Mikhail Gorbachev’s foundation awarded a Peace Prize to CS/YI in November 2004, months after the singer-songwriter was bounced off a jetliner by the Yanks, his name having appeared on the chaotic Bush-Cheney No Fly list.
But of course it was more than that. He wasn’t merely barred from boarding. He did board. Then the Yanks sent up fighters and guided the plane to an emergency landing and … Ludacris crap.
Gorbachev himself awarded the prize at a ceremony in Rome. Two of my favorite people on the planet.
Curious. But Google won’t link to the website for 2012: TIME FOR CHANGE, a great documentary about, in a word, environmentalism, and the need for and possibilities for civilizational change.
Here’s the URL that Google won’t give you:
http://www.2012timeforchange.com/
The film is showing in Los Angeles and New York. Go see if you can, or put it on your rental/stream que.
Ed Note: See here for background reaching back to August 2008, when the CIA commenced bombing Pakistan with drone missiles.
And see comments below to follow events henceforth, including the Peace Talks that turned out to have been attended by a Flim Flam Man in the guise of the Taliban. How long can this travesty go on?
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Pakistan today closed off the main Khyber Pass portal that the US and its meagre coalition-of-the-willing use to supply their war efforts in Afghanistan, after the latest of recent US helicopter attacks killed three uniformed Paki servicemen.
Across the three days prior to the latest attack, Islamabad had expressed outrage at the helicopter raids, which at that point had killed many civilians among some sixty dead.
As the border closing was announced,
The Pakistani interior minister, Rehman Malik indicated that NATO strikes in Pakistan were being taken extremely seriously. “We will have to see whether we are allies or enemies,” he said Thursday.
American officials, too, say it has left them increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Zardari, a deeply unpopular president who was elected two and a half years ago on a wave of sympathy after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. …
In a meeting on Monday that was played on the front page of Pakistan’s newspapers, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, confronted the president and his prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, over incompetence and corruption in the government.
According to the press and Pakistani officials familiar with the conversation, the general demanded that they dismiss at least some ministers in the oversized 60-member cabinet, many of whom face corruption charges.
The civilian government has so far resisted the general’s demand. But the meeting was widely interpreted by the Pakistani news media, which has grown increasingly hostile to the president, as a rebuke to the civilian politicians and as having pushed the government to the brink.
After the meeting, the president’s office issued a statement, approved by all the men, saying they had agreed “to protect the democratic process and to resolve all issues in accordance with the constitution.”
A Pakistani official close to the president who was familiar with the conversation but did not want to be identified, said, “The president made it clear that he would not leave, come what may.”
“Sanity had prevailed,” the official added. …
In his most recent visit to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, the American special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said the international community could not be expected to provide all the billions of dollars needed to repair the flood damage, a warning interpreted here as a rebuke of the civilian government and its mismanagement.
But Washington, not unlike Pakistan’s military, is caught, American officials say, because there is no appetite for a return of military rule. Nor is there desire to see the opposition politician and former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, resume power.
The last is interesting in that Sharif would be popular and even more difficult for Washington to control. But the Times report reports he has no interest in stepping up at the moment given the general chaos.
So it seems that just as Washington has abandoned President Karzai in favor of a perhaps imaginary reprise of Northern Alliance (non-Pashtun) so-called warlords, so across the border it may be looking for a collection of Men We Can Work With.
And as Fletcher Prouty pointed out (while discussing the assassination of President Diem of Vietnam in 1963), when Washington withdraws support of an allied leader, the latter’s native enemies soon swarm and conduct a coup. This may be the week that President Zardari became a walking dead man slated to join his wife in martyrdom. Or perhaps friends in Paris.
Along those lines, note that two weeks ago, September 17, in London, emigre Paki leader Imran Farooq was murdered, leading to great unease in Karachi (the New York of Pakistan), where the MQM party, which he once led and still helped manage, is a major power:
As [Robert Mackey's] colleague Carlotta Gall explained last week, the M.Q.M. represents families who moved to what is today Pakistan when India was partitioned in 1947:
“Political power struggles in the country’s sprawling port city of Karachi have degenerated into an ethnic turf war between two parties in the governing coalition, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, whose support base is drawn from Urdu-speaking immigrants, and the Awami National Party, whose base is mostly Pashtun. Targeted killings left 165 dead people in August, including some senior political figures.
Now tens of thousands of people displaced by the floods, most of them ethnic Sindhis, are arriving in Karachi, adding a volatile new element to the political dynamic there. While Sindhi nationalists are welcoming them, opponents, like M.Q.M. members, warn that they will create more violence.”
