Why Should We Listen to McCain?
Last Tuesday, President Obama invited Congressional leaders to the White House to discuss Afghanistan. John McCain took the opportunity to lecture the President on giving the Generals what they want.
And Republicans pressed him to order the escalation without delay, leading to a pointed exchange between the president and Senator John McCain of Arizona, his Republican opponent from last year’s election.
Mr. McCain told the president that “time is not on our side.” He added, “This should not be a leisurely process,” according to several people in the room.
A few minutes later, Mr. Obama replied, “John, I can assure you this won’t be leisurely,” according to several attendees. “No one feels more urgency to get this right than I do.”
But why should anyone listen to McCain? As Frank Rich points out, the smart thing would be to do the opposite of what McCain suggests.
To appreciate this crowd’s spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’sconstant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.
What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCaingave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: “I think the reason why we didn’t do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention — either rightly or wrongly — was on Iraq.” As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, “What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?”
The next few weeks will be a test of Obama’s political courage. Jim Jones and Joe Biden are right–just doing what Petraeus and McChrystal want would be the easy political route, but not the intelligent long term strategy. A year ago we fought an election over whether John McCain’s aggressive view of foreign policy or Barack Obama’s more nuanced sense of diplomacy was the the right American stance. The results were pretty decisive and the Nobel Prize Committee added their endorsement this week.
The best stance would be to send a few thousand more military trainers and a lot more development aid (in coordination with our NATO allies) to be administered by the U.N. and not the corrupt Karzai government. The worst stance would be to listen to John McCain.
One of the reasons why, on balance, the better guy got elected.
One of the reasons why, on balance, the better guy got elected.
One of the reasons why, on balance, the better guy got elected.
I think the reason Republicans have such sway in American politics (despite losing and despite at least 8 years of being horribly wrong on all things economic, social and military) is that they are right on one point – America is a conservative country.(*)
I predict that Obama will listen to what McCain has to say and do exactly as McCain suggests – despite himself and despite what he campaigned on. I believe the Nobel peace prize hurt him internally and he will do his best not to appear like the next Jimmy Carter. Not that it will do him any good.
The Democrats might wish for a progressive America, but I suspect that deep in their heart they too believe that it America is conservative. That’s why they’re unable to push their professed agendas. ( It’s either that or the US Federal Govt is fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt. Though I’d like to believe the former).
Drastic times call for drastic measures. And if last year’s economic collapse was anything, it was drastic. Yet Obama has done nothing with it. He has not changed Washington. He has not even attempted any move to the left within the established parameters. All this despite a landslide victory for him and his party.
The Republicans treated the economic collapse the same way they treated 9/11 – as a crisis. As such they were able to push forward their own agendas (“don’t let a crisis go to waste”). Obama should have taken that page out of the Republican handbook.
He had a whole year of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years, in which he did nothing drastic. No change. No reform. No gays in the military. No end to Guantanamo. No end to Iraq. Nothing. Just a quest for the ever-elusive bi-partisanship (with the party who invented the “permanent campaign”. Ha!)
Ironically enough, McCain was right about one thing in his campaign – Obama is an appeaser. Who knew he’d be busy appeasing the Republicans. The first sign of this appeasement was allowing Joe Lieberman to keep his chairmanship of Homeland security (with Obama’s support, no less!) and caucus with Dems. This guy should have been given the boot for being a traitor to his party and campaigning at the GNC. But more importantly, he should have been kicked out for being on the wrong side of history.
But apparently Lieberman wasn’t on the wrong side of history. He was right all along and he’s been rewarded for it. It is all of us, still believing that Obama stands for what he campaigned on, that are in the wrong.
I know it may not sound like it from my post, but I am truly sad to watch this great hope fade away so quickly and of its own accord. It brings me no joy to be this disillusioned so soon. And this is compounded by knowing that everyone will treat my remarks as anti-Obama nonsense. As if I was on the same side as the Morgan Wrastlers of the world. I truly wanted Obama to live up to his promise.
(*) – Actually I think American people might not be as conservative as all that.You did after all, and beyond all expectations, elect a black president to the White House. Perhaps in an attempt to show the establishment your immense dissatisfaction with their performance. To show the establishment that people still have power too.
Alas Obama and the Democrats are still part of that establishment.
I think the reason Republicans have such sway in American politics (despite losing and despite at least 8 years of being horribly wrong on all things economic, social and military) is that they are right on one point – America is a conservative country.(*)
I predict that Obama will listen to what McCain has to say and do exactly as McCain suggests – despite himself and despite what he campaigned on. I believe the Nobel peace prize hurt him internally and he will do his best not to appear like the next Jimmy Carter. Not that it will do him any good.
The Democrats might wish for a progressive America, but I suspect that deep in their heart they too believe that it America is conservative. That’s why they’re unable to push their professed agendas. ( It’s either that or the US Federal Govt is fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt. Though I’d like to believe the former).
Drastic times call for drastic measures. And if last year’s economic collapse was anything, it was drastic. Yet Obama has done nothing with it. He has not changed Washington. He has not even attempted any move to the left within the established parameters. All this despite a landslide victory for him and his party.
The Republicans treated the economic collapse the same way they treated 9/11 – as a crisis. As such they were able to push forward their own agendas (“don’t let a crisis go to waste”). Obama should have taken that page out of the Republican handbook.
He had a whole year of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years, in which he did nothing drastic. No change. No reform. No gays in the military. No end to Guantanamo. No end to Iraq. Nothing. Just a quest for the ever-elusive bi-partisanship (with the party who invented the “permanent campaign”. Ha!)
Ironically enough, McCain was right about one thing in his campaign – Obama is an appeaser. Who knew he’d be busy appeasing the Republicans. The first sign of this appeasement was allowing Joe Lieberman to keep his chairmanship of Homeland security (with Obama’s support, no less!) and caucus with Dems. This guy should have been given the boot for being a traitor to his party and campaigning at the GNC. But more importantly, he should have been kicked out for being on the wrong side of history.
But apparently Lieberman wasn’t on the wrong side of history. He was right all along and he’s been rewarded for it. It is all of us, still believing that Obama stands for what he campaigned on, that are in the wrong.
I know it may not sound like it from my post, but I am truly sad to watch this great hope fade away so quickly and of its own accord. It brings me no joy to be this disillusioned so soon. And this is compounded by knowing that everyone will treat my remarks as anti-Obama nonsense. As if I was on the same side as the Morgan Wrastlers of the world. I truly wanted Obama to live up to his promise.
(*) – Actually I think American people might not be as conservative as all that.You did after all, and beyond all expectations, elect a black president to the White House. Perhaps in an attempt to show the establishment your immense dissatisfaction with their performance. To show the establishment that people still have power too.
Alas Obama and the Democrats are still part of that establishment.
I think the reason Republicans have such sway in American politics (despite losing and despite at least 8 years of being horribly wrong on all things economic, social and military) is that they are right on one point – America is a conservative country.(*)
I predict that Obama will listen to what McCain has to say and do exactly as McCain suggests – despite himself and despite what he campaigned on. I believe the Nobel peace prize hurt him internally and he will do his best not to appear like the next Jimmy Carter. Not that it will do him any good.
The Democrats might wish for a progressive America, but I suspect that deep in their heart they too believe that it America is conservative. That’s why they’re unable to push their professed agendas. ( It’s either that or the US Federal Govt is fundamentally and irrevocably corrupt. Though I’d like to believe the former).
