"If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have."
Here is the problem with the people that argue that any measure that will stop a terrorist attack is OK.
So we institute the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness (which is what this is under a new name), biometric national ID cards, etc.
As long as there is no new attack you claim that its thanks to all the draconian measures so they must be A-OK.
The problem comes when there is another attack and there almost certainly will be. There are to many people who hate the U.S. to much now, and as long as they are willing to commit suicide some o them will get through. Israel has been trying to stop them with no success for decades.
So what do you do then, admit all the draconian measures didn't work and throw them out? Of course not. You will declare them as not good enough and put in a whole new raft of even more repressive measures, RFID tag everyone, put checkpoints on the highways, and in every train and bus station so no one can move without the blessing and scrutin of the government.
This is the nature of guerilla wars. The guerillas pick the time and place of the attack and they can almost always find a time and a place. The target government responds with ineffective and repressive measures that cause it to:
A. Cripple its economy both with the cost of the countermeasures themselves, and the drain they put on the economy by restricting trade and travel in particular
B. Be despised by its own population as the repressive measures intrude further and further in their lives so they reach a point they want to throw the government out themselves.
I don't suppose its ever occurred to you that the thinking people at Al Qaeda, and whatever you think of them they are smart people, want the U.S. to tie itself up in knots trying to stop their attacks, and they are overjoyed everytime the U.S. does something stupid like invade Iraq or greenlight Sharon no matter how brutally he treats the Palastinians.
You may think the U.S. is winning with its current approach but its my contention that the people in the Bush Administration are to stupid and devoid of the intellectual subtlety necessary to win this war. You don't have to look much farther than the conman Chalibi to see an Arab who played the Bush administration like a fiddle because they are to dumb to understand all the complexities of this new era.
Some Bush fanboys must have had some mod points for this to get rated Insightful.
First off this project is being done by a somewhat out of control private company with historical ties to Admiral Poindexter. There isn't exactly an "agency" involved, other than I think DOJ threw them some cash and I imagine the CIA or DOD is secretly or not so secretly backing this because Congress shot down this program under its previous name Total Information Awareness because it is so objectional. The Bush administration is so contemptuous of Congressional oversight that this smacks of something they would do as an end run around the "representatives of the people" who are occasionally trying to rein in their gross abuses of their power.
Furthermore you seem to be have jumped to the conclusion that this is going to prevent terrorism. What basis do you have for that? For example I haven't seen them run this system on a database from pre 9/11 to see if it flags any of the real hijackers, especially without them knowing any details about those people in advance so they can tweak their AI engine.
I really doubt there is a lot of information in these databases that will accurately ID a terrorist unless you are willing to engage in racial/religious profiling and red flag every Arab and Muslim in the database, or everyone who has travelled to an Islamic country though that would red flag a quarter of Halliburton's employees.
You might change your tune if your name came up with a match in this fishing expedition, and you end up getting arrested as a "material witness" and the DOJ destroys your life, as in you lose your job, and are placed under a cloud of suspicion without any due process.
For example, in Google News, look up the attorney in Oregon who was falsely implicated in the Madrid bombing. They seem to have fabricated a fingerprint match and more importantly he is on the DOJ's target list because:
A. He converted to Islam B. He had the nerve to defend one of the people in Portland charged with ties to terrorism
The DOJ has taken consistent measures to punish attorneys who defend people they want to lynch for hazy terrorism suspicions. This case appears to be an example of the extremes your government is willing to go to punish innocent people, especially if they are Muslim.
Sorry, but everything the U.S. is doing, this included, is a new version of McCarthyism, just substitute Muslim and Arab for Communist. If it just punished people guilty of something you might be able to rationalize it but when it destroys innocent people, which it certainly will, its not worth the price.
If you've been following the Riggs Banking scandal lately they appear to be getting a lot of it from the Saudi embassy and royal family.
This article doesn't mention it but millions, if not tens of millions of suspicious transactions through this bank from the Sauid Embassy are though to have gone to funding terrorism.
Its kind of odd the U.S. was so keen to take down Saddam for backing terrorism while the U.S. consistently looks the other way or actively suppresses information about the Saudi's actively supporting it. I guess it helps to be both close friends of the Bush family and have control the worlds largest pool of oil.
You might recall the Bush administration had to black out a huge section of the congressional report on 9/11 which exposed Saudi Arabia's involvement, beyond the fact that it was perpetrated almost entirely by Saudi nationals.
"Wrong. The "system" allows you your freedom because you haven't been convicted by a jury of your peers of a crime that requires you be remanded into custody of the state."
Wrong. Jose Padilla would be glad to set you straight assuming you or anyone else could ever talk to him, aside from the MP's that is. A U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil held incommunicado since he was arrested two years ago. Maybe he is an Al Qaeda terrorist but his U.S. citizenship demands that he be given access to a lawyer and due process, which means that he be charged in a timely manner and given a speedy trial with legal counsel of his choosing. His case just now made it to the Supreme Court after two years in solitary. If the Supreme Court rules in his favor then there may be a shred of democracy left in the U.S. If they rule against him, they will have given the Executive sweeping new powers to arrest anyone he feels like without the inconvenience of any due process or messy old legal system. If this happens you are living in a police state and the Supreme Court is just one of its tools.
The other obvious failure in your naive understanding of the police state the U.S. is today is that the executive branch is reserving the right to send anyone it wants to a military tribunal which is most definitely not a jury of your peers. It is a bunch of military officers who may be fair or the may convict you to keep their chain of command happy and their careers on track.
"and perhaps most significantly, you seem unaware that the activities of the FBI are overseen by Senators and Representatives that you and I vote for"
Maybe in some previous era. Thanks to the fact that the Republicans control the Congress they in fact are not going to any great lengths to oversea the executive branch. They are doing bettern now than previously partially because some Republicans are so disgusted with the Bush administration they are compelled by their conscience to investigate it.
The Executive branch is routinely spending money on their little wars without Congressional authorization, and Congress, beyond a shadow of doubt should not allow this. The Bush administration redirected $700 million from authorized spending in Afghanistan to prep for the war in Iraq before Congress approved anything in Iraq. Wolfowitz was just before Congress requesting an additional $25 billion slush fund for wars in the Middle East. With unprecedented nerve they are demanding that Congress give them the money with no strings attached, or oversight, on how they spend it. If precedent holds they will use it to prep for the coming wars on Syria and Iran after they are reelected.
There are a number of Senators, John McCain at the top of the list, that will tell you this administration has shown more contempt for Congressional oversight than any in modern history.
Congressional oversight only worked when there were congressman with a spine, it was a somewhat civil body, and it really only works when at least one house of Congress is held by the party not holding the White House. Today Congress is a worthless rubber stamp. If the Democrats held control they would have already started impeachment hearings for a long series of illegal and unethical actions by the White House that make the Monica Lewinsky scandal look like a tea party.
The ONLY check left in Congress is the fact the Republican's don't have a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate. Look for them to try to fix this with the help of Diebold's machines in the next election(like they did in Georgia in 2002) or to try to unilaterally change the Senate rules after the election which would be a coup without use of guns. You should try watching CSPAN when any contentious issue comes up. You will be embarrassed at the tactics the Republican's are using to destroy this once great body.
If Bush holds the White House and he gets a chance to replace one of the Liberal/Moderate judges on the Supreme Court with a right wing extremist that will further seal the fate of Constitution and any rights you think you have will be there only when the government chooses to let you have them.
The Eurostat source I cited says the population is about the same as U.S. and the GDP is about the same so per capita must be about the same as the U.S. It would be interesting to study if there is more or less regional versus the U.S. I would assume Eastern Europe is probably dragging down the per capita GDP somewhat though its the region poised to grow fastest for the same reasons China is growing, cheap, well educated labor and a lot of room for improvement.
Here is a more plausible reason for this smoke and mirrors program. To emphasize, its sure as hell not to distract people from the mess in Iraq. The fact is the only people who even remember he proposed this are the wannabe Trekkies, aerospace workers and NASA employees. How exactly are you going to distract the nation when no one is paying any attention to this outside of/.
I'm imaging Karl Rove sitting in his office crunching the numbers on the swing states for the 2004 election. Florida of course pops up at the top of the list for potential nail biters.
So you have this relatively small demographic in the Space Coast around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne whose livelihood is entirely dependent on the space program. If those few hundred thousand votes could swing Florida in or out of the R column would you want to go in to the election with them:
A. Facing the cancellation of the Space Shuttle and the ISS and with no manned space program to keep them employed. The unmanned and military programs might keep the Space Coast going but wiping out the Space Shuttle and the manned space program with no replacement would really screw up their local economy, their careers and their prestige.
B. Drooling over a multidecade, ultra exciting and interesting program to go back to the Moon and Mars that would keep even the younger people employed up to retirement age.
Pretty easy answer huh, B. So what does Rove do? He proposes a Mars/Moon program and pretty much locks up the vote on the Space Coast for Bush, and as a bonus any other place where there are a lot of aerospace workers and trekkies. Problem is you probably have zero desire to spend any actual money on it since your priorities are in defense spending, wars in the Middle East and tax cuts, and NASA is the last place you want to sink money.
