“I don’t know how many nukes the United States has pointed toward China, but one would be too many. China isn’t going to attack its biggest customer. And in the unlikely event that some other country attacks China, we’d offer military assistance in a heartbeat. There’s too much money at stake on both sides.”
Scott Adams presents his “Money or Bombs” theory
Writing in the March 20th issue of Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi explores “The tragic self-martyrdom of a groundbreaking politician.”
“The Clintons always represented the notion that the old Democratic Party of unions and LBJ liberals was a thing of the past and that the way forward involved making nice with big business and the military. Her husband passed NAFTA, deregulated Wall Street, rammed through welfare “reform,” bombed Kosovo, chided Sister Soulja, opened the Lincoln bedroom to any foreign nation with spare cash and won two elections.
Winning convinced both of them that they were saviors of everything right and decent in the world. They’d discovered the winning formula, and we were welcome to kiss their asses for finding it. And so what if the formula involved selling out the unions on a series of draconian and insane trade deals, or cozying up to one of the most regressive employers in the world in Wal-Mart, or hiring an evil lobbyist stooge like Mark Penn to be your chief campaign strategist, or voting to give George Bush the authority to launch an illegal invasion of Iraq?”
Matt Taibbi is far and away my favorite political reporter (right after Kay Henderson!) and I buy a copy of Rolling Stone just for his pieces.
His latest leaves the reader with the impression that Hillary is kaput. I’m not so sure. He calls her “one of the most awesomely complex and fascinating public figures in the history of our country.” But not in a good way.
I couldn’t find the article online but will update this post if I do.
We need your help. We need your help to stop George W. Bush from starting a war with Iran. George W. Bush no longer represents the will of the American people. 77% of Americans disapprove of Bush’s job performance and do NOT support attacking Iran. But it’s been a long time since Bush cared what the American people think.
You could say we have the kind of leadership we deserve and you’d be right. Even if you believe –as I do– that Bush and his cronies stole the 2000 election, we allowed the vote to be close enough for him to get away with it. We know we fucked up and a lot of us are trying to rectify our mistake.
But it now seems clear that George Bush plans to launch some sort of military strike against Iran before he leaves office. Dick Cheney has been conspicuously absent for months, working on this disastrous scheme.
As embarrassing as it is to admit, we –the American people– can’t stop our president because it’s been a long time since he cared what we thought.
But maybe you can buy us some time. We just need keep him in check until November. Assuming McCain doesn’t win. In that event, America –and Iran– are fucked.
Our congress probably doesn’t have the balls or the votes to stop this madness. Our generals and admirals –with a few exceptions– will put their careers ahead of their country. So it’s up to the rest of the world to stop Bush.
We just need a little time to clean up the mess that is the Bush administration.
PS: I’m hoping for some six-degrees thing here. J-Walk gives me a link.One of his readers emails it to a friend in Germany. She knows the woman that cleans the home of German Chancellor Angela Merkel…. and so forth. It could happen.
Doc Searls says we need a new leadership narrative:
“…what’s “super” about U.S. superpower — a near-limitless ability to make high-technology war, backed by a fighting force of finite size with few allies — is an anachronism. I’m not sure the people of any Great Nation are ever ready to face the fact that the height of their military and economic powers has passed. Or that the leadership they most need to assert is no longer only a military and economic one.”
If we can no longer win every war we start and our economy isn’t Number One… is it possible for the U.S. to still be “super?” Let’s hope so.
This is a thoughtful and insightful post on America, leadership and journalism. Worth a read.
Writing in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Nir Rosen gives us a spin-free report from the streets of Baghdad. … And for an even scarier perspective on the "war on terrorism" and the real reason we’re up to our chins in Middle East doo doo, read this article from The Guardian archives.
“One view of the near future is that terrorists will get nukes and set the atmosphere on fire, or global warming will kill us all, or bird flu will create a pandemic, or the world economy will melt down, or all of those disasters will happen at once. I suppose that’s possible. But I think it’s more likely we are entering a golden age.
My Golden Age prediction assumes technology will continue to surprise us, especially in the energy realm. The high cost of oil has generated a seemingly endless parade of energy technology research and subsequent breakthroughs.
Wars appear to be shrinking too. World Wars I and II will probably be the final wars between major powers. The biggest powers of today are more interested in being trading partners than foes. As nations become more connected, via economics and the Internet, the risk of war decreases. All war requires a certain degree of lying to the citizens, and the Internet will continue to make that harder.”
