctrine he announces, and contends is just so fine, to ANYone, including is very own near-and-dears, who happen to be in the "kill radius." And gee, so what if so many of those "targeting decisions" are based on less than accurate "intelligence" and warped "observation?" And why does it appear that "we" are doing this stuff "just because we can," without regard to chains of consequences that follow? And don't even dare to ask those silly fundamental questions about whether there isn't some kind of total fit failure between the announced fundamental objectives of "US" and the means deployed nominally to further those objectives? He and the rest involved in and/or apologizing for this "program" and the whole GWOT apparently cannot vocalize what the whole shootin' match is actually "about," or how "we" will figure out that we are "winning," or even measure whether we are actually "making progress" against a flooding tide of reaction to our stupid, clumsy, greed-and-stupid-momentum-driven, can't-find-a-more-rational-way-to-live imperial and imperious behaviors.
Doesn't behave how we say he, she or it say he, she or it should? Didn't say "Uncle, may I?" before breathing or stepping outside to take a leak? "Shoot it." Right?
"no one to blame but themselves," for "the company they keep." Because they happen to be within the "kill radius" (don't you just love talking all military?). You really are something else. And it doesn't even take a 3x5 card to recognize that.
Some of our guys and gals, as you acknowledged a while back, just kill Lawful Noncombatant Nonmilitant Unterrorist Antiinsurgents (and then lie about it, and try to cover it up) for the freakin' fun of it. Or because they are bored. Or because their personal politics include swastikas and pointy hats and stuff. We did it in my war, too.
"no one to blame but themselves." You really are something else. One just has to love the constant shameless refrain of fraudulent pseudo-righteousness. Even a lot of our own military officers acknowledge the moral and tactical and strategic bankruptcy of your "justifications."
Oh, who cares? It's only "wogs," after all. And what's the worry? There's nothing they can really do back to us here in the Homeland.
And if those Casualties weren't doing something bad, or living with or daring to be related to or friendly toward or "supportive of" Terrorist Militant Insurgents, Our Guys and Gals wouldn't have blasted them, now would they? We're the Good Guys and Gals, remember? We can do no wrong, by definition!
Hey, when you get down to it, it's kind of like the cops nailing Al Capone for tax evasion: everyone knows he was doing bad stuff, but he hid in his political version of the mountains of Northwest Pakistan, so you nail him for what you can get him for. Think how much better Prohibition would have gone if President Whoever could have just called for a Hellfire into that Lexington Hotel on Chicago's South Side!
And what is it about "Muslim hardliners" that Our Government finds so, ah, scary again? That Government that has gone to war how many times now under the nominal rubric of "bringing democracy to the heathens"? Which of course is BS from the git-go, excreted by our own cadres of idiot war-wimp "hardliners?" Is it just that Big Brother can't stand it when cousins and siblings are saucy enough to say "You're not the boss of me"?
Some SNC members applauded the US move, while others angrily denounced it as imperialist meddling.
And that's the usual species-wide dilemma: everyone that's attracted to power and wealth looking for personal and tribal advantage, nobody giving a sh_t about the shape of eventual "tension reduction" landscape and the silly old General Welfare.
Still waiting for the Wiser People to state what "US interests" are involved and at risk over there. It shouldn't be enough to just bleat "Well, if you don't know...", wouldn't one think? Given the trillions of dollars getting dumped into the maw of the politico-military machine, and the costs and real threats, economic and environmental, to real ordinary real-wealth-generating people who have to fund, willy-nilly, all the freakin' idiocy that's done to "protect them" and "in their names?"
Too bad that squishy liberals, with their empathy and respect for individuals and odd weak notions about fairness and justice and other stuff that's meaningless to the advancement of our Empire, just don't get that. And looking at the fighting stances of recent presidential candidates, Kerry, Gore and now Obama, well, there really aren't any bits of the necessary pugnacity and tenacity about them. Like our last Dem gubernatorial candidate in FL, Alex Sink -- they just don't want to be the boss of us, it seems, unless we the voters ask them pretty please and make it all easy for them. This ain't student council, it's the fate of all the ordinary people who will be making those last trips to the suicide parlors that are in the backs of so many steal-it-all Red minds....
US doctrine and tactics do not seem to actually be doing a whole effective lot to accomplish any increase in our security or protection of our position in the world. Maybe you have counter-proofs and examples to offer? Sure seems to me that we do not have enough wealth and power to make everyone else on the plant kneel down and say "Uncle," and hand over the keys to their kingdoms...
covert operation
(DOD) An operation that is so planned and executed as to conceal the identity of or permit plausible denial by the sponsor. See also clandestine operation; overt operation.
Source: JP 3-05
Kind of silly, isn't it, to claim that openly conducted, openly avowed droning is "covert?" But I guess it would be too much to demand that the Drone Warriors violate some kind of Astral International Law Of War Version of the 5th Amendment and turn over the evidence of what they have been doing.
What's that I hear from the people on the Right? "If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't be concerned about oversight of your conduct..."
Remember that Afghanistan was not exactly "left alone," even in the wake of the US CIA etc. pot-stirring that aided and hastened the departure of the Soviets. "Our" involvement there did continue, at various levels, and the US had a whole lot to do, locally and globally, with setting conditions for a bin Laden and his merry band of believers to do what they did.
And "terrorists" we will always have with us. Ask Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski how it works. A quality police force sure seems to be the best way to intercept terrorism, but that requires a culture less riddled with corruption and cronyism and the rest.
Yeah, you "gain trust" by orbiting drones with Hellfires 24/7, declaring some valley or district the "front of the week" and sending in some troops to kick ass and blow stuff up, and what's your point? That "we" are "holding up the country?" To keep the country (which is a lot of very independent units with little to no sense of being a "country," as you use the term, at all? Which like a whole lot of other places on the planet is full of lawlessness, including many places that are that way because "the west" has established for commercial reasons and just because "it" can, the conditions and institutions or destruction thereof that produce the lawlessness, including "legitimate lawlessness" carried out under color of "law" laid down by illegitimate but convenient kleptocratic "central governments."
And I'm curious what "military point of view" you think "the west," that is also collapsing, economically and politically and socially as you write, can validly and "successfully" take, with respect to projection of all that power "we" have, all that really cool life-of-its-own weaponry and self-generating-conflict-creation doctrines, into places where the only way to "win" is to nuke the place into glassy slag, given terrain and the nature of the humans and the social groups that inhabit them.
Does the phrase "futile exercise" resonate with you at all? How about "wise alternatives?" Do you give any thought to what, beside "military" planning and execution that has become the default (and demonstrably ineffectual, see "Global War on Terror", except in the warping of our culture and the bankrupting of our countries) "foreign policy," might over time achieve some kind of reduction (because you are never going to get rid of corruption and violence, even in Keokuk, Iowa, a place that is also "porous" to drugs from Mexico and crack brewed at home and race-baiting politicians) of that oh-so-deplorable "lawlessness?
There's so much packed into the few words of your post. Maybe you could explain what "gaining trust" is in your context, and how working toward that seductive goal could in any way be accomplished by looking and acting "from a military point of view"? Not to worry, of course -- that's the well-invested default, and it's pretty clear that there's no interest in "gaining trust" of the natives -- rather, only in instilling fear as in terror in those people, so they won't dare even think about doing anything that might invite a Hellfire from the scrutineers in their little offices half way around the world...
Ordinary people who go to work and create real wealth are the people who end up funding, via taxes and imposts of various types (and of course from other lands, *money* from various "outside agitators" like the CIA and others), the violence and the generation of instability and "incidents." So that people with axes to grind on various issues or partisan propaganda or status as pundits can natter and cavil about Who Shot Ahmed And Smith.
All this talk about which kind of violent person, which group "claiming" or "denying" responsibility, which set of who-gets-to-say "facts" actually are, kind of misses the main issue in all of this, a yearning of those ordinary people for lives free from Stray (or sniper-aimed) Bullets and ordnance, for a LEGITIMATE government that inhales all the toxic fumes of sectarianism and greed and corruption and exhales breathable more or less free air. And enough Rule of Law (recognizing that humans are what they are) to tamp down the urge to chaos and yet another revolution (which most of the time is just a great wheel that in turning, crushes the ordinary people who actually form the soil that all those poisonous weeds grow out of.)
C'mon, Juan -- flip-floppery and Untruthiness are so, you know, passé as decisional electoral issues any more, almost even except when nominal Democrats do them, or what are called "poll-itical operatives" can glue Politifacticated "interpretations" that can be made to look like either, to this or that wimpy Dem candidate. Look upward, to your selection from Tomdispatch today, and outward to whatever sh_t is flooding from the home entertainment speakers today, and backward to the long accelerating climb to our idiot present eminence as "the leader of the Freeeeee World.
If you integrate all the data, the derivative equals negative infinity, and spells out "We, the Most Of Us, are simply Screwed. And our little dogs too."
Hey, I grew up being told to be scared to death that "Cuba is only 90 miles from our shores!!!!!! Commies on our very doorstep!!!!!!!!," while our idiocracy ignores that
United States Naval Station Guantanamo Bay (also called Gitmo or GTMO) is located on 45 square miles (120 km2) of land and water at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba which the United States leased for use as a coaling (fueling) station following the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903. The base is located on the shore of Guantánamo Bay at the southeastern end of Cuba. It is the oldest overseas U.S. Navy Base, and the only one in a country with which the United States does not have diplomatic relations.[1] The Cuban government opposes the presence of the naval base, claiming that the lease is invalid under international law as it was not a sovereign nation at the time. The United States argues this point is irrelevant because Cuba apparently ratified the lease post-revolution, and with full sovereignty, when it cashed one rent check in accordance with the disputed treaty....
Since 2002, the naval base has contained a military prison, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, for persons alleged to be unlawful combatants captured in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.... The alleged mistreatment of prisoners, the proven mistreatment of some prisoners,.... and their denial of protection under the Geneva Conventions, has been a source of international controversy.
So the US, whatever "we" are any more politically and socially, is present, in force, exactly minus-ZERO miles from CUBA's shores. All through the whole freakin' Cold War, and decades before and since. Strange bedfellows: Cubans do a lot of the scut work on the Base, I read, http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=58309 , maybe like the "hooch girls" did for GIs (not my unit the 1st Cav's-- except for Headquarters Company) in Vietnam?
So as to re-locating a base from Bahrain, given the whole freakin' hypocrisy of everything and every part of the Great Game that's being played, why not do a deal with the Persians to make the new base even equally as convenient as Guantanamo, and move it all to Bushehr or Kangan? Somewhat parallel relations between "US" and the current governments, courtesy of "our" fu__ing around with "democratic" processes, leading to Regime Change not seen, finally, to be in "our" favor. They do have elections in both places, that are about as "democratic" as our own...
Of course there's always that "more democratic" port city called Tel Aviv, or the other one called Haifa, both of which "we" have poured out blood and treasure in large measure over many decades, that little tiny tail wagging the enormous US "Uncle Sucker" dog, to establish and maintain... That would really cement "our" democracy to the hair-trigger fate of the Holy Land. I bet Yahooo would LOVE the idea, making it even easier to spy on his "ally"...
I think “we” ought to send a bunch of Marines to Beirut, park ‘em in a big old hotel building all clumped together, and let’s just SEE if there are any “terraists” still moping around in Lebanon. Then la voila, “we” have a casus belli, all neat and clean! Hey, it worked before…
Hey, think that’s a bad idea? then what the hell? After spending hundreds of billions through the IEDiocracy the War Department calls the JIEDDO (Joint IED Defeat Organization, or “JIEDDO Knights”), which generates a buttload of really cool careers and documents and all kinds of fly-away technological approaches to asymmetry, it appears the best way to detect IEDs is to have GIs walk or drive over or adjacent to them, which serves the dual purpose of EOD and detection. And if the GIs in the field are really lucky and really observant and haven’t, by violent arrogance and ignorance, pissed off the locals who sometimes tell where the explosives are concealed, they may actually find some of those artfully placed Devices before they “go off” and add to the numbers of shattered and maimed and damaged carcasses of “our brave troops” that at least "serve" to keep money flowing into the VA into the far future. Unless the buttheads inside the Beltway cut it off, with a smarmy “thank you for your service” and a stern warning about how GIs are contributing to the Omygawd Deficit by being stupid enough to enlist and go kill Wogs and get blown up valiantly in this, that or the other asymmetric idiocy.
As long as we, the species, insist on fisting tight to our tribal BS, boosted by sneaky little Grima Wormtongue apologists whispering in our ripe little ears, and chest-thumping and ego-pumping demagogues shouting NINE-ELEVEN WILL GET YOU TO HEAVEN, and all those sorry effing Milo Minderbinders who will bomb their own troops for cost plus ten percent and run their phony "Syndicates where everybody has a share," and as long as there's a fraction of our annual spawn who will drop cinder blocks from overpasses into the windshields of passing random cars, or apply their fertile and agile and educated imaginations to the infinitely destructive possibilities of perversion of computer and genetic code, and little Secret Squirrel state Securitists in their little inward-spiraling, self-amplifying enclaves behind and across all the arbitrary national boundaries we've scribbled on the face of Gaia employ the "political skills" (note the "scare quotes," please, this time they are there to scare and not just mark off irony and sarcasm) developed in milennia of "civilization" to the FOLLY of statecraft, aided and abetted by those miserable, banally evil little sh_ts who write that code and develop all those weapons of all sorts of increasing lethality and destructiveness, and all the other less obvious but equally pressing forces enhanced by the personally profitable, species-killing "financialization" and "militarization," and of course all those people who buy the notion that the off-road SUV and the street-legal NASCAR or Le Mans GT vehicle gulping tar-sands petroleum will make a sexier, more potent wo/man out of them, it sure looks to me that we are as we say in all the vernaculars of every language, which all appear to have the same meme floating in them, FUC_ED.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, folks -- it ain't like what's coming is anything but inevitable, given how we're wired and the enormous momentum of the Juggernaut we've all had a hand in creating...
Mr. Bill is a great believer in the Right-eousness of lying as a means of obtaining and maintaining power for the kind of creatures and world view and control of the future he speaks for (apologizes for, in the Aquinan sense.)
When I was in law school, back in the old days of tort law when there was a very different notion of conduct and responsibility from what passes today, and in "Contracts," another old-fashioned notion that gets applied in ways so eerie as to boggle this older guy's mind, I learned about early case law that started the sanctification of the kind of bullshit he excuses above as 'not lying.' The cover phrase that excuses, in Mr. Bill's exegesis, the constant drumbeat of bullsh_t propaganda that's decimating what little is left of "democratic traditions" in what used to be America is "mere puffery." It's a lawyer-invented term to give a legal-doctrine excuse for LYING, to escape fraud and misrepresentation claims in civil and more recently criminal contexts in areas like securities law.
For them as give a crap about the subject, and how it relates to Mr. Bull's "mere puffery" on the "Republican brand" front and his take on what's legal in the world, here's a little background piece that's somewhat topical. http://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171
To call what the Roves and Ailes and Kochs and Newts and such of this world are engaged in is just "branding" is B.S., pure and simple.
Sorry I can't hang around today to engage in the last-word exercise with Mr. Bill & Co. Have at it, big fella. It's clear that pretty much whatever persuasive offerings you make here are "mere puffery."
For those who like to look at actual numbers and stuff, maybe Joe could share where he gets his "al Qaeda" body counts of "American whites" -- and was that a little tell, there, Joe? "White?"
And speaking of calculuses, "remarkably low for a modern war," that's an interesting set of comparisons you do, relating drone-dead Innocent Noncombatants to the numbers killed in Real Actual Soldier War, somewhat reminiscent of the numbers our Generals used to run, with their buddies from the RAND Corporation in the days of MAD and MAssive Retaliation and all those sneaky contingency plans for how to pull off a decapitating strike against the Hated Soviets, counted in 'megadeaths' n' stuff: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175605/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_%22the_most_dangerous_moment%2C%22_50_years_later/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=5ce2472b0e-TD_Chomsky10_15_2012&utm_medium=email#more And those Generals, and the Single Integrated Operational Plan and its successor still in effect, ruling how all those nuclear warheads and bombs will be "used up," are still running the doctrines and strategies and tactics of still more predestined failures like Iraginakipakistan, and The Great Big Planetary Integrated Interoperable Networked Battlespace Big War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlesinger_Doctrine
These are the people we are supposed to be putting all our faith and trust and money in the supposedly capable hands of? To "run the world?" And the CIA guys who were going to kill Castro with poisoned cigars? And you write something like "humanitarian perspective"?
But not to worry, guys, I'm just one among a few little Not Serious Little Ranters with a little stack of 3x5 cards. Everything is under adult control, you can sleep well. Tomorrow will be no better, and hopefully no worse...
Yah, Bill, it's all so simple -- Cowboys and Indians, Nazis and Spitfires, all that except of course it's really Spy vs. Spy, and no freakin' good or decency among the Sneaky Petes on either side. How many FATA militants, resisting "central government" and supporting drug trafficking that maybe "our" CIA and other sneaky-petes might possibly be involved with, as they've been in the past, along with a lot of other off-the-reservation bullshit, fit within your hyper-elastic definition of "martyr terrorists?"
Would you like a deck of the post cards that the author has for sale, maybe for Christmas?
And in your version of the world, yours and your opposite, but interchangeable but for the nouns, number, "We" just have to do our self-preservation (sic) dirty business through guys like that, because That's The Way The Great Game Is Played. Of course, it sure seems like every round in the Great Game is, what do they call it, "negative sum," especially for the mopes suckered into paying the freight for your kind of thinking. One percipient author penned this little observation: “But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” And yes, that's on one of my imaginary 3x5 cards, along with a lot of other useless stuff.
It would be a waste of time to suggest you read some stuff by somebody like Barbara Tuchman, who appreciates "The March of Folly," listing many of the idiot, counter-intuitive, clearly-against-enlightened-self-interest behaviors of rulers and their retainers, courtiers and apologists, through the ages since "civilization" started growing on the backs of slaves growing surplus grain back in Mesopotamia or wherever.
Of course, there's a difference of opinion on this assertion too. Wiki gives the alternative views an airing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_Osama_bin_Laden_controversy, and the Hippie Left among other reporters and students and analysts has a different take, one that ties the CIA (interested in "teaching urban terrorism to the mujehadeen," a set of skills that now is causing the havoc "we" are supposedly working to clean up) pretty closely to OBL, sources like this: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/24198
If one reads enough of this stuff, without the blinders of a True Believer, it sure seems like every stratagem executed by "rough men" supposedly Protecting The Weak of the Herd is just another sowing of a sheaf of dragon's teeth. But then that's a great way to provide another kind of "security:" job security, as part of the long slow glissade into the mists of imperial histories.
Too bad there's nothing that tends to move humans in the direction of widespread practice of even bits of the Golden Rule. More corpses; more tears; more anger; more "sophistication;" more of the same.
Mr. Bill, your usual condescending, superior style sure seemed to make it clear that you thought deprecatingly of those you surely think of as ineffectual, morally dishonest dilettantes, and I expect even though you didn't use the word "hippie" in your post, the notion was not far from your mind.
I wonder, and of course neither of us can know, if Imran Khan would be any better in "high office," in the long run, for the state of women in Pakistan, than the usual schmucks that "our" Establishment is happy to deal with -- being very careful not to rock any boats by making noises about how women are treated.
And do you disagree that there are a whole lot of paternalistic "Christian" males in the US who would be just pleased as Punch to "put women back in the place their God has intended for them?" Not including Secretary of State or anything else remotely resembling High Office, or even adequate education and exercise of the franchise?
How picayune and personal it all gets, doesn't it? True Belief in your rectitude and righteousness and the inscrutable, unarguable Wisdom of Your Side? Is that kind of mischaracterization and focus on extracted phrases shoved into an imposed context supplied by your imagination, the best you can do? YOU heroes are the ones excoriating people, whatever their antecedents and however much you disdain, dislike and maybe fear their standing up against BAD POLICY let alone yet another expression of man's capacity for evil, for not marching down Wazir-Akbar-Khan Road in Kabul, or maybe Lyan Expressway in Karachi to protest how women are treated in that different culture.
Again, is that kind of attack the best you got? False equivalence, again?
Bill, you really are something else. Yep, damn irresponsible hippies showing up to protest something that is central, KEY even, to OUR projection of arbitrary power elsewhere in the world, instead of protesting how a different culture treats women. Complete with crocodile tears for the plight of a girl shot in the head by a "religio-conservative" much like the American Talibanners who would reduce women here, once again, to chattel, brood-mare, franchise-free status.
One might attack them damn hippies for not standing up and protesting the kleptocracy in Tunisia that resulted in a desperate shopkeeper setting himself on fire to spotlight the banal horror of daily life under the kind of system that your kind of thinking leads to.
"Missing in action when it really counted." Really. At least for the sake of one little attempt, here, to bolster by obfuscation the immorality ineffectiveness, inaptness and of US droning, and other fun practices.
Confabulation and false equivalence: You really maintain that the recent popularity of drone and other kinds of "remote contro warfare" by our "security forces" are unrelated to the casualties and financial costs of war, US Imperial Style, complete with the usual enormous theft, fraud and waste? (What can "we", you know, "win" there, anyway?) That the whole idea of the drone program was not to do mini-decapitation and terrorizing populations into not supporting their "militants?" Kind of like the Phoenix Program? Not to mention to kill Bad Wogs, because "we" ran out of room at Guantanamo? Not to mention that drone strikes are, by policy, conducted to support US big-war operations in Afghanistan.
And you have but one answer for why US forces are at war in Somalia and Yemen and so many other places: that AUMF way back when. Not all guys with turbans and AKs are "terrorists," anyway, and it's patently clear that the dronists don't do the greatest job of discriminating. Forget, of course, the fundamental questions about whether the whole freakin' exercise is anything more than an expensive folly that fails to achieve even the moving-target missions that are decreed to be so vitally important to the other moving target: "US interests."
As to civilian casualties, you sure seem to have little in the way of concern about them, whoever is the killer: "Why is it that people who purport to be so concerned about civilian casualties are so focused on a much smaller cause of such deaths?" you say. What is the game? Making everyone in Central Asia say "Uncle"?
And so convenient that you find it perfectly "legal" to "accidentally" kill "innocent civilians" in hostilities occasioned by actions like the invasion, under a pale whitewash of "legality," of Afghanistan, a place that with or without a deadline for withdrawal will eventually give the US the same bye-bye it gave the Soviets. As to not being prosecutable anywhere in the world, you want to be so absolute about that?