So you throw tiny amounts of money at it and ramp it up very slowly, just enough to sucker all the voters in the Space Coast until November. After the election let it drag on until it reaches the point they are going to have to spend a lot of money, bend metal and go someplace, then you kill it because the nation can't afford it. Ideally you drag it out through 2008 before you have to spend any money.
I know its pretty cynical and someone may lob the standard tin hat reply at this but politicians really are this cynical and this election is shaping up to be both close enough and vicious enough the candidates are willing to do stuff like this to win.
I think it probably has as more to do with finding a way to shovel large amounts of money in to the coffers of the aerospace companies that are key benefactors of the Bush administration. Boeing in particular is looking to be in deep trouble trying to compete with Airbus in the commercial aviation market. There are some who contend Airbus is winning thanks to subsidies from European governments. This program would be a great way for the U.S. to subsidize Boeing without it being challenged in the WTO. The DOD already tried a blatant subsidy to Boeing last year by trying to award it a huge contract for 767 tankers with no competition and using leases that dramatically inflated the costs and Boeing's profits.
In this it has a lot in common with the missile defense program. Another program where vast sums are being spent over a long period which may or may not result in anything that ever works or is deployed.
If you are seeking to pour money in to the pockets of your friends a program with a multidecade life span which may or may not actually bend any metal or go anywhere for a decade, if ever, is a pretty good program.
It will also result in a bunch of highly paid, high tech jobs in the U.S. that will be hard to outsource. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them end up in swing states like Florida where grateful workers will help shore up the Republicans at the ballot box. I wonder how many of them will be filled by foreign born engineers when they discover there aren't enough qualified engineers in the U.S. to do the work, and the ones there are are busy working on weapons.
Think of it as a counterpart to the Medicare "Reform" bill which subsidizes the health and drug companies (key Republican benefactors), or the the Energy Bill which subsidizes big oil, gas, coal companies (key Republican benefactors) or the War in Iraq which subsidizes Halliburton and Bechtel (key Republican benefactors). The Bush administration is pretty creative in finding ways to loosen up the purse strings on your tax dollars so they can go to their friends.
"Personally, I hope to see more foreign investment and outsourcing."
I guess your view of it depends on whether you are heading to be an executive in a multinational, are rich and a big shareholder in multinationals, or you work for a living. If its the first two you do have a reason to like it. If your the third the only reason you have to like it is you can buy stuff cheap at Walmart. This is important since if you are a worker in the U.S. your real income is probably flat or declining so you need cheap goods.
You are going to have to drum up some truly valuable skills to compete with workers in China and India, and they are working as hard or harder on those same skill as you are. The minimum wage in China is around $0.30/hr and and its a suggestion that is not generally enforced. One estimate of the real wage in China for someone manufacturing stuff for WalMart is around $0.21/hr. I'm sure highly skilled jobs pay substantially better but you are probably still at an at least 10/1 disadvantage just due to the cost of employing you in the West. A 10X handicap is a pretty big thing to overcome no matter how hard you try.
So, I really don't see what special skills you're going to acquire that are likely to make up the gap. A year or two ago everyone was talking about biotech skills but recent stories suggest those are moving to India too. The ONLY skills I can see as really safe are work in homeland security or the military industrial complex since a significant percentages of those jobs require a security clearance and U.S. citizenship and they are America's biggest growth sector. Halliburton is hiring something like 200-300 people a week to send to Iraq as long as you don't value your well being to high. Apart from that you have to go for service jobs like health care which require your body be in the U.S.for the most part. Otherwise I hope you are aiming for an MBA because getting in to executive management is really the only way I can see you may have a good shot at success in America in this century. Trial lawyer might work too, though much of the legal research part of that trade is, you guessed it, being offshored to India.
If globalization was based on truly fair trade it would be easier to support outsourcing and foreign investment. The problem is its not a level playing field. China is using a broad array of tricks to tilt the playing field in its favor. As I mentioned pegging the Yuan artificially low is one. Once its wiped out manufacturing in the U.S., Japan, Korea and the EU it will be free to remove these artifices because it will control the world economy at that point. Exploiting a huge, cheap labor pool, with very few rights is another crucial angle. Western prosperity, workplace standards and healthcare costs have priced Western labor out of the global market no matter how good your skills are. The fat cats that run companies know that and there is absolutely nothing stopping them from abandoning you in favor of the cheapest bodies and minds they can find that can do the job.
"Well, at least you agree that the current administration's plan is working, albiet extremely risky."
I agree it is stimulating something resembling growth. I don't agree that its really working. It works in about the same way CEO's in recent years have taken to making their quarterly number look good, cheap accounting tricks. In an $11 trillion dollar economy, borrow a half a trillion dollars and spend it. Presto you fake a %5 growth in GDP. It makes your numbers look good and if you time it right you get reelected which is the Bush Administrations main goal far more than a sound economy is.
Another key problem is its not the free market the Republicans bellow so much about. When the government is spending all the money in the economy like it is now its picking the economic winners and losers, not the free market. It just happens most of the winners are the supporters of the Republican party, wealthy stockholders, Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed, Boei
Guess it depends on who you believe and most economic statistics are lies or damn lies, thanks to currency fluctuations, accounting differences etc. For the EU once source I find says:
"The European Union surpasses the United States in population and exports and rivals it in GDP. Its population was 377 million on Jan. 1, 2001, and its aggregate GDP for 2002 was US$ 8.591 trillion, compared to 10.365 trillion for the US and 715.4 billion for Canada."
And that was in 2002 so it probably it must easily be over $10 trillion now considering the extent to which the Dollar has cratered relative to the EU since then. You need to allow for the fact the Euro is something like 20% higher than it was versus the dollar before Bush came to town and if you are estimating GDP in dollars that does factor in.
Another more recent estimate:
"According to figures from Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, the EU's combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will grow to 12.1 trillion dollars, slightly higher than the 12.04 trillion dollar GDP of the United States, which will thus lose its position as the world's leading economic power."
Your number for China appear to be more accurate than mine. 6 trillion was thrown out in an article I read a month or two ago. It appears certain China's GDP is around 11 trillion Yuan and it has been growing at just under 10%. The tricky part is how you value the Yuan. One rate I find is about 12 cents for a Yuan which yields maybe a $1.3 trillion GDP. The problem is everyone knows the Yuan is being pegged at an artificially low exchange rate which makes Chinese goods artificially cheap on foreign markets which is why they sell so well and a source of muttered fair trade complaints. To accurately value their GDP the Yuan should be floating and set by market forces, though if it did that it would dramatically alter their financial position relative to the West across the board.
"Were you aware that the USA spends 1/3 of the money spent around the globe? The GDP of the US is over 11 trillion [US Dollars]. The GDP of the entire global economy is merely 32 Trillion."
Keep patting yourself on the back. Just because America was and is wealthy doesn't translate in to it continuing to stay that way.
The E.U.s GDP is approximately the same as the U.S. About $10 trillion if I recall. One reason for the E.U. is to create a unified economy to compete on the global stage with the U.S. and one of its goals is to displace the dollar with the Euro as the currency used to value oil.
China's GDP was around 6 trillion last I saw and growing at a furious pace as in double digit annual growth. At that rate, at the rate at which misguided western executives are pumping capital, jobs and intellectual property in to China at the expense of the U.S., and with the huge trade deficits the U.S. runs with China it will eventually pass the U.S. and not in the so distant future.
Its true the U.S. GDP is growing again but that is almost entirely due to very low interest rates and the massive fiscal stimulus the Federal government is injecting in to the economy by running more than a half trillion dollar budget deficit, borrowed money being put in to the pockets of the wealthy with tax cuts and borrowed money being poured in to massive defense spending, especially thanks to Iraq which has consumed nearly $200 billion alone in a year. This deficit spending is leading to near term prosperity at great future risk. Greenspan, Warren Buffett, the IMF and the World Bank are all raising red flags over the danger inherent in current U.S. economic policies.
The U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation with a 7 trillion dollar national debt which is exploding. The projections for the next ten years thanks to the Bush tax cuts, retirement of the baby boom etc are truly scary unless there is another dot com bubble to dramatically increase revenues or dramatic Federal spending cuts, whil in fact Federal spending is exploding under the Bush administration.
It remains to be seen if the trend continues but one reason the DOW is declining is foreign investors dumped a record $13.5 billion in U.S. stock in March. Warren Buffet is likewise betting heavily against the dollar and the U.S. economy.
On the news last night it was reported that outsourcing is running at a rate 40% higher than previous estimates and accelerating rapidly.
"As it turns out, we mostly did it your way, the "humane" way and didn't crack down on the populace at the end of combat and the beginning of occupation. Thusfar it has accomplished little good but the alienation of Iraqis that want law and order and the encouragement of insurrection."
Well no, the U.S. occupation hasn't been particularly humane and the U.S. is paying a deep price for in that 80% of Iraqis in a recent poll hate the coalition and want it out. Your scorched earth strategy might certainly work for a time to pacify the country but I'm at a lost to know how, if your there to bring "Freedom and Democracy" to the Iraqi's summary executions and leveling cities is going to achieve your goal. All you would gain is to insure the U.S. would have to occupy the place indefinitely and its pretty rare for an occupier to last indefinitely because the population will turn completely against you and your troops will be picked off in handfulls every day until you give up, withdraw and the country devolved in to civil war. I'm wondering if you can cite an instance where the tactics you describe actually worked anytime in the last century. The Russians tried it in Afghanistan and ultimately lost.