Drastic times call for drastic measures. And if last year’s economic collapse was anything, it was drastic. Yet Obama has done nothing with it. He has not changed Washington. He has not even attempted any move to the left within the established parameters. All this despite a landslide victory for him and his party.
The Republicans treated the economic collapse the same way they treated 9/11 – as a crisis. As such they were able to push forward their own agendas (“don’t let a crisis go to waste”). Obama should have taken that page out of the Republican handbook.
He had a whole year of the greatest economic crisis in 80 years, in which he did nothing drastic. No change. No reform. No gays in the military. No end to Guantanamo. No end to Iraq. Nothing. Just a quest for the ever-elusive bi-partisanship (with the party who invented the “permanent campaign”. Ha!)
Ironically enough, McCain was right about one thing in his campaign – Obama is an appeaser. Who knew he’d be busy appeasing the Republicans. The first sign of this appeasement was allowing Joe Lieberman to keep his chairmanship of Homeland security (with Obama’s support, no less!) and caucus with Dems. This guy should have been given the boot for being a traitor to his party and campaigning at the GNC. But more importantly, he should have been kicked out for being on the wrong side of history.
But apparently Lieberman wasn’t on the wrong side of history. He was right all along and he’s been rewarded for it. It is all of us, still believing that Obama stands for what he campaigned on, that are in the wrong.
I know it may not sound like it from my post, but I am truly sad to watch this great hope fade away so quickly and of its own accord. It brings me no joy to be this disillusioned so soon. And this is compounded by knowing that everyone will treat my remarks as anti-Obama nonsense. As if I was on the same side as the Morgan Wrastlers of the world. I truly wanted Obama to live up to his promise.
(*) – Actually I think American people might not be as conservative as all that.You did after all, and beyond all expectations, elect a black president to the White House. Perhaps in an attempt to show the establishment your immense dissatisfaction with their performance. To show the establishment that people still have power too.
Alas Obama and the Democrats are still part of that establishment.
Foreign adventuring and warmongering is “progressive”. What it isn’t is liberal.
Foreign adventuring and warmongering is “progressive”. What it isn’t is liberal.
Foreign adventuring and warmongering is “progressive”. What it isn’t is liberal.
I find this whole story quite worrying.
U.S foreign policy has a problem and Obama’s process of dealing with it is to invite the peoples representatives to discuss the issue and offer advice then presumably ruminate and choose a wise path.
While it sounds sensible it also sounds like someone who’s idea of governance is talking to the various political stake holders and finding the working compromise between them.
An attitude that may work well at the city, county or state level where mediating between competing interests is a viable solution to daily business.
But which may be a ruinous attitude for a countries executive where the correct policy might not be a compromise between battling political ideologies, parties or competences.
This is a field where decisive leadership more than negotiation may be more useful.
It worries me that Obama thinks it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.
I find this whole story quite worrying.
U.S foreign policy has a problem and Obama’s process of dealing with it is to invite the peoples representatives to discuss the issue and offer advice then presumably ruminate and choose a wise path.
While it sounds sensible it also sounds like someone who’s idea of governance is talking to the various political stake holders and finding the working compromise between them.
An attitude that may work well at the city, county or state level where mediating between competing interests is a viable solution to daily business.
But which may be a ruinous attitude for a countries executive where the correct policy might not be a compromise between battling political ideologies, parties or competences.
This is a field where decisive leadership more than negotiation may be more useful.
It worries me that Obama thinks it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.
I find this whole story quite worrying.
U.S foreign policy has a problem and Obama’s process of dealing with it is to invite the peoples representatives to discuss the issue and offer advice then presumably ruminate and choose a wise path.
While it sounds sensible it also sounds like someone who’s idea of governance is talking to the various political stake holders and finding the working compromise between them.
An attitude that may work well at the city, county or state level where mediating between competing interests is a viable solution to daily business.
But which may be a ruinous attitude for a countries executive where the correct policy might not be a compromise between battling political ideologies, parties or competences.
This is a field where decisive leadership more than negotiation may be more useful.
It worries me that Obama thinks it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.
“It worries me that Obama MIGHT think it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.”
I meant ‘might think’, I’m not sure he’s wasting his time just worried that he might be.
“It worries me that Obama MIGHT think it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.”
I meant ‘might think’, I’m not sure he’s wasting his time just worried that he might be.
“It worries me that Obama MIGHT think it’s all about negotiating a peace at home rather than resolving conflict abroard.”
I meant ‘might think’, I’m not sure he’s wasting his time just worried that he might be.
> You did after all, and beyond all expectations,
> elect a black president to the White House.
Not against all expectations, I won $50 on that.
> You did after all, and beyond all expectations,
> elect a black president to the White House.
Not against all expectations, I won $50 on that.
> You did after all, and beyond all expectations,
> elect a black president to the White House.
Not against all expectations, I won $50 on that.
Lincoln listened to McClellan, and what did you get? Tuned in to Grant, and welcome to the modern war of attrition, which I guess at least from the perspective of the northern proto-industrialists was a “win.”
LBJ listened to Westmoreland and then Abrams, and what did you get?
Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur, he fired the disobedient motherfucker.
Generals in this country don’t have a very good track record — especially as the military enterprise has grown in hugeness and complexity, and they have diddled with the levers of policy alongside their partners in crime in the civilian government.
Obama gives McChrystal what he wants, well, as John Papola says, “we shall see…”
Lincoln listened to McClellan, and what did you get? Tuned in to Grant, and welcome to the modern war of attrition, which I guess at least from the perspective of the northern proto-industrialists was a “win.”
LBJ listened to Westmoreland and then Abrams, and what did you get?
Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur, he fired the disobedient motherfucker.
Generals in this country don’t have a very good track record — especially as the military enterprise has grown in hugeness and complexity, and they have diddled with the levers of policy alongside their partners in crime in the civilian government.
Obama gives McChrystal what he wants, well, as John Papola says, “we shall see…”
Lincoln listened to McClellan, and what did you get? Tuned in to Grant, and welcome to the modern war of attrition, which I guess at least from the perspective of the northern proto-industrialists was a “win.”
LBJ listened to Westmoreland and then Abrams, and what did you get?
Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur, he fired the disobedient motherfucker.
Generals in this country don’t have a very good track record — especially as the military enterprise has grown in hugeness and complexity, and they have diddled with the levers of policy alongside their partners in crime in the civilian government.
Obama gives McChrystal what he wants, well, as John Papola says, “we shall see…”
I suppose that McCain views himslef as Prophet of the Surge, vis-a-vis the abuse Petraeus took at the hands of Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the Soros combine, so that now he thinks he can predict the future of Afghanistan and talk down to the Left he finds in power partly as a result of his own electoral incompetence. If that’s so, then perhaps he’s showing a penchant for fighting the last war as, JTM recently suggested, the present-day hawks still are prone to do.
I suppose that McCain views himslef as Prophet of the Surge, vis-a-vis the abuse Petraeus took at the hands of Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the Soros combine, so that now he thinks he can predict the future of Afghanistan and talk down to the Left he finds in power partly as a result of his own electoral incompetence. If that’s so, then perhaps he’s showing a penchant for fighting the last war as, JTM recently suggested, the present-day hawks still are prone to do.
I suppose that McCain views himslef as Prophet of the Surge, vis-a-vis the abuse Petraeus took at the hands of Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the Soros combine, so that now he thinks he can predict the future of Afghanistan and talk down to the Left he finds in power partly as a result of his own electoral incompetence. If that’s so, then perhaps he’s showing a penchant for fighting the last war as, JTM recently suggested, the present-day hawks still are prone to do.
“Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur”
Yes and to this day, a lot of people of my dad’s generation consider Truman to be only slightly better on the scale of evil than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Satan. Obama can’t afford anything like that. Hell, even FDR couldn’t afford to stand up to MacArthur in 1944.
Though to be honest I wish FDR had told him, “OK then go ahead and resign, you big crybaby, resign and come home and run against me, find out what rough-and-tumble politics are like instead of rambling around your Brisbane mansion in your silk dressing gowns, issuing orders like ‘Come back victorious or don’t come back at all’ to the generals who are actually slogging it out on New Guinea and Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan. Go on, Dugout Doug: resign.”
My guess is MacArthur would have shrunk to his proper proportions.
“Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur”
Yes and to this day, a lot of people of my dad’s generation consider Truman to be only slightly better on the scale of evil than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Satan. Obama can’t afford anything like that. Hell, even FDR couldn’t afford to stand up to MacArthur in 1944.
Though to be honest I wish FDR had told him, “OK then go ahead and resign, you big crybaby, resign and come home and run against me, find out what rough-and-tumble politics are like instead of rambling around your Brisbane mansion in your silk dressing gowns, issuing orders like ‘Come back victorious or don’t come back at all’ to the generals who are actually slogging it out on New Guinea and Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan. Go on, Dugout Doug: resign.”
My guess is MacArthur would have shrunk to his proper proportions.
“Harry Truman not only DID NOT listen to MacArthur”
Yes and to this day, a lot of people of my dad’s generation consider Truman to be only slightly better on the scale of evil than Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Satan. Obama can’t afford anything like that. Hell, even FDR couldn’t afford to stand up to MacArthur in 1944.
Though to be honest I wish FDR had told him, “OK then go ahead and resign, you big crybaby, resign and come home and run against me, find out what rough-and-tumble politics are like instead of rambling around your Brisbane mansion in your silk dressing gowns, issuing orders like ‘Come back victorious or don’t come back at all’ to the generals who are actually slogging it out on New Guinea and Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Saipan. Go on, Dugout Doug: resign.”
My guess is MacArthur would have shrunk to his proper proportions.
“To a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
McCain is a sick mother fucker, and that’s all there is to it. He’s a poster child for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’s deeply pissed off (and not without reason…though it was his choice to fly over and bomb North Vietnam and then get shot down), and he will be forever. He’d damaged goods, and as such he is tremendously appealing to armchair soldiers whose glory days are decades past…but they vote.
These are the “death before dishonor” guys who are utterly clueless to their own dishonorable ingorance. The “my country right or wrong” crowd who haven’t read the next lines…the ones that call for change if our country is wrong. Which it is very much these days.
Strategic retreat…that’s what’s called for. Get the fuck out and declare victory.
What the hell, we’ve made it a new tradition to lie to ourselves, haven’t we?
Peace prizes are made from drones raining death upon civilians, right?
Maybe we all need the juice of the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Chill out a bit…
“To a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
McCain is a sick mother fucker, and that’s all there is to it. He’s a poster child for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’s deeply pissed off (and not without reason…though it was his choice to fly over and bomb North Vietnam and then get shot down), and he will be forever. He’d damaged goods, and as such he is tremendously appealing to armchair soldiers whose glory days are decades past…but they vote.
These are the “death before dishonor” guys who are utterly clueless to their own dishonorable ingorance. The “my country right or wrong” crowd who haven’t read the next lines…the ones that call for change if our country is wrong. Which it is very much these days.
Strategic retreat…that’s what’s called for. Get the fuck out and declare victory.
What the hell, we’ve made it a new tradition to lie to ourselves, haven’t we?
Peace prizes are made from drones raining death upon civilians, right?
Maybe we all need the juice of the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Chill out a bit…
“To a hammer, every problem is a nail.”
McCain is a sick mother fucker, and that’s all there is to it. He’s a poster child for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He’s deeply pissed off (and not without reason…though it was his choice to fly over and bomb North Vietnam and then get shot down), and he will be forever. He’d damaged goods, and as such he is tremendously appealing to armchair soldiers whose glory days are decades past…but they vote.
These are the “death before dishonor” guys who are utterly clueless to their own dishonorable ingorance. The “my country right or wrong” crowd who haven’t read the next lines…the ones that call for change if our country is wrong. Which it is very much these days.
Strategic retreat…that’s what’s called for. Get the fuck out and declare victory.
What the hell, we’ve made it a new tradition to lie to ourselves, haven’t we?
Peace prizes are made from drones raining death upon civilians, right?
Maybe we all need the juice of the poppy fields of Afghanistan. Chill out a bit…
I agree with Jon Taplin on this one.
Now, Mr Asante, i really gotta call you out.
You obviously didn’t grow up in working-class America or you’d have empathy, even sympathy for the day.
You appear a cynic desirous of action or just another dumb redneck w/a tie, ie critic.
You called us conservative. Easy label, eh? Was Hiroshima conservative? Flood control? Industrial revolution?….
You say the Nobel hurts…WTF?
Then you really pissed me off when you talked down on Carter. You “action” guys like to call him weak – he ok’d a commando job on foreign soil…
You say Obama didn’t change Washington. Dude!…less than one fuckin yr on the job!! …and definitely aimed in the right direction.
You say “we” may perceive you anti-Oabma…nah, just shallow. Obama got elected because “we” worked hard to do it – “we” put him there – against big money – get it?
What “We” learned in our short history, and especially more recently in the 60s, was that it takes an awful lot of work to make things better, but the world can be made worse, much worse, quickly.
Today is “Columbus” Day. There’s an action figure for ye!
In ‘The People’s History of the US’, Howard Zinn provides many a jaw-dropping account of factual instances of action-figures like CC. Remember, Zinn was a bombardier in the big WW II… Conservative? Weak?
We’re full of contradictions, us worker-types here in the US but we generally tend toward a nice quiet life with a few good times. We tend toward family, and we tolerate cynics and critics just so far.
A sucker is born every minute. I s’pose it’s just perception….ya know…motion of the other – motion of the same.
“troop-surge”… “body-count”…”action”
I agree with Mr Taplin.
I agree with Jon Taplin on this one.
Now, Mr Asante, i really gotta call you out.
You obviously didn’t grow up in working-class America or you’d have empathy, even sympathy for the day.
You appear a cynic desirous of action or just another dumb redneck w/a tie, ie critic.
You called us conservative. Easy label, eh? Was Hiroshima conservative? Flood control? Industrial revolution?….
You say the Nobel hurts…WTF?
Then you really pissed me off when you talked down on Carter. You “action” guys like to call him weak – he ok’d a commando job on foreign soil…
You say Obama didn’t change Washington. Dude!…less than one fuckin yr on the job!! …and definitely aimed in the right direction.
You say “we” may perceive you anti-Oabma…nah, just shallow. Obama got elected because “we” worked hard to do it – “we” put him there – against big money – get it?
What “We” learned in our short history, and especially more recently in the 60s, was that it takes an awful lot of work to make things better, but the world can be made worse, much worse, quickly.
Today is “Columbus” Day. There’s an action figure for ye!
In ‘The People’s History of the US’, Howard Zinn provides many a jaw-dropping account of factual instances of action-figures like CC. Remember, Zinn was a bombardier in the big WW II… Conservative? Weak?
We’re full of contradictions, us worker-types here in the US but we generally tend toward a nice quiet life with a few good times. We tend toward family, and we tolerate cynics and critics just so far.