Hey, Joe: You're the one tossing out the red herring that the "theory" of terrorism is revenge for US killing of their village mates or nationals. There's a subset of every population, like the PashTaliban in the FATA, like Tim McVeigh and that Norwegian guy, and other folks whose lives are impacted by "policies" and imagery and the idiot human need for "an enemy," who will pick up an AK or an RPG-29 or dig a hole to fill with "re-purposed" US-made artillery rounds or bombs, or just that fertilizer-and-diesel-fuel stuff. These folks are largely interchangeable, whatever the surficial "reasons" for their resort to that so-soul-satisfying violence may be. (And even some fraction of good ol' US GIs are not above killing "wogs" for fun, or of course out of REVENGE for some other wog or wogs having killed or wounded some of their Band of Brothers.)
YOU are the one who needs to drive all discourse into a simplistic disputation, consistent with how you believe the world works or ought to. Even the military here now mostly eschews the word "terrorist," recognizing that repetition coupled with patent inconsistency with reality over time takes the power out of the "enemy demonization" term and forces the leadership into ever more idiotic and ineffectual doctrines and tactics. Not even redefining the mission can give a "rational" face to the "giant hammer" approach to all the different reasons that humans do "terrorism," including faceless Hellfire launches into groups of other humans. (It used to be, in a lot of places like Northern Ireland and South Africa and such, that a gathering of more than 3 people was presumed to be revolution-plotting and insurrection.)
All you guys got is serial apologetics for What We Do, in all its complexity, from Coca-colonialism to "regime change" to supporting dictators for "administrative convenience," et effing cetera, to now setting up "bases" or "areas" or whatever cover words are au courant all over the planet at enormous expense to do exactly WHAT, again?
There's no freakin' way to use military force or fear to establish US hegemony, any more than the much more brutal and efficient Soviet and Israeli and other entities' resort to those "tools of statecraft" have been in achieving "security" or even assuring longevity of their political forms. Just a question: how would you and Mr. Bill, our other resident apologist for How Things Are Done, react to say a Canadian drone, circling overhead, launching an 'Eh?fire' missile into your daughter's wedding reception? Maybe not make an instant "terrorist" of you, but maybe predispose you, as one tiny little member of a target class, to add whatever little you can do in local politics, your little militia group, or if you have bigger ambitions and involvement, into setting policy in support of larger groups who can reach out and touch folks in Ottawa or Alberta with the tools of asymmetric battle?
Too complex for sound bites, of course. And the momentum, and the flow of huge amounts of money and power, as you full well know, is in the direction of your preference and belief structure. Too bad for the rest of us soft targets and bugsplats...
(3x5 check: yep, got 'em all in.)
And RBTL: What do you consider Joe's "good point" to be, again?
Maybe that's because there are damn few "sensible, rational, well-informed high government officials in the State and Defense Departments and the NSC."
And of course as with Vietnam, with Reagan's Lebanon involvement, with Iraq, and a bunch of other imperial adventures, there clearly are other ways that "the war," or whatever it might be called, comes to a close. As in, exhaustion, bankruptcy, a new crusade flogged by the neocons to distract from the current inevitable failure of the latest one, "declaring victory," cutting-and-running like the Soviets, stuff like that.
People appear to be getting more subtle at packaging the troll torpedoes.
I've got no particular personal affection for the rulers' policies and behaviors, the consistent ones that over a couple of centuries have taken "us" from George Washington, the honorable statesman, through Eisenhower the general who warned us about his own extended MICC "family," to Reagan and the Bush League and Clintons then and now and the Current Occupant, the latter stages being more and more corporate and bureaucratized and insensitive and inflexible and purblind, stumbling on the road to the usual decline and fall.
But the folks you pray for, Hype, will take us even faster down the Yellow Brick Road to dissolution. Your guys tell outright lies of the Double-Whopper-with-Cheese variety and scale, but all of the Powers that Be live in a bouillabaisse of dishonesty and dishonor and perversions cloaked rhetorically in the "patriotic" patois of "National Interest. But it seems more likely that the Dems will throw an occasional bone to us dogs down on the floor than the Reds (remember when those same dorks would rather have been "dead than Red?) who are pretty much all about vacuuming up even the scraps and crumbs, starving out the rest of us in pursuit of idiot dreams of hegemony...
Reagan was scarcely the only president, and Weinberger scarcely the only post-hoc history revisionist war promoter concerned near the end of life about his "place in history," to send "our people" on an impossible mission.
Does that include people who answer any challenge to the Conventional Foolish Stupidity with the good old unsupported "You're too dumb to understand, I'm much smarter and better informed (from the sources and beliefs that I choose to believe) about policy and politics, and what our rulers are doing is just fine, by definition, because they are doing it" line? Any particular reason you and Mr. Bill feel impelled to spend effort on impeaching what I and others might offer here by way of a different view and path forward?
And it's got nothing to do with smartass remarks about the length of the ambassador's skirt, and everything to do with a set of policies and behaviors and power-projections that really don't actually seem to "advance or protect U.S. interests" (maybe YOU can take a shot at laying out what those are supposed to be?) even a little bit, as opposed to making a few people rich and a lot more people dead or injured or starving, or lead to anything more than more of the same more-and-more. Which demonstrably is not working and is not going to. My country, according to what I was taught in civics and history, is supposed to be better than that. Obviously, my teachers did not understand the "gritty reality" you people have been able to force or sucker the rest of us into living in.
That's a four-note bass line that I will be happy to keep playing in the hope that stuff like the New American Century gets finally shoved up the backsides of the SOBs who have peddled it.
It's not like you or Bill can point to any great "policy successes" as a result of the way the Players, who ascribe to game theory among other sources of illumination, are playing the Game, or even show that what's going on now, where Romney can say with conviction that Russia is the US's greatest adversary, is anything more than a clumsy and doomed continuation of the Great Game that has wasted so much of the planet's resources and kept people who are trying to find ways to do things better, or simply to live without a Hellfire warhead in their noncombatant ear, from making any headway. Or maybe you want to take a shot at that advocacy too?
OOOOOh, let me check my 3x5 cards to make sure I didn't miss anything....
Susan, I bet you know the sleep of the "Cowboys" and "Jackals" is untroubled by any "dreams of liberating the oppressed." You know what U.S. foreign policy and the actions and obfuscations "our" imperial institutions have carried out under the Foggy Bottom obscurantisms of "national interest" and "state security" and the rest. "We" are collectively Not Very Nice People (the cutting edge being people like Gary Schroen who wrote "First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," a brag piece that unwittingly spotlights the evil and complexity and incompetence and tangential thievery and fraud that characterizes our Sneaky-Petes and has since Wild Bill Donovan and Kermit Roosevelt Jr.) And it's not just "Not Very Nice:" these 'tards are playing games that advance them and their little cliques and clients for short-term apparent gains, but with long-term costs like "blowback" that they neither anticipate, nor care about even if they do.
Maybe if the a--holes who make "policy" inside the Imperial Beltway gave the embassies something actually useful to do, stuff that looks beyond the Great Game and all the business-as-usual sh-t that has been the stuff of American Exceptionalimperialomanifestydestiny for generations, something that trends toward stability and sustainability (check the 3x5 cards -- got those points, good.) and survival of the species, maybe the embassies and consulates would not be such inviting targets and would actually require a lot less "security," something that at that distance (see: Iran, November 4. 1979) that can't be given? Rather than just stirring things up and carrying out the stuff that Mr. Bill tells us is the all-wise best that "we" can do "to protect the US and US interests," which neither he nor any other AllWiser has chosen to tell the rest of us what they are? Continually using his little set of catchphrases, like the Sneaky-Petes in DC do, to cover and obscure with the stink of "patriotism" and "homeland security" and "national interest" all the secret deals and murders and other crap?
I know, it's just like nukular weapon technology -- the cat's out of the bag, everyone supposedly wants it (or at least some of their rulers do), and only now are people, PEOPLE, starting to accept that a few of the smarter rulers see the wisdom of standing down from perpetual Defcon 3.3.
Even the reactionaries at the Heritage Foundation don't take the claim as far in the partisan "you did it too" direction as your comment does. The link here gives some pretty telling details on who paid what for what purposes, and gives the lie to your claim, including the part about Democrats voting in equal numbers to majority Republicans in the House appropriations activities. http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/11/libya-security-lapse-the-budget-for-embassy-security-is-not-responsible/
Yeah, the military does not set policy. Tell that to the Vietnamese. Tell that to the taxpayers who cough up a lung paying for F-35s that will never see combat any more than the F-22 has. And who "sets policy" in Notagainistan, where "the front" and the Doctrine of the Day are moving targets, and gee, who was that general who was so really smart and wrote the book on the ineluctably failed tactics of COIN/nation building that pretty much set the policy that you say we don't, or is it ought not to try, to do? Any number of weapon systems with their coteries and flacks in the military, now they don't kind of nudge "policy" in the direction of actions that involve procurement and deployment and replacement of those weapons, do they?
As to drone use, YOUR statement is the silly one. Hiding behind grammatical quibbles and pretending to all kinds of deep knowledge of what is clearly a violation of national sovereignties, among other really good reasons why it is "bad policy," and ought to make an "American" who has the interests of the whole country, not just the neocon few and the Great Gamers, just vomit. Your repeated claim that FATA leaders attending a jirga, and their neighbors who dare to come to the aid of the survivors of the first warhead, who are "double-tapped" by Hellfires are "terrorist leaders [who] openly planned and committed attacks against the United States" is simply self-justifying BS, that is not even mitigated by the sly addition of that meaningless phrase "and U.S. interests."
You are all about demanding precision and definition and citations and all that on the part of other people here. How about listing how people who are being Hellfired are "attacking the US," and more especially just what do you mean by that phrase "U.S. interests"?
People who think the way you do will be the death of all of us. All the while being so cock-sure they know it all, and are carrying out the plans of the Almighty or Manifest Destiny or some such crap. Or are cynically suckering the rest of us, every chance they get, into swallowing their deceptions and illusions and delusions that have gotten all of us into this imperial dead-end death spiral.
But once again, buddy, not to worry. The Juggernaut you are riding won't be deflected a tiny fraction of a radian by plowing over the bodies of the rest of us...
Sez who, "we're good at" counter-terrorism? Trillions of dollars to maybe kill a few hundred "terrorists?" ain't done a whole lot to increase or even maintain the stability of the world, improve "our" security, advance the economic interests of Average Americans or any other bunch of Ordinary People, any of that crap that the Great Gamers claim it's all supposed to be about. Rather more the opposite. My grandma's advice to mostly mind my own business sure seems a lot wiser than the crap emitted by a Wolfowitz or a Cheney. Or a Jeb Bush, with the chutzpah to claim of W that "My brother kept us safe." http://thehounddawg.com/?p=1059 Not.
It's a good thing that Mr. Bill's "WE" only extends to a pretty small bunch of Experienced Players, here and there. I guess that's a good thing. Bill knows the actual large "WE" doesn't subscribe to the vast majority of the stuff "THEY" tell us is the way Wise People play the Game for us, moving us little Game Pieces across their Big Board and off the Board into the Bone Pile...
Though a tiny minority of "US," included in that "WE" of his, are seriously going about doing "stupid" on a planetary scale, driven by "doctrines" that at the far end of the pipeline are abject idiotic destructive painful failures, but of course upstream are nice cushy billets for chicken hawks, war wimps, jingoists, creatures like Curtis LeMay and his buddies, all of that. Who have figured out how, like creepy little parasitic catalysts, to diddle the rest of us into making the world fit their putrid little world view, and pay for their pleasure with our real wealth and our lives.
But he can take a quick read of scholarship like that of Barbara Tuchman, in works like "The March of Folly:"
Barbara Tuchman was the greatest popular history writer of the late 20th century, and this is her finest book: a work of history for those who don't read history. Unlike the typical history which tackles a period and/or region, this book examines, in quite of bit of detail, four instances of folly in human history. This turns out to be a remarkably useful device for learning about the kinds of events that drive human organizations to places they don't often go -- and in these four cases, shouldn't have gone.
The book defines folly by examining the first case, letting the Trojan Horse into Troy. To qualify as folly for this book, Tuchman explains, acts have to be clearly contrary to the self-interest of the organization or group pursuing them; conducted over a period of time, not just in a single burst of irrational behavior; conducted by a number of individuals, not just one deranged maniac; and, importantly, there have to be people alive at the time who pointed out correctly why the act in question was folly (no 20/20 hindsight allowed).
In the case of the Trojan Horse, the latter role is played by Laocoon, a blind priest, who chastises Trojan leadership the moment the wooden equine is found. "You can't bring that thing in here," he says, "it might be full of Greek soldiers!" Later, as it becomes evident the will to bring it in is strong, he suggests helpfully, "Well, if you're going to bring it in, at least poke it with a spear and see if anybody yelps."
"Folly" should comfort him that nothing is likely to change, and that sneaky little miasma that is the "WE" he subscribes to will be easily able to keep on keeping on. Bet that makes him happy...
And then flip on over to "The Proud Tower," which catalogs the idiocies of human behavior, tribal loyalties over more sensible self-interest in stuff like self-preservation (see: WW I, the Great War), and the apparent constant lust, occasionally peaking, for COMBAT. Fomented by little sneaks who make weapons, "make policy" and make off with all the money. (see: German "Nazis," escaping the fall of the idiot Third Reich in U-boats and cargo ships, hiding behind false passports and abetted by "Western security services," off to Argentina and such places with lots of very portable wealth...)
It's so very reminiscent of how cancers spread by metastasis.
Little outposts of malignant cells are dispatched from the original tumor and migrate, silently, stealthily and intentionally invisible to the immune system that ought to police them, engulf them and return their components to healthy homeostatic processes.
Once the outposts glue themselves to a new site, they send out messages that trick the body into angiogenesis, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/angiogenesis -- the growing of new arteries, BIG arteries, feeding lifeblood full-force into the "successful" distant tumors, letting them grow unchecked, killing and displacing healthy tissue.
Since, after all, stability and sustainability and stuff that proves there really is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the whole table kind of gets in the way of your personal religion of MOREISM, as in "more for the few at the top, and screw everybody else since them at the top will only be around maybe a couple of decades and have places to run and hide and be very comfortable and have no fear of retribution or co-suffering if their parasitism and predations finally push everything past some ineluctable tipping point"?
Mr. Koroi, "America" is a place that is mythical and as seldom visible as that town of Brigadoon. The small part of the "US" population that profits from this apex of human consumptive history, the small part that actually dictates how the rest of us live and die, is actively opposed to any motions in the wider world that lead to all the rest of us being anything but prey animals.
Re regulation going too far: got any Paulian exemplars of how de- or non-regulation has worked out wonderfully for anyone except those who are de- or non-regulated? Your example is a seductive fraud, as I am sure you know. The permitting process for construction is the way it is in part because interested parties, usually as a result of some bad outcome (the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire and many bridge collapses and falling buildings in minor earthquakes and Ford Pintos with pinchpenny explosive "engineering" of their fuel fillers come to mind), use the "rule of law" to set some standards. Which then may or may not be enforced. And once regulatory apparatuses are in place, "running government like a business" by lobbying regs that favor YOU at the expense of your competition is just peachy. And it's BS to claim, given our nature and all the historical evidence, to expect that it will ever be much different.
Your elderly parents in many places could have just spread a little grease around and slid right past the "crazy" regulation you toss out as a red herring exemplar. And of course you provide no details of what kinds of approvals were required, what jurisdiction you are yakking about, (not "federal," nice conjurer's trick there), what "features" of that garage might have been "odd," and other stuff that might allow rational analysis as opposed to emotional tear-jerking.
Love the casual toss-off of loaded terms, that sound so "fair" and "rational:" regulations must satisfy some "cost-benefit" test (and gee, who will administer that, again?), and be "constitutional?" What's that high-pitched squealing I can barely hear? A dog whistle?
The Pauls are sneaks and frauds in their own right, and the amount of misrepresentation offered on their behalf and that of their acolytes is just astounding, comparable to other cults...
To double down on something I linked below, this little snippet seems so apropos of your situation. Must be horrible when the reality (another failed imperium, a planet that may spit us humans out like a mouthful of dirt, inability to think or act our way out of a cul-de-sac) really clearly and pretty much inarguably stops corresponding with the force-fit mythic model, on which one is then compelled to triple down on, quadruple even...
The question is whether we, as a species, will continue to live within this crumbling fiction or whether we can construct a different mythological system founded on principles that are a closer fit to our really existing circumstances.
Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction.
Let's stick with what we know. We ain't gonna live much longer anyway. And do you know there are older people who run their Oldsmobiles and Escalades into crowds on the street, killing and maiming, and claim they just hit the gas instead of the brake "by accident?" And in their hearts are actually just doing something they have always wanted to do but were afraid to simply on account of the uncomfortable consequences (which they now escape, by prosecutorial discretion in favor of the very old or because they die, out on bail awaiting trial on reduced charges): Kill another human being, or many of them if they're lucky.
And what do you think is in the hearts of the folks who run the drone program, and the rendition program, and the Phoenix Program, and all the rest of those "programs?"
I guess Paul Krugman is not, by your judgment, a "serious economist." Thanks for sharing the "conservative" talking points, with some of the sharper barbs sanded down a bit. It's becoming increasingly clear that "economists," particularly the ones denominated "serious" by the Narrativatizers, are paid shills for the kleptocracy. And that "economics" as a "discipline" starts from false premises and postulates, and goes downhill, fast, from there.
Ever trouble yourself with the likes of Yves Smith (or the actual Adam Smith, for that matter, not the ChicagoAustrian Cliff Notes (per)version) or Matt Taibbi (who does not pretend to be an "economist" but has done a heck of a job showing how the vampire-capitalist state actually works)?
A couple of recent selections from Naked Capitalism:
This is the legacy that Smith [Adam, that is}] has left us today. Not just in the field of economics, but also as a sort of moral or mythic code by which we arrange our social intercourse in mass society. When we step into a shop and purchase a good or a service we are acting as Smithian individuals. We see ourselves as unbounded to those around us and free to make whatever decisions we please. And we believe that once the transaction is complete we can wash our hands of it.
The problem is that this is not true and it probably never has been. Today, instead, we see all too clearly the importance of debt. Debt is what ties us together. We may be in the position of creditor or in the position of debtor – or we may even be in the position of neither – but debt affects all of us. Even those of us that balance our books perfectly and do not engage in any form of lending nevertheless rely on banking systems and systems of government founded on the simple and timeless principles of debt. And it is these principles that bind us together.
We are not, in any way, “men who owe no obligation to one another”. Our entire social system is founded on obligation and interconnectedness. This was likely true even in Smith’s time, but his genius was to have hidden it from view and in doing so to construct the founding myth of liberal individualism as it exists in modern times.
<strong?Yet today the debt issue explodes once more. And because Smith’s mythology cannot contain it we see all around us anxiety together with its attendant primitive emotions such as envy, anger, spite and malice and, in countries such as Greece, a general collapse of the entire social economy. We see politicians obsessed over government debt sending their countries into ruin simply because they adhere to a redundant mythology. In short, we see the chaos that terrified Smith of a society in which, in his words, injustice prevails.
What Smith gave to humanity in his founding of economics was a great lie with which to structure our newly forming nation-states and mass societies. But it was a lie that was in many ways quite fragile. And it is this lie that we see cracking up all around us today. The question is whether we, as a species, will continue to live within this crumbling fiction or whether we can construct a different mythological system founded on principles that are a closer fit to our really existing circumstances.
Almost every moral pillar of our contemporary societies – from the discipline of economics, to ideas that dominate about what constitutes good statesmanship – militates against the formation of such a new mythology. And, as psychopathology teaches us well, people are quite stubborn in their giving up of their mythologies, despite their possibly high degree of dysfunction. But given that the stakes are rather high and humans are a fairly adaptive species, we may surprise ourselves yet.
Gee, think of all those places that are having "austerity" shoved up their ______, who are discovering that all it means is that "bondholders," a tiny7 fraction of the alrecy hugely wealthy, are now freed from the downside risk that they, as "sophisticated investors," knew or should have known supposedly was priced into the bonds they bought at various discounts.
Spare us your fake empathy, claiming to be "all for helping the truly disabled." That's a line our FL governator, Rick Scott, uses when cutting Medicaid and kicking disabled kids out of their homes into "privatized" institutions owned by his buddies. All disabled people are not true Scotsmen. As a nurse who works with them every day, I call you a liar or at least misinformed on how many cheaters there are (and how many fully able rich sh_ts have "disabled" license plates and hang tags for their Lexus or Mercedes? Any "economist" studied that statistic?)
Don't you dare lay half the "greed" label on "Main Street, bunkie -- it was the Very Few who created and operated The Economy for their benefit, creating huge debt on the part of people who created all that REAL wealth, people with ZERO chance to "make it big," and enormous invisible profit, all on the way, like their feudal and Gilded Age forbears, to "owning all the land." Ask Henry Potter how the model works -- he almost ended up with the Brass Ring of owning all of Bedford Falls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Potter
Afraid of DEBT, Dan? Maybe that's one of the myths that the first link discusses, hey? Think about it. "Austerity" is killing people and their relationships, in favor of more upward migration and concentration of wealth. There's only one possible end to that process. Economically speaking. Global environmental collapse or nuclear war and several other possibilities are in the running.
There is no such thing as a "Ford Barracuda," and you might go check some places like snopes.com on the genesis and tenacity of this particular urban legend.
Of course, we all jump right past the part where some iggorant savage asks, "Why do people all have to have cars and drive around in the first place? Wasn't that a big part of what got us into the mess we are in? Standard Oil, destruction of the Red Car trolley, fracking for "energy independence," worrying about planetary farts on an Arctic-hydrate scale, Slurbia and "real estate bubbles," all that crap? And now the Chinese and Indians want to get in on the whole 'freedom of the open road thing, with all that implies? I mean, really..."
And most folks, the ones not struck dumb by the apparent lunacy, say "Without my AudiChevyVolvoLada, I have no identity, and NO WAY TO GET TO THE MALL!" Judge Doom had the important, profitable, short-term, unsustainable insight: http://www.apta.com/resources/hottopics/sustainability/Documents/Projjal%20DuttaMTAAPTASustainabilitypresentation.pdf (starting on page 2) 307 million people of all ages, wealth/poverty, degrees of ability/disability, and 254 million vehicles, not quite to parity yet. Is that the best we can do?