The Marine division that moved through Central Iraq during the invasion was particularly ruthless in its shoot on sight tactics. The Marines had to quietly remove its commander in the middle of the campaign because his tactics were apparently exactly what you are advocating.
According the Army's own numbers 60% of the people its arrested, and held indefinitely, aren't guilty of anything. The Red Cross estimates are in the 70-90% range. The fact that the U.S. has been kicking down doors in the middle of the night and hauling away people with no basis massively alienated the Iraqis, not the failure of the coalition to be tough enough.
The month the U.S. recently spent in Fallujah resulted in the killing of hundreds of civilians including women and children. Fallujah is a city of several hundred thousand people. Most of them probably dislike the U.S. but most of them aren't insurgents. When you advocate leveling a city of this size as a get tough strategy you have moved from getting tough in to war criminal, especially when the U.S. wasn't attacked by Iraq and didn't have a sound basis for invading it in the first place.
The tactics you are proposing might be justified if Iraq had attacked the U.S. There is no justification for them in the current ambiguous circumstance.
"includes preventing Saddam Hussein from exterminating entire Kurdish villages using chemicial weapons, raping and torturing, looting the treasury of Iraq, filling mass graves with hundreds of thousands of bodies, and develeoping chemical and biological weapons. That Saddam Hussein comitted those acts and that the United States Under three different administrations acted to curtal and halt them is solid and indisputable fact. By mischaracterizing those actions..."
You're the one mischaracterizing the situation. The U.S. didn't do anything to halt these actions for decades. We were arming and supporting Saddam when he was gassing Iranians. The U.S. gave him his Anthrax strains. As I said in another post, and I don't know why I'm stilling wasting time on you, George H.W. Bush encouraged the Kurd's and Shia's to revolt right after the first gulf war and then turned his back while Saddam slaughtered them which is what leaders do in the face of armed revolt. Saddam was just somewhat more brutal than most in putting down insurrection. The Bush family has lots of Iraqi blood on its hands too, which is one reason the cleric leading the Shia's wont even meet with the U.S.
You are really confused about the U.S. motives in running through this laundry list of Saddam's transgressions. When he was our ally, which he was when he was fighting Iran for us, though he wasn't ever exactly a favorite ally, we consistently looked the other way at his brutality.
It isn't until the U.S. decides they want to take a leader down that they switch from looking the other way at tyrants and in to these campaigns to demonize them which you have picked up with such vigor. These campaigns are designed to get the American people thristing for the leaders blood so they will rush in to war. They did the same thing to Noriega in Panama, though he too was our ally and a CIA stooge in the beginning.
You seem to be real concerned about the U.S. putting an end to Saddam's torture of Iraqi's. You conveniently overlook the fact that the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt brutally repress and torture their people too. There is a place in Saudi Arabia called chop chop square where they publicly behead people. There was a 60 minutes piece a few weeks ago about how the Saudi's arrested a group of Canadians and British and tortured them into confessing to car bombings because they Saudi's refused to admit Islamic extremists would attack them and they wanted to frame the British and Israel for it. Why aren't you ranting from your pulpit about those regimes and demanding we take them down? Why because they are U.S. allies and thats the double standard the U.S. has always applied to the world. Its OK to be a tyrant as long as you are our ally and do what we want.
You seem like a pretty intelligent and knowledgable person. You make some good points and I find myself agreeing with some of them. Unfortunately you pepper your writing with extremist rants and viscous personal attacks against anyone who doesn't see the world your way. You do yourself and your message a great deal of harm in the process. You seem to be convinced that you and Western civilization are inherently superior to the rest of the world. You don't seem to understand that free speech, opposing viewpoints, rational debate and discourse are one of the better parts of civilization. If you were to learn to make your points without the viscous rhetoric more people would listen to you. If you learned to consider opposing viewpoints you might grow yourself.
Do you work for the Bush administration? Your approach to people who differ from your world view seems pretty similar, viscous personal attacks instead of debating the issues.
"Mass graves. Long range missles. Rape. Torture. Chemical and biological weapons programs. Ethnic genocide. Looting the national treasury. Corruption of U.N. food-for-oil program. Never happened in Iraq? Bush adminstration never mentioned those ?"
Many of the mass graves are filled with Shia and Kurds George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt after the first Gulf War. When they did Bush turned his back and let Saddam slaughter them which is what just about every leader does in the face of armed revolt. The Shia still remember the betrayal of George H.W. Bush, its a key reason they don't trust the U.S. today. If it was about mass graves we would have done something about Cambodia, Rawanda or a host of countries that kill there own people en masse.
Long range missiles? The only missiles Iraq had at the time of the war were some capable of a few miles over the U.N. caps placed on Iraq. They most definitely weren't long range. They were short range. The range was also open to debate based on how they were configured. The U.N. was destroying them until they had to flee in front of the U.S. invasion.
Rape and Torture? Its becoming apparent the coalition is still doing those. I guess its going to have to take down itself now.
Chemical and biological weapons programs. No evidence Iraq has had them for years. Lest you forget the U.S., in particular Rumsfeld in his first stint at the DOD, gave them their starter kits and looked the other way when Iraq used them against Iran because the U.S. wanted them used against Iran to make sure Iran didn't win. You forget the U.S. was backing Iraq against Iran during that war. If there use on Iran and the Kurds was the issue the U.S. should have been taken Iraq down a decade ago when it had the chance.
Ethnic genocide. Like I said George H.W. Bush is as much to blame as Saddam for provoking the armed revolt of the Kurds and Shias that led to the worst of the slaughter. Once again where was the U.S. during Rwanda where the genocide was on a much larger scale. What is it doing about the ethnic genocide going on in Sudan going on NOW. Nothing. The U.S. is pretty selective on what it does and doesn't care about.
Looting the national treasury. If that were a criteria the U.S. is going to have to take down half the governments in the world.
Corruption of U.N. food-for-oil program? I think that only came out after the war and they sifted through documents. I'm at a complete loss how this is justification for war. Charge anyone at the U.N. guilty of corruption. Move on.
All in all you are just desperately trying to compensate for the fact that EVERYONE knows the top two reasons the U.S. had for invading Iraq were complete B.S. Powell yesterday admitted his presentation to the U.N. was based on fabrications by informants put up to it by Chalibi in order to sucker the U.S. in to taking down Saddam for him, so he could take control of Iraq.
"Saddam Hussein was one of the worst tyrants the world has known."
Bullshit. He was about average for tyrants the world has known. The Shah of Iran, our ally was just as bad. The dictators we installed in Guatemala were just as bad. Stalin, our ally in World War II was one of the worst tyrants the world has known. Its cool with me Saddam's no longer in power but the way the U.S. went about it was based on massive deception, and its costing the U.S. dearly. The cost in money, lives, and the extent to which it is inflaming the world against the U.S. just wasn't worth it.
"I have a copy of the DSM-IV in hand. I am totally serious: You should seek professional help. The first step to healing is to admit to yourself that you have a problem."
At this point just fuck off. If you can't engage in debate without the vicious personal attacks then maybe you should just SHUT UP. I'm not wasting any more time on you.
"They are now characterized by illiteracy, poverty, religious fanatism and government oppression. Western societies are characterized by high rates of literacy, greater wealth, more even distibution of wealth, rule of law, and rapid technological advance, a high degree of social mobility and individual social and economic freedom. As a result Arabs have become jealous and emittered, despiratley recounting ancient greatness to preserve a lingering pride in their failed civilizations."
Are you suggesting the U.S. is entering its decline?
I hate to break it to you but "illiteracy, poverty, religious fanaticism and government oppression" could pretty easily be used to describe the trend in the U.S. today though it certainly hasn't reached epidemic proportions in all categories yet. I'm pretty nervous with the the extent to which fundamentalist Christianity has inserted itself into the Bush administration. Everyone has their right to religious preference but they should be leaving it at the home and in the church when they enter government. The Founding Father emphasized the separation of church and state because many of them were well aware of religious persecution in Europe at the time.
As for you ramblings about first mover advantage I don't really see the point. All civilizations rise and fall. So will American and Western European civilization, fall that is. You seem pretty eager to condemn China to the dustbin of greatness but all indications are that today they are a juggernaut that will pass the U.S., E.U. and Japan in economic supremacy, at least, and in the not to distant future.
"From those facts you nonsensically conclude that Romans are partly accountable for Arab misfortune and the relative ascenadancy of the west. Europeans were ultimately defeated in the crusades by Arabs."
On this point I conceede and punt. Arab history is so complex and poorly understood by this Westerner I'll have to admit I have no clue how they reached the nadir they did in the early 20th century.
"1. You allege that there has existed a right-wing conspiracy since the Eisenhower administration to take over all of the oil fields in the world"
Uh no. You keep putting the words "right wing conspiracy" in my mouth. Hate to break it to you but you seem to be one obsessed with 'C' word. I never used it. I've just pointed out the simple fact, with documentation, that in Iran the Eisenhower administration did topple the government of Iran over control of oil. It worked and U.S. oil companies made out like bandits for decades. The toppling part worked so well the CIA moved on to Guatemala the next year though that had nothing to do with oil.
