Archive for the Sorrows of Empire category
August 21st, 2010
This new ad on the NY subway (like Starbucks) seems asking and aching for a stencil campaign.
The old NAACP (if memory serves) motto comes to mind: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” I see it stenciled, shouting, across this wannabe actress’s face.
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The caption up top (clipped as I snapped the photo) reads in full: “Education for the Real World.”
Indeed:
– The world of Arne Duncan, our Secretary of Education, who spent the first decade of the New American Century turning five public schools in Chicago into ‘military academies.’ No need to even begin going through the motions of education. Just teach’em how to spit and shoot and salute and send them off to patrol the mideast.
– And the world of our First Lady — who a few weeks ago explained that America’s kids need to lose weight so they qualify for military service.
June 28th, 2010
The administration’s newly announced Space policy, looking mostly to undo Bush-Cheney unilateral militarism and return to the norms of Reagan, Bush pere and Clinton, modest as it seems, echoes a bit ominously.
To begin, it seems intended to put NASA out of the spaceship business.
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NASA in 1963 was a deeply Cowboy institution. And when the president that year signed National Security Action Memo No 271 — headed “Cooperation with the Soviet Union on Outer Space Matters” — the reaction from the national security apparat was pale.
The same day Kennedy signed a less well known memo headed “Classification review of all UFO intelligence files affecting National Security” which referenced NSAM 271 and directed the CIA, which had recently taken over the UFO beat from the Air Force, to begin declassifying UFO files with an eye toward partnered investigation with the Soviet Union.
Jim Marrs, author of worthwhile books on both JFK and UFOs, reports:
In this memo Kennedy stated, “I have initiated [blacked out] and have instructed [then NASA Administrator] James Webb to develop a program with the Soviet Union in joint space and lunar exploration. It would be very helpful if you would have the high threat cases reviewed with the purpose of identification of bona fide as opposed to classified CIA and USAF sources. It is important that we make a clear distinction between the knowns and unknowns in the event the Soviets try to mistake our extended cooperation as a cover for intelligence gathering of their defense and space programs.”
Kennedy then asked for all files on “Unknowns” to be turned over to the NASA authorities and an interim report be forwarded to the White House no later than February 1, 1964.
Kennedy signed the two memos on November 12 and ten days later was dead.
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Werner von Braun and his President
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After running in 1960 as a Colder Warrior than Nixon, then nearly getting sunk by conniving brass and spooks at the Bay of Pigs some 70 days after taking office, after being embarrassed and outfoxed by Khruschev in Vienna then outlasting him at the psy ops battle of West Berlin, and after defusing the Cuban missile crisis by outfoxing his own warmongering brass while brokering a back-channel compromise with the Reds …
After all that, Kennedy during his last summer confirmed his fundamental turn with a commencement address at American University. For a few months it was rather in the news:
“Among the many traits the peoples of our two countries have in common, none is stronger than our mutual abhorrence of war. Almost unique, among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.
“And no nation in the history of battle ever suffered more than the Soviet Union suffered in the course of the Second World War. At least twenty million lost their lives. Countless millions of homes and farms were burned or sacked. A third of the nation’s territory, including nearly two-thirds of its industrial base, was turned into a wasteland — a loss equivalent to the devastation of this country east of Chicago.
“Today, should total war ever break out again — no matter how — our two countries would become the primary targets. It is an ironic but accurate fact that the two strongest powers are the two in the most danger of devastation. All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first twenty-four hours.
Kennedy then voiced clear comprehension of what Eisenhower had been struggling with since making his truce in Korea with Peking and then had spoken of with quiet thunder in his farewell address days before Kennedy took office.
“And even in the cold war [Kennedy said in '63], which brings burdens and dangers to so many countries, including this nation’s closest allies — our two countries bear the heaviest burdens.
“For we are both devoting to weapons massive sums of money that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.