Going by history and results, one might wonder if that critique of those, c'mon, Bill, say it out loud, "dilletantes who should leave all this stuff to the Experts," couldn't also be accurately applied to various US "initiatives" under color of "policy." I guess the boots on the ground, not speaking the language, on hair-trigger alert all the time, lecturing village elders on how they are supposed to be following the current US doctrine, whatever it is (like repopulating market villages where the GIs would "protect them," and then reminding the GIs that "with all their technology and weapons, they can't even protect themselves",) GIs who can (sometimes) rely on air strikes and artillery and medevac to pull their butts out of situations where almost all of what they do is futile, as in FUTILE, regarding implementation of the stated policy goals of our forces and home front chicken hawk leaders, GIs who have developed that same wary, violent scariness from having been forced into a stupid game of imperial invasion and war for the profit of it, and have taken to killing "wogs" for fun 'n stuff, are what? Worse than those "self-righteous protestors" you excoriate? People who are stupid enough to hope that maybe person-to-person contact, maybe even martyrdom of a sort, might work better than shooting-them-up and Hellfiring them?
And it's not like our "policy wonks" have done anything other than make things worse -- generating more angry "wogs" to fill the ranks of "those who hate us" for reasons like we kill their families and friends, even though they are no freakin' threat to the US (excepting the GIs who are plopped down in those nice "impregnable" forward bases and stuff, like how the losing invaders in most every nationalist asymmetric conflict in history have pinned themselves down as targets for opportunistic, justifiably pissed-off locals. Mark my word.
But I am sure there's a measured, if wrong, response to those observations. Can't seem to find the 3x5 card it should be on...
It's posited that our Intel agencies knew and know a whole lot about the Israeli efforts to sink the USS Liberty, efforts that killed 34 US sailors, wounded 140, that to the chagrin of the Israelis and due to the valiant efforts of the remaining crew, stayed afloat. http://www.gtr5.com/photos_during.htm
It seems there is another kind of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in play in the US military/security state. No guarantee that "our intel agencies," that foster critters like Jonathan Pollard and where some of the players, apparently not the ones who drive "policy," consider Israel to be the US's biggest threat in the Middle East, would report the presence and actions of one of those German U-boats now owned and operated by the Israeli Navy, even if the Israelis sank one or more of our billion-dollar ships. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-u-s-officials-say-cia-considers-israel-to-be-mideast-s-biggest-spy-threat-1.454189
What a bunch of stupid cattle we are, plowing and planting and harvesting wealth to fill the silos of slicker others, and at the end being hauled off to the knacker where they use up the rest of everything, including that terminal bellow...
Joe, you might want to take a look at this site, re # of contractors. Looks like 117,000+, and projections are that this is a great area of economic growth and opportunity. http://www.dangerzonejobs.com/jobs-in-afghanistan.html\
The cool part is the pay rates, especially compared to GIs doing the same work. A little danger, but hey, that spices life right up! and if you kill a "wog" for whatever reason, hey, a little blood money and all is well, right?
Way past time to have pulled our _ick out of that ugly crack... But then of course there are many more waiting for the Troops to come to town, for the Fleet to be in port, all that, and more than enough incompetent, egocentric, revolving-door generals and colonels to oblige with Doctrine and Procurement and Logisticalidociousness to keep the gravy train moving.
I guess Vietnam, "taken over by the Communists" after the failed US intervention there, for which "we" are still paying a large price, as are the Agent-Oranged, Arc Lighted and cluster-bombed "gooks," has become a "very different country than it was, or is." Is that a tautology? And is that why the shirts and slacks I buy at Walmart are labeled "made in Vietnam," or why the US Navy conducts joint naval maneuvers with Vietnam's Navy? Or why Vietnam is now a "most favored nation," with all the secret complexities that implies? http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/1445
The dominoes fell, weakened and tipped by Great Gamers, but gee, out of the bone pile come various Asian Tigers...
Re paying guerrillas not to fight, there's the war as presented on TV and other MSM outlets, that gritty shoot-out between Our Brave Troops and The Evil TalibalQuaeda, the Manichaean contest that grips the imaginations of the few of "us" who still pay any attention, and then there's the real war, of corruption and bribery and contractor theft and fraud and (opium) and all the other stuff.
And yes, "we" have paid whatever you want to call semi-organized, mercurial-loyalty, profit-seeking bunches of armed men in Afghanistan not to shoot at "us." One little link, out of many that report on the practice: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=40d_1343872952 Maybe not on the "Awakening" scale, but nearly a half a billion is almost beyond the edge of "chump change."
How the real details do vary so, from the Simple Narrative...
Just curious, re #4 -- why do so many folks think training up a military and police force are the best ways to, I guess, "improve" countries and their populations in so many different situations (Libya, Notagainistan, Iraq, all those little Central American Banana Republics, sub-Saharan Africa, you-name-it)? Is that hammer the only tool in the toolbox? (Institutionally, I bet the momentum and inertia of our Ship of State, the whole MIC/state security apparatus, pretty much insure that will be the only one...)
The dynamics of the modern militarization and police-ification process sure seem to trend more toward internal economic hegemony of the Generals and Colonels, and of course increasingly oppressive "state security," like the Egyptian/Myanmar/et too many cetera examples, than the kind of rule-of-law-ing and redirection of the martial and violent impulses and regulation and co-opting, if not suppression, of "militants" and "insurgents."
The "policy" of creating police and military forces on a national scale, at least as implemented by Our Fearless Leaders, seems mostly to have benefited contractors and institutionalized and frozen tribal and sectarian divides, far from the melting pot and shining example of democratization that we are told the New Cops and Army will inevitably be. The messes we see sure seem to be an inevitable outcome, from the futile attempt to manufacture a "strong central government" that "we can do business with."
If the model produces the same stupid and futile result in case after case, why not try something else? It's not like there aren't people with insight into places like Afghanistan, the dynamics of the groupings and interests and behaviors, who see better ways to bow out gracefully without doing still more harm to the people there and to ourselves...
Super, if you haven't run across it, might I suggest you look into Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower"? Her subject is documenting the personalities and behaviors of Late Early Industrialization in Europe, a time when the collective incompetences of all of European society clotted up together to really screw up the planet to the extent that Krupp's steel and the nascent skills of popular manipulation and newspaper-level communication allowed. (Maybe you know her earlier work, like "A Distant Mirror," about the fun of daily life in the 14th Century and again, the multiple obvious parallels and re-expressions of idiotic but widely-practiced and violently supported human behaviors, then and now.)
It sure looks to me like there's a host of parallel pathologies in the works right now, including the militarization and imperialization of everything, the restless drivers of lust for combat in a milieu of extreme disparities of wealth and power, the extra-national behaviors of corporate interests (e.g., arms makers peddling the latest and best to one side, then the other, part of fomenting profitable conflict, and of course the predations of outfits like Monsanto, peddling deadly gene modifications in a wonderful example of vertical integration.)
In all, a fun read for anyone who has a bit of knowledge and a cynical appreciation for futility in motion.
C'mon -- "integrity" is a meaningless word once you get inside the Imperial Beltway, or even start to get close to it. And that "Beltway" word is just a shorthand generic for pretty much any place where money and power congregate in their irresistible bloody concupiscence.
"Integrity," the characteristic (as opposed to the handlers' carefully manufactured "selling point") is a positive handicap in any Player in the Great Game. Ask Tom Clancy and other luminaries who spend time inside the imaginary heads of rulers, doers and shakers. As just one sorry little example of the whole literature of corruption and "humanity," from my little store of 3x5 cards.
There's whole books written about Lying, the Art -- and how to lie -- and whole classes, not always in the formal curriculum of course, in higher education, including B-school and the War College, that start with Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and other Great Devious Minds that teach us the "how," including the how-to-justify-and-rationalize-post-hoc-and-pre-hoc. But you guys who do that kind of stuff every day, for sport or professionally, have to provide your own "why." Too bad that you can't provide any real actual "victories" to justify the bloody hands and destruction of stability and community.
You can only drain just so much blood out of a human body, individual or corporate (in the more decent, communitarian sense of that word), before the heart rate and rhythm go all to hell, consciousness fades, and eventually respiration gets labored and finally ceases altogether.
"Militants?" Which ones? and how are they "waging war on the US," again? Not exactly a robust example of the art of impeachment, friend, and you need to work on the timing of getting in the last word...
THIS comment makes little sense -- it appears the author might have altogether missed what Chris was trying to convey. Sarcasm and irony can be sometimes too subtle. Especially to the pedantic and Serious Experienced Players...
And again: have the tribespeople of the FATA, or Yemen, or other places in Africa, the near and far and mid East, Central and South America "attacked us?" That assertion would seem to require the one making it to offer some proof, other than "everyone knows." If one goes and pisses on someone else's doorstep, or throws a stink bomb or something more destructive into their house, does one get to claim that the homeowner attacked YOU? Only in Florida or Texas, maybe...
At least be honest about what "we" are doing, and say out loud that one supports Imperial hegemonic ambitions and salients, and excuses every kind of what most would consider bad behavior because "we" did it in furtherance of our grand Manifest Destiny, because our "race," as Winston Churchill and others generically referred to the US back in the 1940s, had like the English and French and German "races" before us shown our "right" to rule the world by virtue (sic) of "our" great economic dominance and unmatched military power.
Which of course are simply accidents of geography and history -- an entire fertile and fecund continent full of natural resources to rape, minimal opposition by people who thought "counting coup" was how you showed valor and achieved victory in battle. And the Louisiana Purchase and the taking of the West were more matters of fortuity than "we" want to let on.
Look close before casting aspersions on "the Left:" If you take even a moment to look at what comes from "the Left" these days, there's actually a whole blast of disaffected anger at what Obama (who of course is just a figurehead for a much larger beast) has been, is, and promises to be doing. If only you and I and a bunch of other people could get past the false Manichaean divisions that manipulative SOBs spew at us until we are too fuddled to think for ourselves, to look for ourselves, to see things honestly and in all their actual hidden complexity, maybe there'd be a chance of Something Better.
When it comes to evil, the Devil got a left hand, and the Devil got a right hand too. The trick is to be able, rather than embracing one side of the Devil or the other, to be able to say to the Devil, "Satan, get thee behind me and get outa my frippin' face."
But of course we are wired to want to divvy everything up into Us versus Them, which more honest and astute people more accurately characterize as "Spy vs. Spy." NObody gets to wear the white hat, though.
Maybe the lady you are dissing had something else in mind? Like a long-term set of policy drivers that are aimed not at hegemony or running out the violent futility of empire and grabbit-and-run consumption, but at fostering the kind of meta-stability that steadily discourages the various other drivers, the emplacement and support of "convenient strongmen" and attempts to create armed forces and "police" that squash and bleed and frustrate billions of people who ultimately find outlets in what Bill used to call "terrorism."
Specific suggestions? I grew up in the Cold War, took part in one of its futile spasms, know humans are capable of anything and too often driven to tribalism and attracted to greed and violence and power. It's hard to see what kinds of "policies" might rise up out of the ashen fields of Foggy Bottom and the White House and our other institutions, all insulated by distance and the short, profitable tenures of the individuals who are drawn to and end up making up the Imperial Guards and courtiers and courtesans. It's hard to see the cynical sh_ts who run things, the heirs of Wild Bill and Teddy Roosevelt and Woody Wilson, adopting behaviors that foster the satisfaction of basic human needs, and a sense of participation that leads to a stronger belief in the legitimacy of their institutions. Rather than what's taught at the School of the Americas, or demonstrated by "our" participation in coups and various other kinds of wealth-and-power grabs, ala United Fruit in Central America, et seq. Seems to me that the demands of the few for more of everything, in the lubricating soup of vulture capitalism and our current political practices, have us all, all of humanity, headed for a cliff. And the cynical SOBs who are carrying all this out know, right or wrong, that they are immune to any consequences and are free to indulge any whim that takes their fancy and will die not under the blade of a guillotine or the cord of a garrotte or a small-calliber bullet to the back of the head, but comfortably abed, pain-free and free of fear.
That ain't "right," but maybe it's inevitable? But how do we know, since we ain't never tried the other way?
(And as to "non-lethal," most actual US-landmass-threatening "terrorist" plots are intercepted by the POLICE, including the ones they draw people into to have big cases to brag on. As opposed to shooting Hellfires and other ordnance into people in their own homelands, trying to kill a set of behaviors by fostering the hate and revenge that drive more people to pick up a gun. And invading a foreign country with "bases" and "facilities" that are by Imperial Decree to be considered US Soil, and inviting the kinds of attacks that are inevitable after Our Troops kick ass in the neighborhood, and then sending in the drones and Special Ops to kill and maim, is the worst kind of smoke and mirror "straw man-red herring" BS. As I see it, of course. Doesn't matter -- the killing will continue until the Wogs say Uncle, and love us for stealing their stuff and killing their kids and planting autocrats to rule them in our favor.)
A new party? Like for example the Paulists? Careful what you wish for, unless you get a lawyer to draft the wish, in infinite detail...
The problem is the institutional momentum of the whole Imperial thing. Changing Presidents is not even as effective as changing gym socks any more. The body still sweats and stinks. There's too much money to be made (until the game turns fatal for the rest of us,) too many careers depending on more-of-the-same whether it's the GWOT or GWOD or ethanol subsidies or tar-sands pipelines whose promoters get to "condemn" private property with a sneer at "rule of law" and that antiquated document, the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
In the past, reform has so terribly seldom worked, because there are too many people happy to profit, personally and for their little tribal preferences, from the Spoils System and the Great Game and good old "regulatory capture."
Too bad very few of our elected reps will likely be standing under the Capitol dome when it collapses for lack of a bit of infrastructure maintenance and repair.
So the people of FATA are "deliberately waging an asymmetrical war against the United States?" Is that notion on one of your 4x6 note cards? Have they launched ICBMs against us, or kicked down doors in Keokuk and shot everyone in the room? Of course there's the convenient "9-11" example, resulting apparently from another failure to be "doing policy" in the real world. As in ignoring and discounting "intelligence" pointing to the staging of that debacle.
What other sets of people, since YOU have made the undefined, unsupported assertion, are waging such "asymmetrical war against the United States," such that it is apparently their and their unfortunate neighbors' "fault" that Hellfires are plopping in their midst? How do you define "waging war on the United States?" Shooting at US troops who have invaded their country under the Universal Flag of Manifest Exceptional Destiny and are shooting at them in their own territory? And spare the crap about how 'most militants are outside agitators:' that just ain't so, unless you have PROOF of that assertion. Just how do you define "militant?" The moving-target definition in the War Department Dictionary Of Terms And Acronyms?
How are YOU going to state the strategies and tactics that will result in some militants (what? you follow the Narrative lead, and don't call them "terrorists" any more?)"answer for" (your phrase) the hide-in-general-population tactics that maybe (you offer no proof or support) some of them use? A renewal of the Phoenix Program, maybe? That worked out so successfully back in Vietnam, now didn't it, another asymmetric war that exactly WHO started, again? Don't dare recite "Gulf of Tonkin," fella. And how do you distinguish some FATA fella who, like them good ol' boys in Texas, is ready to suit up and kill anyone, ANYone, who invades and endangers their Castle Keep?
As far as the entire gravamen of your comment, it's becoming glaringly apparent that the entire "Global War on Terror," which I presume to presume that you favor, is a bust, when it comes to even "killing all of al Quaeda," and "terrorism" seems most effectively foiled by plain old cops-and-robbers police action.
So glad that there are so many who live in the fantasy of this cancerous outgrowth of ColdWarriorism. As to non-lethal, if "we" were a little more astute in playing the game of politics and sociology, "we" might figure that you can catch more flies with honey than by sporadically setting off cherry bombs in a few garbage piles.
Maybe "we" should delegate all those targeting decisions to someone like you, who so obviously knows "militant" from "civilian," and is brave enough, from 8,000 miles away, to launch Hellfires into mixed or maybe mistakenly or intentionally fingered innocent gatherings of "wogs." And then into groups who foolishly rush to succor the survivors of the first attack. Oh, wait -- it appears from the record, even just the bits recently documented by Prof. Cole, that that's already been done...
And we have our very own senators and reps emitting the same flavor and color of BS, happy to carry the water for, and wash the feet of, Yahoo and the Likudniks. There's a reason a lot of Israelis refer to the US as Uncle Freier ("Sucker!")
Again, the neocons and their shadow backers know that they can personally profit hugely from the miseries that are the real nature of the "policies" they peddle, and either be comfortably dead from old age, or like the Nazis in late 1945 or multiple recently deposed dictators, moved on to sunnier climes where fellow autocrats will give them a nice resort-like home, free from petty annoyances like extradition to face criminal charges "at home" or in the World Court.
That wouldn't be a surprise, given that most of the people being Hellfired and "bugsplatted" are in those unruly border areas that apparently don't pay either taxes or attention to the "central government." The only good FATA, it seems, is a dead FATA, unless of course they got opium...
But of course that's only one level of complexity, there's millions more that "our" Security Specialists apparently sort of perceive but are too tunnel-visioned on other parts of the Game to really pay attention or care...
I and others have noted the Phoenix Program here a number of times, as an example of what Eugene, above, is writing about.
There's a huge gulf between what is professed, and what is perpetrated, and all the pretense in the world will not totally obscure the fundamental imperial "manifest destiny" nature of US behavior on the world stage. Promoting Freedom and Democracy? Most people in the US know the words, but are immune to the concepts.
The Phoenix Program was active while I was "serving my country" in Vietnam. Here's a little snippet to describe way it usually worked, a far cry from the selling pitch that our CIA and its excrescences were "promoting the growth of democracy" by mostly random murder:
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, motherfucker.' 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.
There was eventually a series of U.S. Congressional hearings. In 1971, in the final day of hearing on "U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam", a former serviceman named K. Barton Osborn, described the Phoenix Program as a "sterile depersonalized murder program." Consequently, the military command in Vietnam issued a directive that reiterated that it had based the anti-VCI campaign on South Vietnamese law, that the program was in compliance with the laws of land warfare, and that U.S. personnel had the responsibility to report breaches of the law...
Abuses were common.[6][14][15] In many instances, rival Vietnamese would report their enemies as "VC" in order to get U.S. troops to kill them.[16] In many cases, Phung Hoang chiefs were incompetent bureaucrats who used their positions to enrich themselves. Phoenix tried to address this problem by establishing monthly neutralization quotas, but these often led to fabrications or, worse, false arrests. In some cases, district officials accepted bribes from the NLF to release certain suspects.[5]
After Phoenix Program abuses began receiving negative publicity, the program was officially shut down. However, another program of a similar nature, code-named "F-6", was initiated as Phoenix was phased out.
Remember the Somali warlord Hellfired by "somebody" who apparently was fingered by a competing warlord seeking to both curry favor with the real "Occupy" and eliminate a rival. GOOOOAAAAALLL!
Of course, the Experienced Players would claim that these were "very effective programs." In what possible sense, I would ask? Bill, you got the glib, pedantic, stilted-prose answer?
One thing most US-ers don't get, unless they've been there, is that this kind of terrorism can be a whole lot of fun. "Call of Duty" gives many just a taste of how alive one feels when on the way to killing other people. Ambushes are exciting to set and trigger, knowing that there's no way out of the killing zone for your fellow humans. I wonder about what Obama knows and feels. It's an ugly thing to be the Boss of the World, to have to try to keep the ordinary taxpaying wage slaves just this side of the level of misery that would let a tiny triggering episode, like a self-immolation by one of the least of them, set the whole house on fire. That, and knowledge that Businessmen are not above conspiring with "Christian" generals to pull off a coup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_Plot Couldn't happen here. Couldn't happen in Rome, or England, or Germany, or France, or Burma/Myanmar, or... Keep the generals and senior spy guys happy, or else, Mr. Commander=in-Chief, serves-at-their-pleasure President.
There's often a cost to one's psyche in giving in to one's true humanity, as a few of the Dronists who actually pickle off the Hellfires have discovered, despite the careful indoctrination that tries to persuade them that they are doing God's work and the "legal cover" and anonymity they have. There never is any accountability or consequence under the "laws of war" (sic) or any other. Without accountability and consequences, you have Shackley, retained and relocated for his "expertise," squared,, cubed, to the nth power.
What's happening is nothing new. That it sustains itself through changes of administration and even national identities (this ain't purely some US phenomenon, of course -- Mossad, KGB, ISI, MI-n, you name it).
Amazing, isn't it, how humans become everything they claim to hate in the people they define as their enemies? Mimesis is fascinating.
Maybe Bill or somebody can tell the rest of us US-ers what exactly is being accomplished by Hellfiring the hell out of tribespeople in No Man's Land, or Lands, actually? (Maybe the Answer is on one of the 4x7 cards that are bigger than my 3x5s.) I guess the virtue of being the Dying Empire, being sucked dry (like empires long since dead) by an enormous huge military that can spend billions on its own dictionary and NASCAR sponsorships and a gynormous PR apparatus, is that "our guys" get to define what our guys do as "tactical missions under doctrine," and what "they" do as "terrorism." These same people tell us that a "terrorist victory" is achieved by inducing fear in a population. How's the song go? "One of these things is JUST like the other"?
Any proof that that droning noise, which since the planes do make noise in flight and of course a Hellfire warhead makes a pretty good bang, and wounded people tend to scream and moan, is any more effective at endearing the democracy we are supposed to be the apotheosis of, to the people we are told we need to win the hearts and minds of, than maybe playing the bagpipes at them, real loud, and making them scrape their fingernails across a billion blackboards?
But then it's not all about oil, as most everybody knows, but it's sure as hell not about spreading the blessings of democracy and freedom, those other comfortable and meaningless noises that delude so many of us into supporting dead-end geopolitical foolishness of all sorts, to Wogland, now is it?
At least we can comfort ourselves that our Droners have made a few people in far-off places very, very afraid. And killed a bunch of them, especially what they call "bugsplat," for just what reasons again?
It's so convenient how the human brain organizes information. Convenient for people who fill the ranks of the neocon-artists, the Likud, those f___ing TV preachers, the CIA and other organs of state here and abroad, and all the related purveyors of Big Lies. Makes the most of us easy prey for idiot-dream messages and manipulation, out of meaningless tribal loyalties and fear of some Other or other.
(One wonders whether the K-T event might still be ahead of the likely-onrushing Ragnarök, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k, when it comes to chaos and destruction. It's all a matter of scale, and who gets immolated or shattered...)