Its impossible for me to say what the reasons were for the Bush administration to invade Iraq. All the ones they officially used have proven to be BS. Its no secret that the ONLY part of Iraq they tried to protect from sabotage and looting were the oil fields and the oil ministry so you know it was at the top of their list going in. And of course Halliburton is now firmly entrenched developing those same oil fields today. Who knows what will happen to them if the U.S. ever gives real control back to the Iraqis. It will certainly be interesting to see how the U.S. responds if the Iraqi's give them to the French, Russians or Chinese to develop.
If you want to move to a different part of the world its also NO SECRET that the Bush administration has been aggressively trying to topple the government in Venezuela because they also sit on top of huge oil reserves, are a key supplier to the U.S., and their government is openly hostile to the U.S. I can dig up references but me continuing to cite facts while you hurl unsubstantiated BS at me is proving to be pointless.
"Not secret and evident to whom besides yourself ? Do I need to wear a flaming aluminum foil hat to block the mind control rays if I am to understand this ?"
Maybe I should clarify, once again its NO SECRET that the U.S. toppled Iran's government to regain control of its oil fields. Again no one outside the twisted corridors of the Bush administration knows what their motivations are today. Its NO SECRET that energy companies are some of their biggest backers and beneficiaries. You may have heard there is a Supreme court case because environmental groups want to know which energy companies sat in Dick Cheney's office and helped him write the Energy bill still grinding through Congress.
"You, on the other hand, believe political support of special intersts is proof a vast 50-year old conspiracy by Republicans, involving the CIA, to take over all of the oil fields in the world."
Once again, please stop putting words in my mouth. I never said anything remotely resembling "50-year old conspiracy by Republicans". I just pointed out that its been done at least once, its been verified by one of the CIA's own, and I know that chaps your ass since you are trying to claim I made all this up. Chances are good its being done again in Venezuela. Who knows in Iraq. Its such a mess I don't think anyone can figure out what's going on there, including the Bush administration. I'm certainly willing to speculate that is possible Iraq was done partially to control its oil fields or at least get them back on the market. I have no proof, excepting the Foreign Minister of Poland flat out said last summer they were in the coalition to get a piece of Iraq's oil business.
"Quit quoting google at me and tell me what basis your speculation in the original post has some basis."
Sorry to keep bursting your unsubstantiated rhetoric with facts but you started the mud slinging. I'm just pointing out the fact the U.S. IS PUTTING bases all over Central Asia. I'll grant that the motivation for them is anyone's guess outside the corridors of the Pentagon. They may well be there to just fight Islamic fundamentalism but every news source I've found places emphasis on protection of oil and gas fields and pipelines. For example:
"To reduce reliance on Persian Gulf oil, the Bush Administration has sought to strengthen relations with other non-OPEC, oil-rich countries. In February, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited Kazakhstan, promising security assistance for Kazakhstan's oil pipelines and facilities on the Caspian Sea, where an estimated 7-9 billion barrels of oil were recently discovered (the largest oil discovery anywhere in 30 years). Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey just signed a U.S.-backed deal to build an oil pipeline to bring that oil to ports on the Mediterranean. The U.S. has military ties with each."
Afghanistan has been in play for over a decade as the site of a pipeline to get the huge gas reserves in Turkmenistan to the Indian ocean. The Taliban was problematic to the U.S. companies trying to build this pipeline (Unocal and Bridas). Last I heard the new regime and the presence of U.S. troops have enabled the start on this project after more than a decade of trying though most of Afghanistan is still pretty shaky for a big, expensive, project like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.st m
If the U.S. has military bases sitting on your soil they have a massive influence on what your country does and doesn't do, especially if you are a little third world country with no military.
For example its pretty unlikely you are going to try and nationalize oil fields being developed by a U.S. company and you are going to think twice before you redirect the oil contracts to an American adversary. Its also a trip wire to prevent any of your neighbors from laying claim to your oil fields.
U.S. military bases are the ideal police force to protect the interests of U.S. oil companies before they invest billions of dollars to develop oil fields and build pipelines. They enable development that might not happen in unstable parts of the world otherwise. To be pedantic these troops aren't generally sitting on the oil fields but they are in easy striking distance.
"The US has made some poor foreign policy decisions in its 200+ yr history, of that there can be no doubt... but I feel it's outweighed by the good (WW1, WW2, Eastern Bloc/Communism)"
I'll give you WW2. Yes America's role in World War 2 was an immensely positive thing. Stop pretending like the world is eternally in America's debt because of it and America can do no wrong because for this 4 years it did something good. The British, Canadians, Indians, Free French, New Zealanders, Aussies, Chinese and the Russians and a whole bunch of othere were there too. Many of them sacrificed a lot more than the U.S. did. World War 2 made the U.S. an economic, miliary and political superpower because it was about the only nation on the planet the war didn't devastate. The U.S. has gotten its reward for WW2 about a hundred times over.
Its not entirely clear who was right and wrong in WW1. It was a bloody mess fought for massively stupid reasons. Every nation involved should be deeply ashamed. In the end it just rearranged a bunch of colonial empires and laid the foundation for World War II. What exactly did the U.S. do that is so deserving of praise, other than throw in some troops as cannon fodder at the last minute that tipped the balance in a stalemate being fought for no real obvious reason.
Eastern Bloc/Communism. Its certainly open to debate whether the U.S. involvement was a plus or minus. The U.S. effort to stop Communism lead to the installation of a large number of right wing dictatorships that were as bad or worse than their Communist counterparts. I know the U.S., especially, the Reagan Republicans, can't resist claiming credit for the collapse of the U.S.S.R, thats just the American way to take credit for everything, but you have to give credit to Gorbachev and Yeltsin first. The collapse of the U.S.S.R, like most of the Eastern Bloc countries, was led from within, thats the best way for regime change to happen, and the credit should go to the peoples of those nations who stuck there necks way out to make it happen, not the U.S. whose main contribution during the time was just massive defense spending mostly with borrowed money.
I didn't say it was necessarily a bad thing that the Neocons are planning for the day when oil reserves are exhausted. As I alluded and someone else emphasized it would be a whole lot smarter if all the money and people being squandered in Iraq were instead working on alternative energy sources so the never ending chess game being played over oil reserves would stop mattering.
"Don't make me laugh. That's just plain stupid. Have our military forces sit on oil fields in Central Asia? International militaristic blackmail doesn't work, no matter how powerful your military is. The Soviets learned that lesson really well."
Enough already. Look up your facts before you keep sharing your misinformed wisdom. The U.S. does have troops sitting in just about every Central Asian country already, many of them in full blown bases. The U.S. negotiated for and paid most of these countries for basing rights ostensibly to enable the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but its not like they are going to leave now that they are there:
Its not like they are there just because lots of new oil and gas fields are coming on line in Central Asia. These bases sit right on the underbelly of Russia and China so they are of strategic importance too.
Not sure I have the time to rebut every instance of you saying I'm full of shit but I may just because you are trying to make my post look like BS when it wasn't.
"WTF? No. That's revisionist bullshit. Well before PH the Japanese were into conquest, Indonesia we had little real interest in, we had internal sources for oil that were much cheaper."
Geez before you people keep saying I'm a full of shit do a simple google search. Its simple historical fact that Roosevelt did lay an oil embargo on Japan in an attempt to slow their aggression in China. It might not be the only reason for Pearl Harbor but it helped start the rapid deterioration in relations that ended in Pearl Harbor:
"On July 24th, the Japanese army, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Vichy government in France, occupied key positions throughout Indo-China. And on July 26th, President Roosevelt ordered the freezing of all Japanese assets in the United States and the placing of all petroleum exports to Japan under embargo subject to licence. The British and Dutch governments quickly followed suit. To this day the record is unclear as to whether the President realised the full implications of his actions. Some memoirs of his entourage indicate that he intended to use the licensing authority as a diplomatic weapon -- a tap to be turned on or off for bargaining purposes. But the freeze made it almost impossible for Japan to continue paying cash for oil as before. In any case, this was a victory for the hardliners in the administration -- Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and Secretary of the Interior Ickes -- who had been pressing for an oil embargo for months in the belief that it would force Japan to its knees."
Guess I'll just chalk this up to that never ending American desire to pretend Pearl Harbor happened out of the blue and America didn't do anything to provoke it.
Well I'm tired of right wing wackos like you trying to paint it all as conspiracy theory and that I'm a wacko making it up. Everything historical I'm posting you can corroborate from historical sources. You're making out like I'm claiming this is some grand and secret conspiracy. Its not. Why, because its not particularly secret.
When the president is from a family whose business is oil, the vice president is the former CEO of the worlds largest oil field service company and the head of NSA is a former board member of Chevron there sure isn't any reason why the U.S. is going to do anything that might benefit America's oil companies. Bah, what a wacky conspiracy theory that is.
There is simply to much historical data on what the Eisenhower administration did in Iran for you to pretend like it didn't happen they way I've described it. Look up TPAJAX. There is a 200 page document written in 1954 by Donald Wilbur, one of the CIA agents involved, floating around that describes it in detail. Excerpts:
The goal at the top of the list of reasons for the CIA coup was:
"to cause the fall of the Mossadeq government.and bring to power a government which would reach an equitable oil settlement."
Anti communist hysteria was cited as a reason by the U.S. for the coup but the oil fields were the tangible thing the British and U.S. were after and got from the 1953 coup until the Shah was toppled in 1979.