[Full post]
“Some people still think that there’s an “Islamo-fascist tyranny” somewhere that hates our freedoms and can organize Islam-dom into a coherent fascist state… There’s just no way. Al Qaeda and the Taliban aren’t true “fascists.” Fascists can at least make trains run on time. Even Communists were better-organized. The mujihadeen have no organized army and no industrial policy and they don’t know where to find any. Because God was supposed to handle all that for them. You’re supposed to die nobly in a crowd of unwitting strangers, and then God’s supposed to make that all better. That’s the big plan.”
“But when you blow up the china shop, God doesn’t reassemble the plates for you. Being faith-based doesn’t trump reality.”
“Now the Americans have clearly lost the thread… the Americans are really just horribly out of it, they’re like some giant fundie Brazil, nobody takes their pronunciamentos seriously or believes a word they say… Whereas the world is much more seriously global now. China and India are real players, they’re part of the show and they matter.
“Serious-minded people everywhere do know they have to deal with the resource crisis and the climate crisis. Because the world-machine’s backfiring and puffing smoke. Joe and Jane Sixpack are looking at four-dollar milk and five-dollar gas. It’s hurting and it’s scary and there’s no way out of it but through it.”
From Bruce Sterling’s State of the World, 2008
Watched a really interesting program on the History Channel last night about military bloggers (milbloggers) in Irag:
“For the first time in history, modern technology is enabling viewers to experience war as it really is… directly from the battlefield. An ever growing band of military bloggers are using the internet, video cameras and cell phones to deliver honest, powerful and uncensored content. Band of Bloggers will be the site that will collect this raw and riveting “soldier generated content.”
Remember the early day of the war when network reporters (and anchors) were “embedded” with our troops, reporting from “the front lines?” Well, a lot of those reporters have got the fuck out of Dodge or been forced to do their reports from the basement of the Baghdad Hilton.
Questions of objectivity aside, you can’t get much more “front line” than these men and women. Some of them have even rigged cameras to their helmets to record video.
If Vietnam was our first televised war, Iraq is our first blogged war. If you’re a blogger or read blogs, you’ll want to watch Band of Bloggers.
I recently read Halting State by Charles Stross. It’s science fiction (for lack of a better description) set in 2012 (in Scotland and/or cyberspace). You can read the description on Amazon. A couple of paragraphs have been haunting me for a few days. Not sure they’ll make much sense out of context, but I include them here for future reference:
“This is the twenty-first century, and we’re in the developed world. You’re probably thinking wars are something that happen in third-world shit-holes a long way away. And to a degree, you’d be right. Modern warfare is capital-intensive, and it hasn’t really been profitable for decades; it was already a marginal proposition back in 1939 when Hitler embarked on his pan-European asset-stripping spree — his government would have been bankrupt by March 1940 if he hadn’t invaded Poland and france — and it’s even worse today. When the Americans tried it in Iraq, they spent nine times the value of the country’s entire oil reserves conquering a patch of desert full of — sorry, I’m rambling. Pet hobby-horse. But anyway: Back in the eighteenth century, von Clauswitz was right about war being the continuation of diplomacy by other means. But today, in the twenty-first, the picture’s changed. It’s all about enforcing economic hegemony, which is maintained by broadcasting your vision of how the global trade system should be structured. And what we’re facing is a real headache — a three-way struggle to be the next economic hegemon.”
Who is we? That’s the question you’re asking yourself…
” ‘We,’ for these purposes, is the intellectual property regime we live in — call it the European System. The other hegemonic candidates are the People’s Republic of China, and India. American isn’t in play — they’ve only got about three hundred and fifty million people, and once we finish setting up the convergence criteria for Russian accession to the Group of Thirty, the EU will be over seven hundred. China and India are even bigger. More to the point, the USA went post-industrial first. Their infrastructure is out-of-date and replacing it, now oil is no longer cheap, is costing them tens of trillions of euros to modernize. Plus, they’ve got all those rusty aircraft carriers to keep afloat. It’s exactly the same problem Britain faced in the 1930s, the one that ultimately bankrupted the empire. But today, our infrastructure –Europe’s– is in better shape, and the eastern states are even newer. They went post-industrial relatively recently, so their network infrastructure is almost as new as the shiny new stuff in Shanghai and New Delhi. So there’s this constant jockeying for position between three hyperpowers while the USA takes time out.”
“If it ever happened that America attacked Iran because of alleged nukes, and later confirmed it had no nuclear weapons program, and we discovered that the administration knew it all along, would it be in the best interest of the citizens of the United States to overthrow their government?”
— Scott Adams blogs this hypothetical question