“In short, both the United States and its allies, and the Soviet Union and its allies, have a mutually deep interest in a just and genuine peace and in halting the arms race. …
“So, let us not be blind to our differences — but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.”
The speech, written by young brain-truster Ted Sorenson, had opened more abstractly, contesting the notion that war was the inevitable condition of modern states, taking clear cue here from FDR’s speech at Chicago in 1937.
Kennedy then broke some surprising news, announcing that the US would henceforth refrain, unilaterally, from testing nukes in the atmosphere, and that talks had been set in Moscow “looking toward early agreement on a comprehensive test ban treaty.”
He then concluded:
“Finally, my fellow Americans, let us examine our attitude toward peace and freedom here at home. The quality and spirit of our own society must justify and support our efforts abroad. … ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,” the Scriptures tell us, “he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’
“And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war ….”
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It’s only against JFK in June 1963, and Eisenhower in 1961, and FDR in 1937, that one can fully appreciate the depths to which we’ve been pulled by the Bush-Cheney doctrine and practice of preemptive war. Indeed, the contrasting lines of argument are so strong that Vladimir Putin at Munich in 2007 reminded the world of FDR at Chicago, in long, loyal paraphrases, while trying to organize the international community in opposition to the American warmongering.
It bears repeating that the Baby Bush Doctrine was promulgated for the most part by the American Likud Lobbyists gathered under the umbrella of The Project for the New American Century in DC.
And lo. Unilateral and exclusive military exploitation of space is high on the agenda of the manifesto published by the group in 2000, two months before the failed election. Half a dozen leading PNAC “Vulcans” were then advising baby Bush’s campaign and months later two dozen would take command of his War Room.
And so it’s only natural to wonder what today’s Apparat thinks of Obama’s announcement about peacefully sharing the last frontier.
March 18th, 2010
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more remarkable interview from Washington.
This sad concession signals the death of the movement for health care reform in D.C that began during the Long Campaign and then crested — Who knew? — with Obama’s inauguration.
Poor Dennis looks dead on his feet.
This comes against news stories in the past two weeks reporting that Obama made explicit promises to the insurance companies last summer to reject a bill with a public plan.
The other shoe will drop with the hopeless wars, leaving Obama toast. Romney seems a shoe-in as successor.
Then we revisit Highway 61.
I was talking to someone in Dennis K’s office Thursday, suggesting that he might be more effective in Ohio, as a governor, working the angle he repeatedly holds hope out for in the interview here.
If he thought the same, his argument for voting Yes here would falter. He could go out with a significant NO, like Eliot Richardson and Wm Ruckelshaus in 1973, and use it as a rallying cry back home.
But I guess Dennis still thinks there is a reason to be in Washington. He chairs an important subcommittee. Although that comes and goes with the Donkey majority, and the latter is hardly a clinch in November.
It’s March 2010. Do you know where your future is?
January 18th, 2010
Major piece in February’s Harper’s. Hats off to them.
The center does not hold.
Obama has done nothing but talk on this.
January 10th, 2010
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1. Noam Chomsky talks about Gaza a year after the Israeli attack.
2. Meanwhile Israel complains because George Mitchell has threatened to cut off the cash trying to pressure Netanyahu — a precise echo of the Bush-Baker years.
3. And the Israeli general who once headed their nuclear weapons program says that Iranian nukes are seven years distant.
Team Obama this year has enacted a betrayal of the Cairo speech.
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January 8th, 2010
Another in Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frog interviews on the National Security Apparat.
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 …?
In the Land of the Blind …
January 6th, 2010
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.”
Laugh or cry or …?
January 5th, 2010
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.
In same vein, the Times editors today forecasted doom for US real estate this year in light of Team Obama’s Do Nothing agenda.
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.
January 1st, 2010
“A London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post and the other around his neck and drove away, launching his head from the car.
Sarah Palin published a book and Sylvia Plath’s son hanged himself in Alaska.
Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.”
From the Yearly Review in Harper’s.