A sucker is born every minute. I s’pose it’s just perception….ya know…motion of the other – motion of the same.
“troop-surge”… “body-count”…”action”
I agree with Mr Taplin.
I agree with Jon Taplin on this one.
Now, Mr Asante, i really gotta call you out.
You obviously didn’t grow up in working-class America or you’d have empathy, even sympathy for the day.
You appear a cynic desirous of action or just another dumb redneck w/a tie, ie critic.
You called us conservative. Easy label, eh? Was Hiroshima conservative? Flood control? Industrial revolution?….
You say the Nobel hurts…WTF?
Then you really pissed me off when you talked down on Carter. You “action” guys like to call him weak – he ok’d a commando job on foreign soil…
You say Obama didn’t change Washington. Dude!…less than one fuckin yr on the job!! …and definitely aimed in the right direction.
You say “we” may perceive you anti-Oabma…nah, just shallow. Obama got elected because “we” worked hard to do it – “we” put him there – against big money – get it?
What “We” learned in our short history, and especially more recently in the 60s, was that it takes an awful lot of work to make things better, but the world can be made worse, much worse, quickly.
Today is “Columbus” Day. There’s an action figure for ye!
In ‘The People’s History of the US’, Howard Zinn provides many a jaw-dropping account of factual instances of action-figures like CC. Remember, Zinn was a bombardier in the big WW II… Conservative? Weak?
We’re full of contradictions, us worker-types here in the US but we generally tend toward a nice quiet life with a few good times. We tend toward family, and we tolerate cynics and critics just so far.
A sucker is born every minute. I s’pose it’s just perception….ya know…motion of the other – motion of the same.
“troop-surge”… “body-count”…”action”
I agree with Mr Taplin.
“Sen. McCain visits Iraq to bolster foreign policy, crisis reaction and military-support credentials.”
Here’s another McCain story to warm your hearts toward this man. Remember McCain’s recent credential-building trip around the Mideast, with Sen. Lieberman and others in tow? Do you also remember April 1, 2007, yes, for the politically tone-deaf (or maybe it was just some dirty-trickster initiative by a Dem mole on his PR staff, or a joke by the generals), APRIL FOO’S DAY, when McCain took a walk on the carefully-tamed wild side by waltzing through a market in Baghdad, in body armor and in the care and custody of something like a brigade of GIs, complete with armored vehicles and air support, to “prove” how things were going so well in Iraq as of that date? Check the video connected to this link.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again.
A plausible urban myth describes “Potemkin villages,” town fronts made of fresh-painted pasteboard and lath supposedly set up, struck down and moved up the road to persuade a Russian monarch that her Minister of State was doing well by the country, as the serfs starved behind. We’ve been treated to a series of such trips since Vietnam was a war instead of a supplier of Wal-Mart clothing.
Recall McCain’s blustery but fearful, “plausibly deniable,” passive-voice assurances then that “progress is being made?” Sound familiar? Yes, in the sound bites he wasn’t saying absolutely, positively, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for sure that “we” were “winning,” however that might be defined, but our boy thought it very significant that instead of having to fly to the market above the insurgent/sectarian RPG rounds and bullets, his armored column was able to actually drive the carefully-swept highway from Baghdad’s airport to the Green Zone. Why am I reminded of Mike Dukakis during HIS run for the White House, driving a tank and looking like Alfred E. (“What, me worry?”) Newman, while trying to establish his cred as potential Commander in Chief?
It’s reported that the Baghdad merchants wouldn’t let any of the Republican senators and congressmen pay for the wog souvenirs they fancied. How nice, and how appropriate in our current kleptocratic political culture. Maybe those grinning Sunni men of business had already collected some of the literally billions in unaudited, unaccountable, “disappeared” $100 bills, shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan by the planeloads, ending up who-knows-where. Or had made enough in second-job night work. It’s reported that apolitical Iraqis, and now Afghanis, to make a buck, are getting paid in petrodollars for planting roadside bombs and booby traps. Not out of hatred for the colonial invader, but just to make a buck.
Why does the majority accept constantly being lied to, the same nonsense over and over? Maybe Obama and his crowd might do it too, but John McCain is not another Ike or Truman.
And just what do the rest of us get for our new age of perpetual war, the $3 trillion cost of this particular wealth transfer to the military-industrial matrix, and the rest of the bleeding of our people and our economy? Security? Stability? Simple affordability of necessities? How about a $9 trillion national debt?
The conventional wisdom says “the surge” was a stroke of functinal genius. No proof, any more than existed for Patriot missiles missing Scuds. Slight reduction in incidents of violence: causation or only correlation? I see the “more troops” number has now crept up to 80,000. Humans adapt to conflict – look at how soon (and how temporarily) Beirut returned to business as usual during and after the 1975 chaos. People gotta eat, even under sniper fire and random bombings. People in places like Iraq and Afghanistan eventually grow tired of war, and wind it down to some tolerable level of social breakdown. Our professional American warriors don’t tolerate a world with minimal conflict. It conflicts with the flow of money out of productive channels and into “threat reactions.”
Sen. McCain is programmed to put the best smiley face he can manage on the latest “Great War.” How many more billions and body bags have to make their journeys to and from the Lands of Chaos before we get collectively smart enough to do something wiser?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me — I know this one!
“Sen. McCain visits Iraq to bolster foreign policy, crisis reaction and military-support credentials.”
Here’s another McCain story to warm your hearts toward this man. Remember McCain’s recent credential-building trip around the Mideast, with Sen. Lieberman and others in tow? Do you also remember April 1, 2007, yes, for the politically tone-deaf (or maybe it was just some dirty-trickster initiative by a Dem mole on his PR staff, or a joke by the generals), APRIL FOO’S DAY, when McCain took a walk on the carefully-tamed wild side by waltzing through a market in Baghdad, in body armor and in the care and custody of something like a brigade of GIs, complete with armored vehicles and air support, to “prove” how things were going so well in Iraq as of that date? Check the video connected to this link.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again.
A plausible urban myth describes “Potemkin villages,” town fronts made of fresh-painted pasteboard and lath supposedly set up, struck down and moved up the road to persuade a Russian monarch that her Minister of State was doing well by the country, as the serfs starved behind. We’ve been treated to a series of such trips since Vietnam was a war instead of a supplier of Wal-Mart clothing.
Recall McCain’s blustery but fearful, “plausibly deniable,” passive-voice assurances then that “progress is being made?” Sound familiar? Yes, in the sound bites he wasn’t saying absolutely, positively, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for sure that “we” were “winning,” however that might be defined, but our boy thought it very significant that instead of having to fly to the market above the insurgent/sectarian RPG rounds and bullets, his armored column was able to actually drive the carefully-swept highway from Baghdad’s airport to the Green Zone. Why am I reminded of Mike Dukakis during HIS run for the White House, driving a tank and looking like Alfred E. (“What, me worry?”) Newman, while trying to establish his cred as potential Commander in Chief?
It’s reported that the Baghdad merchants wouldn’t let any of the Republican senators and congressmen pay for the wog souvenirs they fancied. How nice, and how appropriate in our current kleptocratic political culture. Maybe those grinning Sunni men of business had already collected some of the literally billions in unaudited, unaccountable, “disappeared” $100 bills, shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan by the planeloads, ending up who-knows-where. Or had made enough in second-job night work. It’s reported that apolitical Iraqis, and now Afghanis, to make a buck, are getting paid in petrodollars for planting roadside bombs and booby traps. Not out of hatred for the colonial invader, but just to make a buck.