Re "peace," generally defined by most of us as "the temporary absence of war," which says a lot all by itself: try reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower," a history of the end of the optimistic Victorian 19th Century and the enthusiastic and profitable runup to The War to End All Wars, WW I. She does a pretty good job of laying out the real nature of the human beast, and our collective adhesion to the Glory of It All: "Give me combat!" says the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Brit, while the armamentarium of the Krupp corporate person sells serially advanced weapons to all sides, current belligerents and those still teetering on the knife-edge, held back only ever so slightly by "pacifists" and "Socialists" and egged on by editors and politicians and gloriously uniformed military officers and "prophets of global war" like Captain Alfred T. Mahan, whose "genius" inspires even the present generation of war lovers that drive the mighty (and so mightily vulnerable) Great Ships of current military doctrine, and here's a sample of what's being built with your tax dollars and the future earnings of your great-grandchildren, as we sit and natter: http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009-12/mahans-lingering-ghost
Tuchman's genius, among other things, is pointing out, subtly or not so, the consistencies of Great Forces at work then and now. Look back a little further to "A Distant Mirror," her examination of the 14th Century. Not much new under the sun.
That's a pretty universal human trait -- ask the Brits, the Germans, or of course ask the French, since they had something to do with the etymology of the word and concept itself. And you might spend some time with US citizens, there and here, to get a sense of how universal that chauvinistic thing is.
Of course, the US is never wrong, so for us, that blithely accepted exceptionalism is totally justified... (that's irony, of course)
(Hmmm, I'd better add that to my stack of 3x5 cards...)
If you google "jamal julani" you get a whole bunch of links, most of which refer to "lynching" and "deplore" what nine Israeli teens did to an inoffensive young Arab man in Jerusalem. Links enough?
According to the indictments, the suspects specifically planned to target Arabs that evening. At around 10 P.M. on August 16, some 60 young people gathered at Jerusalem’s Zion Square. One of the female suspects called the attention of the other teenagers to some Arabs sitting nearby, adding “They can't sit there.”
“She and the others decided to beat them. One of them told the others: ‘Whoever is a man will hit Arabs,’” the indictment read. To incite the crowd, one of the teenage girls started shouting racist curses, such as “Mohammed is dead” and “A Jew is a soul, an Arab is a son of a bitch.” As the incident progressed, they drove away some Arabs that were sitting nearby.
Yeah, that's all it would have taken. Change that little 52-card-pickup policy. Years of runup to getting enough "patriotic," war-fever, fear-of-the-Other smoke in the air to cover the PNAC mission of proving US hegemony, absolute and arbitrary, over the whole world. The Iraqis will greet us with flowers, and then we will TAKE all their frippin' oil. And the "oil field contracts" would be between some critter like Bremer, the unlamented Viceroy of Iraq, and a Cheney affiliate, with the Russians and Chinese and other Woglands debarred from even bidding.. And all those weapon sales, stuff that got sold to Saudi Arabia and other "hot spots," and gifted to Israel, instead...
I guess when the idea is to get people to believe that it's as simple as that, and the Grown.Ups are in command, all just part of a Great Game that's as simple as the board and rules of RISK!, except when it suits to hint at complexities that only the speaker can appreciate, one can come up with an explanation for What Might Have Been and that we are supposed to accept that it was all about more than oil, really other Terribly Important Stuff That Ordinary People Are Too Dull To Understand.
Which it was, of course -- all about a bunch of clumsy dumbf__ks, claiming "expertise," as idiotic as the nationalist war lovers who ran the planet into the wall called WW I, our Really Smart People who clearly "don't know what they don't know" even today, who were going to finish the whole war and invasion thing off in a couple of "Mission Accomplished" weeks. All as one part of a Grand Global Strategy that Surprise! foundered on the sharp rocks of ridiculous logistics, populace divisions, the tenacity and inventiveness of supposed tribal backwardspeople, insuperable asymmetry, and a bunch of other out-of-mind, out-of-their-everlovin'-minds idiocies and elements of True Belief in Manifest Destiny by the Double Secret Invisible Neocon People who drove the "policy."
There was obviously no changing that "policy" of invasion and conquest, and taking to one of embrace, as Bill says. If that was just "all we had to do," which of course it was not. And what "we" actually did didn't work out all that well, either, did it? Except for the people who Hoovered up a couple of trillion dollars, largely tax-free and without personal consequences, despite massive acknowledged theft and fraud. And who were those people, again? Halliburton? General Atomic? Lockheed Martin? Krupp? (Whoops, sorry about that last one, wrong exercise in futility.)
But maybe Bill knows, and would care to add to the sum of actual public transparent wisdom, what else the whole US set of behaviors, large, medium, small, and invisible, in and relating to the Mideast (and Africa and now PivotAsia and Central and South America) includes, what we all pay taxes and mortgage our collective future to underwrite actually is, what those games are all about, and what, other than short-term benefit and long-term apparently ignorant futility, all the motions and strategies and doctrines actually are. Why did "we" start that OIF-OEF thing, again, if you know? (Note that the original mission name and acronym were "Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)," likely thanks to some wag in the Pentagram, until the PR guys woke up to the snickering irony...) Just what was the "need to go to war"?
If the K Streeters don't succeed in just having their pet rats in Congress just change the law so what these folks are doing is "not illegal," you can bet that a poopload of money will be spent on doing what the tobacco people have done to vitiate the effects of those box labels on packages of cancer sticks. It's proven so easy to get humans to walk right around big old tumors right in the middle of the sidewalk, thanks to the addictions they have picked up because of advertising and movies and all the rest that convince them that "smoking is very glamorous." https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRUpmDgqH7QaRHV9BYKPds7C5puLyFIHGIO-mov1Npqgq5AGiQ3
The Monsanto creature is pretty much pure evil,
and has been since before my generation, working in Carter's Environmental Protection Agency until the Reaganauts came in and told us that "industry is our new customer, and we are supposed to be all about 'customer service'," did what we could to rein in their rain of toxins at and from plants like the one in Sauget, Illinois.
The parts I like, though, are the ones about Monstinko buying up and destroying all the seed banks that might provide eventual recovery from the addiction to Roundup and the triumph of Roundup-immune weeds and other pests, and the 200,000 Indian farmers who have committed suicide in the face of M-imposed dependence on M's hybridized, engineer-neutered, toxin-manufacturing "seeds" and herbicides.
And the Israeli government does not acknowledge "officially" that Yahoo commands maybe 400 nuclear warheads and bombs and probably man-portable thingies too...
And the Army solemnly declared on their sacred honneur that Dreyfus was guilty.
So, Joe, in your estimation, the US, as of 2011, stopped the CIA in its underground tracks, in your tellingly active-voice phrase "allowed Mubarak to be deposed," and also stopped whatever other "agency" activity has been ongoing and according to a lot of observers of places like Central America and now Africa and as the "pivot" to Asia moves ahead, there too, is still ongoing? We've removed all the station chiefs from Managua and San Jose and all those other capitals where "US interests" are supposedly in play, and all their staffs, acknowledged and not? We've stopped employing Jackals, stopped sending "what look a lot like Marine Forward Bases," according to the Marine Corps' head on some news program on FOX recently, "but that is not what we are calling them," to places like Costa Rica and South Africa? Nobody planning to paralyze any "hostile country," like say maybe Iran, try to force "regime change" via cyberwar or eventually weapons from space? All of a sudden "We" have ended "our" friendship with the Sauds? And determined to let Israelis determine their own fate without involvement of US arms and wealth and power?
Seems to me that what happened and apparently is happening now in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya (yes, "We" did some apparently useful shooting there, exceptions often prove the rule) has little to nothing to do with any sea change in US "policy" toward Friendly Despots.
Gaddaffyduk had poked Uncle Sam and John Bull in the eye too many times, and was too crazy and greedy even for his own people. Mubarak was an old man who had worn out the last vestiges of his legitimacy, and even our sneaky petes know when to stop backing a loser, fade out for a bit, and quitely keep nudging things in whatever direction they are motivated to do. I bet they are still pretty close to the "back in their barracks" military, that still owns a huge chunk of the economy and all the big guns and a bunch of political clout. And are the kind of people that our "people" prefer to deal with, since way back when. More "reliable" than a bunch of changeable, squishy democrats...
On the other hand, I dearly hope you are right about all this and I am totally wrong. Don't think so. Doesn't matter what we think, of course. Events will eventuate.
Speaking of how the State Department disinterestedly takes on the task of warning US citizens about potential danger, with the conditional clause "if the situation warrants such a warning" which certainly leaves a discretionary hole as big as all outdoors for "policy-driven" trucks to drive through
Can anyone remember a time when the State Department maybe did not quite feel, or meet, an "obligation" to issue one of them "travel warnings?"
Here's an interesting tidbit comment from an article in the Express Tribune today:
Well, it is not just the U.S. but the entire world which is warning its citizens not to go to Pakistan. How does that translate for Pakistan? Zero tourism, zero investors, zero business visits, etc. But certainly still more jihadi tourists from other countries, who want to come to protest in Pakistan because they are “incensed” by the insults in the world’s free press which finds itself tickled because Pakistanis are “sooooooo touchy” about their religion (although they themselves do all the things in contravention of the principles of that religion). Talking to a World Bank economist three days back in London, we were told as visiting economists that Pakistan is on the verge of total isolation globally (businesses are avoiding Pakistan because they see everything dark and gloomy, and do not want to throw their money into the fire pit). What happens to the economy of a country with a population of roughly 190 million? No wealth-creating economic activities, no productivity, no growth. It also means more dependence on alms from the rich donor countries who are simply fed up with the deviousness and manipulations of Pakistanis. I feel sorry for the Pakistani businesspeople who have to sit on their goods and services, waiting for customers to order by phone and other means (forget their coming to Pakistan). Some of these businesspeople, who attend international trade shows, find it extremely difficult to even get visas to attend trade shows in Europe and the USA because of Pakistan’s “reputation”. No man — or country — is an island. And this is all the more pronounced as globalization takes steam.
No, I did not write that -- credit to one indira fernandes.
And of course our rulers' policies are, huh, maybe by design? doing a great job of spreading enthusiasm for the "Jihadi" brand among people who are repressed, oppressed, suppressed and just plain pressed by a Made-In-USA kind of Coca-Colonialism and securiderivatizorentierfinancialism that if you believe the Libertarians, is not even properly called "capitalism." But is on the way to owning everything it does not simply spoil...
Hmmmm, BHA and RBTL: And if our leaders are going to continue to have some Enemies to flap about, to scare the rest of us into supporting or at least moping along with a Forever War, well, like Forever, they had better get busy doing everything in their waning power in the way of making sure, by hook or by crook, that the Islamic Democratic Parliamentary parties are nobbled and hamstrung as quickly and completely as possible. I mean, they been doing it since those early successes in places like Italy and Souoth Korea and Notagainistan and Iran(oops).
I mean, if what appear to be the actual "national interests" they represent, and bust their (and mostly our) humps to "Forward," are to be kept consistent with what they actually "Believe In [regarding] America..." and want the rest of us putzes to just go along with and pay for the Grand Interoperable Networked Hegemonic Battlespace and all its plug-ins, they need to keep the Great Game Board from being reprinted with a different face, and keep the pieces in play from any change in their values and potentials. To ensure that the plutokleptoligocrats continue to have nice comfortable retirements, in the best of places and circumstances.
And, of course, to be sure that no ugly aspects of parliamentary democracy ever dare raise their wishful dangerous little heads above the trench tops or paddy dikes, here in the land of "Freedom tm c pat.pend."
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Now the wait for our wise apologists here and in all the Really Wise Blogspace and Commentariat, (sorry, Bill, for typing "secretariat" rather than "directorate" in the comment that triggered your last impeachment riposte -- keeping track of all Milbabble and Defspeak and Secnoise is not my stock in trade) who tell us they know what is going on "on the ground" over there, and all the reasons why staying the course is the one and only RIGHT thing to do. And of course why Droning on and on and on is also just a Really Smart Tactic in a Really Smart Strategy under Really Smart Doctrines of Forever War.
All us aging hippies don't know squat, of course, and any source that does not agree with the Narrative is ipso facto WRONG, as in LEFT, as in SINISTER...
And in this alternative universe, of course, Hellfire drone strikes and "unarmed [spy?] [provocative?] flights" that might according to some cramped logical twister argument have been "acceded to" by the silence or absence of one part of some nominal central government, or are done in disregard of such inconvenient niceties, are A-OK?
Would it be different if the Iranian aircraft that apparently shot at the drone was one of Iran's US-sourced F-14s, rather than an Evil Commie SU-25?
"Serious aspect," hey? "Gulf of Tonkin"-"Yellowcake"-kind-of-serious?
I think I read in Aviation Week&Space Technology that hypocrisy-powered Reapers fly higher, and faster, and farther too...
Bill will be happy to explain that niggling distinction to you.
What's the big deal? We are assured that it's all "perfectly legal" and "in accordance with international law." And the subsumed subtext is that the Grown.Ups are in charge, and what they do (like invading Iraq and Afghanistan and picking a war with Iran and droning and "[using] all necessary and appropriate force" any- and everywhere, damn the cost in dollars, death and instability, and who cares about unknown unknowns, anyway?) is fully vetted and carefully controlled and all-wise, right?
Some smarty-pants Ivory Tower law student offers this notion:
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1294&context=djcil
But that kind of flies in the face of the Imperial Presidency, doesn't it? I mean, isn't the "right" way to run a country just to have it that whatever the President says (or his nominal underlings can stick him with) just, you know, GOES?
You got to love the "business model" for all these dictatorial kleptocrats: Steal big, as fast as you can, as long as you can, enjoy the adulation and clout at home, but have a nice bolt-hole ready for when things start to get a little unpleasant. The Mubarak clan, Yasser Arafat, some guy named Batista, a fella named Reza Pahlavi, people like Marc Rich and a host of others, sponsored largely (in all senses) by "our government."
Says the author, "Talking to The National, asset recovery expert Eric Lewis said that the action needed to be spearheaded by a ‘powerful and focused executive branch.’" Like THAT is going to happen.
Has anyone offered a massively comfortable retirement to that Assad guy, at all?
Too bad one can't just drive by and "like" MyComment's comment. About the most sensible short read I have ever seen here.
Bill sez, "Anyone who disagrees with him is stoopid or lying."
Gee, Bill, so nice to blow right past the obvious and easily obtained debate materials over the "legality" of your beloved drone program, and do your usual flat and unsupported and likely unsupportable assertion that it's all just pattycake and smiles in DroneWorld.
From the Wall Street Journal, recently: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444100404577641520858011452.html
There's the Council on Foreign Relations: http://www.cfr.org/counterterrorism/targeted-killings/p9627
And the word from those damn hippie commies at The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/21/drone-strikes-international-law-un
And a whole lot more, no doubt including commentary by folks within the Pentagram's Rings who not only see the dangers of opening doors like this for other "Enemas" to walk through too, but have their own moral and legal-interpretive discomforts with what "we" are up to.
Speaking of revealing one's ignorance or misrepresenting stuff, your flat assertion about the "legality" (I note you don't argue the UTILITY or EFFECTIVENESS -- either cost-effectiveness or tactical and strategic effectiveness, short- or long-term, which both are pretty hotly contested too) is pretty much plain old wrong, for those who live outside your brain.
There ain't a whole lot of evidence that "the US" is in the business of "respecting the rule of law" ANYwhere, now any more than it has done since entering the Imperial Game back toward the end of the 19th Century.
Now don't you dare go poking holes in the hot air balloon that is the Narrative. It's taken as a given that "the surge worked," because it's so easy to pack into a sound bite and so many "experts" with shall we say interests in that theme are happy to repeat it and expand on it.
There are, of course, dissenting viewpoints to the one expressed by Bill. Interesting how the situation stabilized...
"Targeted air strike angst?" Moral relativism in service of whatever what "we" are doing is so fetching.
So people we identify as "the Taliban" (a very disparate, non-organized set, by all accounts, that "we" are now sneaking around to try to "negotiate" a safe withdrawal with) have killed a lot of their fellow citizens. How many plain old ordinary people have "the ANA and APolice" killed, not counting "the enemy?" I bet there are "republics" in sub-Saharan Africa where the gunmen and Unlawful Thugs have killed lots more civilians and Unlawful Enema Combatants than all the drone strikes (so far.) And something like 5-10 percent of all death penalties in America apparently are carried out on people innocent of the charged crime, maybe even more, and something like 2/3 of all death penalty cases are so loaded with error that they get reversed or even dismissed, before Oopsie time. http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/summary-columbia-university-study-prof-james-s-liebman.
And even in that carefully controlled, multi-level-reviewed, decades-long process of "full due process, judicially imposed" death sentences, a combination of prosecutorial zeal and bias, incompetent counsel (who speaks for the Drone Dead, at trial or during sentencing?) and system prejudices and public and private enthusiasms like our own Prison Industrial Complex's lobbying for more crimes and higher penalties (none of which are of course present in the Matrix Shoot to Kill process, now are they?), there's a buttload of "error."
Maybe some of those wrongfully charged and convicted and even executed were guilty of something else, isn't that the argument? And they had some kind of "process," right? Even if it was wrong? And for the Droned, as with death penalty statutes, if the idea is to produce deterrence (and of course to "wreak justice" and retribution, and for some of us, I bet, just to have some serious unaccountable fun) guess what? People still kill people -- a "husband" down here in FL doused his annoying wife ("allegedly") with gasoline and set her on fire, and she died in horrible pain and fear weeks later. And of course "Talibanners" and ANAers and all the rest of us humans will keep on killing and oppressing.
Does that make what the CIA and contractors and uniformed drone pilots and GIs on the ground are doing either wise or effective or "right?" Can there be any doubt? http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-11-09/news/35014703_1_drone-strikes-north-waziristan-agency-mullah-fazlullah
3x5 check complete, and of course I don't know nothing, right?
The CIA secretariat is not and has not been for some time an honest broker and analyst. Those guys and gals, and a lot of people in the various branches and offices, clearly are "players" with their own little mini-games in motion. Not the least of which is the droning noise you hear, coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
And the cool part, in the perverse system of "checks and balances" that now obtains (you, Mr. President, don't mess with our stratagems and money, and we won't depose/bowstring you like the Roman Mercenary Imperial Guard used to do so frequently in that collapsing Empire), is that Big Mo is all on the side of the Serious People.
It's not like there's not been a few astute voices from inside the Rings of Power or that Langley jackaltopolis who didn't pretty clearly state the likely outcomes that mirabile dictu have come to pass. Too bad that the Players, behind the painted flats of the phonied-up America the Exceptional Drama are actually doing something else or a bunch of sneaky something elses altogether. "We" pretend that we are all goody two-shoes, needing to "take care of the women and children" and the Quisling/Vichy types who took and take our money and now have to worry about the post-Saigon scenario. Same song, next verse. You can bet Karzai et al have their exit cues and marks firmly memorized. And gee, what consequences to screw-ups like Petraeus and the other generals and colonels suffer for walking us off the end of the dock? Even a war lover like Thomas Ricks sees that "our war chiefs" can't find their butts with both hands, though they are masters of Milbabble and Pentagrammetonics and all the complexity noises that make up a CAREER. Too bad all that "expertise" is in areas other than the ones the Myths have the rest of us believing are appropriate. Though of course there are those whose elastic notions of imperial goodness, complete with neo-dumbisms like "Unlawful Enema Combatants," who see some kind of personal advantage in The Way Things Have Come To Be Done.
Query: Is sticking one's arm into a running wood chipper a "disaster," or a "stupid?"
It's the myth of "understanding" and supposed wisdom that I react to. Since when have the US rulers or any other invader in situations like Iraq (which, do I have it right, you thought was a bad idea from the git-go?) and Afghanistan (after US and Soviet and British and other incursions) and (oops, don't say it, Vietnam,) been accomplished so as to leave "stability" behind, whether done fast or slow? What does one see when one follows the money?
What "we" have done is very complicated, involving troops and bribes and sneaky-petes and corporate interests very much at odds with the nominal expressions of "national interest" (which again, no one seems to want to hang out a definition of for some reason). You care to offer how the "NATO" activities on the ground have increased security and stability over there? I don't see many folks offering up examples of that, as part of some kind of success story for this round of the Great Game. "The Taliban" in all its little and large parts is resurgent, our generals and DoS people are trying to figure out how or whether (realpolitiking) to try to "negotiate" with the masters of the byzantine shifting relations and double cross.
As to answers to complicated questions, what are the questions? How to "make a strategic rearward advance to previously prepared positions?" How not to set up a photo op of a Blackhawk with one wheel on the pinnacle of the US Embassy in Kabul, with "our people" clambering to get on board, or the CIA guy face-punching "gooks" trying to get on a transport plane out of Cam Ranh? You think our leaders have any clear vision of human behavior that is most likely to follow what they and their predecessors have triggered? I don't think so, but then as you point out, by your lights people like me don't know anything about anything.
On the other hand, from watching and reading and even participating in some of that kind of stuff, I have a pretty strong feeling that control is a myth, that a lot of stuff just happens, chaotically, and the people who initiate invasions (like Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and the rest, and whichever Soviet dorks thought a land war in Notagainistan was just a great idea!) may have a lot of detailed bits of information but do not have even a ghost of understanding of what they really are playing at and with. Except for maybe some major self-advancement?
Interesting how everything turns personal and critical, isn't it? Grades, and 3x5 cards and all that?
What do you want or hope for the world to look like at the next "ten year gut check?" I, personally, with my tiny little window into the Great Game, got a pretty strong feeling that, barring some sudden massive increase in general wisdom, my grandkids are not going to like it very much.
As Bill would say, "Correct, Joe!" Gold star on the grade book page for you today!
Isn't it interesting how "normalcy" can often occur without the "benefit" of US involvement, aka meddling in, or invasion of, or otherwise stomping around in, the middle of other people's bidness...
But of course it's always possible to have recourse to that old "but for" argument that gives rise to the joke about the guy with the elephant gun, stalking around Times Square, getting stopped by a cop who asks what the hell he's doing, responds "Keeping the wild elephants away!" and the cop says, "Buddy, there ain't a wild elephant within 7,000 miles of here!" and the fella beams triumphantly and says, "SEE, IT WORKS! Now let me get back to my patrolling."
"American capability?" Recall the villager, confronted by a Marine E-6 telling him he "has" to move back into a market town vacated due to "Taliban" attacks and that the US troops would "protect him," responding, "You Americans, with all your weapons and technology, cannot even protect YOURSELVES: how can you say you are going to protect US?"