In 2007, the BBC explained that the M.Q.M.’s leaders have effectively run large parts of Karachi from London for years. At the time, a party spokesman said it was not necessary for the city’s leaders to actually be in Pakistan, since, “in these days of high-tech communication why not govern Karachi from London? It’s a new form of outsourcing.”
Meanwhile the long delayed NATO offensive to cleanse Kandahar of people who don’t side with the Kabul government of Karzai (whom the americans themselves have been steadily defaming for more than a year) seems to have muddled but continues. It began in mid August. Two days ago the American commander Petraeus told the press of peace talks of some sort . between Karzai and that loose coalition of unwilling various Afghans in arms referred to in the press as the Taliban.
All this comes against the great disaster of the summer in Pakistan — flooding of biblical proportions, which the western world reacted to largely with a yawn, but which since beginning in late July has (says the Times) “ruined just about every physical strand that knit this country together — roads, bridges, schools, health clinics, electricity and communications.”
Has Pakistan this September, under such pressures, begun to cease to exist as the state we’ve dealt with since the Soviet invasion next door?
I don’t want the war
Don’t want the war I
Want the war I know
The war I know what
War I know what wars
I know what wars are
Know what wars are like.
I know the destruction and
Know the destruction and death
The destruction and death that
Destruction and death that comes
And death that comes with
Death that comes with them.
I am the one who
Am the one who has
The one who has to
One who has to comfort
Who has to comfort mothers
Has to comfort mothers and
To comfort mothers and widows
Comfort mothers and widows of
Mothers and widows of thee
And widows of the dead.
Of course for us that
Course for us that would
For us that would be
Us that would be the
That would be the best
Would be the best solution.
Besides it would save us
It would save us fifty
Would save us fifty billion.
This is a bit from a long piece of journalism about life during the siege. Provoked to posting here by chat on Facebook about sophisticated ignorance, ignorant cynicism, etc.
As part of the protracted transition back to Manhattan, I just sold all my Avalon Hill war games to an enthusiast, cutting a tie to passionate childhood, wishing to lay burdens down by the riverside and study war no more.
Friend and poet Michael Gushue reports this alleged lost scene from the Citizen Kane script:
Kane stands with his butler/factotum, Raymond in the family tomb. His only son, Charles Foster Kane II, is dead at the age of 31. The year is 1938, and workmen are setting a slab on the grave.
After they leave, Kane looks at the simple inscriptions on the crypts of his father, mother and son.
Above the blank space reserved for him, is an inscription on an ornate, ancient wall imported from Persia.
Kane translates for Raymond (bored and couldn’t care less):
The drunkenness of youth
Has passed like a fever
And yet I saw many things
Seeing my glory in the days of my glory
I thought my power eternal
And the days of my life
Fixed surely in the years
But a whisper came to me
From Him who dies not
I called my tributary kings together
And those who were proud rulers under me
I opened the boxes of my treasure to them, saying
“Take hills of gold, mountains of silver
And give me one more day upon the earth”
But they stood silent
Looking upon the ground
So that I died
And Death came to sit upon my throne
O sons of men
You see a stranger upon the road
You call to him and he does not stop
He is your life
Walking towards time
Hurrying to meet the kings of India and China
O sons of men
You are caught in the web of the world
And the spider
Nothing waits behind it
Where are the men with towering hopes?
They have changed places with owls
Owls who lived in tombs
And now inhabit a palace
We live in affluence
And are blind to where we are
This is actually a conversion of a screenplay, the antepenultimate, my fifth, from 2005, into a novel. Thought about doing it before. Now it seems to have gone and …
Oh brother.
The opening paragraph seems to be:
In June 2004, after five Medecins Sans Frontieres were found murdered in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, Aaron called, for the first time since coming to New York with Maya. Long out of touch had been the pattern of a friendship born and first aborted in Texas, then again at Duke, before settling down to disjointed maturity during years of criss-crossing work overseas. Since the rebirth of History the routine had been that to meet for coffee one went to Baghdad or Bosnia or Berlin.
That, or perhaps:
He would miss his turn.
And so on to the end.
If we shall suppose that writing lengthy bits that no one shall ever read is one of those offenses which, in the providence of Dog, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both Yea and Ney this terrible task as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living Dog always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of lore may speedily pass away.
Yet, if Dog wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the pen man’s sore head and hands and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the quill shall be paid by another drawn by the horde, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “The judgments of the lord are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as Dog gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Very worthwhile — as they’ve all been. This is number 18. She’s leading one of the most important discussions around.
Ellsberg is measured in assessing Obama, and even so the judgments are bleak. Syncs well with my own black-biled broodings.