I should add a correction to my previous post. On more research it appears British Petroleum did get some of its Iranian oil concession back after the coup. But it had 5 new American partners including the predecessors to Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and Texaco.
Another take on the coup though its from a left winger so I imagine you will dismiss it as conspiracy theory written by a wacko too:
TPAJAX is the template for the U.S. compelling regime change to gain control of oil. The fact that the docs on it, written by the CIA, are now available sends your tin foil hat charges down in flames.
"I suspect that if the Army had shown a merciless Iron Hand in the immediate aftermath of the war -- shoot-on-sight curfews, round-ups, summary trials and executions -- we would have instilled a level of fear-based respect we don't have now, not to mention preservation of infrastructure and law and order."
I really hope you are just trolling. If so, good one. If you're not sorry to say it man but this is just sick. What's more sickening is some large percentage of Americans, mostly Republicans, probably think this would have been the way to go. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma sure seems to subscribe to your approach.
I hate to break it to you but 90+% of the Iraqi's are guilty of just about nothing but being unfortunate to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. What exactly have most of them done to you or the U.S. to justify this kind of scorched earth reprisal. I'm assuming you must have fallen for the Bush administration propaganda that Iraq was behind 9/11 and they were about to nuke American cities or fly drones over them spraying them with nerve gas or Anthrax. It was propaganda man. It wasn't true it was just BS a few people in the Bush administration used to whip up a war frenzy and sucker people in to supporting it. Unfortunately it worked because most people are dumb and gullible. A few percent of the Iraq population are complete dicks, a few percent of Americans are complete dicks. The rest of them are just people, like you and me, trying to get along in life. They really don't deserve to have the U.S. military rain death on them from above, or to be tortured, humiliated or killed for no reason.
You go down this road and you are no better than, or different from, the Nazi's.
"Let's see, the U.S. freed the Phillipines from a Spanish tyranny and rather than subsuming the islands, the U.S. eventually set them off on their own."
The U.S. did subsume the Phillipines for about 90 years. It wasn't until 1986 when Marcos was toppled and 1992 when the U.S. removed its huge military bases that it achieved something resembling real sovereignty.
Apparently you've never read the history of the initial American occupation of the Phillipines. The U.S.replaced Spanish tyranny with American tyranny.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States." Major Littleton W. T. Waller: How young? Smith: Ten years and up. --Exchange on October 1901, quote from the testimony at Smith's court martial by the New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902). General Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was popularly known as "Hell Roaring Jake" or "Howling Wilderness".
The civilian causalties as the U.S. fought the Phillipine insurgency was most probably in the hundreds of thousands.
"Most of the mideast prior to the actions of western oil companies were vaste wastelands traversed by ignorant nomads. The western oil companies discovered the oil, gave it value, and it then was stolen by the disgusting murderers that call themselves governments in the mideast."
Are you American, British or Israeli. Thank you for once again proving what an arrogant, imperialistic, bunch Westerners are. Some of the "murders that call themselves governments" are close friends of the Bush family and the best of allies of the U.S., the Saudi royal family, the Emir of Kuwait, etc. Either your respect the sovereignty of nations or you don't. If you think a western company can enter a country and take all its resources with little or no compensation to the country which owns the resources you are a blatant imperialist.
Mossadegh. The head of Iran the U.S. overthrew was Time "Man of the Year", fairly progressive, anti-communist and Truman wouldn't even consider overthrowing him, the Dulles brothers on the other hand could care less when there was a chance to seize control of Iran's oil for U.S. oil companies.
Not sure how well you are versed in history but Iraq sits on top of the cradle of civilization. There were great civilizations there when your Western ancestors were living in caves or sod huts and running around in animal skins.
The number system you use today, though possibly Indian in origin, was introduced to the West by Arabs. They have had rich civilizations, great empires, and some of the world's best scholars. There have been periods when Arab culture was far more advanced than Europe's.
Many of the misfortune's of the Arab world can be traced to military interventions from the West, including the Romans, the Crusades, British imperialism and now U.S. imperialism.
"The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself."
Keep telling yourself that. Its simply not true. Chat with the average person in Iran, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Dominican Republic, the Phillipines.
The Phillipines endured a brutal, genocidal occupation by the U.S. from the end of the Spanish American war up to World War II. After World War II the U.S. backs the massively corrupt rule of the Marcos regime. I'll post this same link I post everytime an American says how good they've been to the world:
Some parts of it are overdone and a stretch but it has all the names and dates for all the misery the U.S. has inflicted on the world in the last century which you can corroborate easily if you choose to not believe this source.
In 1953 Iranian Nationalists gained power at a time when the British were looting 88% of Iran's oil revenues. The Iranians demanded a more equitable deal and offered the British 25%. Blockeds and boycotts ensued. The British ran crying to the U.S. and Truman. Truman ignored them. When Eisenhower took power it happened the Dulles brothers, head of the CIA and Secretary of State were lawyers form Anglo-American oil. The Dulles brothers used the CIA to topple the Iranian government and installed the Shah of Iran, who was every bit as despotic as Saddam was as far as the secret police, torture and disappearing people went. Rather than giving the British their oil contracts back they were given to, you guessed it, American oil companies. The reason the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized was revenge for all the misery the U.S. inflicted on Iran under the Shah.
This also points out that the U.S. has in fact been using its military and intelligence power to win control of oil fields for American companies since World War II at least. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the U.S. was embargoing Japan's access to U.S. controlled oil fields in Indonesia.
To date control of oil fields has been primarily for the economic benefit of the seven sisters(the big oil companies formed from the break up of Standard Oil though there are a lot less than seven now thanks to mergers). They have immense influence in U.S. politics, especially on the Republican's. George H.W. Bush's main career before politics was at Zapata Oil which built off shore oil rigs and ships to do contract drilling for the big oil companies and many foreign governments. Its widely suspected Zapata was also a CIA front, since there ships tended to be parked just offshore of every hotspot in the world. Zapata is also a key factor in the closeness of the Bush family to the royal families in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Halliburton's oil operations closely resemble those of Zapata.
In the future as oil reserves start to run out strategic control of the oil fields will determine the economic winners and losers of this century at least until somebody comes to their senses and starts investing billions in developing alternative energy sources instead of fighting over the current fossil fuel sources.
China's oil consumption in particular is exploding at double digit annual percentage growth and its a contibutor to the current tight oil market. The Neocons are in fact looking ahead to when the day there isn't enough oil to meet demand. When that day comes they will look pretty smart when they have the U.S. military sitting in the middle of all the old oil fields in the Middle East and all the new ones in Central Asia. When that day comes some people will get the oil their economies need and some nations will go dark.
Another pretty good read is the New Yorker column on Copper Green:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa_ fa ct
This SAP (Specal Access Program a.k.a Top Top Secret) was a highly successful program to kill, capture and use exceptional interrogation techniques, especially sexual humiliation tactics, against high value Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently there is an old book call "The Arab Mind" the neocons are using as their bible on how to interrogate Arabs.
Unfortunately Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone decided to apply the same techniques on taxi drivers in the prisons in Iraq. They went from using highly secure interrogation sites to a big insecure prison in the middle of Iraq. They went from using highly trained, disciplined and cleared special forces to do the interrogation to untrained, undisciplined Army reservists(ordinary people). The CIA was so disgusted with Rumsefeld and Cambone's efforts they withdrew, both because they knew the secrecy would be blown thanks to DOD sloppiness and they ethically objected in taking these extra legal tactics from use on top Al Qaeda, who probably deserve it, to Iraqi prisoners in a conventional war. The Army's own number suggest 60% of the Iraqi prisoners are wrongfully detained. The Red Cross thinks its more like 70-90%.
All indications are Rumsfeld, Myers, and Cambone are between a rock and a hard place, they either commit perjury in front of Congress by denying knowledge of this project or rat it out and commit treason by exposing a top secret project. George W. is the only one who can declassify the program so the people really responsible are held accountable and that appears to be Rumsfeld, Meyers and Cambone.
If this article is true, and it appears its sourced by people in the CIA and DOD who are exacting revenge on Rumsfeld and Cambone for there arrogance and stupidity then Rumsfeld is flat out lieing when he pretends like he didn't know about what was going on in Iraq and in fact ordered it. Its fundamentally wrong to charge a bunch of reservists, ordinary citizens, for following orders when they implemented this top secret program.
Slashdot Mirror
"If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have."
Here is the problem with the people that argue that any measure that will stop a terrorist attack is OK.
So we institute the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness (which is what this is under a new name), biometric national ID cards, etc.
As long as there is no new attack you claim that its thanks to all the draconian measures so they must be A-OK.
The problem comes when there is another attack and there almost certainly will be. There are to many people who hate the U.S. to much now, and as long as they are willing to commit suicide some o them will get through. Israel has been trying to stop them with no success for decades.
So what do you do then, admit all the draconian measures didn't work and throw them out? Of course not. You will declare them as not good enough and put in a whole new raft of even more repressive measures, RFID tag everyone, put checkpoints on the highways, and in every train and bus station so no one can move without the blessing and scrutin of the government.
This is the nature of guerilla wars. The guerillas pick the time and place of the attack and they can almost always find a time and a place. The target government responds with ineffective and repressive measures that cause it to:
A. Cripple its economy both with the cost of the countermeasures themselves, and the drain they put on the economy by restricting trade and travel in particular
B. Be despised by its own population as the repressive measures intrude further and further in their lives so they reach a point they want to throw the government out themselves.