Maybe by leaving the US checkbook lying open, with all the checks signed, to bribe the "Unlawful Enema Combatants" not to shoot up the place? that would work, right? It kept a few of them from attacking "our" convoys hauling fuel and ammo to "the front..."
Yep, if "we" weren't "patrolling," even though most of our "patrolling" has zero or negative effects on stability and security, the place would be overrun with wild elephants...
And it's still the case that most "terrorist" activity, along with other kinds of criminal activity (other than huge movements of "Unlawful" drugs, it seems) is caught and avoided by plain old-fashioned POLICE work, not by the trillions of dollars of "matrix" gaming by our MIC.
You gotta just love the way the Great Game operates. And of course the blinders that keep most of us from seeing what "War, the Great Wealth Transfer," really looks like. Half a billion in "gratuities" to let the US ("NATO or whatever") military truck their tools and toys relatively unhindered from Dumbistan to NeverNeverLand. Where's the Glory and Victory and "success" etc. in that?
Of course, say the Players, it's all the fault of naysayers who dared to point out over decades the utter futility of those ol' "land wars in Asia," even ones in places long denominated as the Graveyard of Empires for some reason or another. On the RISK! board of our planet, there's no little flap of skin on the back of the arms of all those "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" that our Really Smart Generals (huh? see here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/) can clamp down on, like the schoolyard bully, and pinch and twist until the Lower Orders say "Uncle!"
In the meantime, the great lumbering incompetent inflexible bureaucracy-with-dozens-of-littler-but-equally-incompetent-bureaucracies-sticking-out-of-it-and-greedy-"industries"-sucking-off-it stumbles along, with more of the same in the Great Procurement Jobs Program Weapons That Will Likely Never Be Used But Have Such Vast Constituencies Game: http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_09_24_2012_p24-497815.xml
There's WAR in them thar Pentagram Rings, all right, and the tiny chance that there might be a tiny reduction in even the rate of growth of the Great Wealth Transfer has all the players sharpening their daggers and looking around for some Unlawful Competing Procurement to stab in the kidney or heart...
Maybe the dust from all the explosions of all those smart weapons "bringing heat on" and "lighting up" the heads and bodies of all those "wogs" will create a cloud high enough and large enough to increase the albedo, http://www.ask.com/wiki/Albedo?o=2799&qsrc=999, of Planet War-th, and counterbalance and cure the inexorable buildup of heat from our vast consumption of combustibles down here at ground level. And maybe do enough destruction to the infrastructure of Petro-world that the rate of oxidation of all that carbon will also slow.
Or maybe we are all just f___ed as a species, because of all the people who suck up real wealth and spit out and otherwise excrete this kind of techno-sh(p)_t.
Professor, as you know, O'Reilly could not care less about what you (or the rest of us) think about him. He's got a nice payday, and lots of nice places to live and hang out, and eats like a Saudi prince and has "people" to take care of his "stuff." Not as big as Limbaugh, that pig of pigs, but right up there.
He's a nice demon demonstrator, but the problem is not individual personalities, it's the disease of Stupid and Greedy, and the MORE-mon cult-think, that's running us ever deeper into the ditch.
Regarding those paymasters, one wonders if the Kochs and the other Black Paymasters will be sending some guy named Guido and his buddy 'Fredo to have a little talk with Mittsy and Rove and those guys about failing to deliver what was paid for. I mean, the Mexican mobs will kill you, your family and everyone in your neighborhood for shorting them a half a gram in a coke deal... What's the penalty for failing to deliver a whole fucking nation?
Hey, if you're the "Leader of the Free World" (sic sic sic) you have to do SOMEthing about controlling EVERYthing, right? To make it all come out in accordance with the Narrative and the Received Myths?
Just think of all the briefing documents and white papers and advisers and lobbyists and generals all clamoring for Caesar to place his imprimatur on their thick sheafs of obscure importantia...
And there are things that happen in the world in spite of the actions of "the United States," or the fraction of "the United States" that is so busy stirring the big pot, in hopes of picking all the best bits out for themselves...
The important thing to remember, Bill, about our various views, most certainly including yours, and mine too, is that they don't mean squat. The machinery is in motion, building its own idiot momentum.
It's so satisfying to think you (or any of us) are part of the "winning team," and to feel so smart and potent and all that, and lined up with the Great Exceptionalist Manifest Destiny Forces of History. But unless you are part of the ruling in-group, the Fraction-of-One-Percenters, your pronuniamentos and pontifications mean less than the stream of exhaust from the rocket motor pushing a Hellfire warhead and its "smart" electronics into the house or car or back yard of one of your "Unlawful Enemy Combatants." You (and I) are nothing but a bunch of wealth-generating-but-not-retaining, tax-paying saps and cannon fodder, pushed around or worse, simply ignored, by Big Gamers.
Some of us act as if we are really plugged into the Great Game, by our superior lights, but all that tough-guy, self-justifying stuff that you applaud is not doing a damn thing to make the world a more tolerable or even long-haul survivable place for humans, including my grandchildren of whom I am inordinately fond. Far as I can see, Professor Bill, that condescending grading ("Correct!" or "3x5!") of everyone else's opinions here is quaint, but naught but sadly humorous. But I bet your ego saves you any sense of meaningless and futility.
Gee, too bad you and people who think the way you do didn't acknowledge the futile nature of the Big Great Networked Battlespace Game from the git-go. It would have saved the rest of us maybe $3 or $4 trillion, and thousands of Our Troops' lives, not to mention all those "wogs," and gee, there's this thing about history, the sandpaper of time, that will wear down and soften the Taliban thing like it has done so many times in so many places before. Without the "intervention" of people who think like you and have the power if not the wisdom to act on that "inspiration." (Hint: Notagainistan does not need to "devolve" into those "satrapies:" that condition sure appears never to have changed, in all the time "we" have been paying your "Unlawful Baddies" not to attack "our" fuel and munition convoys, and have been delivering large blocks of used, non-sequential $100 bills to various loading docks and dark corners as part of your idiot Game. And what "law" says those people we kill so blithely are "Unlawful," again?)
One hopes that whatever future government obtains in the US, there will be some more honest and realistic assessment of the "threats" that are trumpeted to justify your droning and the whole other clumsy, incompetent apparatus of MilitoGeopoliltics that neither protects "us" nor serves OUR interests (that you never have deigned to define for the rest of us.) And more realistic appreciations of the limits of Empire, and devotion to keeping our country alive for the long term rather than spending its virtues and fading resources in idiot "power projections."
And did you see the recent "Atlantic" article by military camp follower Thomas E. Ricks, titled "General Failure"? http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/general-failure/309148/ Sure comforting to see the real nature of our military leadership, our generals in action or is it inaction, explored in such painful detail. Not that the author ever asks the question, "Is this (or any other) war necessary?" And don't forget that retired Marine general that sunk most of the 6th Fleet in that Millenium challenge war game back in 2002: http://www.armytimes.com/legacy/new/0-292925-1060102.php Even though the "Blue Force" called "cancel cancel" after losing, and cooked the results after cooking the rules in "our" favor.
Not much hope of "honest" leadership or statecraft here, now is there?
The thing to remember about the barracudas and vampire squids is that they have no reason to fear any consequences. First, humans live maybe 80-odd years, and once they're dead they are immune to any retribution or restitution. So these folks just have to maintain their pre-eminence, and deflect the righteous anger of the REAL wealth generators, for the 50-odd years they are in full predator-and-parasite mode.
There are lots of "people" more than happy to sign on to protect their masters' sorry arses and advance their masters' interests via lobbying and all the elements of kleptocratic hegemony, buying the "law" that suits them and so forth. They are without empathy (spare me any crap about the self-serving "generosity" of Bill'n'Melinda and such-like).
And why the foolish belief that these people are in any way aligned with any "national interest?" They are post-national people, at the top of the world food chain, unconcerned that their pleasure-and-power-seeking behaviors threaten the life of everything and everyone else, who have prepared nice places to jet off to, like the former war chief of Iraq who took off on his private paid-for-by-US-taxpayers jet, to where, Dubai maybe, with billions in US dollars and "his people's" wealth when it appeared he might be indicted for excessive corruption. so reminiscent of the Roman senators and the Bourbons and the Nazis and the Romanovs, who, if and when the crap actually hits the fan and their "people" lose their grip on the myths and machinery that keep the proles in their places, run off to Argentina and Bali with everything of value they can carry or keep covert in the banking system.
In case any of you with short-term memory deficits have already forgotten, the catch phrase amongst the Bankstas (remember THEM? speaking of immunity from consequences) was AND IS "IBG-YBG." Simply, "I'll be gone, you'll be gone," so screw the Dumb Money Muppets they take full leveraged advantage of.
It's an old story, an old theme, repeated maybe endlessly until the final meltdown. Here's the (short) classicist's view, again, of the antecedents and successive apparitions of "Apres moi le deluge," which is arrogance and unconcern writ really large:
http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.com/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html
Why is our species stupid and venal enough to go through this same round of misery and loss over and over? We are supposed to be capable of learning -- damn little evidence of it.
For those who believe in the perfect accuracy of anything that the CIA or contractors or the military do, and the perfect consistency of those actions with "policy," and that there's never error or venality or stupidity in the deployment of those "smart weapons," or don't care that there's "collateral damage" to totally (even by your elastic standards) innocent people obviously stupid enough to dare to be in the "kill radius" (love that term) of a weapon we fire, may we hope that there's excuses enough that you won't arbitrarily be excluded from Heaven when the time comes.
It's just BS that drone-fire and the rest are actually aimed at people who are "planning on harming the US or US interests" or are even very capable of any such thing in any significant way. Or that the prescription, death by Hellfire with Bugsplat damages, http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2012/06/drones-pakistan-bugsplats-death?page=1, will in any way cure the supposed disease you say exists.
There's a disease process in action here, all right...
"Peace" is kind of like "Victory" -- an undefined and apparently undefinable aspirational term. One of those flashy distractions that are used so successfully to lead the most of us around like a bunch of, you know, "sheep," critters that actually have a lot more sense than we seem to, at least in their wild, native, un-domesticated condition. It's not surprising that the closest to a definition of "peace" in the DoD Dictionary is
The world is blessed with people like Bill, who can conjure up whole realms of freaky thought and dogma to justify just about any old kind of violence. Like his new category of
https://www.juancole.com/2012/10/top-five-signs-of-capitalist-dictatorship-in-the-romney-campaign.html#comments (There's no definition of that term anywhere in the DoD dictionary. Wonder why?)
And that "justification" for killing a 16-year-old kid, a US citizen, that's all just A-ok because he was apparently sitting in the same car as someone who was determined somehow to be an "Unlawful Enemy Compatants [sic] dedicated to harming the United States." "HARM us how, exactly? by not getting down on hands and knees and crying "Uncle!"? By being so foolish as to shoot at Americans who were sent to his location to do what, again, exactly?
The degree of idiocy in the asymmetry of the whole imperial (c'mon, guys, deny that what "we" are up to is anything other than imperialism on a global scale, and say why "this time is different," exactly -- something other than a rehash of "American exceptionalism," if you can manage it) ought to cause spiritual and intellectual vertigo in most of us. Our apologists for the 'archyocracy' gloss right over the idiocy of paying some apparently Unlawful Enemy Compatants [sic] dedicated to harming the United States not to attack convoys of tanker trucks delivering $500-a-gallon fuel to "the front," and of course when it comes to drones, there's been some explication here of how inefficient they are and then there's this little reminder, for those who are unclear on tactical secrecy and stuff: "Most U.S. Drones Openly Broadcast Secret Video Feeds" http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/hack-proof-drone/
But drones have a huge constituency, even though the program seems to have some huge internal mal- and cys-incentives: "How Drones Can Reinforce Failure" http://nation.time.com/2012/08/20/how-drones-reinforce-failure/ And this, which has appeared here before: "The 'Crash and Burn' Future of Drone Warfare" http://www.thenation.com/article/165684/crash-and-burn-future-drone-warfare#
You would think that jingoists whose wild imaginations and "threat perceptions" let them attribute to tribalists and warlords such enormous powers to "harm us" from the mountains of Notagainistan or FATA (other than GIs who are sent there to pick fights with them) would be a little concerned about simulcasting unencrypted tactical imagery that kind of breaches even Bill's cramped definition of "covert." But then that's not really an issue for those folks, is it?
Other than continuing to burn carbon for profit, and turn real wealth into war toys and leveraged Funny Munny dollars and mystically generated debt, all of which are a hell of a lot more threatening to "us" than the current boogeymen, what exactly is "the issue?"
(By the way, there are exactly ZERO entries in the DoD dictionary for "victory" or "winning" or "success," or even "accomplish," which maybe hints at something wrong, very wrong? Since there's metrics for every part of the planning-through-deployment-through-withdrawal process, but none at all for the supposed fundamental purpose and meaning of the whole effing exercise...)
Bill's lining up, no doubt, to get the last word here, if he can. But I am just morally sure he would extend the doctrine he announces, and contends is just so fine, to ANYone, including is very own near-and-dears, who happen to be in the "kill radius." And gee, so what if so many of those "targeting decisions" are based on less than accurate "intelligence" and warped "observation?" And why does it appear that "we" are doing this stuff "just because we can," without regard to chains of consequences that follow? And don't even dare to ask those silly fundamental questions about whether there isn't some kind of total fit failure between the announced fundamental objectives of "US" and the means deployed nominally to further those objectives? He and the rest involved in and/or apologizing for this "program" and the whole GWOT apparently cannot vocalize what the whole shootin' match is actually "about," or how "we" will figure out that we are "winning," or even measure whether we are actually "making progress" against a flooding tide of reaction to our stupid, clumsy, greed-and-stupid-momentum-driven, can't-find-a-more-rational-way-to-live imperial and imperious behaviors.
Doesn't behave how we say he, she or it say he, she or it should? Didn't say "Uncle, may I?" before breathing or stepping outside to take a leak? "Shoot it." Right?
Riding along with you, Bill, is a real trip.
"no one to blame but themselves," for "the company they keep." Because they happen to be within the "kill radius" (don't you just love talking all military?). You really are something else. And it doesn't even take a 3x5 card to recognize that.
Some of our guys and gals, as you acknowledged a while back, just kill Lawful Noncombatant Nonmilitant Unterrorist Antiinsurgents (and then lie about it, and try to cover it up) for the freakin' fun of it. Or because they are bored. Or because their personal politics include swastikas and pointy hats and stuff. We did it in my war, too.
"no one to blame but themselves." You really are something else. One just has to love the constant shameless refrain of fraudulent pseudo-righteousness. Even a lot of our own military officers acknowledge the moral and tactical and strategic bankruptcy of your "justifications."
Oh, who cares? It's only "wogs," after all. And what's the worry? There's nothing they can really do back to us here in the Homeland.
And if those Casualties weren't doing something bad, or living with or daring to be related to or friendly toward or "supportive of" Terrorist Militant Insurgents, Our Guys and Gals wouldn't have blasted them, now would they? We're the Good Guys and Gals, remember? We can do no wrong, by definition!
Hey, when you get down to it, it's kind of like the cops nailing Al Capone for tax evasion: everyone knows he was doing bad stuff, but he hid in his political version of the mountains of Northwest Pakistan, so you nail him for what you can get him for. Think how much better Prohibition would have gone if President Whoever could have just called for a Hellfire into that Lexington Hotel on Chicago's South Side!
And what is it about "Muslim hardliners" that Our Government finds so, ah, scary again? That Government that has gone to war how many times now under the nominal rubric of "bringing democracy to the heathens"? Which of course is BS from the git-go, excreted by our own cadres of idiot war-wimp "hardliners?" Is it just that Big Brother can't stand it when cousins and siblings are saucy enough to say "You're not the boss of me"?
And that's the usual species-wide dilemma: everyone that's attracted to power and wealth looking for personal and tribal advantage, nobody giving a sh_t about the shape of eventual "tension reduction" landscape and the silly old General Welfare.
Still waiting for the Wiser People to state what "US interests" are involved and at risk over there. It shouldn't be enough to just bleat "Well, if you don't know...", wouldn't one think? Given the trillions of dollars getting dumped into the maw of the politico-military machine, and the costs and real threats, economic and environmental, to real ordinary real-wealth-generating people who have to fund, willy-nilly, all the freakin' idiocy that's done to "protect them" and "in their names?"
Too bad that squishy liberals, with their empathy and respect for individuals and odd weak notions about fairness and justice and other stuff that's meaningless to the advancement of our Empire, just don't get that. And looking at the fighting stances of recent presidential candidates, Kerry, Gore and now Obama, well, there really aren't any bits of the necessary pugnacity and tenacity about them. Like our last Dem gubernatorial candidate in FL, Alex Sink -- they just don't want to be the boss of us, it seems, unless we the voters ask them pretty please and make it all easy for them. This ain't student council, it's the fate of all the ordinary people who will be making those last trips to the suicide parlors that are in the backs of so many steal-it-all Red minds....
Keep up the cover noise, telling us about "anti-US commentary" and ignoring the pretty clear evidence "suggesting" that Our Boys and Girls are killing random noncombatants and using that really fun "double tap" tactic of lighting up the folks who come to give aid. http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2012/10/01/double-tap-drone-strikes-are-questionable.html
US doctrine and tactics do not seem to actually be doing a whole effective lot to accomplish any increase in our security or protection of our position in the world. Maybe you have counter-proofs and examples to offer? Sure seems to me that we do not have enough wealth and power to make everyone else on the plant kneel down and say "Uncle," and hand over the keys to their kingdoms...
Says DoD:
http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/dod_dictionary/?zoom_query=covert&zoom_sort=0&zoom_per_page=10&zoom_and=1
Kind of silly, isn't it, to claim that openly conducted, openly avowed droning is "covert?" But I guess it would be too much to demand that the Drone Warriors violate some kind of Astral International Law Of War Version of the 5th Amendment and turn over the evidence of what they have been doing.
What's that I hear from the people on the Right? "If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't be concerned about oversight of your conduct..."
Remember that Afghanistan was not exactly "left alone," even in the wake of the US CIA etc. pot-stirring that aided and hastened the departure of the Soviets. "Our" involvement there did continue, at various levels, and the US had a whole lot to do, locally and globally, with setting conditions for a bin Laden and his merry band of believers to do what they did.
And "terrorists" we will always have with us. Ask Tim McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski how it works. A quality police force sure seems to be the best way to intercept terrorism, but that requires a culture less riddled with corruption and cronyism and the rest.
Yeah, you "gain trust" by orbiting drones with Hellfires 24/7, declaring some valley or district the "front of the week" and sending in some troops to kick ass and blow stuff up, and what's your point? That "we" are "holding up the country?" To keep the country (which is a lot of very independent units with little to no sense of being a "country," as you use the term, at all? Which like a whole lot of other places on the planet is full of lawlessness, including many places that are that way because "the west" has established for commercial reasons and just because "it" can, the conditions and institutions or destruction thereof that produce the lawlessness, including "legitimate lawlessness" carried out under color of "law" laid down by illegitimate but convenient kleptocratic "central governments."
And I'm curious what "military point of view" you think "the west," that is also collapsing, economically and politically and socially as you write, can validly and "successfully" take, with respect to projection of all that power "we" have, all that really cool life-of-its-own weaponry and self-generating-conflict-creation doctrines, into places where the only way to "win" is to nuke the place into glassy slag, given terrain and the nature of the humans and the social groups that inhabit them.
Does the phrase "futile exercise" resonate with you at all? How about "wise alternatives?" Do you give any thought to what, beside "military" planning and execution that has become the default (and demonstrably ineffectual, see "Global War on Terror", except in the warping of our culture and the bankrupting of our countries) "foreign policy," might over time achieve some kind of reduction (because you are never going to get rid of corruption and violence, even in Keokuk, Iowa, a place that is also "porous" to drugs from Mexico and crack brewed at home and race-baiting politicians) of that oh-so-deplorable "lawlessness?
There's so much packed into the few words of your post. Maybe you could explain what "gaining trust" is in your context, and how working toward that seductive goal could in any way be accomplished by looking and acting "from a military point of view"? Not to worry, of course -- that's the well-invested default, and it's pretty clear that there's no interest in "gaining trust" of the natives -- rather, only in instilling fear as in terror in those people, so they won't dare even think about doing anything that might invite a Hellfire from the scrutineers in their little offices half way around the world...
Ordinary people who go to work and create real wealth are the people who end up funding, via taxes and imposts of various types (and of course from other lands, *money* from various "outside agitators" like the CIA and others), the violence and the generation of instability and "incidents." So that people with axes to grind on various issues or partisan propaganda or status as pundits can natter and cavil about Who Shot Ahmed And Smith.
All this talk about which kind of violent person, which group "claiming" or "denying" responsibility, which set of who-gets-to-say "facts" actually are, kind of misses the main issue in all of this, a yearning of those ordinary people for lives free from Stray (or sniper-aimed) Bullets and ordnance, for a LEGITIMATE government that inhales all the toxic fumes of sectarianism and greed and corruption and exhales breathable more or less free air. And enough Rule of Law (recognizing that humans are what they are) to tamp down the urge to chaos and yet another revolution (which most of the time is just a great wheel that in turning, crushes the ordinary people who actually form the soil that all those poisonous weeds grow out of.)
Everything goes a lot faster these days than it used to...
C'mon, Juan -- flip-floppery and Untruthiness are so, you know, passé as decisional electoral issues any more, almost even except when nominal Democrats do them, or what are called "poll-itical operatives" can glue Politifacticated "interpretations" that can be made to look like either, to this or that wimpy Dem candidate. Look upward, to your selection from Tomdispatch today, and outward to whatever sh_t is flooding from the home entertainment speakers today, and backward to the long accelerating climb to our idiot present eminence as "the leader of the Freeeeee World.
If you integrate all the data, the derivative equals negative infinity, and spells out "We, the Most Of Us, are simply Screwed. And our little dogs too."
Nominations?
Hey, I grew up being told to be scared to death that "Cuba is only 90 miles from our shores!!!!!! Commies on our very doorstep!!!!!!!!," while our idiocracy ignores that
So the US, whatever "we" are any more politically and socially, is present, in force, exactly minus-ZERO miles from CUBA's shores. All through the whole freakin' Cold War, and decades before and since. Strange bedfellows: Cubans do a lot of the scut work on the Base, I read, http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=58309 , maybe like the "hooch girls" did for GIs (not my unit the 1st Cav's-- except for Headquarters Company) in Vietnam?