November 30th, 2009
Most of Colonel Prouty’s writings are archived by heroic Len Osanic at Prouty.org — but not this one: an article from Gallery magazine and 1975, chatting about the “assassination business.”
Shop talk done, the author then wanders back to the watershed — both his and the Republic’s — of November 1963, when first President Diem of Vietnam and then President Kennedy of the U.S.A. were dispatched.
One bothers to post Prouty’s piece now in support of Roger Craig’s moving last testament — for Prouty’s piece focuses on the technique of suiciding targets in places, like Washington D.C., where moblike drive-by blasts wouldn’t do.
Craig was deemed to have died — months after filming his testament — by a suicidal rifle blast to the chest.
But that was then, surely. Not now …
Well. The Prouty piece emphasizes his conviction that the fix was in at the Secret Service in Dallas.
And one can’t help but note the odd event at the White House last week, when the Secret Service allowed — for no reason yet public — an oddball couple sans invitation to enter the White House grounds, then the building and then the East Room, where a State Dinner was in progress, and shake hands with the President.
Is it merely funny that this happened just days before Obama’s long-awated All Things Considered speech in which his decision as to the future of the National Security Apparat’s venture in Pakghanistan will be revealed?
Might a little slip in security just be a way to remind the young Prez who’s got his back, and why?
Read Prouty here — then place comments below.
October 26th, 2009
The USA: No longer a country for man, woman or beast.
October 20th, 2009
A fortiori, I don’t think the Four Days in September were without significance:
A feature piece in the Times this morning airs the growling of anonymous generals about the President “pulling out the rug” from beneath them in Afghanistan, and moving to cut their budget. The nerve …
“The thunderstorm is there and it’s kind of brewing and it’s unstable and the lightning hasn’t struck, and hopefully it won’t,” said Nathaniel C. Fick, a former Marine Corps infantry officer who briefed Mr. Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and is now the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security, a military research institution in Washington. “I think it can probably be contained and avoided, but people are aware of the volatile brew.”
October 18th, 2009
The horrendous suicide bomb attack today on Iranian soil and top military leaders, apparently by native unhappy Baluchi campers, is very dangerous for Team Obama and the world.
Tehran has immediately accused Washington and the Brits of being behind the attack.
A bit odd, to do so so quickly, and given that the nuke talks are about to get underway.
Might the Iranians have clear intelligence about US/Brit support of the Jundallah group that’s claiming responsibility?
In any case, if Tehran’s claims are serious, then the worries I had a year ago here — of Obama getting led by the nose into something he doesn’t see and can’t control — on the model of JFK at the Bay of Pigs …
Those worries become relevant — even if, as one hopes, the western so-called intelligence apparats, including Israel’s, had nothing to do with today’s attack.
The Pakis, of course, invaded South Waziristan in force last week, in reaction to the bombing of the Paki Army HQ outside Islamabad the week before.
South Waziristan is just north of Baluchistan, all within Pakistan’s borders. And it’s apparently Baluchi separatists in Iran behind today’s attack.
So — just a thought — PERHAPS the Paki invasion of Waziristan has led unhappy campers there or just south to undertake this attack in Iran as a way to invite Iran into the mess and thus make things more difficult for Islamabad?
Just a thought, based on nothing yet n the news. There was something suspicious in Islamabad’s reaction to the bomb of its army HQ last week, as noted here: the immediate statement by Islamabad that an invasion of Waziristan was now called for. We may be looking at a chain of events much more tightly knit, re causality, than the news we read is able to convey.
October 18th, 2009
ED NOTE: See comments below to continue following this disaster into 2010, where, in June, McChrystal shoots off his mouth and loses his head.
Well, it seems Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup was on target:
John Kerry — who has been Obama’s stalking canary (?) for weeks, loudly making the argument for no more troops — today told the Sunday talk shows that another 40,000 is maybe okay if yadda yadda yadda …
There is nothing to win over there. The LBJ precedent looms.