I don't suppose its ever occurred to you that the thinking people at Al Qaeda, and whatever you think of them they are smart people, want the U.S. to tie itself up in knots trying to stop their attacks, and they are overjoyed everytime the U.S. does something stupid like invade Iraq or greenlight Sharon no matter how brutally he treats the Palastinians.
You may think the U.S. is winning with its current approach but its my contention that the people in the Bush Administration are to stupid and devoid of the intellectual subtlety necessary to win this war. You don't have to look much farther than the conman Chalibi to see an Arab who played the Bush administration like a fiddle because they are to dumb to understand all the complexities of this new era.
Some Bush fanboys must have had some mod points for this to get rated Insightful.
First off this project is being done by a somewhat out of control private company with historical ties to Admiral Poindexter. There isn't exactly an "agency" involved, other than I think DOJ threw them some cash and I imagine the CIA or DOD is secretly or not so secretly backing this because Congress shot down this program under its previous name Total Information Awareness because it is so objectional. The Bush administration is so contemptuous of Congressional oversight that this smacks of something they would do as an end run around the "representatives of the people" who are occasionally trying to rein in their gross abuses of their power.
Furthermore you seem to be have jumped to the conclusion that this is going to prevent terrorism. What basis do you have for that? For example I haven't seen them run this system on a database from pre 9/11 to see if it flags any of the real hijackers, especially without them knowing any details about those people in advance so they can tweak their AI engine.
I really doubt there is a lot of information in these databases that will accurately ID a terrorist unless you are willing to engage in racial/religious profiling and red flag every Arab and Muslim in the database, or everyone who has travelled to an Islamic country though that would red flag a quarter of Halliburton's employees.
You might change your tune if your name came up with a match in this fishing expedition, and you end up getting arrested as a "material witness" and the DOJ destroys your life, as in you lose your job, and are placed under a cloud of suspicion without any due process.
For example, in Google News, look up the attorney in Oregon who was falsely implicated in the Madrid bombing. They seem to have fabricated a fingerprint match and more importantly he is on the DOJ's target list because:
A. He converted to Islam
B. He had the nerve to defend one of the people in Portland charged with ties to terrorism
The DOJ has taken consistent measures to punish attorneys who defend people they want to lynch for hazy terrorism suspicions. This case appears to be an example of the extremes your government is willing to go to punish innocent people, especially if they are Muslim.
Sorry, but everything the U.S. is doing, this included, is a new version of McCarthyism, just substitute Muslim and Arab for Communist. If it just punished people guilty of something you might be able to rationalize it but when it destroys innocent people, which it certainly will, its not worth the price.
If you've been following the Riggs Banking scandal lately they appear to be getting a lot of it from the Saudi embassy and royal family.
This article doesn't mention it but millions, if not tens of millions of suspicious transactions through this bank from the Sauid Embassy are though to have gone to funding terrorism.
Its kind of odd the U.S. was so keen to take down Saddam for backing terrorism while the U.S. consistently looks the other way or actively suppresses information about the Saudi's actively supporting it. I guess it helps to be both close friends of the Bush family and have control the worlds largest pool of oil.
You might recall the Bush administration had to black out a huge section of the congressional report on 9/11 which exposed Saudi Arabia's involvement, beyond the fact that it was perpetrated almost entirely by Saudi nationals.
"Wrong. The "system" allows you your freedom because you haven't been convicted by a jury of your peers of a crime that requires you be remanded into custody of the state."
Wrong. Jose Padilla would be glad to set you straight assuming you or anyone else could ever talk to him, aside from the MP's that is. A U.S. citizen arrested on U.S. soil held incommunicado since he was arrested two years ago. Maybe he is an Al Qaeda terrorist but his U.S. citizenship demands that he be given access to a lawyer and due process, which means that he be charged in a timely manner and given a speedy trial with legal counsel of his choosing. His case just now made it to the Supreme Court after two years in solitary. If the Supreme Court rules in his favor then there may be a shred of democracy left in the U.S. If they rule against him, they will have given the Executive sweeping new powers to arrest anyone he feels like without the inconvenience of any due process or messy old legal system. If this happens you are living in a police state and the Supreme Court is just one of its tools.
The other obvious failure in your naive understanding of the police state the U.S. is today is that the executive branch is reserving the right to send anyone it wants to a military tribunal which is most definitely not a jury of your peers. It is a bunch of military officers who may be fair or the may convict you to keep their chain of command happy and their careers on track.
"and perhaps most significantly, you seem unaware that the activities of the FBI are overseen by Senators and Representatives that you and I vote for"
Maybe in some previous era. Thanks to the fact that the Republicans control the Congress they in fact are not going to any great lengths to oversea the executive branch. They are doing bettern now than previously partially because some Republicans are so disgusted with the Bush administration they are compelled by their conscience to investigate it.
The Executive branch is routinely spending money on their little wars without Congressional authorization, and Congress, beyond a shadow of doubt should not allow this. The Bush administration redirected $700 million from authorized spending in Afghanistan to prep for the war in Iraq before Congress approved anything in Iraq. Wolfowitz was just before Congress requesting an additional $25 billion slush fund for wars in the Middle East. With unprecedented nerve they are demanding that Congress give them the money with no strings attached, or oversight, on how they spend it. If precedent holds they will use it to prep for the coming wars on Syria and Iran after they are reelected.
There are a number of Senators, John McCain at the top of the list, that will tell you this administration has shown more contempt for Congressional oversight than any in modern history.
Congressional oversight only worked when there were congressman with a spine, it was a somewhat civil body, and it really only works when at least one house of Congress is held by the party not holding the White House. Today Congress is a worthless rubber stamp. If the Democrats held control they would have already started impeachment hearings for a long series of illegal and unethical actions by the White House that make the Monica Lewinsky scandal look like a tea party.
The ONLY check left in Congress is the fact the Republican's don't have a fillibuster proof majority in the Senate. Look for them to try to fix this with the help of Diebold's machines in the next election(like they did in Georgia in 2002) or to try to unilaterally change the Senate rules after the election which would be a coup without use of guns. You should try watching CSPAN when any contentious issue comes up. You will be embarrassed at the tactics the Republican's are using to destroy this once great body.
If Bush holds the White House and he gets a chance to replace one of the Liberal/Moderate judges on the Supreme Court with a right wing extremist that will further seal the fate of Constitution and any rights you think you have will be there only when the government chooses to let you have them.
This is some good, thoughtful writing. Anyone, with some mod points give it a boost. You right wingers better savage it mercilessly.
Also thanks for giving me the source for the 6 trillion figure for China's GDP, err GDP-PPP I used in the original post.
The Eurostat source I cited says the population is about the same as U.S. and the GDP is about the same so per capita must be about the same as the U.S. It would be interesting to study if there is more or less regional versus the U.S. I would assume Eastern Europe is probably dragging down the per capita GDP somewhat though its the region poised to grow fastest for the same reasons China is growing, cheap, well educated labor and a lot of room for improvement.
Here is a more plausible reason for this smoke and mirrors program. To emphasize, its sure as hell not to distract people from the mess in Iraq. The fact is the only people who even remember he proposed this are the wannabe Trekkies, aerospace workers and NASA employees. How exactly are you going to distract the nation when no one is paying any attention to this outside of /.
I'm imaging Karl Rove sitting in his office crunching the numbers on the swing states for the 2004 election. Florida of course pops up at the top of the list for potential nail biters.
So you have this relatively small demographic in the Space Coast around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne whose livelihood is entirely dependent on the space program. If those few hundred thousand votes could swing Florida in or out of the R column would you want to go in to the election with them:
A. Facing the cancellation of the Space Shuttle and the ISS and with no manned space program to keep them employed. The unmanned and military programs might keep the Space Coast going but wiping out the Space Shuttle and the manned space program with no replacement would really screw up their local economy, their careers and their prestige.
B. Drooling over a multidecade, ultra exciting and interesting program to go back to the Moon and Mars that would keep even the younger people employed up to retirement age.
Pretty easy answer huh, B. So what does Rove do? He proposes a Mars/Moon program and pretty much locks up the vote on the Space Coast for Bush, and as a bonus any other place where there are a lot of aerospace workers and trekkies. Problem is you probably have zero desire to spend any actual money on it since your priorities are in defense spending, wars in the Middle East and tax cuts, and NASA is the last place you want to sink money.
So you throw tiny amounts of money at it and ramp it up very slowly, just enough to sucker all the voters in the Space Coast until November. After the election let it drag on until it reaches the point they are going to have to spend a lot of money, bend metal and go someplace, then you kill it because the nation can't afford it. Ideally you drag it out through 2008 before you have to spend any money.
I know its pretty cynical and someone may lob the standard tin hat reply at this but politicians really are this cynical and this election is shaping up to be both close enough and vicious enough the candidates are willing to do stuff like this to win.
I think it probably has as more to do with finding a way to shovel large amounts of money in to the coffers of the aerospace companies that are key benefactors of the Bush administration. Boeing in particular is looking to be in deep trouble trying to compete with Airbus in the commercial aviation market. There are some who contend Airbus is winning thanks to subsidies from European governments. This program would be a great way for the U.S. to subsidize Boeing without it being challenged in the WTO. The DOD already tried a blatant subsidy to Boeing last year by trying to award it a huge contract for 767 tankers with no competition and using leases that dramatically inflated the costs and Boeing's profits.