So as to re-locating a base from Bahrain, given the whole freakin' hypocrisy of everything and every part of the Great Game that's being played, why not do a deal with the Persians to make the new base even equally as convenient as Guantanamo, and move it all to Bushehr or Kangan? Somewhat parallel relations between "US" and the current governments, courtesy of "our" fu__ing around with "democratic" processes, leading to Regime Change not seen, finally, to be in "our" favor. They do have elections in both places, that are about as "democratic" as our own...
Of course there's always that "more democratic" port city called Tel Aviv, or the other one called Haifa, both of which "we" have poured out blood and treasure in large measure over many decades, that little tiny tail wagging the enormous US "Uncle Sucker" dog, to establish and maintain... That would really cement "our" democracy to the hair-trigger fate of the Holy Land. I bet Yahooo would LOVE the idea, making it even easier to spy on his "ally"...
I think “we” ought to send a bunch of Marines to Beirut, park ‘em in a big old hotel building all clumped together, and let’s just SEE if there are any “terraists” still moping around in Lebanon. Then la voila, “we” have a casus belli, all neat and clean! Hey, it worked before…
Hey, think that’s a bad idea? then what the hell? After spending hundreds of billions through the IEDiocracy the War Department calls the JIEDDO (Joint IED Defeat Organization, or “JIEDDO Knights”), which generates a buttload of really cool careers and documents and all kinds of fly-away technological approaches to asymmetry, it appears the best way to detect IEDs is to have GIs walk or drive over or adjacent to them, which serves the dual purpose of EOD and detection. And if the GIs in the field are really lucky and really observant and haven’t, by violent arrogance and ignorance, pissed off the locals who sometimes tell where the explosives are concealed, they may actually find some of those artfully placed Devices before they “go off” and add to the numbers of shattered and maimed and damaged carcasses of “our brave troops” that at least "serve" to keep money flowing into the VA into the far future. Unless the buttheads inside the Beltway cut it off, with a smarmy “thank you for your service” and a stern warning about how GIs are contributing to the Omygawd Deficit by being stupid enough to enlist and go kill Wogs and get blown up valiantly in this, that or the other asymmetric idiocy.
(In case it's not clear what it’s all about and why the Juggernaut is looping on autopilot with constant refueling, lookie here, http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Jieddo-Coic-l-Washington,-DC.html
and here, with clear charts showing the “success” of a mission that exists only because stoopid people think they can run an empire on mental flatus), http://defense-update.com/20080313_iednetworks-2.html (Lots of things to argue about as to what they show, but the brown curve area is still pretty flat, the color of dried blood…)
and here's where the tax dollars meet the road, or path, or compound -- http://www.soteradefense.com/assets/uploads/Sotera_JIEDDO_TSE_Bleeds_1.pdf
As long as we, the species, insist on fisting tight to our tribal BS, boosted by sneaky little Grima Wormtongue apologists whispering in our ripe little ears, and chest-thumping and ego-pumping demagogues shouting NINE-ELEVEN WILL GET YOU TO HEAVEN, and all those sorry effing Milo Minderbinders who will bomb their own troops for cost plus ten percent and run their phony "Syndicates where everybody has a share," and as long as there's a fraction of our annual spawn who will drop cinder blocks from overpasses into the windshields of passing random cars, or apply their fertile and agile and educated imaginations to the infinitely destructive possibilities of perversion of computer and genetic code, and little Secret Squirrel state Securitists in their little inward-spiraling, self-amplifying enclaves behind and across all the arbitrary national boundaries we've scribbled on the face of Gaia employ the "political skills" (note the "scare quotes," please, this time they are there to scare and not just mark off irony and sarcasm) developed in milennia of "civilization" to the FOLLY of statecraft, aided and abetted by those miserable, banally evil little sh_ts who write that code and develop all those weapons of all sorts of increasing lethality and destructiveness, and all the other less obvious but equally pressing forces enhanced by the personally profitable, species-killing "financialization" and "militarization," and of course all those people who buy the notion that the off-road SUV and the street-legal NASCAR or Le Mans GT vehicle gulping tar-sands petroleum will make a sexier, more potent wo/man out of them, it sure looks to me that we are as we say in all the vernaculars of every language, which all appear to have the same meme floating in them, FUC_ED.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, folks -- it ain't like what's coming is anything but inevitable, given how we're wired and the enormous momentum of the Juggernaut we've all had a hand in creating...
Mr. Bill is a great believer in the Right-eousness of lying as a means of obtaining and maintaining power for the kind of creatures and world view and control of the future he speaks for (apologizes for, in the Aquinan sense.)
When I was in law school, back in the old days of tort law when there was a very different notion of conduct and responsibility from what passes today, and in "Contracts," another old-fashioned notion that gets applied in ways so eerie as to boggle this older guy's mind, I learned about early case law that started the sanctification of the kind of bullshit he excuses above as 'not lying.' The cover phrase that excuses, in Mr. Bill's exegesis, the constant drumbeat of bullsh_t propaganda that's decimating what little is left of "democratic traditions" in what used to be America is "mere puffery." It's a lawyer-invented term to give a legal-doctrine excuse for LYING, to escape fraud and misrepresentation claims in civil and more recently criminal contexts in areas like securities law.
For them as give a crap about the subject, and how it relates to Mr. Bull's "mere puffery" on the "Republican brand" front and his take on what's legal in the world, here's a little background piece that's somewhat topical. http://contractslawinaction.law.miami.edu/?page_id=171
To call what the Roves and Ailes and Kochs and Newts and such of this world are engaged in is just "branding" is B.S., pure and simple.
Sorry I can't hang around today to engage in the last-word exercise with Mr. Bill & Co. Have at it, big fella. It's clear that pretty much whatever persuasive offerings you make here are "mere puffery."
For those who like to look at actual numbers and stuff, maybe Joe could share where he gets his "al Qaeda" body counts of "American whites" -- and was that a little tell, there, Joe? "White?"
There are Americans of other colors too. Do "al Qaedans" kill them too? Here's one among many sources that do a horrible calculus of how many people "al Qaeda," however you choose to denominate what gets put into that category of "the enemy," has killed: http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/06/27/time-to-declare-victory-al-qaeda-is-defeated-opinion/
Obviously a Commie Shill.
And speaking of calculuses, "remarkably low for a modern war," that's an interesting set of comparisons you do, relating drone-dead Innocent Noncombatants to the numbers killed in Real Actual Soldier War, somewhat reminiscent of the numbers our Generals used to run, with their buddies from the RAND Corporation in the days of MAD and MAssive Retaliation and all those sneaky contingency plans for how to pull off a decapitating strike against the Hated Soviets, counted in 'megadeaths' n' stuff: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175605/tomgram%3A_noam_chomsky%2C_%22the_most_dangerous_moment%2C%22_50_years_later/?utm_source=TomDispatch&utm_campaign=5ce2472b0e-TD_Chomsky10_15_2012&utm_medium=email#more And those Generals, and the Single Integrated Operational Plan and its successor still in effect, ruling how all those nuclear warheads and bombs will be "used up," are still running the doctrines and strategies and tactics of still more predestined failures like Iraginakipakistan, and The Great Big Planetary Integrated Interoperable Networked Battlespace Big War. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlesinger_Doctrine
These are the people we are supposed to be putting all our faith and trust and money in the supposedly capable hands of? To "run the world?" And the CIA guys who were going to kill Castro with poisoned cigars? And you write something like "humanitarian perspective"?
But not to worry, guys, I'm just one among a few little Not Serious Little Ranters with a little stack of 3x5 cards. Everything is under adult control, you can sleep well. Tomorrow will be no better, and hopefully no worse...
Yah, Bill, it's all so simple -- Cowboys and Indians, Nazis and Spitfires, all that except of course it's really Spy vs. Spy, and no freakin' good or decency among the Sneaky Petes on either side. How many FATA militants, resisting "central government" and supporting drug trafficking that maybe "our" CIA and other sneaky-petes might possibly be involved with, as they've been in the past, along with a lot of other off-the-reservation bullshit, fit within your hyper-elastic definition of "martyr terrorists?"
Here's one of "OUR" Mooslum Martyrs:
http://www.warlordsofafghanistan.com/gulbuddin-hekmatyar.php
Would you like a deck of the post cards that the author has for sale, maybe for Christmas?
And in your version of the world, yours and your opposite, but interchangeable but for the nouns, number, "We" just have to do our self-preservation (sic) dirty business through guys like that, because That's The Way The Great Game Is Played. Of course, it sure seems like every round in the Great Game is, what do they call it, "negative sum," especially for the mopes suckered into paying the freight for your kind of thinking. One percipient author penned this little observation: “But you know as well as I, patriotism is a word; and one that generally comes to mean either my country, right or wrong, which is infamous, or my country is always right, which is imbecile.” And yes, that's on one of my imaginary 3x5 cards, along with a lot of other useless stuff.
It would be a waste of time to suggest you read some stuff by somebody like Barbara Tuchman, who appreciates "The March of Folly," listing many of the idiot, counter-intuitive, clearly-against-enlightened-self-interest behaviors of rulers and their retainers, courtiers and apologists, through the ages since "civilization" started growing on the backs of slaves growing surplus grain back in Mesopotamia or wherever.
Of course, there's a difference of opinion on this assertion too. Wiki gives the alternative views an airing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_%E2%80%93_Osama_bin_Laden_controversy, and the Hippie Left among other reporters and students and analysts has a different take, one that ties the CIA (interested in "teaching urban terrorism to the mujehadeen," a set of skills that now is causing the havoc "we" are supposedly working to clean up) pretty closely to OBL, sources like this: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/24198
If one reads enough of this stuff, without the blinders of a True Believer, it sure seems like every stratagem executed by "rough men" supposedly Protecting The Weak of the Herd is just another sowing of a sheaf of dragon's teeth. But then that's a great way to provide another kind of "security:" job security, as part of the long slow glissade into the mists of imperial histories.
Too bad there's nothing that tends to move humans in the direction of widespread practice of even bits of the Golden Rule. More corpses; more tears; more anger; more "sophistication;" more of the same.
Mr. Bill, your usual condescending, superior style sure seemed to make it clear that you thought deprecatingly of those you surely think of as ineffectual, morally dishonest dilettantes, and I expect even though you didn't use the word "hippie" in your post, the notion was not far from your mind.
I wonder, and of course neither of us can know, if Imran Khan would be any better in "high office," in the long run, for the state of women in Pakistan, than the usual schmucks that "our" Establishment is happy to deal with -- being very careful not to rock any boats by making noises about how women are treated.
And do you disagree that there are a whole lot of paternalistic "Christian" males in the US who would be just pleased as Punch to "put women back in the place their God has intended for them?" Not including Secretary of State or anything else remotely resembling High Office, or even adequate education and exercise of the franchise?
How picayune and personal it all gets, doesn't it? True Belief in your rectitude and righteousness and the inscrutable, unarguable Wisdom of Your Side? Is that kind of mischaracterization and focus on extracted phrases shoved into an imposed context supplied by your imagination, the best you can do? YOU heroes are the ones excoriating people, whatever their antecedents and however much you disdain, dislike and maybe fear their standing up against BAD POLICY let alone yet another expression of man's capacity for evil, for not marching down Wazir-Akbar-Khan Road in Kabul, or maybe Lyan Expressway in Karachi to protest how women are treated in that different culture.
Again, is that kind of attack the best you got? False equivalence, again?
Bill, you really are something else. Yep, damn irresponsible hippies showing up to protest something that is central, KEY even, to OUR projection of arbitrary power elsewhere in the world, instead of protesting how a different culture treats women. Complete with crocodile tears for the plight of a girl shot in the head by a "religio-conservative" much like the American Talibanners who would reduce women here, once again, to chattel, brood-mare, franchise-free status.
One might attack them damn hippies for not standing up and protesting the kleptocracy in Tunisia that resulted in a desperate shopkeeper setting himself on fire to spotlight the banal horror of daily life under the kind of system that your kind of thinking leads to.
"Missing in action when it really counted." Really. At least for the sake of one little attempt, here, to bolster by obfuscation the immorality ineffectiveness, inaptness and of US droning, and other fun practices.
Confabulation and false equivalence: You really maintain that the recent popularity of drone and other kinds of "remote contro warfare" by our "security forces" are unrelated to the casualties and financial costs of war, US Imperial Style, complete with the usual enormous theft, fraud and waste? (What can "we", you know, "win" there, anyway?) That the whole idea of the drone program was not to do mini-decapitation and terrorizing populations into not supporting their "militants?" Kind of like the Phoenix Program? Not to mention to kill Bad Wogs, because "we" ran out of room at Guantanamo? Not to mention that drone strikes are, by policy, conducted to support US big-war operations in Afghanistan.
And you have but one answer for why US forces are at war in Somalia and Yemen and so many other places: that AUMF way back when. Not all guys with turbans and AKs are "terrorists," anyway, and it's patently clear that the dronists don't do the greatest job of discriminating. Forget, of course, the fundamental questions about whether the whole freakin' exercise is anything more than an expensive folly that fails to achieve even the moving-target missions that are decreed to be so vitally important to the other moving target: "US interests."
As to civilian casualties, you sure seem to have little in the way of concern about them, whoever is the killer: "Why is it that people who purport to be so concerned about civilian casualties are so focused on a much smaller cause of such deaths?" you say. What is the game? Making everyone in Central Asia say "Uncle"?
And so convenient that you find it perfectly "legal" to "accidentally" kill "innocent civilians" in hostilities occasioned by actions like the invasion, under a pale whitewash of "legality," of Afghanistan, a place that with or without a deadline for withdrawal will eventually give the US the same bye-bye it gave the Soviets. As to not being prosecutable anywhere in the world, you want to be so absolute about that?
Hey, Joe: You're the one tossing out the red herring that the "theory" of terrorism is revenge for US killing of their village mates or nationals. There's a subset of every population, like the PashTaliban in the FATA, like Tim McVeigh and that Norwegian guy, and other folks whose lives are impacted by "policies" and imagery and the idiot human need for "an enemy," who will pick up an AK or an RPG-29 or dig a hole to fill with "re-purposed" US-made artillery rounds or bombs, or just that fertilizer-and-diesel-fuel stuff. These folks are largely interchangeable, whatever the surficial "reasons" for their resort to that so-soul-satisfying violence may be. (And even some fraction of good ol' US GIs are not above killing "wogs" for fun, or of course out of REVENGE for some other wog or wogs having killed or wounded some of their Band of Brothers.)
YOU are the one who needs to drive all discourse into a simplistic disputation, consistent with how you believe the world works or ought to. Even the military here now mostly eschews the word "terrorist," recognizing that repetition coupled with patent inconsistency with reality over time takes the power out of the "enemy demonization" term and forces the leadership into ever more idiotic and ineffectual doctrines and tactics. Not even redefining the mission can give a "rational" face to the "giant hammer" approach to all the different reasons that humans do "terrorism," including faceless Hellfire launches into groups of other humans. (It used to be, in a lot of places like Northern Ireland and South Africa and such, that a gathering of more than 3 people was presumed to be revolution-plotting and insurrection.)
All you guys got is serial apologetics for What We Do, in all its complexity, from Coca-colonialism to "regime change" to supporting dictators for "administrative convenience," et effing cetera, to now setting up "bases" or "areas" or whatever cover words are au courant all over the planet at enormous expense to do exactly WHAT, again?
There's no freakin' way to use military force or fear to establish US hegemony, any more than the much more brutal and efficient Soviet and Israeli and other entities' resort to those "tools of statecraft" have been in achieving "security" or even assuring longevity of their political forms. Just a question: how would you and Mr. Bill, our other resident apologist for How Things Are Done, react to say a Canadian drone, circling overhead, launching an 'Eh?fire' missile into your daughter's wedding reception? Maybe not make an instant "terrorist" of you, but maybe predispose you, as one tiny little member of a target class, to add whatever little you can do in local politics, your little militia group, or if you have bigger ambitions and involvement, into setting policy in support of larger groups who can reach out and touch folks in Ottawa or Alberta with the tools of asymmetric battle?
Too complex for sound bites, of course. And the momentum, and the flow of huge amounts of money and power, as you full well know, is in the direction of your preference and belief structure. Too bad for the rest of us soft targets and bugsplats...
(3x5 check: yep, got 'em all in.)
And RBTL: What do you consider Joe's "good point" to be, again?
Maybe that's because there are damn few "sensible, rational, well-informed high government officials in the State and Defense Departments and the NSC."
And of course as with Vietnam, with Reagan's Lebanon involvement, with Iraq, and a bunch of other imperial adventures, there clearly are other ways that "the war," or whatever it might be called, comes to a close. As in, exhaustion, bankruptcy, a new crusade flogged by the neocons to distract from the current inevitable failure of the latest one, "declaring victory," cutting-and-running like the Soviets, stuff like that.
People appear to be getting more subtle at packaging the troll torpedoes.
I've got no particular personal affection for the rulers' policies and behaviors, the consistent ones that over a couple of centuries have taken "us" from George Washington, the honorable statesman, through Eisenhower the general who warned us about his own extended MICC "family," to Reagan and the Bush League and Clintons then and now and the Current Occupant, the latter stages being more and more corporate and bureaucratized and insensitive and inflexible and purblind, stumbling on the road to the usual decline and fall.
But the folks you pray for, Hype, will take us even faster down the Yellow Brick Road to dissolution. Your guys tell outright lies of the Double-Whopper-with-Cheese variety and scale, but all of the Powers that Be live in a bouillabaisse of dishonesty and dishonor and perversions cloaked rhetorically in the "patriotic" patois of "National Interest. But it seems more likely that the Dems will throw an occasional bone to us dogs down on the floor than the Reds (remember when those same dorks would rather have been "dead than Red?) who are pretty much all about vacuuming up even the scraps and crumbs, starving out the rest of us in pursuit of idiot dreams of hegemony...
Reagan was scarcely the only president, and Weinberger scarcely the only post-hoc history revisionist war promoter concerned near the end of life about his "place in history," to send "our people" on an impossible mission.
Does that include people who answer any challenge to the Conventional Foolish Stupidity with the good old unsupported "You're too dumb to understand, I'm much smarter and better informed (from the sources and beliefs that I choose to believe) about policy and politics, and what our rulers are doing is just fine, by definition, because they are doing it" line? Any particular reason you and Mr. Bill feel impelled to spend effort on impeaching what I and others might offer here by way of a different view and path forward?
And it's got nothing to do with smartass remarks about the length of the ambassador's skirt, and everything to do with a set of policies and behaviors and power-projections that really don't actually seem to "advance or protect U.S. interests" (maybe YOU can take a shot at laying out what those are supposed to be?) even a little bit, as opposed to making a few people rich and a lot more people dead or injured or starving, or lead to anything more than more of the same more-and-more. Which demonstrably is not working and is not going to. My country, according to what I was taught in civics and history, is supposed to be better than that. Obviously, my teachers did not understand the "gritty reality" you people have been able to force or sucker the rest of us into living in.
That's a four-note bass line that I will be happy to keep playing in the hope that stuff like the New American Century gets finally shoved up the backsides of the SOBs who have peddled it.
It's not like you or Bill can point to any great "policy successes" as a result of the way the Players, who ascribe to game theory among other sources of illumination, are playing the Game, or even show that what's going on now, where Romney can say with conviction that Russia is the US's greatest adversary, is anything more than a clumsy and doomed continuation of the Great Game that has wasted so much of the planet's resources and kept people who are trying to find ways to do things better, or simply to live without a Hellfire warhead in their noncombatant ear, from making any headway. Or maybe you want to take a shot at that advocacy too?
OOOOOh, let me check my 3x5 cards to make sure I didn't miss anything....
Susan, I bet you know the sleep of the "Cowboys" and "Jackals" is untroubled by any "dreams of liberating the oppressed." You know what U.S. foreign policy and the actions and obfuscations "our" imperial institutions have carried out under the Foggy Bottom obscurantisms of "national interest" and "state security" and the rest. "We" are collectively Not Very Nice People (the cutting edge being people like Gary Schroen who wrote "First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan," a brag piece that unwittingly spotlights the evil and complexity and incompetence and tangential thievery and fraud that characterizes our Sneaky-Petes and has since Wild Bill Donovan and Kermit Roosevelt Jr.) And it's not just "Not Very Nice:" these 'tards are playing games that advance them and their little cliques and clients for short-term apparent gains, but with long-term costs like "blowback" that they neither anticipate, nor care about even if they do.
Insane is as insane does!!!!!!!! And what's more!!!!!!! !! !!!!!
Maybe if the a--holes who make "policy" inside the Imperial Beltway gave the embassies something actually useful to do, stuff that looks beyond the Great Game and all the business-as-usual sh-t that has been the stuff of American Exceptionalimperialomanifestydestiny for generations, something that trends toward stability and sustainability (check the 3x5 cards -- got those points, good.) and survival of the species, maybe the embassies and consulates would not be such inviting targets and would actually require a lot less "security," something that at that distance (see: Iran, November 4. 1979) that can't be given? Rather than just stirring things up and carrying out the stuff that Mr. Bill tells us is the all-wise best that "we" can do "to protect the US and US interests," which neither he nor any other AllWiser has chosen to tell the rest of us what they are? Continually using his little set of catchphrases, like the Sneaky-Petes in DC do, to cover and obscure with the stink of "patriotism" and "homeland security" and "national interest" all the secret deals and murders and other crap?
Since our fearless leaders are apparently to freakin' stupid to identify real threats and real enemies and figure out how to do anything other than be ready to blow stuff up. For the fearful: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Richard-Clarke-on-Who-Was-Behind-the-Stuxnet-Attack.html
I know, it's just like nukular weapon technology -- the cat's out of the bag, everyone supposedly wants it (or at least some of their rulers do), and only now are people, PEOPLE, starting to accept that a few of the smarter rulers see the wisdom of standing down from perpetual Defcon 3.3.
Even the reactionaries at the Heritage Foundation don't take the claim as far in the partisan "you did it too" direction as your comment does. The link here gives some pretty telling details on who paid what for what purposes, and gives the lie to your claim, including the part about Democrats voting in equal numbers to majority Republicans in the House appropriations activities. http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/11/libya-security-lapse-the-budget-for-embassy-security-is-not-responsible/
Where did you get your talking points?
What does that mean for the "Michigan Militia?"