October 16th, 2009
MUST WATCH, unfortunately …
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9/11, the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex, and what 50 years of same has done to American society.
Here’s Part One at youtube.
The other nine are there too. About 100 minutes total.
Can buy a copy here.
The producers include Wim Wenders — a fave.
Most of what the film has to say is familiar. But the last two parts (on youtube) have revived basic despair about not only our owner-operator class but the young soldiers, who seem as alien and rabid as the teen zealots of 1917 did to so many Russians.
It’s only a few baby steps from shooting civilians for fun in Iraq to the same in American cities. I guess we will see this sooner than later, perhaps even before election day 2016 if Romney beats Obama in 2012.
And of course I don’t mean to imply that it’s okay in Iraq. It’s so NOT okay that … words elude.
And thoughts of leaving the country intrude.
I mean only to gauge the degradation of our people — our enemy met that is us — raised on video games and patriotic television. We mirror the owner-operators with gruesome fidelity.
And have deprived ourselves of sound basis for complaint should one day a city of our own go up in smoke.
October 15th, 2009
Paul Street complained in well informed style about the Peace Prize and Obama’s war-making trail so far.
I REPLIED:
Nevertheless, he did say Woah on a Sunday talk show a few weeks ago, triggering the current Pakghanistan policy debate — and outing McChrystal.
My blog the past 11 months is full of disapppointed rants re the people Obama kept on or hired atop the Nat’l Security Apparat, including a post headlined (like yours) with Orwell’s name after the surreal scene in Strasbourg.
But to think Obama had much of a choice about, e.g., Stanley Mac’s appointment is perhaps to overestimate a callow president’s power to reject the truths and advice of the Briefers of the Apparat.
His chief failing, it seems to me, is that of an ingenue, not a Kissinger; and those of us who elected the ingenue bear some responsibility.
During the campaign I thought Hillary was the better choice to feed into this sausage grinder. She was ready for battle and knows how to take a bullet. Obama seemed better suited as her successor.
But one goes to peace with the President one has. The policy at this moment is in the air, and for the first time since Gates-Mullen picked up the pieces post Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz. If Obama fails to make this opportunity a turning point, I’ll jump on the bandwagon damning him simply.
But I’m hoping he manages to execute a change in rough accord with the Cairo speech that will mark the end of the beginning of his foreign policy odyssey.
October 13th, 2009
Today’s pictures say alot about the success of the Shanghai Coooperation Organization in policing its bounds and pushing back expansionist American policy since 2000.
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China and Russia ink trade agreements and agree re natural gas.
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Russia resists Hillary push for new sanctions against Iran — the latter which sends a ton of oil to China.
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October 12th, 2009
Ed Note: See comments across time to follow the progress.
Radovan Karadzic, political leader of the Bosnian Serbs in the early 90s, will go on trial next week.
A Guardian piece looks forward to that — and back to Srebrenica. Very much worth reading.
See here for a primer on War Crime law, such as it is.
And see here for a reminder of what all the shooting was about.
October 10th, 2009
An ugly bloody week over there — now capped by an assault on a Paki Army headquarters.
From the London Daily Telly:
The daring assault, a few miles from the capital, was the third significant terrorist attack in Pakistan this a week. A suicide bomb attack on a UN headquarters killed five, and more than fifty people died when a huge car bomb exploded in a bazaar in the city of Peshawar.
Saturday’s attack seemed intended to show that the Taliban can still strike at the very heart of Pakistan’s security apparatus despite recent military operations against their forces and the killing of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a drone attack in August.
The attackers may have been trying to kill army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who was inside the complex on Saturday, although it was not clear whether he was there during the attack. Military statements said he attended meetings there and at the president’s office in nearby Islamabad during the day.
It’s as if the so-called Pakistan Taliban, campers unhappy with the feebly pro-Western central government, don’t want the Yankees to go home after all.