In this it has a lot in common with the missile defense program. Another program where vast sums are being spent over a long period which may or may not result in anything that ever works or is deployed.
If you are seeking to pour money in to the pockets of your friends a program with a multidecade life span which may or may not actually bend any metal or go anywhere for a decade, if ever, is a pretty good program.
It will also result in a bunch of highly paid, high tech jobs in the U.S. that will be hard to outsource. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them end up in swing states like Florida where grateful workers will help shore up the Republicans at the ballot box. I wonder how many of them will be filled by foreign born engineers when they discover there aren't enough qualified engineers in the U.S. to do the work, and the ones there are are busy working on weapons.
Think of it as a counterpart to the Medicare "Reform" bill which subsidizes the health and drug companies (key Republican benefactors), or the the Energy Bill which subsidizes big oil, gas, coal companies (key Republican benefactors) or the War in Iraq which subsidizes Halliburton and Bechtel (key Republican benefactors). The Bush administration is pretty creative in finding ways to loosen up the purse strings on your tax dollars so they can go to their friends.
"Personally, I hope to see more foreign investment and outsourcing."
I guess your view of it depends on whether you are heading to be an executive in a multinational, are rich and a big shareholder in multinationals, or you work for a living. If its the first two you do have a reason to like it. If your the third the only reason you have to like it is you can buy stuff cheap at Walmart. This is important since if you are a worker in the U.S. your real income is probably flat or declining so you need cheap goods.
You are going to have to drum up some truly valuable skills to compete with workers in China and India, and they are working as hard or harder on those same skill as you are. The minimum wage in China is around $0.30/hr and and its a suggestion that is not generally enforced. One estimate of the real wage in China for someone manufacturing stuff for WalMart is around $0.21/hr. I'm sure highly skilled jobs pay substantially better but you are probably still at an at least 10/1 disadvantage just due to the cost of employing you in the West. A 10X handicap is a pretty big thing to overcome no matter how hard you try.
So, I really don't see what special skills you're going to acquire that are likely to make up the gap. A year or two ago everyone was talking about biotech skills but recent stories suggest those are moving to India too. The ONLY skills I can see as really safe are work in homeland security or the military industrial complex since a significant percentages of those jobs require a security clearance and U.S. citizenship and they are America's biggest growth sector. Halliburton is hiring something like 200-300 people a week to send to Iraq as long as you don't value your well being to high. Apart from that you have to go for service jobs like health care which require your body be in the U.S.for the most part. Otherwise I hope you are aiming for an MBA because getting in to executive management is really the only way I can see you may have a good shot at success in America in this century. Trial lawyer might work too, though much of the legal research part of that trade is, you guessed it, being offshored to India.
If globalization was based on truly fair trade it would be easier to support outsourcing and foreign investment. The problem is its not a level playing field. China is using a broad array of tricks to tilt the playing field in its favor. As I mentioned pegging the Yuan artificially low is one. Once its wiped out manufacturing in the U.S., Japan, Korea and the EU it will be free to remove these artifices because it will control the world economy at that point. Exploiting a huge, cheap labor pool, with very few rights is another crucial angle. Western prosperity, workplace standards and healthcare costs have priced Western labor out of the global market no matter how good your skills are. The fat cats that run companies know that and there is absolutely nothing stopping them from abandoning you in favor of the cheapest bodies and minds they can find that can do the job.
"Well, at least you agree that the current administration's plan is working, albiet extremely risky."
I agree it is stimulating something resembling growth. I don't agree that its really working. It works in about the same way CEO's in recent years have taken to making their quarterly number look good, cheap accounting tricks. In an $11 trillion dollar economy, borrow a half a trillion dollars and spend it. Presto you fake a %5 growth in GDP. It makes your numbers look good and if you time it right you get reelected which is the Bush Administrations main goal far more than a sound economy is.
Another key problem is its not the free market the Republicans bellow so much about. When the government is spending all the money in the economy like it is now its picking the economic winners and losers, not the free market. It just happens most of the winners are the supporters of the Republican party, wealthy stockholders, Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed, Boei
Guess it depends on who you believe and most economic statistics are lies or damn lies, thanks to currency fluctuations, accounting differences etc. For the EU once source I find says:
"The European Union surpasses the United States in population and exports and rivals it in GDP. Its population was 377 million on Jan. 1, 2001, and its aggregate GDP for 2002 was US$ 8.591 trillion, compared to 10.365 trillion for the US and 715.4 billion for Canada."
And that was in 2002 so it probably it must easily be over $10 trillion now considering the extent to which the Dollar has cratered relative to the EU since then. You need to allow for the fact the Euro is something like 20% higher than it was versus the dollar before Bush came to town and if you are estimating GDP in dollars that does factor in.
Another more recent estimate:
"According to figures from Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Communities, the EU's combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will grow to 12.1 trillion dollars, slightly higher than the 12.04 trillion dollar GDP of the United States, which will thus lose its position as the world's leading economic power."
Your number for China appear to be more accurate than mine. 6 trillion was thrown out in an article I read a month or two ago. It appears certain China's GDP is around 11 trillion Yuan and it has been growing at just under 10%. The tricky part is how you value the Yuan. One rate I find is about 12 cents for a Yuan which yields maybe a $1.3 trillion GDP. The problem is everyone knows the Yuan is being pegged at an artificially low exchange rate which makes Chinese goods artificially cheap on foreign markets which is why they sell so well and a source of muttered fair trade complaints. To accurately value their GDP the Yuan should be floating and set by market forces, though if it did that it would dramatically alter their financial position relative to the West across the board.
"Were you aware that the USA spends 1/3 of the money spent around the globe? The GDP of the US is over 11 trillion [US Dollars]. The GDP of the entire global economy is merely 32 Trillion."
Keep patting yourself on the back. Just because America was and is wealthy doesn't translate in to it continuing to stay that way.
The E.U.s GDP is approximately the same as the U.S. About $10 trillion if I recall. One reason for the E.U. is to create a unified economy to compete on the global stage with the U.S. and one of its goals is to displace the dollar with the Euro as the currency used to value oil.
China's GDP was around 6 trillion last I saw and growing at a furious pace as in double digit annual growth. At that rate, at the rate at which misguided western executives are pumping capital, jobs and intellectual property in to China at the expense of the U.S., and with the huge trade deficits the U.S. runs with China it will eventually pass the U.S. and not in the so distant future.
Its true the U.S. GDP is growing again but that is almost entirely due to very low interest rates and the massive fiscal stimulus the Federal government is injecting in to the economy by running more than a half trillion dollar budget deficit, borrowed money being put in to the pockets of the wealthy with tax cuts and borrowed money being poured in to massive defense spending, especially thanks to Iraq which has consumed nearly $200 billion alone in a year. This deficit spending is leading to near term prosperity at great future risk. Greenspan, Warren Buffett, the IMF and the World Bank are all raising red flags over the danger inherent in current U.S. economic policies.
The U.S. is the world's largest debtor nation with a 7 trillion dollar national debt which is exploding. The projections for the next ten years thanks to the Bush tax cuts, retirement of the baby boom etc are truly scary unless there is another dot com bubble to dramatically increase revenues or dramatic Federal spending cuts, whil in fact Federal spending is exploding under the Bush administration.
It remains to be seen if the trend continues but one reason the DOW is declining is foreign investors dumped a record $13.5 billion in U.S. stock in March. Warren Buffet is likewise betting heavily against the dollar and the U.S. economy.
On the news last night it was reported that outsourcing is running at a rate 40% higher than previous estimates and accelerating rapidly.
"As it turns out, we mostly did it your way, the "humane" way and didn't crack down on the populace at the end of combat and the beginning of occupation. Thusfar it has accomplished little good but the alienation of Iraqis that want law and order and the encouragement of insurrection."
Well no, the U.S. occupation hasn't been particularly humane and the U.S. is paying a deep price for in that 80% of Iraqis in a recent poll hate the coalition and want it out. Your scorched earth strategy might certainly work for a time to pacify the country but I'm at a lost to know how, if your there to bring "Freedom and Democracy" to the Iraqi's summary executions and leveling cities is going to achieve your goal. All you would gain is to insure the U.S. would have to occupy the place indefinitely and its pretty rare for an occupier to last indefinitely because the population will turn completely against you and your troops will be picked off in handfulls every day until you give up, withdraw and the country devolved in to civil war. I'm wondering if you can cite an instance where the tactics you describe actually worked anytime in the last century. The Russians tried it in Afghanistan and ultimately lost.
The Marine division that moved through Central Iraq during the invasion was particularly ruthless in its shoot on sight tactics. The Marines had to quietly remove its commander in the middle of the campaign because his tactics were apparently exactly what you are advocating.
According the Army's own numbers 60% of the people its arrested, and held indefinitely, aren't guilty of anything. The Red Cross estimates are in the 70-90% range. The fact that the U.S. has been kicking down doors in the middle of the night and hauling away people with no basis massively alienated the Iraqis, not the failure of the coalition to be tough enough.