Why does the majority accept constantly being lied to, the same nonsense over and over? Maybe Obama and his crowd might do it too, but John McCain is not another Ike or Truman.
And just what do the rest of us get for our new age of perpetual war, the $3 trillion cost of this particular wealth transfer to the military-industrial matrix, and the rest of the bleeding of our people and our economy? Security? Stability? Simple affordability of necessities? How about a $9 trillion national debt?
The conventional wisdom says “the surge” was a stroke of functinal genius. No proof, any more than existed for Patriot missiles missing Scuds. Slight reduction in incidents of violence: causation or only correlation? I see the “more troops” number has now crept up to 80,000. Humans adapt to conflict – look at how soon (and how temporarily) Beirut returned to business as usual during and after the 1975 chaos. People gotta eat, even under sniper fire and random bombings. People in places like Iraq and Afghanistan eventually grow tired of war, and wind it down to some tolerable level of social breakdown. Our professional American warriors don’t tolerate a world with minimal conflict. It conflicts with the flow of money out of productive channels and into “threat reactions.”
Sen. McCain is programmed to put the best smiley face he can manage on the latest “Great War.” How many more billions and body bags have to make their journeys to and from the Lands of Chaos before we get collectively smart enough to do something wiser?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me — I know this one!
“Sen. McCain visits Iraq to bolster foreign policy, crisis reaction and military-support credentials.”
Here’s another McCain story to warm your hearts toward this man. Remember McCain’s recent credential-building trip around the Mideast, with Sen. Lieberman and others in tow? Do you also remember April 1, 2007, yes, for the politically tone-deaf (or maybe it was just some dirty-trickster initiative by a Dem mole on his PR staff, or a joke by the generals), APRIL FOO’S DAY, when McCain took a walk on the carefully-tamed wild side by waltzing through a market in Baghdad, in body armor and in the care and custody of something like a brigade of GIs, complete with armored vehicles and air support, to “prove” how things were going so well in Iraq as of that date? Check the video connected to this link.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on me again.
A plausible urban myth describes “Potemkin villages,” town fronts made of fresh-painted pasteboard and lath supposedly set up, struck down and moved up the road to persuade a Russian monarch that her Minister of State was doing well by the country, as the serfs starved behind. We’ve been treated to a series of such trips since Vietnam was a war instead of a supplier of Wal-Mart clothing.
Recall McCain’s blustery but fearful, “plausibly deniable,” passive-voice assurances then that “progress is being made?” Sound familiar? Yes, in the sound bites he wasn’t saying absolutely, positively, light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel for sure that “we” were “winning,” however that might be defined, but our boy thought it very significant that instead of having to fly to the market above the insurgent/sectarian RPG rounds and bullets, his armored column was able to actually drive the carefully-swept highway from Baghdad’s airport to the Green Zone. Why am I reminded of Mike Dukakis during HIS run for the White House, driving a tank and looking like Alfred E. (“What, me worry?”) Newman, while trying to establish his cred as potential Commander in Chief?
It’s reported that the Baghdad merchants wouldn’t let any of the Republican senators and congressmen pay for the wog souvenirs they fancied. How nice, and how appropriate in our current kleptocratic political culture. Maybe those grinning Sunni men of business had already collected some of the literally billions in unaudited, unaccountable, “disappeared” $100 bills, shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan by the planeloads, ending up who-knows-where. Or had made enough in second-job night work. It’s reported that apolitical Iraqis, and now Afghanis, to make a buck, are getting paid in petrodollars for planting roadside bombs and booby traps. Not out of hatred for the colonial invader, but just to make a buck.
Why does the majority accept constantly being lied to, the same nonsense over and over? Maybe Obama and his crowd might do it too, but John McCain is not another Ike or Truman.
And just what do the rest of us get for our new age of perpetual war, the $3 trillion cost of this particular wealth transfer to the military-industrial matrix, and the rest of the bleeding of our people and our economy? Security? Stability? Simple affordability of necessities? How about a $9 trillion national debt?
The conventional wisdom says “the surge” was a stroke of functinal genius. No proof, any more than existed for Patriot missiles missing Scuds. Slight reduction in incidents of violence: causation or only correlation? I see the “more troops” number has now crept up to 80,000. Humans adapt to conflict – look at how soon (and how temporarily) Beirut returned to business as usual during and after the 1975 chaos. People gotta eat, even under sniper fire and random bombings. People in places like Iraq and Afghanistan eventually grow tired of war, and wind it down to some tolerable level of social breakdown. Our professional American warriors don’t tolerate a world with minimal conflict. It conflicts with the flow of money out of productive channels and into “threat reactions.”
Sen. McCain is programmed to put the best smiley face he can manage on the latest “Great War.” How many more billions and body bags have to make their journeys to and from the Lands of Chaos before we get collectively smart enough to do something wiser?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me — I know this one!
An impressive post. So, JTM, are you prepared to join my fight against debt monetization by the fed, which has been the way that these military boondoggles get financed without raising taxes? End the Fed means end the warfare state. I think it’s clear that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich were the only truly, honestly anti-war candidates.
An impressive post. So, JTM, are you prepared to join my fight against debt monetization by the fed, which has been the way that these military boondoggles get financed without raising taxes? End the Fed means end the warfare state. I think it’s clear that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich were the only truly, honestly anti-war candidates.
An impressive post. So, JTM, are you prepared to join my fight against debt monetization by the fed, which has been the way that these military boondoggles get financed without raising taxes? End the Fed means end the warfare state. I think it’s clear that Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich were the only truly, honestly anti-war candidates.
The way these wars have been allowed to continue is that the MIC learned the lesson of Vietnam…the lesson that it is far easier to strip the American public of its money than its youth. Hence we do not have a military draft right now. Instead we have mercenaries and contractors doing the work previously done by conscripts. If we had a draft, you’d see the streets filled with protesters. You’d see a return to draft card burnings. You’d see some of our brightest slipping over the border to Canada. You’d see a fast end to the Middle East conflicts.
But the red state crowd figured it out. All it takes is money, and nobody racked up the debt like the Repubs did in order to finance their war and pay off their MIC pals. Among Iraq, Pakighanistan, the bankers, the credit extender plastic money lenders, and the Wall Streeters, you have the biggest transfer of wealth that’s ever happened in less than a generation. And John, widen your view a bit. It’s not all about “the government”…it’s about who bought the government…and it wasn’t the health care crowd.
The way these wars have been allowed to continue is that the MIC learned the lesson of Vietnam…the lesson that it is far easier to strip the American public of its money than its youth. Hence we do not have a military draft right now. Instead we have mercenaries and contractors doing the work previously done by conscripts. If we had a draft, you’d see the streets filled with protesters. You’d see a return to draft card burnings. You’d see some of our brightest slipping over the border to Canada. You’d see a fast end to the Middle East conflicts.
But the red state crowd figured it out. All it takes is money, and nobody racked up the debt like the Repubs did in order to finance their war and pay off their MIC pals. Among Iraq, Pakighanistan, the bankers, the credit extender plastic money lenders, and the Wall Streeters, you have the biggest transfer of wealth that’s ever happened in less than a generation. And John, widen your view a bit. It’s not all about “the government”…it’s about who bought the government…and it wasn’t the health care crowd.
The way these wars have been allowed to continue is that the MIC learned the lesson of Vietnam…the lesson that it is far easier to strip the American public of its money than its youth. Hence we do not have a military draft right now. Instead we have mercenaries and contractors doing the work previously done by conscripts. If we had a draft, you’d see the streets filled with protesters. You’d see a return to draft card burnings. You’d see some of our brightest slipping over the border to Canada. You’d see a fast end to the Middle East conflicts.