For it’s the best guess, stateside, that this week’s attacks will support Pentagon and CIA warmakers in their recently convened public debate with the White House — especially if the Paki Army now throws up its hands and shouts to Stanley McChrystal across the border, Heck, come on down and we’ll kick some rebel ass!
From an Associated Press story:
The government said the assault on the headquarters …had strengthened its resolve to push into South Wazristan — a mountainous region where security forces have been beaten back by insurgents before.
The spasm of violence was confirmation that the militants had regrouped despite recent military operations against their forces and the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a CIA drone attack in August. His replacement vowed just last week to step up attacks around the country and repel any push into Waziristan.
Sounds like something that could snowball into the party war I’d imagined was in the works last December when erstwhile CIA Director General Michael Hayden declared war on/in Pakistan.
Perhaps this week’s attacks are expressions of native alienation from Islamabad pure and simple, and nothing more.
Or perhaps there’s bona fide provocation at work, maybe by American warmakers looking to win the debate and close the deal, or merely by Moscow, smiling on the sidelines like a Cheshire cat as it arms the resistance, turnabout being fair play and revenge a dish best served cold.
It may be worth recalling: Bush-Cheney called Mullah Omar and his merry band on the carpet in January and (if memory serves) May of 2001 — trying to get them to work with Houston’s Unocal on the Caspian basin pipeline, rather than Argentina’s Bridas.
But Omar grew sullen. And in midsummer (as voices from Tony Blair’s gov’t have reported) Bush-Cheney told the NATO folk to saddle up for the ride into Kabul.
It seems fair, then, to say that we did not go to Afghanistan to Get Osama. Our reasons for remaining there remain obscure. No good reasons are evident.
If this week’s attacks are native affairs, let the Paki apparatus, half of which hates Uncle Sam’s guts, handle them.
And if the attacks are more than meets the eye? Then all the better for the American President to resist the mousetrap cheese.
Neither the various forces labelled Taliban nor the meeting of minds referred to as al Qaeda are things a Pentagon can dismantle. Wars on terror are won or lost largely between the ears.
Obama knows this. Evidence: The Cairo and recent UN speeches. That he initiated the current public debate — saying Woah on a Sunday talk show — remains hopeful.
But whether he has the power and the nerve to turn off the Aimless war he cheerleaded and then inherited is far from clear.
He strode during the campaign last year, smiling and waving, into a near perfect trap, like Jesus entering Jerusalem on his ass. There are certainly elements of tragedy in this, but also of Obama’s particular great-souled naivete.
Hillary (whom I also admire) was the one to feed to this sausage grinder. She was ready for battle and knows how to take a bullet. Romney seems a good bet to be president four years hence: a time and place I don’t want to be.
October 9th, 2009
A second Gorbachev, indeed.
A double-edged sword.
The Nobel folks have of course been awarding prizes proactively, as it were, for many years now — trying to shape attitudes, rather than recognizing crowning achievement.
That’s what this seems: support from Scandanavia for the President in his subtle struggle with the National Security Apparat.
But mightn’t the Nobelvolkers have kept their powder dry? For a rainier day? Perhaps it’s raining harder than we suppose.
Or is the odd timing of the award its very essence? Is it meant as much as anything as a rejection of Bush-Cheney unilateralism, and of the megalomaniacal militarism of the manifesto published by his PNAC wonkers in September 2000 (which months later became the basis of US foreign policy)?
In this light, the new President is merely the parchment upon which the Nobel message has been written.
However that all may be, it’s certainly an embarrassment of moral riches for Obama, and one that creates all sorts of local disturbances — when what he really needs is an army to help muscle the Apparat on policy.
Camus, too, was embarrassed to receive the honor at a rather young age, when he thought so many elder writers more deserving.
Perhaps, to begin, the Prez should review Camus’s acceptance speech for pointers on how to graciously take home the prize.
And then look to Churchill, who was also a touch embarrassed (just a touch) to get his Literature prize, re how to hit Apparatchiks on the head and make generals behave.