Yeah, the military does not set policy. Tell that to the Vietnamese. Tell that to the taxpayers who cough up a lung paying for F-35s that will never see combat any more than the F-22 has. And who "sets policy" in Notagainistan, where "the front" and the Doctrine of the Day are moving targets, and gee, who was that general who was so really smart and wrote the book on the ineluctably failed tactics of COIN/nation building that pretty much set the policy that you say we don't, or is it ought not to try, to do? Any number of weapon systems with their coteries and flacks in the military, now they don't kind of nudge "policy" in the direction of actions that involve procurement and deployment and replacement of those weapons, do they?
As to drone use, YOUR statement is the silly one. Hiding behind grammatical quibbles and pretending to all kinds of deep knowledge of what is clearly a violation of national sovereignties, among other really good reasons why it is "bad policy," and ought to make an "American" who has the interests of the whole country, not just the neocon few and the Great Gamers, just vomit. Your repeated claim that FATA leaders attending a jirga, and their neighbors who dare to come to the aid of the survivors of the first warhead, who are "double-tapped" by Hellfires are "terrorist leaders [who] openly planned and committed attacks against the United States" is simply self-justifying BS, that is not even mitigated by the sly addition of that meaningless phrase "and U.S. interests."
You are all about demanding precision and definition and citations and all that on the part of other people here. How about listing how people who are being Hellfired are "attacking the US," and more especially just what do you mean by that phrase "U.S. interests"?
People who think the way you do will be the death of all of us. All the while being so cock-sure they know it all, and are carrying out the plans of the Almighty or Manifest Destiny or some such crap. Or are cynically suckering the rest of us, every chance they get, into swallowing their deceptions and illusions and delusions that have gotten all of us into this imperial dead-end death spiral.
But once again, buddy, not to worry. The Juggernaut you are riding won't be deflected a tiny fraction of a radian by plowing over the bodies of the rest of us...
Sez who, "we're good at" counter-terrorism? Trillions of dollars to maybe kill a few hundred "terrorists?" ain't done a whole lot to increase or even maintain the stability of the world, improve "our" security, advance the economic interests of Average Americans or any other bunch of Ordinary People, any of that crap that the Great Gamers claim it's all supposed to be about. Rather more the opposite. My grandma's advice to mostly mind my own business sure seems a lot wiser than the crap emitted by a Wolfowitz or a Cheney. Or a Jeb Bush, with the chutzpah to claim of W that "My brother kept us safe." http://thehounddawg.com/?p=1059 Not.
It's a good thing that Mr. Bill's "WE" only extends to a pretty small bunch of Experienced Players, here and there. I guess that's a good thing. Bill knows the actual large "WE" doesn't subscribe to the vast majority of the stuff "THEY" tell us is the way Wise People play the Game for us, moving us little Game Pieces across their Big Board and off the Board into the Bone Pile...
Though a tiny minority of "US," included in that "WE" of his, are seriously going about doing "stupid" on a planetary scale, driven by "doctrines" that at the far end of the pipeline are abject idiotic destructive painful failures, but of course upstream are nice cushy billets for chicken hawks, war wimps, jingoists, creatures like Curtis LeMay and his buddies, all of that. Who have figured out how, like creepy little parasitic catalysts, to diddle the rest of us into making the world fit their putrid little world view, and pay for their pleasure with our real wealth and our lives.
But he can take a quick read of scholarship like that of Barbara Tuchman, in works like "The March of Folly:"
http://www.stoneschool.com/Reviews/MarchOfFolly.html Segue to Vietnam, Iraq, Notagainistan, bomb-bomb-Iran...
"Folly" should comfort him that nothing is likely to change, and that sneaky little miasma that is the "WE" he subscribes to will be easily able to keep on keeping on. Bet that makes him happy...
And then flip on over to "The Proud Tower," which catalogs the idiocies of human behavior, tribal loyalties over more sensible self-interest in stuff like self-preservation (see: WW I, the Great War), and the apparent constant lust, occasionally peaking, for COMBAT. Fomented by little sneaks who make weapons, "make policy" and make off with all the money. (see: German "Nazis," escaping the fall of the idiot Third Reich in U-boats and cargo ships, hiding behind false passports and abetted by "Western security services," off to Argentina and such places with lots of very portable wealth...)
It's so very reminiscent of how cancers spread by metastasis.
Little outposts of malignant cells are dispatched from the original tumor and migrate, silently, stealthily and intentionally invisible to the immune system that ought to police them, engulf them and return their components to healthy homeostatic processes.
Once the outposts glue themselves to a new site, they send out messages that trick the body into angiogenesis, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/angiogenesis -- the growing of new arteries, BIG arteries, feeding lifeblood full-force into the "successful" distant tumors, letting them grow unchecked, killing and displacing healthy tissue.
Unchecked, that is, except by the eventual cachexia, http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Cancer+Cachexia, and death of the host.
Hellloooooo--- Hello out there in GreatGameLand!
Is anybody listening?
Do any of you culs even care?
Since, after all, stability and sustainability and stuff that proves there really is enough of everything that matters to go all the way around the whole table kind of gets in the way of your personal religion of MOREISM, as in "more for the few at the top, and screw everybody else since them at the top will only be around maybe a couple of decades and have places to run and hide and be very comfortable and have no fear of retribution or co-suffering if their parasitism and predations finally push everything past some ineluctable tipping point"?
Mr. Koroi, "America" is a place that is mythical and as seldom visible as that town of Brigadoon. The small part of the "US" population that profits from this apex of human consumptive history, the small part that actually dictates how the rest of us live and die, is actively opposed to any motions in the wider world that lead to all the rest of us being anything but prey animals.
Re regulation going too far: got any Paulian exemplars of how de- or non-regulation has worked out wonderfully for anyone except those who are de- or non-regulated? Your example is a seductive fraud, as I am sure you know. The permitting process for construction is the way it is in part because interested parties, usually as a result of some bad outcome (the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire and many bridge collapses and falling buildings in minor earthquakes and Ford Pintos with pinchpenny explosive "engineering" of their fuel fillers come to mind), use the "rule of law" to set some standards. Which then may or may not be enforced. And once regulatory apparatuses are in place, "running government like a business" by lobbying regs that favor YOU at the expense of your competition is just peachy. And it's BS to claim, given our nature and all the historical evidence, to expect that it will ever be much different.
Your elderly parents in many places could have just spread a little grease around and slid right past the "crazy" regulation you toss out as a red herring exemplar. And of course you provide no details of what kinds of approvals were required, what jurisdiction you are yakking about, (not "federal," nice conjurer's trick there), what "features" of that garage might have been "odd," and other stuff that might allow rational analysis as opposed to emotional tear-jerking.
Love the casual toss-off of loaded terms, that sound so "fair" and "rational:" regulations must satisfy some "cost-benefit" test (and gee, who will administer that, again?), and be "constitutional?" What's that high-pitched squealing I can barely hear? A dog whistle?
The Pauls are sneaks and frauds in their own right, and the amount of misrepresentation offered on their behalf and that of their acolytes is just astounding, comparable to other cults...
To double down on something I linked below, this little snippet seems so apropos of your situation. Must be horrible when the reality (another failed imperium, a planet that may spit us humans out like a mouthful of dirt, inability to think or act our way out of a cul-de-sac) really clearly and pretty much inarguably stops corresponding with the force-fit mythic model, on which one is then compelled to triple down on, quadruple even...
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/philip-pilkington-debt-and-the-decay-of-the-myth-of-liberal-individualism.html#7FkoshpyXSJggm7p.99
Let's stick with what we know. We ain't gonna live much longer anyway. And do you know there are older people who run their Oldsmobiles and Escalades into crowds on the street, killing and maiming, and claim they just hit the gas instead of the brake "by accident?" And in their hearts are actually just doing something they have always wanted to do but were afraid to simply on account of the uncomfortable consequences (which they now escape, by prosecutorial discretion in favor of the very old or because they die, out on bail awaiting trial on reduced charges): Kill another human being, or many of them if they're lucky.
And what do you think is in the hearts of the folks who run the drone program, and the rendition program, and the Phoenix Program, and all the rest of those "programs?"
I guess Paul Krugman is not, by your judgment, a "serious economist." Thanks for sharing the "conservative" talking points, with some of the sharper barbs sanded down a bit. It's becoming increasingly clear that "economists," particularly the ones denominated "serious" by the Narrativatizers, are paid shills for the kleptocracy. And that "economics" as a "discipline" starts from false premises and postulates, and goes downhill, fast, from there.
Ever trouble yourself with the likes of Yves Smith (or the actual Adam Smith, for that matter, not the ChicagoAustrian Cliff Notes (per)version) or Matt Taibbi (who does not pretend to be an "economist" but has done a heck of a job showing how the vampire-capitalist state actually works)?
A couple of recent selections from Naked Capitalism:
Read more at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/philip-pilkington-debt-and-the-decay-of-the-myth-of-liberal-individualism.html#7FkoshpyXSJggm7p.99
And then there's this, but you'll have to read or watch it for yourself: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/10/gar-alperovitz-systemic-crisis-politics-as-usual.html
Gee, think of all those places that are having "austerity" shoved up their ______, who are discovering that all it means is that "bondholders," a tiny7 fraction of the alrecy hugely wealthy, are now freed from the downside risk that they, as "sophisticated investors," knew or should have known supposedly was priced into the bonds they bought at various discounts.
Spare us your fake empathy, claiming to be "all for helping the truly disabled." That's a line our FL governator, Rick Scott, uses when cutting Medicaid and kicking disabled kids out of their homes into "privatized" institutions owned by his buddies. All disabled people are not true Scotsmen. As a nurse who works with them every day, I call you a liar or at least misinformed on how many cheaters there are (and how many fully able rich sh_ts have "disabled" license plates and hang tags for their Lexus or Mercedes? Any "economist" studied that statistic?)
Don't you dare lay half the "greed" label on "Main Street, bunkie -- it was the Very Few who created and operated The Economy for their benefit, creating huge debt on the part of people who created all that REAL wealth, people with ZERO chance to "make it big," and enormous invisible profit, all on the way, like their feudal and Gilded Age forbears, to "owning all the land." Ask Henry Potter how the model works -- he almost ended up with the Brass Ring of owning all of Bedford Falls. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Potter
Afraid of DEBT, Dan? Maybe that's one of the myths that the first link discusses, hey? Think about it. "Austerity" is killing people and their relationships, in favor of more upward migration and concentration of wealth. There's only one possible end to that process. Economically speaking. Global environmental collapse or nuclear war and several other possibilities are in the running.
There is no such thing as a "Ford Barracuda," and you might go check some places like snopes.com on the genesis and tenacity of this particular urban legend.
Of course, we all jump right past the part where some iggorant savage asks, "Why do people all have to have cars and drive around in the first place? Wasn't that a big part of what got us into the mess we are in? Standard Oil, destruction of the Red Car trolley, fracking for "energy independence," worrying about planetary farts on an Arctic-hydrate scale, Slurbia and "real estate bubbles," all that crap? And now the Chinese and Indians want to get in on the whole 'freedom of the open road thing, with all that implies? I mean, really..."
And most folks, the ones not struck dumb by the apparent lunacy, say "Without my AudiChevyVolvoLada, I have no identity, and NO WAY TO GET TO THE MALL!" Judge Doom had the important, profitable, short-term, unsustainable insight: http://www.apta.com/resources/hottopics/sustainability/Documents/Projjal%20DuttaMTAAPTASustainabilitypresentation.pdf (starting on page 2) 307 million people of all ages, wealth/poverty, degrees of ability/disability, and 254 million vehicles, not quite to parity yet. Is that the best we can do?
Yeah, electric cars don't require any energy, have no downsides and are the way to see the USA in your Chevrolet... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhR8GZ_WWMM
Bill laughs at you. I cheer you. Let's keep it up, even if the act may be totally futile. It's the correct and honorable thing to do.
Going by history and results, one might wonder if that critique of those, c'mon, Bill, say it out loud, "dilletantes who should leave all this stuff to the Experts," couldn't also be accurately applied to various US "initiatives" under color of "policy." I guess the boots on the ground, not speaking the language, on hair-trigger alert all the time, lecturing village elders on how they are supposed to be following the current US doctrine, whatever it is (like repopulating market villages where the GIs would "protect them," and then reminding the GIs that "with all their technology and weapons, they can't even protect themselves",) GIs who can (sometimes) rely on air strikes and artillery and medevac to pull their butts out of situations where almost all of what they do is futile, as in FUTILE, regarding implementation of the stated policy goals of our forces and home front chicken hawk leaders, GIs who have developed that same wary, violent scariness from having been forced into a stupid game of imperial invasion and war for the profit of it, and have taken to killing "wogs" for fun 'n stuff, are what? Worse than those "self-righteous protestors" you excoriate? People who are stupid enough to hope that maybe person-to-person contact, maybe even martyrdom of a sort, might work better than shooting-them-up and Hellfiring them?
And it's not like our "policy wonks" have done anything other than make things worse -- generating more angry "wogs" to fill the ranks of "those who hate us" for reasons like we kill their families and friends, even though they are no freakin' threat to the US (excepting the GIs who are plopped down in those nice "impregnable" forward bases and stuff, like how the losing invaders in most every nationalist asymmetric conflict in history have pinned themselves down as targets for opportunistic, justifiably pissed-off locals. Mark my word.
But I am sure there's a measured, if wrong, response to those observations. Can't seem to find the 3x5 card it should be on...
It's posited that our Intel agencies knew and know a whole lot about the Israeli efforts to sink the USS Liberty, efforts that killed 34 US sailors, wounded 140, that to the chagrin of the Israelis and due to the valiant efforts of the remaining crew, stayed afloat. http://www.gtr5.com/photos_during.htm
It seems there is another kind of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in play in the US military/security state. No guarantee that "our intel agencies," that foster critters like Jonathan Pollard and where some of the players, apparently not the ones who drive "policy," consider Israel to be the US's biggest threat in the Middle East, would report the presence and actions of one of those German U-boats now owned and operated by the Israeli Navy, even if the Israelis sank one or more of our billion-dollar ships. http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/former-u-s-officials-say-cia-considers-israel-to-be-mideast-s-biggest-spy-threat-1.454189
Remember the Maine! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_%28ACR-1%29
What a bunch of stupid cattle we are, plowing and planting and harvesting wealth to fill the silos of slicker others, and at the end being hauled off to the knacker where they use up the rest of everything, including that terminal bellow...
To the hyper-punctilious pecksniffian, labels trump reality every time. And do a good job of hiding the reality.
Joe, you might want to take a look at this site, re # of contractors. Looks like 117,000+, and projections are that this is a great area of economic growth and opportunity. http://www.dangerzonejobs.com/jobs-in-afghanistan.html\
The cool part is the pay rates, especially compared to GIs doing the same work. A little danger, but hey, that spices life right up! and if you kill a "wog" for whatever reason, hey, a little blood money and all is well, right?
Way past time to have pulled our _ick out of that ugly crack... But then of course there are many more waiting for the Troops to come to town, for the Fleet to be in port, all that, and more than enough incompetent, egocentric, revolving-door generals and colonels to oblige with Doctrine and Procurement and Logisticalidociousness to keep the gravy train moving.
I guess Vietnam, "taken over by the Communists" after the failed US intervention there, for which "we" are still paying a large price, as are the Agent-Oranged, Arc Lighted and cluster-bombed "gooks," has become a "very different country than it was, or is." Is that a tautology? And is that why the shirts and slacks I buy at Walmart are labeled "made in Vietnam," or why the US Navy conducts joint naval maneuvers with Vietnam's Navy? Or why Vietnam is now a "most favored nation," with all the secret complexities that implies? http://www.policyarchive.org/handle/10207/1445
The dominoes fell, weakened and tipped by Great Gamers, but gee, out of the bone pile come various Asian Tigers...
Re paying guerrillas not to fight, there's the war as presented on TV and other MSM outlets, that gritty shoot-out between Our Brave Troops and The Evil TalibalQuaeda, the Manichaean contest that grips the imaginations of the few of "us" who still pay any attention, and then there's the real war, of corruption and bribery and contractor theft and fraud and (opium) and all the other stuff.
And yes, "we" have paid whatever you want to call semi-organized, mercurial-loyalty, profit-seeking bunches of armed men in Afghanistan not to shoot at "us." One little link, out of many that report on the practice: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=40d_1343872952 Maybe not on the "Awakening" scale, but nearly a half a billion is almost beyond the edge of "chump change."
How the real details do vary so, from the Simple Narrative...
Just curious, re #4 -- why do so many folks think training up a military and police force are the best ways to, I guess, "improve" countries and their populations in so many different situations (Libya, Notagainistan, Iraq, all those little Central American Banana Republics, sub-Saharan Africa, you-name-it)? Is that hammer the only tool in the toolbox? (Institutionally, I bet the momentum and inertia of our Ship of State, the whole MIC/state security apparatus, pretty much insure that will be the only one...)
The dynamics of the modern militarization and police-ification process sure seem to trend more toward internal economic hegemony of the Generals and Colonels, and of course increasingly oppressive "state security," like the Egyptian/Myanmar/et too many cetera examples, than the kind of rule-of-law-ing and redirection of the martial and violent impulses and regulation and co-opting, if not suppression, of "militants" and "insurgents."
The "policy" of creating police and military forces on a national scale, at least as implemented by Our Fearless Leaders, seems mostly to have benefited contractors and institutionalized and frozen tribal and sectarian divides, far from the melting pot and shining example of democratization that we are told the New Cops and Army will inevitably be. The messes we see sure seem to be an inevitable outcome, from the futile attempt to manufacture a "strong central government" that "we can do business with."
If the model produces the same stupid and futile result in case after case, why not try something else? It's not like there aren't people with insight into places like Afghanistan, the dynamics of the groupings and interests and behaviors, who see better ways to bow out gracefully without doing still more harm to the people there and to ourselves...
Super, if you haven't run across it, might I suggest you look into Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower"? Her subject is documenting the personalities and behaviors of Late Early Industrialization in Europe, a time when the collective incompetences of all of European society clotted up together to really screw up the planet to the extent that Krupp's steel and the nascent skills of popular manipulation and newspaper-level communication allowed. (Maybe you know her earlier work, like "A Distant Mirror," about the fun of daily life in the 14th Century and again, the multiple obvious parallels and re-expressions of idiotic but widely-practiced and violently supported human behaviors, then and now.)
It sure looks to me like there's a host of parallel pathologies in the works right now, including the militarization and imperialization of everything, the restless drivers of lust for combat in a milieu of extreme disparities of wealth and power, the extra-national behaviors of corporate interests (e.g., arms makers peddling the latest and best to one side, then the other, part of fomenting profitable conflict, and of course the predations of outfits like Monsanto, peddling deadly gene modifications in a wonderful example of vertical integration.)
In all, a fun read for anyone who has a bit of knowledge and a cynical appreciation for futility in motion.
C'mon -- "integrity" is a meaningless word once you get inside the Imperial Beltway, or even start to get close to it. And that "Beltway" word is just a shorthand generic for pretty much any place where money and power congregate in their irresistible bloody concupiscence.
"Integrity," the characteristic (as opposed to the handlers' carefully manufactured "selling point") is a positive handicap in any Player in the Great Game. Ask Tom Clancy and other luminaries who spend time inside the imaginary heads of rulers, doers and shakers. As just one sorry little example of the whole literature of corruption and "humanity," from my little store of 3x5 cards.
There's whole books written about Lying, the Art -- and how to lie -- and whole classes, not always in the formal curriculum of course, in higher education, including B-school and the War College, that start with Machiavelli and Sun Tzu and other Great Devious Minds that teach us the "how," including the how-to-justify-and-rationalize-post-hoc-and-pre-hoc. But you guys who do that kind of stuff every day, for sport or professionally, have to provide your own "why." Too bad that you can't provide any real actual "victories" to justify the bloody hands and destruction of stability and community.
You can only drain just so much blood out of a human body, individual or corporate (in the more decent, communitarian sense of that word), before the heart rate and rhythm go all to hell, consciousness fades, and eventually respiration gets labored and finally ceases altogether.
"Militants?" Which ones? and how are they "waging war on the US," again? Not exactly a robust example of the art of impeachment, friend, and you need to work on the timing of getting in the last word...
THIS comment makes little sense -- it appears the author might have altogether missed what Chris was trying to convey. Sarcasm and irony can be sometimes too subtle. Especially to the pedantic and Serious Experienced Players...
And again: have the tribespeople of the FATA, or Yemen, or other places in Africa, the near and far and mid East, Central and South America "attacked us?" That assertion would seem to require the one making it to offer some proof, other than "everyone knows." If one goes and pisses on someone else's doorstep, or throws a stink bomb or something more destructive into their house, does one get to claim that the homeowner attacked YOU? Only in Florida or Texas, maybe...
At least be honest about what "we" are doing, and say out loud that one supports Imperial hegemonic ambitions and salients, and excuses every kind of what most would consider bad behavior because "we" did it in furtherance of our grand Manifest Destiny, because our "race," as Winston Churchill and others generically referred to the US back in the 1940s, had like the English and French and German "races" before us shown our "right" to rule the world by virtue (sic) of "our" great economic dominance and unmatched military power.
Which of course are simply accidents of geography and history -- an entire fertile and fecund continent full of natural resources to rape, minimal opposition by people who thought "counting coup" was how you showed valor and achieved victory in battle. And the Louisiana Purchase and the taking of the West were more matters of fortuity than "we" want to let on.
Look close before casting aspersions on "the Left:" If you take even a moment to look at what comes from "the Left" these days, there's actually a whole blast of disaffected anger at what Obama (who of course is just a figurehead for a much larger beast) has been, is, and promises to be doing. If only you and I and a bunch of other people could get past the false Manichaean divisions that manipulative SOBs spew at us until we are too fuddled to think for ourselves, to look for ourselves, to see things honestly and in all their actual hidden complexity, maybe there'd be a chance of Something Better.
When it comes to evil, the Devil got a left hand, and the Devil got a right hand too. The trick is to be able, rather than embracing one side of the Devil or the other, to be able to say to the Devil, "Satan, get thee behind me and get outa my frippin' face."
But of course we are wired to want to divvy everything up into Us versus Them, which more honest and astute people more accurately characterize as "Spy vs. Spy." NObody gets to wear the white hat, though.
Maybe the lady you are dissing had something else in mind? Like a long-term set of policy drivers that are aimed not at hegemony or running out the violent futility of empire and grabbit-and-run consumption, but at fostering the kind of meta-stability that steadily discourages the various other drivers, the emplacement and support of "convenient strongmen" and attempts to create armed forces and "police" that squash and bleed and frustrate billions of people who ultimately find outlets in what Bill used to call "terrorism."