But the red state crowd figured it out. All it takes is money, and nobody racked up the debt like the Repubs did in order to finance their war and pay off their MIC pals. Among Iraq, Pakighanistan, the bankers, the credit extender plastic money lenders, and the Wall Streeters, you have the biggest transfer of wealth that’s ever happened in less than a generation. And John, widen your view a bit. It’s not all about “the government”…it’s about who bought the government…and it wasn’t the health care crowd.
Rick,
Bingo. You help enough folks on to the road to and into the into the poor house and there’s no need for a draft. Can one call this outcome “orchestrated”? If one believes as I do that we have become the United Corporate States of America, thinking our current state of existence has resulted from anything other than corporate
America’s power brokers (especially those in or
affiliated w/ the MIC) doing their utmost to directly or indirectly de-emphasize/de-capitalize any effort contrary to their best interests, and to adequately de-sensitize and stupefy the segment of the population required to satisfy their war-profiteering needs, is illogical.
In any event, an economy in disarray where the choice is between working for MacDonald’s or signing up for the military in the hopes of being able to use that as a stepping stone to college and a better life has become the norm for many:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21201
and I’m sure the perpetual war folks are loving it.
Rick,
Bingo. You help enough folks on to the road to and into the into the poor house and there’s no need for a draft. Can one call this outcome “orchestrated”? If one believes as I do that we have become the United Corporate States of America, thinking our current state of existence has resulted from anything other than corporate
America’s power brokers (especially those in or
affiliated w/ the MIC) doing their utmost to directly or indirectly de-emphasize/de-capitalize any effort contrary to their best interests, and to adequately de-sensitize and stupefy the segment of the population required to satisfy their war-profiteering needs, is illogical.
In any event, an economy in disarray where the choice is between working for MacDonald’s or signing up for the military in the hopes of being able to use that as a stepping stone to college and a better life has become the norm for many:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21201
and I’m sure the perpetual war folks are loving it.
Rick,
During the campaign, you may recall, I voiced similar worries about McCain’s bitterness and foul temper. His mien probably has become even worse since then.
I agree also with your remarks on the MIC, with the exception of that Vietnam connection dealing with induction. Most of the U.S. personnel during that conflict were volunteers, not inductees. But yeah, the exception does prove your rule that the MIC has learned better domestic tactics since, especially in light of the shitstorm caused by the draft of the late-1960s and early-1970s.
I already know that I can’t put this the right way, but in keeping with what so many of you have said, there is such a disconnect between what the C-in-C thinks he can order up, once his mind is made up, and what the people will tolerate after a time. Perhaps this speaks to what so many historians have referred to as the limitations of presidential power. And maybe those who today wish to do great harm to the USA are even more astute in gauging this disjunction than were the North Vietnamese and their superpower masters.
Rick,
During the campaign, you may recall, I voiced similar worries about McCain’s bitterness and foul temper. His mien probably has become even worse since then.
I agree also with your remarks on the MIC, with the exception of that Vietnam connection dealing with induction. Most of the U.S. personnel during that conflict were volunteers, not inductees. But yeah, the exception does prove your rule that the MIC has learned better domestic tactics since, especially in light of the shitstorm caused by the draft of the late-1960s and early-1970s.
I already know that I can’t put this the right way, but in keeping with what so many of you have said, there is such a disconnect between what the C-in-C thinks he can order up, once his mind is made up, and what the people will tolerate after a time. Perhaps this speaks to what so many historians have referred to as the limitations of presidential power. And maybe those who today wish to do great harm to the USA are even more astute in gauging this disjunction than were the North Vietnamese and their superpower masters.
Rick,
During the campaign, you may recall, I voiced similar worries about McCain’s bitterness and foul temper. His mien probably has become even worse since then.
I agree also with your remarks on the MIC, with the exception of that Vietnam connection dealing with induction. Most of the U.S. personnel during that conflict were volunteers, not inductees. But yeah, the exception does prove your rule that the MIC has learned better domestic tactics since, especially in light of the shitstorm caused by the draft of the late-1960s and early-1970s.
I already know that I can’t put this the right way, but in keeping with what so many of you have said, there is such a disconnect between what the C-in-C thinks he can order up, once his mind is made up, and what the people will tolerate after a time. Perhaps this speaks to what so many historians have referred to as the limitations of presidential power. And maybe those who today wish to do great harm to the USA are even more astute in gauging this disjunction than were the North Vietnamese and their superpower masters.
Bear in mind that I have no illusions that the Communist puppet masters in SouthEast Asia were wonderful caring human beings. But that area had been so raped by the French, the English, and then by us that it is no wonder that the Communists took over. What we failed to believe was that Communism is such a flawed system (for the same reasons I think Libertarianism is hopeless…human nature being what it is…) that the regime(s) adopting it would eventually collapse as the people became more educated, more prosperous, and wanted more of a piece of the pie.
Bear in mind that I have no illusions that the Communist puppet masters in SouthEast Asia were wonderful caring human beings. But that area had been so raped by the French, the English, and then by us that it is no wonder that the Communists took over. What we failed to believe was that Communism is such a flawed system (for the same reasons I think Libertarianism is hopeless…human nature being what it is…) that the regime(s) adopting it would eventually collapse as the people became more educated, more prosperous, and wanted more of a piece of the pie.
Never thought that you were so illusioned, and I agree with you about colonial abuses and arbitrary and racist violence having helped to make the case for Communism.
The parallel that worries me most now, has to do with the the repercussions of the U.S. pullout from South Vietnam: a wholesale and protracted slaughter from three fronts, North Vietnam, Cambodia, China itself. (In this last case, remember China’s bloody incursion into reunified Vietnam following the American withdrawal.) Comfy as I am, I’m a bit haunted by the prospect of a similar fate befalling the Afghans. I wouldn’t know, but it does worry me–especially as its prospect is so conspicuously ignored by journalists who use the Vietnam analogy to argue for a new withdrawal, while ignoring the actual, Asian consequences of the ugly U.S. and allied withdrawal from Vietnam: millions of refugees, millions of dead. In lesser numbers, “re-educated”.
It really haunts.
Sunni, Shia, Kurds in Iraq. All the tribes in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Taliban. Hezbollah and Hamas. Palestinians and Jews. Jews and their literal cousins, the Arabs. All the tribes in Eastern Europe, India, etc.
For better or worse, dreadful dictators seemed to have stopped wholesale slaughter in many regions. Now it’s back to the same old same old, but it’s not swords and single shot muskets anymore, it IEDs and suicide bombers and automatic weapons. The instincts remain primitive as ever, and the technology for dealing death is more advanced than ever. What would Genghis Khan have done with nukes?
I doubt the current crop of those who “wish to do great harm to the US” (assuming you are talking about people who are not from around here, where plenty are killing the country from within by plunder and fraud) are anywhere near as astute as Le Duc Tho and Ho-Ho-Ho-Chi-Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. I kind of think that except for a pretty small bunch, the US has become pretty irrelevant except for a need to stay out of the warhead targeting lists in the SIOP.
And WHAT “superpower masters?” Vietnamese have no love for China for loing historical reasons, and did not seem to follow all those sneaky Marxist-Leninist Dictates from the late Soviet Union very well. The Gooks had nationalism and a shared identity on their side, a long history of resisting colonialism and older conquerors, and I think they took the Soviets to the cleaners almost as well as they did Henry “Fuck my Way Through Paris Because I Am Zo Kuhl, Pretend To Be In The Know” Kissinger.