Touches on the political consequences of allowing high hopes to fail for lack of leadership. Ellsberg doesn’t mention the Carter-Reaganism dynamic, but what he says brings it to mind.
And he puts the puzzle of the escalation decision in clear terms, observing that neither the top Pentagon brass, nor NS Advisor Jms Jones (retired four-star general), nor Rahm Emanuel — with the fine DC instincts and his eye on the 2010 elections — were pusihng the escalation. (Nor Biden.) And some were on record against it.
Is Obama more of a militarist than Petraeus, whose recent interview in Newsweek shows a mind less than persuaded of any successful outcome over there? Where did the decision come from?
Westmoreland and LBJ
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Recall Col. Flectcher Prouty’s history of the Pentagon’s war in Vietnam (which, note, began in 1965) — and which Prouty thinks began almost accidentally, with a big push by Textron and its lobbyists to get the Gov to start buying Bell “Huey” helicopters en masse.
As conglomerate Textron — then as now a major war supplier — was preparing a corporate takeover of Bell Helicopters, a guy from Yale working on Wall Street kept showing up at Prouty’s office atop the Air Force staff in the Pentagon — trying to sell the notion that tactical helicopters would revolutionize counterinsurgency ops …
The Air Force kept saying no. Finally somebody got to somebody on the Nat’l Security Council staff in the White House, and the order came across the river: Let’s buy some more helicopters — and let’s base them across the border from Laos, rather than where all the shootin’s going on. Yeah, let’s put them in Vietnam.
The Huey program was greenlighted — but under CIA auspices. Which perhaps rounds around to explain why a banker out of Yale was lead salesman.
The CIA had opened its first official spy store in Saigon in 1954 (post French defeat at Dien Bien Phu) but our involvement there reached back into the war, when the OSS helped to arm Ho’s nationalists against the Japanese. Some say that the same guys, now wearing CIA badges, including Ed Lansdale, were covertly on the ground again well before ’54, working again with locals but this time to oust the French.
However that may be, Prouty writes that each early CIA Huey base in Vietnam needed some 500 (if memory serves) pairs of Pentagon boots to provide pilots, maintenance, security and support.
And when the bases started drawing fire from local insurgents even more Advisors were needed to Keep the Peace.
Wasn’t long before 16,000 soldiers were in country, under CIA command, shooting at insurgents from behind barricades as the choppers bounced and bombed around the South as Lansdale & company tried to figure out how to win their hearts and minds.
Then, in late ’63, a new President took office persuaded that it was time to let the Pentagon clean house.
Obama and Stanley
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The obvious parallel is the CIA’s drone campaign, based in Afghanistan, attacking Pakistan, which began under lame duck Bush-Cheney, August 2008, rather late — perhaps to be sure it was online fait accompli before the new prez came in.
The latter again brings to mind the Bay of Pigs — in particular the panicked revisions to the plan that went on between November 1960, when Kennedy shocked the planners by defeating Nixon, and January when he took office.
Steps were taken to downsize the scheme (quite consciously beyond hope of success) and to persuade the new White House team that the raid had been approved by Eisenhower (not so — rather, by VP Nixon, who headed the CIA oversight committee in Ike’s White House).
The raid came 70 days into Kennedy’s presidency. He wasn’t quick enough to choke it off, but deserves great credit for frustrating the prime motive by refusing its gambit — ie, refusing to send in the Marines to rescue the raid (and execute regime change).
And, of course, he never escalated with the Pentagon in Vietnam. That came after Johnson won his ’64 election.
Obama within weeks of taking office enlarged the CIA drone program.
And now, against the advice and/or instincts of Jones, Mullen, Eikenberry, even it seems Petraeus (four four-star generals) as well as VP Biden and CoS Rahm, he’s escalating the war.
Ellsberg pointedly compares Obama’s decision to that of Johnson (under whom and closely with he worked) in 1965 — and sadly laughs at the notion of turning on a dime and getting out in July 2011. The commitment, he insists, cannot but be anything but indefinite re both time and manpower.
More than puzzling. Why did subordinate Stanley McChrystal win this policy debate? Why was he even involved in it?
And what is the War Aim over there? I STILL don’t see one, and neither it seems does the senior brass.
Let’s see, who makes the Predator drone? Expensive little bombs ….. Who’s their anchor banker …?
It’s just astonishing that given the track record of Blackwater, which is a repeat offender endangering our mission repeatedly, endangering the lives of our military and costing the lives of innocent civilians, that there would be any relationship,” Schakowsky said.
“That we would continue to contract with them or any of Blackwater’s subsidiaries is completely unacceptable.”