Specific suggestions? I grew up in the Cold War, took part in one of its futile spasms, know humans are capable of anything and too often driven to tribalism and attracted to greed and violence and power. It's hard to see what kinds of "policies" might rise up out of the ashen fields of Foggy Bottom and the White House and our other institutions, all insulated by distance and the short, profitable tenures of the individuals who are drawn to and end up making up the Imperial Guards and courtiers and courtesans. It's hard to see the cynical sh_ts who run things, the heirs of Wild Bill and Teddy Roosevelt and Woody Wilson, adopting behaviors that foster the satisfaction of basic human needs, and a sense of participation that leads to a stronger belief in the legitimacy of their institutions. Rather than what's taught at the School of the Americas, or demonstrated by "our" participation in coups and various other kinds of wealth-and-power grabs, ala United Fruit in Central America, et seq. Seems to me that the demands of the few for more of everything, in the lubricating soup of vulture capitalism and our current political practices, have us all, all of humanity, headed for a cliff. And the cynical SOBs who are carrying all this out know, right or wrong, that they are immune to any consequences and are free to indulge any whim that takes their fancy and will die not under the blade of a guillotine or the cord of a garrotte or a small-calliber bullet to the back of the head, but comfortably abed, pain-free and free of fear.
That ain't "right," but maybe it's inevitable? But how do we know, since we ain't never tried the other way?
(And as to "non-lethal," most actual US-landmass-threatening "terrorist" plots are intercepted by the POLICE, including the ones they draw people into to have big cases to brag on. As opposed to shooting Hellfires and other ordnance into people in their own homelands, trying to kill a set of behaviors by fostering the hate and revenge that drive more people to pick up a gun. And invading a foreign country with "bases" and "facilities" that are by Imperial Decree to be considered US Soil, and inviting the kinds of attacks that are inevitable after Our Troops kick ass in the neighborhood, and then sending in the drones and Special Ops to kill and maim, is the worst kind of smoke and mirror "straw man-red herring" BS. As I see it, of course. Doesn't matter -- the killing will continue until the Wogs say Uncle, and love us for stealing their stuff and killing their kids and planting autocrats to rule them in our favor.)
A new party? Like for example the Paulists? Careful what you wish for, unless you get a lawyer to draft the wish, in infinite detail...
The problem is the institutional momentum of the whole Imperial thing. Changing Presidents is not even as effective as changing gym socks any more. The body still sweats and stinks. There's too much money to be made (until the game turns fatal for the rest of us,) too many careers depending on more-of-the-same whether it's the GWOT or GWOD or ethanol subsidies or tar-sands pipelines whose promoters get to "condemn" private property with a sneer at "rule of law" and that antiquated document, the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
In the past, reform has so terribly seldom worked, because there are too many people happy to profit, personally and for their little tribal preferences, from the Spoils System and the Great Game and good old "regulatory capture."
Too bad very few of our elected reps will likely be standing under the Capitol dome when it collapses for lack of a bit of infrastructure maintenance and repair.
So the people of FATA are "deliberately waging an asymmetrical war against the United States?" Is that notion on one of your 4x6 note cards? Have they launched ICBMs against us, or kicked down doors in Keokuk and shot everyone in the room? Of course there's the convenient "9-11" example, resulting apparently from another failure to be "doing policy" in the real world. As in ignoring and discounting "intelligence" pointing to the staging of that debacle.
What other sets of people, since YOU have made the undefined, unsupported assertion, are waging such "asymmetrical war against the United States," such that it is apparently their and their unfortunate neighbors' "fault" that Hellfires are plopping in their midst? How do you define "waging war on the United States?" Shooting at US troops who have invaded their country under the Universal Flag of Manifest Exceptional Destiny and are shooting at them in their own territory? And spare the crap about how 'most militants are outside agitators:' that just ain't so, unless you have PROOF of that assertion. Just how do you define "militant?" The moving-target definition in the War Department Dictionary Of Terms And Acronyms?
How are YOU going to state the strategies and tactics that will result in some militants (what? you follow the Narrative lead, and don't call them "terrorists" any more?)"answer for" (your phrase) the hide-in-general-population tactics that maybe (you offer no proof or support) some of them use? A renewal of the Phoenix Program, maybe? That worked out so successfully back in Vietnam, now didn't it, another asymmetric war that exactly WHO started, again? Don't dare recite "Gulf of Tonkin," fella. And how do you distinguish some FATA fella who, like them good ol' boys in Texas, is ready to suit up and kill anyone, ANYone, who invades and endangers their Castle Keep?
As far as the entire gravamen of your comment, it's becoming glaringly apparent that the entire "Global War on Terror," which I presume to presume that you favor, is a bust, when it comes to even "killing all of al Quaeda," and "terrorism" seems most effectively foiled by plain old cops-and-robbers police action.
So glad that there are so many who live in the fantasy of this cancerous outgrowth of ColdWarriorism. As to non-lethal, if "we" were a little more astute in playing the game of politics and sociology, "we" might figure that you can catch more flies with honey than by sporadically setting off cherry bombs in a few garbage piles.
Maybe "we" should delegate all those targeting decisions to someone like you, who so obviously knows "militant" from "civilian," and is brave enough, from 8,000 miles away, to launch Hellfires into mixed or maybe mistakenly or intentionally fingered innocent gatherings of "wogs." And then into groups who foolishly rush to succor the survivors of the first attack. Oh, wait -- it appears from the record, even just the bits recently documented by Prof. Cole, that that's already been done...
Nothing new under the sun: "Carthago delenda est!" (the simplified version, for those not familiar with the arc of former empires: http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/punicwars/a/thirdpunicwar.htm )
And we have our very own senators and reps emitting the same flavor and color of BS, happy to carry the water for, and wash the feet of, Yahoo and the Likudniks. There's a reason a lot of Israelis refer to the US as Uncle Freier ("Sucker!")
Again, the neocons and their shadow backers know that they can personally profit hugely from the miseries that are the real nature of the "policies" they peddle, and either be comfortably dead from old age, or like the Nazis in late 1945 or multiple recently deposed dictators, moved on to sunnier climes where fellow autocrats will give them a nice resort-like home, free from petty annoyances like extradition to face criminal charges "at home" or in the World Court.
That wouldn't be a surprise, given that most of the people being Hellfired and "bugsplatted" are in those unruly border areas that apparently don't pay either taxes or attention to the "central government." The only good FATA, it seems, is a dead FATA, unless of course they got opium...
But of course that's only one level of complexity, there's millions more that "our" Security Specialists apparently sort of perceive but are too tunnel-visioned on other parts of the Game to really pay attention or care...
I and others have noted the Phoenix Program here a number of times, as an example of what Eugene, above, is writing about.
There's a huge gulf between what is professed, and what is perpetrated, and all the pretense in the world will not totally obscure the fundamental imperial "manifest destiny" nature of US behavior on the world stage. Promoting Freedom and Democracy? Most people in the US know the words, but are immune to the concepts.
The Phoenix Program was active while I was "serving my country" in Vietnam. Here's a little snippet to describe way it usually worked, a far cry from the selling pitch that our CIA and its excrescences were "promoting the growth of democracy" by mostly random murder:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program
The Wiki article also contains this:
Remember the Somali warlord Hellfired by "somebody" who apparently was fingered by a competing warlord seeking to both curry favor with the real "Occupy" and eliminate a rival. GOOOOAAAAALLL!
Of course, the Experienced Players would claim that these were "very effective programs." In what possible sense, I would ask? Bill, you got the glib, pedantic, stilted-prose answer?
One thing most US-ers don't get, unless they've been there, is that this kind of terrorism can be a whole lot of fun. "Call of Duty" gives many just a taste of how alive one feels when on the way to killing other people. Ambushes are exciting to set and trigger, knowing that there's no way out of the killing zone for your fellow humans. I wonder about what Obama knows and feels. It's an ugly thing to be the Boss of the World, to have to try to keep the ordinary taxpaying wage slaves just this side of the level of misery that would let a tiny triggering episode, like a self-immolation by one of the least of them, set the whole house on fire. That, and knowledge that Businessmen are not above conspiring with "Christian" generals to pull off a coup. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Business_Plot Couldn't happen here. Couldn't happen in Rome, or England, or Germany, or France, or Burma/Myanmar, or... Keep the generals and senior spy guys happy, or else, Mr. Commander=in-Chief, serves-at-their-pleasure President.
There's often a cost to one's psyche in giving in to one's true humanity, as a few of the Dronists who actually pickle off the Hellfires have discovered, despite the careful indoctrination that tries to persuade them that they are doing God's work and the "legal cover" and anonymity they have. There never is any accountability or consequence under the "laws of war" (sic) or any other. Without accountability and consequences, you have Shackley, retained and relocated for his "expertise," squared,, cubed, to the nth power.
What's happening is nothing new. That it sustains itself through changes of administration and even national identities (this ain't purely some US phenomenon, of course -- Mossad, KGB, ISI, MI-n, you name it).
Amazing, isn't it, how humans become everything they claim to hate in the people they define as their enemies? Mimesis is fascinating.
Maybe Bill or somebody can tell the rest of us US-ers what exactly is being accomplished by Hellfiring the hell out of tribespeople in No Man's Land, or Lands, actually? (Maybe the Answer is on one of the 4x7 cards that are bigger than my 3x5s.) I guess the virtue of being the Dying Empire, being sucked dry (like empires long since dead) by an enormous huge military that can spend billions on its own dictionary and NASCAR sponsorships and a gynormous PR apparatus, is that "our guys" get to define what our guys do as "tactical missions under doctrine," and what "they" do as "terrorism." These same people tell us that a "terrorist victory" is achieved by inducing fear in a population. How's the song go? "One of these things is JUST like the other"?
Any proof that that droning noise, which since the planes do make noise in flight and of course a Hellfire warhead makes a pretty good bang, and wounded people tend to scream and moan, is any more effective at endearing the democracy we are supposed to be the apotheosis of, to the people we are told we need to win the hearts and minds of, than maybe playing the bagpipes at them, real loud, and making them scrape their fingernails across a billion blackboards?
But then it's not all about oil, as most everybody knows, but it's sure as hell not about spreading the blessings of democracy and freedom, those other comfortable and meaningless noises that delude so many of us into supporting dead-end geopolitical foolishness of all sorts, to Wogland, now is it?
At least we can comfort ourselves that our Droners have made a few people in far-off places very, very afraid. And killed a bunch of them, especially what they call "bugsplat," for just what reasons again?
It's so convenient how the human brain organizes information. Convenient for people who fill the ranks of the neocon-artists, the Likud, those f___ing TV preachers, the CIA and other organs of state here and abroad, and all the related purveyors of Big Lies. Makes the most of us easy prey for idiot-dream messages and manipulation, out of meaningless tribal loyalties and fear of some Other or other.
(One wonders whether the K-T event might still be ahead of the likely-onrushing Ragnarök, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k, when it comes to chaos and destruction. It's all a matter of scale, and who gets immolated or shattered...)
So are kudzu, zebra mussels, water hyacinths, fire ants, Africanized bees...
Some say the last plague on humanity to escape from that box entrusted to Pandora was "Hope."
Re "peace," generally defined by most of us as "the temporary absence of war," which says a lot all by itself: try reading Barbara Tuchman's "The Proud Tower," a history of the end of the optimistic Victorian 19th Century and the enthusiastic and profitable runup to The War to End All Wars, WW I. She does a pretty good job of laying out the real nature of the human beast, and our collective adhesion to the Glory of It All: "Give me combat!" says the Frenchman, the German, the Italian, the Brit, while the armamentarium of the Krupp corporate person sells serially advanced weapons to all sides, current belligerents and those still teetering on the knife-edge, held back only ever so slightly by "pacifists" and "Socialists" and egged on by editors and politicians and gloriously uniformed military officers and "prophets of global war" like Captain Alfred T. Mahan, whose "genius" inspires even the present generation of war lovers that drive the mighty (and so mightily vulnerable) Great Ships of current military doctrine, and here's a sample of what's being built with your tax dollars and the future earnings of your great-grandchildren, as we sit and natter: http://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2009-12/mahans-lingering-ghost
Tuchman's genius, among other things, is pointing out, subtly or not so, the consistencies of Great Forces at work then and now. Look back a little further to "A Distant Mirror," her examination of the 14th Century. Not much new under the sun.
That's a pretty universal human trait -- ask the Brits, the Germans, or of course ask the French, since they had something to do with the etymology of the word and concept itself. And you might spend some time with US citizens, there and here, to get a sense of how universal that chauvinistic thing is.
Of course, the US is never wrong, so for us, that blithely accepted exceptionalism is totally justified... (that's irony, of course)
(Hmmm, I'd better add that to my stack of 3x5 cards...)
If you google "jamal julani" you get a whole bunch of links, most of which refer to "lynching" and "deplore" what nine Israeli teens did to an inoffensive young Arab man in Jerusalem. Links enough?
The end game for these inspired 'teenagers" was the beating and near murder of Jamal Julani. One wonders which part of the fractured Israeli polity they "belong to." And there's more in just this little story, illustrative of a few of the many reasons that humans are not likely to keep their pinnacle-species status much longer. http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/israel-files-indictments-against-teens-over-arab-youth-lynching.premium-1.461233
Or try this one: http://ottomansandzionists.wordpress.com/tag/jamal-julani/ Still more reason for optimism [not].
"embrace Saddam."
Yeah, that's all it would have taken. Change that little 52-card-pickup policy. Years of runup to getting enough "patriotic," war-fever, fear-of-the-Other smoke in the air to cover the PNAC mission of proving US hegemony, absolute and arbitrary, over the whole world. The Iraqis will greet us with flowers, and then we will TAKE all their frippin' oil. And the "oil field contracts" would be between some critter like Bremer, the unlamented Viceroy of Iraq, and a Cheney affiliate, with the Russians and Chinese and other Woglands debarred from even bidding.. And all those weapon sales, stuff that got sold to Saudi Arabia and other "hot spots," and gifted to Israel, instead...
I guess when the idea is to get people to believe that it's as simple as that, and the Grown.Ups are in command, all just part of a Great Game that's as simple as the board and rules of RISK!, except when it suits to hint at complexities that only the speaker can appreciate, one can come up with an explanation for What Might Have Been and that we are supposed to accept that it was all about more than oil, really other Terribly Important Stuff That Ordinary People Are Too Dull To Understand.
Which it was, of course -- all about a bunch of clumsy dumbf__ks, claiming "expertise," as idiotic as the nationalist war lovers who ran the planet into the wall called WW I, our Really Smart People who clearly "don't know what they don't know" even today, who were going to finish the whole war and invasion thing off in a couple of "Mission Accomplished" weeks. All as one part of a Grand Global Strategy that Surprise! foundered on the sharp rocks of ridiculous logistics, populace divisions, the tenacity and inventiveness of supposed tribal backwardspeople, insuperable asymmetry, and a bunch of other out-of-mind, out-of-their-everlovin'-minds idiocies and elements of True Belief in Manifest Destiny by the Double Secret Invisible Neocon People who drove the "policy."
There was obviously no changing that "policy" of invasion and conquest, and taking to one of embrace, as Bill says. If that was just "all we had to do," which of course it was not. And what "we" actually did didn't work out all that well, either, did it? Except for the people who Hoovered up a couple of trillion dollars, largely tax-free and without personal consequences, despite massive acknowledged theft and fraud. And who were those people, again? Halliburton? General Atomic? Lockheed Martin? Krupp? (Whoops, sorry about that last one, wrong exercise in futility.)
But maybe Bill knows, and would care to add to the sum of actual public transparent wisdom, what else the whole US set of behaviors, large, medium, small, and invisible, in and relating to the Mideast (and Africa and now PivotAsia and Central and South America) includes, what we all pay taxes and mortgage our collective future to underwrite actually is, what those games are all about, and what, other than short-term benefit and long-term apparently ignorant futility, all the motions and strategies and doctrines actually are. Why did "we" start that OIF-OEF thing, again, if you know? (Note that the original mission name and acronym were "Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL)," likely thanks to some wag in the Pentagram, until the PR guys woke up to the snickering irony...) Just what was the "need to go to war"?
If the K Streeters don't succeed in just having their pet rats in Congress just change the law so what these folks are doing is "not illegal," you can bet that a poopload of money will be spent on doing what the tobacco people have done to vitiate the effects of those box labels on packages of cancer sticks. It's proven so easy to get humans to walk right around big old tumors right in the middle of the sidewalk, thanks to the addictions they have picked up because of advertising and movies and all the rest that convince them that "smoking is very glamorous." https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRUpmDgqH7QaRHV9BYKPds7C5puLyFIHGIO-mov1Npqgq5AGiQ3
Another source on what Monsanto "Soylent" Corporation is up to: http://www.naturalnews.com/037289_Monsanto_corporations_ethics.html
The Monsanto creature is pretty much pure evil,
and has been since before my generation, working in Carter's Environmental Protection Agency until the Reaganauts came in and told us that "industry is our new customer, and we are supposed to be all about 'customer service'," did what we could to rein in their rain of toxins at and from plants like the one in Sauget, Illinois.
Others tell the current story better than I ever could: Froom Mother Jones, vetted and reprinted all over the place, there's "How Mitt Romney Helped Monsanto Take Over the World," http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/09/romney-monsanto-bain And from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism (a national treasure she is, in my book) we have a Wall Street skeptic's take on the French study, http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2012/09/new-study-finds-severe-toxic-effects-of-pervasively-used-monsanto-herbicide-roundup-and-roundup-ready-gmo-corn.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NakedCapitalism+%28naked+capitalism%29 . Smith links to the published study here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/106438581/Long-Term-Toxicity-of-Roundup-Herbicide As she says, be sure to look at the pictures. (Cue the apologists and contra-scientists and trolls in 3, 2, 1...)
The parts I like, though, are the ones about Monstinko buying up and destroying all the seed banks that might provide eventual recovery from the addiction to Roundup and the triumph of Roundup-immune weeds and other pests, and the 200,000 Indian farmers who have committed suicide in the face of M-imposed dependence on M's hybridized, engineer-neutered, toxin-manufacturing "seeds" and herbicides.
And the Israeli government does not acknowledge "officially" that Yahoo commands maybe 400 nuclear warheads and bombs and probably man-portable thingies too...
And the Army solemnly declared on their sacred honneur that Dreyfus was guilty.
The new era of "implausible denialability."
So, Joe, in your estimation, the US, as of 2011, stopped the CIA in its underground tracks, in your tellingly active-voice phrase "allowed Mubarak to be deposed," and also stopped whatever other "agency" activity has been ongoing and according to a lot of observers of places like Central America and now Africa and as the "pivot" to Asia moves ahead, there too, is still ongoing? We've removed all the station chiefs from Managua and San Jose and all those other capitals where "US interests" are supposedly in play, and all their staffs, acknowledged and not? We've stopped employing Jackals, stopped sending "what look a lot like Marine Forward Bases," according to the Marine Corps' head on some news program on FOX recently, "but that is not what we are calling them," to places like Costa Rica and South Africa? Nobody planning to paralyze any "hostile country," like say maybe Iran, try to force "regime change" via cyberwar or eventually weapons from space? All of a sudden "We" have ended "our" friendship with the Sauds? And determined to let Israelis determine their own fate without involvement of US arms and wealth and power?
Seems to me that what happened and apparently is happening now in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya (yes, "We" did some apparently useful shooting there, exceptions often prove the rule) has little to nothing to do with any sea change in US "policy" toward Friendly Despots.
Gaddaffyduk had poked Uncle Sam and John Bull in the eye too many times, and was too crazy and greedy even for his own people. Mubarak was an old man who had worn out the last vestiges of his legitimacy, and even our sneaky petes know when to stop backing a loser, fade out for a bit, and quitely keep nudging things in whatever direction they are motivated to do. I bet they are still pretty close to the "back in their barracks" military, that still owns a huge chunk of the economy and all the big guns and a bunch of political clout. And are the kind of people that our "people" prefer to deal with, since way back when. More "reliable" than a bunch of changeable, squishy democrats...
On the other hand, I dearly hope you are right about all this and I am totally wrong. Don't think so. Doesn't matter what we think, of course. Events will eventuate.
Speaking of how the State Department disinterestedly takes on the task of warning US citizens about potential danger, with the conditional clause "if the situation warrants such a warning" which certainly leaves a discretionary hole as big as all outdoors for "policy-driven" trucks to drive through
Here's a kind of fun take on "travel warnings" from, of all places, Ha'aretz: "Visit Israel at your own risk, warn many Western countries" http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/visit-israel-at-your-own-risk-warn-many-western-countries-1.461842
Can anyone remember a time when the State Department maybe did not quite feel, or meet, an "obligation" to issue one of them "travel warnings?"
Here's an interesting tidbit comment from an article in the Express Tribune today:
No, I did not write that -- credit to one indira fernandes.
And of course our rulers' policies are, huh, maybe by design? doing a great job of spreading enthusiasm for the "Jihadi" brand among people who are repressed, oppressed, suppressed and just plain pressed by a Made-In-USA kind of Coca-Colonialism and securiderivatizorentierfinancialism that if you believe the Libertarians, is not even properly called "capitalism." But is on the way to owning everything it does not simply spoil...
Hmmmm, BHA and RBTL: And if our leaders are going to continue to have some Enemies to flap about, to scare the rest of us into supporting or at least moping along with a Forever War, well, like Forever, they had better get busy doing everything in their waning power in the way of making sure, by hook or by crook, that the Islamic Democratic Parliamentary parties are nobbled and hamstrung as quickly and completely as possible. I mean, they been doing it since those early successes in places like Italy and Souoth Korea and Notagainistan and Iran(oops).
I mean, if what appear to be the actual "national interests" they represent, and bust their (and mostly our) humps to "Forward," are to be kept consistent with what they actually "Believe In [regarding] America..." and want the rest of us putzes to just go along with and pay for the Grand Interoperable Networked Hegemonic Battlespace and all its plug-ins, they need to keep the Great Game Board from being reprinted with a different face, and keep the pieces in play from any change in their values and potentials. To ensure that the plutokleptoligocrats continue to have nice comfortable retirements, in the best of places and circumstances.
And, of course, to be sure that no ugly aspects of parliamentary democracy ever dare raise their wishful dangerous little heads above the trench tops or paddy dikes, here in the land of "Freedom tm c pat.pend."