This ain’t a board game, though the level of Realpolitik brought to bear is about as competent and complex and informed as what you find in a kids’ game of Risk!
Check out the PBS Frontline series coming up. March along (and duck a lot) with the Marines sent to pacify Helmland Province. Watch a recapitulation of the strategies that didn’t work in Vietnam (and mostly for the same asymmetric, Lumbering Bully-vs-Neighborhood Street Kids reasons that “rural pacification” and “strategic hamlets” didn’t work in Vietnam. Watch the game of “Mission Creep” (or is it Creepy Mission?) as GIs walk around with lots of guns and attitude and what they as Marines and grunts know how to do simply does not have a prayer of “winning the hearts and minds” by “protecting the Hajjis from the Taliban” when there is so much going on to which they are simply, all up and down the command structure, oblivious. Says a Marine captain who is trying to keep track of the various doctrines and strategies and missions as they flutter down, and like a loyal soldier, to carry them out, in responding to this question: “How well do you think the soldiers in your command understand and follow the counterinsurgency doctrine that Gens. Petraeus and McChrystal are currently putting forward?” Quoth the captain, “They are beginning to understand that their job here is to protect the people from the Taliban.” Not to kill an identified enemy. Oops. Don’t speak the language, run roughshod over custom, smartass down to village elders, put themselves in harm’s way so that as they walkabout in those dusty villages, some guy in the tree line can pop off a few rounds, maybe get lucky and wing or kill a grunt or three, then disappear back into the populace. Demonstrating exactly how powerless the Great American Behemoth really is, down at this level. Says one of the Jarheads to one of the few villagers prave enough to try to move back into the village next to which the Marines have squatted so as to be “closer to the people, to get to know them and develop relationships with them, “We are here trying to help you people. Why aren’t you helping us?”: Says the Hajji, “You Americans have guns and tanks and airplanes. We have nothing. If you cannot win with all that, how can we help you?”
We are little more than an infestation of migrating birds, and the Hajjis know that eventually we’ll eat our fill and move on.
The senior commanders and CinC can decree and imagine and get briefed and write dissertations and white papers and create doctrines and such other futile exercises all they want. What they know is what’s around them all the time, the buzz of “policy experts” like a bunch of hornets on a dead carcass, the blandishments of people with a big stake in continuing a losing game because they can continue to enrich themselves before the Big Guys boot a tripwire and obliterate themselves.
Look — Kissinger and so many others are still selling the same rotted schmaltz to and along with the same set of people who, like the Emperor’s court and advisers, want to appear wise and discerning and say Serious and Important Things about the new clothes, even though their Ruler’s dick is flapping in the breeze.
And I started to try to transcribe the “uplifting pre-mission-sendoff-peptalk words of the major or colonel sending Easy Company off to Take As Far South As We Have Troops To Go In Helmand Again, but it was too much, reminded me too much of too many other futile bullshit sendoffs from too many other field officers, that part especially about how future generations will study this great battle (that not being the mission at all, which is to win the hearts and minds) and how their grandchildren will be so proud that these hallowed few went off and Did Their Duty. Here, if you haven’t seen it, please watch this trailer that is the first installment in the PBS production, “Obama’s War.” And spare me any shit about how “liberal” PBS is, after years of repopulation and redirection of its editorial staff and content by the flaming assholes on the Right, has written some evil leftist bias into this production.
As my sergeant gleefully used to say in basic training when he was about to put us through another level of Hell, “Heeere We Go Aga-innn!!!”
Rick, you might enjoy “Tribes With Flags,” by Phillip Glass, who also wrote the following article for The Nation, of all things:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051128/glass
Looking for some hints on how to think our way out of this one? Look there, among other places…
Pakistan’s nukes are a real and present problem.
> Pakistan’s nukes are a real and present problem.
For Indians. They are not at much risk being used for any other purpose except deterring India from doing something silly like annexing Kashmir.
Which by the way appears to be a problem for the U.S.
U.S efforts to make better friends with India are currently annoying Pakistan who the U.S is demanding take on Pushtun militants Pakistan has not much beef with.
The mess that is Afghanistan is spreading trouble through out the region for no good reason. U.S insistence on maintaining the conflict is going to increasingly cause current allies grief.
It’s stupid and pointless and entirely ego driven. Get out and make nice to Iran.
So what’s the alternative? Should we still be in Vietnam? How many more dead would there have been over the past 35 years as a result? Or do you think that the South Vietnamese government would have eventually cured its systemic corruption and gotten its act together? Do you think the Vietcong would have eventually moderated its rabid, suicidal, fanatical prosecution of the war?
If we had stayed another decade, and then left, would the aftermath have been better or worse? Is it possible to know?
Should we be in Afghanistan for 50 years? To accomplish what, other than short-term protection of its people (which we can’t provide anyway)? Much of Afghanistan is a borderline Stone Age civilization. Meanwhile our own bridges are crumbling and collapsing, and so is our economy, our financial infrastructure, our basic confidence in the way things run in this country.
Just how many plates can we spin before they all come crashing down around our ears?
Right Fentex, make a deal, insure an steady oil supply, open up to South America lifting Cuba’s embargo , reconstruct internally and spend the money on energy & transportation research.
Doesn’t it bother anyone here that you’re all trying to get Obama to NOT listen to McCain?
Seriously, if you’re setting your sights on Obama not moving to the right of the “center” he currently holds, then you’ve already lost.
You’re just supporting him in facing the Republican right (you know? the guys who allegedly lost in November), instead of threatening to withdraw your support unless he moves left of where he stands now.
Um, OK.
When I was getting my military training, a sergeant old in war and cynicism, educated beyond his station, told a hall full of trainees that the Army NEVER RETREATED: the Army only made “strategic rearward advances to previously prepared positions.”
I’m sorry about having been so disturbed by the spin around here, and especially by such sophomoric questions as:
“Who, they?”
You already know who they are. Turn them in.
Sometimes a leader has to stop listening when is time to act. The problems are of such magnitude that right center or left don’t mean nothing. Laisser faire is not an option. Ounce you know you do and if you don’t you are doomed.
I suppose that McCain views himslef as Prophet of the Surge, vis-a-vis the abuse Petraeus took at the hands of Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and the Soros combine, so that now he thinks he can predict the future of Afghanistan and talk down to the Left he finds in power partly as a result of his own electoral incompetence. If that’s so, then perhaps he’s showing a penchant for fighting the last war as, JTM recently suggested, the present-day hawks still are prone to do.
@koko,
Didn’t I just say that? What, then, do you think?
koko, I think it’s even worse than “fighting the last war.” That’s the meme of the last war.
The people in charge create their own mythical war, complete with doctrines and strategies and tactics as complicated as the wildest of Rube Goldberg’s devices coupled to the Best of the Byzantine Empire, and then try to get everyone else to fight THAT construct along with them.
Listen to the generals complain that “the insurgents” are frustrating them because they decline to fight on Battle Space fixed conventional terms. Again, watch the opening segment of “Obama’s War,” PBS’s “Frontline” production, where a company of Marines is sent off to Helmand Province to “protect the people,” and the major or colonel giving them the pep talk that they parrot later to their families in messages home, about how “you men are going to change history.” Listen to everything the major or colonel or whatever he is says, including the part about how generations yet unborn will study this great campaign as a model of its kind, and these men can sit around the fireplace with their great grandkids and say with pride, “I was there…”
As if their exposing themselves to IEDs and EFPs and sniper fire showing their idiot vulnerability despite all their weapons and training, from tribal people who live in the area and grow opium poppies and pot and hash, while abusing and condescending to and killing-by-accident some of those same soft-target people they have been told that instead of killing them which is what they are trained to do, they are supposed to “protect” the ungrateful sonsabitches who decline to re-populate the villages next to where the Jarheads set up their forward bases, will somehow “make a difference” in decades to come.