Big brain out of the Nat’l Security Apparat adds value re the difficulty of bombing underground:
“It complicates your targeting,” said Richard L. Russell, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst now at the National Defense University. “We’re used to facilities being above ground. Underground, it becomes literally a black hole. You can’t be sure what’s taking place.”
Need a second opinion?
“Deeply buried targets have been a problem forever,” said Greg Duckworth, a civilian scientist who recently led a Pentagon research effort to pinpoint enemy tunnels. “And it’s getting worse.”
Yesterday’s spectacular debut of the world’s tallest building — twice as tall (!) as the Trade Center towers were — in Dubai, whose related sovereign debt is number six on a recent list of Most Likely To Fails after its corporate sister pleaded poverty in December …
Leaves me speechless.
Floyd Norris managed to say something. Hear him, sigh.
And check out the business prospects for this white mammoth. Those prospects are nil, but Murdoch’s man closes with assurance that the “image of yesterday’s fireworks display” will surely mean alot to Dubai in years to come.
Meanwhile, farther east, into the creditor hemisphere, a single tuna sells for $177,000. In Japan. Our second biggest banker.
Back at the ranch, a prominent finance CEO today accused the Fed and Tsy of steadily buying stock futures during 2009 to ignite and prop the miraculous rally of March-November.
The money-management world is full of serious people who are certain this began in March 2003 — in an effort to support the (world?) war also set in motion that month by Bush-Cheney. “The Market That Will Not Go Down” then ran up despite news and experience in highly abnormal fashion until the weight of the credit crisis finally crushed it in October 2007.
Meanwhile, more mundanely, the media are full of forecasts for the year. Here is a quick summary of twelve prominent money minders, all foretelling doom as Obama cements his administration’s feet in the status quo ante on the finance front.
Finance. Pakghanistan. Health Care. No Change We Need in any of these, and very little change at all.
Who would have thought, fourteen months ago?
“He went down with the ship.”
My own thoughts about the year ahead in the markets are almost entirely neutral, having been neutralized by the odd three years now past. The future is a mist and the postwar’s First World is as fragile as it has ever been. No reason for long-term confidence of any sort. Investments are all trades.
The stock market just had a fabulous, perhaps basically fraudulent, run, so one must be cautious. And yet if the combined forces, public and covert, of the Fed and Tsy and their international investors continue to juice the markets perhaps there’s some profit yet to be had in being long stocks.
My retirement account went all cash in early December, selling its gold fund FGLDX near peak (on the report of the November employment numbers, which juiced the dollar, breaking gold’s uptrend). Had already sold its China and Tech in May and summer (too early). And its energy by September. So the autumn was about 40% gold and 60% cash, until cashing out entirely in December.
Yesterday I stepped back in with some China. About 14% of the account. Rest is still cash.
Why China. Simply because it’s in a fundamentally sound position, bad news is less likely to appear here, or cash in reaction to flee from here, and the chart is somewhat more inviting than the others.
In my mother’s account of free cash I bought some CTL, the fourth-largest telecom in the US last time I looked, something of a takeover possibility, with a very healthy dividend and rather nice chart. I should have bought it before Christmas — had been watching — but was without an internet connection when the opportunity arose. I’m unhappy buying it here — 36.75 — but will be even less happy if it breaks out over $37, which bad news elsewhere is likely to make it do. The buy was a small lot, about a third of what one hopes to buy if things work out.
In short: I’m trying to get my head back in the morass.
Gold jumped the past two days as the dollar (which broke its downtrend late in the year) sank a bit — but then gold sold off this afternoon and its bulls seem flummoxed again, after 36 hours of unrestrained crowing.
The big news here is Friday’s December employment numbers, which will clarify the dollar (and thus gold) picture. I will be looking for the right time to get back into gold. Perhaps already missed the best time, but there’s plenty of upside left if the bull thesis has merit. Gold’s LONG-TERM prospects seem secure, up up and up as the postwar First World continues its descent into the maelstrom for wont of political will to regulate capital and large corporations.
But it’s not clear yet that the dollar’s late-year rebound is done. I tend to think not, and thus have done nothing. If Friday’s numbers are unexpectedly not bad, the dollar should resume its rise and the time to restock gold will have been pushed further into the future. If the numbers are unexpectedly poor, the dollar may roll over and gold go off again to the races.
Finally, if the dollar continues to rise, it will pressure american stocks down in general, although other factors may be countervailing.
Otherwise, there are certainly some inviting tech stories. But for now the macro picture outweighs in my mind any stock-picking enthusiasms, all of which will get funnelled into short-term trades or the trash.
This has been a poorly written report from a mind mostly elsewhere.