The whole deal spins around the great Makers of Policy, who tell all the rest of us that this is some Great Crusade to Extend Democracy to the Middle East. And come up with all the fillips and furbelows that make their bullshit seem almost real, so real that they persuade themselves that the Iraqis would be throwing flowers at Our Boys rather than RPGs, and the oil we would steal from them would pay for the invasion and takeover.
Want to taste the reality of what we really are? Remember this little bit of tone-deafness? How ‘bout a highly ‘lectronicized personal no-actual-danger video game where you can shoot up some fucking towelheads in a reprise of the giant failure known as the Battle of Fallujah? Now THERE’s valor and honor for ya!
Good stuff, JTM. But the baddies are really, really bad. You know they are.
BTW, from this end, have you seen some of the virtual-reality recruitment tools of late? Scary stuff. Right up your circuitous alley. Gives me both the Creeps and the Willies.
Hugo, my problem is one of IFF, I’m sure you know what that stands for. The Pogo problem, if you will
It does not compute, for me, that “we” need to suffer under Baddies who are at best parasitical members of Our Tribe, when Our Baddies eat us out of hut and hearth and just give Their Baddies an excuse to do what they do. Yeah, maybe beheading is worse than waterboarding, but from what I can gather, Our Baddies killed a lot of Quivering Captives in equally obscene ways.
Humans are supposed to be intelligent — just curious why the best “we” can do is this deal that’s like one of the bad old Star Trek episodes, where the people of Planet A are “at war” with the people of Planet B, one orbit in, and something like a berserk model of WOPR, with input from Baddies from both sides, spins a random number generator, decrees that City Q has been hit by a Planet A nukular missile, that X thousand humans from Planet B have to report to the dematerialization chambers immediately, thus saving money otherwise spent on actual missiles and nukes for other war economy expenses, like dancing girls and private space yachts for the Brass Baddies.
I wondered a long time ago what the penis-envy deal is with ICBMs anyway. I mean, it’s not like it wouldn’t be much more MacNamara-efficient to just pre-position our nukes in their target installations and cities, and theirs in our installations and cities. Then it’s just a trivial command-and-control function to threaten and detonate, saving a shitload of money that would otherwise be wasted in coming up with counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-threats and -defenses. Speaking of relative-value pricing — the libertarians ought to love it!
And yes, I’ve perused the Army of One recruitment tools. But then, I still think, deep down, that humanity has got a death wish. Wish that wasn’t so…
Me too.
And to keep up my habit of dropping useless tidbits at the ends of exhausted threads, here’s one on one of our Baddies, a “story” that broke early this year and is getting a tiny bit of recent play, about Sacred Stan McChrystal and one dead GI killed by his own troops and turned posthumously and magically from a symbol of futility and more of the fucking same, to a “hero of the Kill The Arabs Revolution.” Most of us can hardly even remember his name, just a dead former foo-ball star who decided to do a reverse Audie Murphy and actually go from comfortable fame to shootin’ war.
The story? It seems this most trustworthy of generals, who has an answer (and a footnote he will long hence point to, “proving” that he was “right,” whichever way things turn out) for everything and never met a “force enhancement” he didn’t like, orchestrated a coverup within a coverup of the murder of Pat Tillman. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/zirin2
But who cares? The Narrative has moved on, and now the issue is: 20,000, or 40,000, or 89,000, and how the shitheads with the stars on their baseball caps will play this shell game. Bearing in mind that just yesterday it was pointed out in several MSM page-7 stories that already 20 or 40,000 more “support troops” are on the ground, in addition to the several hundred thousand “contractors” with potato chips in their naked asses and lots of live ammo, that more than doubles “our” “force structure” in that war without a purpose anyone can define other than to keep shooting, Afapakitinistan.
Fucking stupid human tricks… but my mantra now is “I don’t care — never you mind…”
I care for the kids that have inherited our mistakes,
we shouldn´t be at war we anyone. JTM I feel for these kids. Makes me sad as you are. Shit man why? I do care and we, at our age, better no know better. How?
Sometimes the Baddies are external, JTM. How does that fact sit with your metaphysics? (Personally, I just lose sleep.)
The metaphysics (I assume the reference is intended as a bit of a dig) seems to me to be all in the Accepted Narrative belief structure, not in any little thoughts and observations of mine.
This site is chock full of examples of the dissonance between what we just take as postulates about the nature of the Grand Manichaean Conflict, and what really is. The Baddies are functionally interchangeable; the nastiest KGB and SIS and CIA and NSA and MI6 (“We obey only our own law”) are all the same kind of people. And it’s manifest that the notion that they keep each other in check so us Ordinary Mortals can go on about our business is just claptrap. They seed and fertilize each other, as far as I can tell, in an unhealthy feedbeck. Don’t like an elected leader of someplace with stuff that some business type in the Homeland wants to make money off of? Well, just Change Regimes, either by stealth and skuduggery, or simple invasion and conquest.
Don’t misunderstand or mis-state: everybody does it. Cite me a bin Laden, who exists and prospers thanks to US Baddie connivance in Afghapinnookistan ’round the turn of the century, and I’ll cite you a Timothy McVeigh. I am at least as fearful of Cheney and Xe and Rove and Gingrich and the nameless thousands at the NSA and CIA and even FBI, who busily engage in bureaucratic warfare between themselves while busily inflating their territories and briefs and subterfuges and carving away at what’s left of our mythical freedoms and telling us to remember that if we aren’t doing anything wrong, we have nothing to be afraid of. What’s to choose between this nascent and creeping Orthodoxy and the Rule of the Mullahs or the Mob (as in criminal syndicates, that seem to run so much of the world anyway)?
You believe in your tribe, Hugo, and that the net sum of all the chicanery and “War is a racket” shit that your tribe undertakes somehow comes out better than what the other tribes do. I’m stupid enough to try to keep in mind all the trees in the forest, keep adding to my list of illustrative anecdotes that show we humans are none of us better than any other of us, and even occasionally looking for a single theorem that might not only explain what we are but also point to some pathway leading to Better For Everyone. But I keep coming up against the vast credulity and concupiscience and corruption that humans work, thanks I guess to a relatively shriveled or, more hopefully, just underdeveloped, spiritual part and a hyperdeveloped set of Beer Muscles.
I lose sleep thanks to all the Baddies, who go to work every day in their corner of the Cave, in blind or cynical service to self-interest, or slavish adherence to doctrines that are pretty demonstrably as empty as the flood of words that has accompanied the Balloon Boy story and its apparent (or just parent?) genesis in the desire of Dad and Mom to have their very own reality TV show. An empty flood that nonetheless sweeps away any continuing reflection or even recall that young males are marching around on a totally feckless “mission” in Iraq and Afghanistan, making enemies of people who, until Our Boys brought their guns and Predators to the terrain, were likely pretty much indifferent to the American Tribe.
But hey, you’ve spent a lifetime developing your world view, and I’ve got 60+ years of a different kind of mentation and life experiences. And all that does, other than give us reasons to spar with or spear one another, is add an accretive proof to my thesis that humanity is not long for this world.