The month the U.S. recently spent in Fallujah resulted in the killing of hundreds of civilians including women and children. Fallujah is a city of several hundred thousand people. Most of them probably dislike the U.S. but most of them aren't insurgents. When you advocate leveling a city of this size as a get tough strategy you have moved from getting tough in to war criminal, especially when the U.S. wasn't attacked by Iraq and didn't have a sound basis for invading it in the first place.
The tactics you are proposing might be justified if Iraq had attacked the U.S. There is no justification for them in the current ambiguous circumstance.
"includes preventing Saddam Hussein from exterminating entire Kurdish villages using chemicial weapons, raping and torturing, looting the treasury of Iraq, filling mass graves with hundreds of thousands of bodies, and develeoping chemical and biological weapons. That Saddam Hussein comitted those acts and that the United States Under three different administrations acted to curtal and halt them is solid and indisputable fact. By mischaracterizing those actions..."
You're the one mischaracterizing the situation. The U.S. didn't do anything to halt these actions for decades. We were arming and supporting Saddam when he was gassing Iranians. The U.S. gave him his Anthrax strains. As I said in another post, and I don't know why I'm stilling wasting time on you, George H.W. Bush encouraged the Kurd's and Shia's to revolt right after the first gulf war and then turned his back while Saddam slaughtered them which is what leaders do in the face of armed revolt. Saddam was just somewhat more brutal than most in putting down insurrection. The Bush family has lots of Iraqi blood on its hands too, which is one reason the cleric leading the Shia's wont even meet with the U.S.
You are really confused about the U.S. motives in running through this laundry list of Saddam's transgressions. When he was our ally, which he was when he was fighting Iran for us, though he wasn't ever exactly a favorite ally, we consistently looked the other way at his brutality.
It isn't until the U.S. decides they want to take a leader down that they switch from looking the other way at tyrants and in to these campaigns to demonize them which you have picked up with such vigor. These campaigns are designed to get the American people thristing for the leaders blood so they will rush in to war. They did the same thing to Noriega in Panama, though he too was our ally and a CIA stooge in the beginning.
You seem to be real concerned about the U.S. putting an end to Saddam's torture of Iraqi's. You conveniently overlook the fact that the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt brutally repress and torture their people too. There is a place in Saudi Arabia called chop chop square where they publicly behead people. There was a 60 minutes piece a few weeks ago about how the Saudi's arrested a group of Canadians and British and tortured them into confessing to car bombings because they Saudi's refused to admit Islamic extremists would attack them and they wanted to frame the British and Israel for it. Why aren't you ranting from your pulpit about those regimes and demanding we take them down? Why because they are U.S. allies and thats the double standard the U.S. has always applied to the world. Its OK to be a tyrant as long as you are our ally and do what we want.
You seem like a pretty intelligent and knowledgable person. You make some good points and I find myself agreeing with some of them. Unfortunately you pepper your writing with extremist rants and viscous personal attacks against anyone who doesn't see the world your way. You do yourself and your message a great deal of harm in the process. You seem to be convinced that you and Western civilization are inherently superior to the rest of the world. You don't seem to understand that free speech, opposing viewpoints, rational debate and discourse are one of the better parts of civilization. If you were to learn to make your points without the viscous rhetoric more people would listen to you. If you learned to consider opposing viewpoints you might grow yourself.
Do you work for the Bush administration? Your approach to people who differ from your world view seems pretty similar, viscous personal attacks instead of debating the issues.
"Mass graves. Long range missles. Rape. Torture. Chemical and biological weapons programs. Ethnic genocide. Looting the national treasury. Corruption of U.N. food-for-oil program. Never happened in Iraq? Bush adminstration never mentioned those ?"
Many of the mass graves are filled with Shia and Kurds George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt after the first Gulf War. When they did Bush turned his back and let Saddam slaughter them which is what just about every leader does in the face of armed revolt. The Shia still remember the betrayal of George H.W. Bush, its a key reason they don't trust the U.S. today. If it was about mass graves we would have done something about Cambodia, Rawanda or a host of countries that kill there own people en masse.
Long range missiles? The only missiles Iraq had at the time of the war were some capable of a few miles over the U.N. caps placed on Iraq. They most definitely weren't long range. They were short range. The range was also open to debate based on how they were configured. The U.N. was destroying them until they had to flee in front of the U.S. invasion.
Rape and Torture? Its becoming apparent the coalition is still doing those. I guess its going to have to take down itself now.
Chemical and biological weapons programs. No evidence Iraq has had them for years. Lest you forget the U.S., in particular Rumsfeld in his first stint at the DOD, gave them their starter kits and looked the other way when Iraq used them against Iran because the U.S. wanted them used against Iran to make sure Iran didn't win. You forget the U.S. was backing Iraq against Iran during that war. If there use on Iran and the Kurds was the issue the U.S. should have been taken Iraq down a decade ago when it had the chance.
Ethnic genocide. Like I said George H.W. Bush is as much to blame as Saddam for provoking the armed revolt of the Kurds and Shias that led to the worst of the slaughter. Once again where was the U.S. during Rwanda where the genocide was on a much larger scale. What is it doing about the ethnic genocide going on in Sudan going on NOW. Nothing. The U.S. is pretty selective on what it does and doesn't care about.
Looting the national treasury. If that were a criteria the U.S. is going to have to take down half the governments in the world.
Corruption of U.N. food-for-oil program? I think that only came out after the war and they sifted through documents. I'm at a complete loss how this is justification for war. Charge anyone at the U.N. guilty of corruption. Move on.
All in all you are just desperately trying to compensate for the fact that EVERYONE knows the top two reasons the U.S. had for invading Iraq were complete B.S. Powell yesterday admitted his presentation to the U.N. was based on fabrications by informants put up to it by Chalibi in order to sucker the U.S. in to taking down Saddam for him, so he could take control of Iraq.
"Saddam Hussein was one of the worst tyrants the world has known."
Bullshit. He was about average for tyrants the world has known. The Shah of Iran, our ally was just as bad. The dictators we installed in Guatemala were just as bad. Stalin, our ally in World War II was one of the worst tyrants the world has known. Its cool with me Saddam's no longer in power but the way the U.S. went about it was based on massive deception, and its costing the U.S. dearly. The cost in money, lives, and the extent to which it is inflaming the world against the U.S. just wasn't worth it.
"I have a copy of the DSM-IV in hand. I am totally serious: You should seek professional help. The first step to healing is to admit to yourself that you have a problem."
At this point just fuck off. If you can't engage in debate without the vicious personal attacks then maybe you should just SHUT UP. I'm not wasting any more time on you.
"They are now characterized by illiteracy, poverty, religious fanatism and government oppression. Western societies are characterized by high rates of literacy, greater wealth, more even distibution of wealth, rule of law, and rapid technological advance, a high degree of social mobility and individual social and economic freedom. As a result Arabs have become jealous and emittered, despiratley recounting ancient greatness to preserve a lingering pride in their failed civilizations."
Are you suggesting the U.S. is entering its decline?
I hate to break it to you but "illiteracy, poverty, religious fanaticism and government oppression" could pretty easily be used to describe the trend in the U.S. today though it certainly hasn't reached epidemic proportions in all categories yet. I'm pretty nervous with the the extent to which fundamentalist Christianity has inserted itself into the Bush administration. Everyone has their right to religious preference but they should be leaving it at the home and in the church when they enter government. The Founding Father emphasized the separation of church and state because many of them were well aware of religious persecution in Europe at the time.
As for you ramblings about first mover advantage I don't really see the point. All civilizations rise and fall. So will American and Western European civilization, fall that is. You seem pretty eager to condemn China to the dustbin of greatness but all indications are that today they are a juggernaut that will pass the U.S., E.U. and Japan in economic supremacy, at least, and in the not to distant future.
"From those facts you nonsensically conclude that Romans are partly accountable for Arab misfortune and the relative ascenadancy of the west. Europeans were ultimately defeated in the crusades by Arabs."
On this point I conceede and punt. Arab history is so complex and poorly understood by this Westerner I'll have to admit I have no clue how they reached the nadir they did in the early 20th century.
"1. You allege that there has existed a right-wing conspiracy since the Eisenhower administration to take over all of the oil fields in the world"
Uh no. You keep putting the words "right wing conspiracy" in my mouth. Hate to break it to you but you seem to be one obsessed with 'C' word. I never used it. I've just pointed out the simple fact, with documentation, that in Iran the Eisenhower administration did topple the government of Iran over control of oil. It worked and U.S. oil companies made out like bandits for decades. The toppling part worked so well the CIA moved on to Guatemala the next year though that had nothing to do with oil.
Its impossible for me to say what the reasons were for the Bush administration to invade Iraq. All the ones they officially used have proven to be BS. Its no secret that the ONLY part of Iraq they tried to protect from sabotage and looting were the oil fields and the oil ministry so you know it was at the top of their list going in. And of course Halliburton is now firmly entrenched developing those same oil fields today. Who knows what will happen to them if the U.S. ever gives real control back to the Iraqis. It will certainly be interesting to see how the U.S. responds if the Iraqi's give them to the French, Russians or Chinese to develop.
If you want to move to a different part of the world its also NO SECRET that the Bush administration has been aggressively trying to topple the government in Venezuela because they also sit on top of huge oil reserves, are a key supplier to the U.S., and their government is openly hostile to the U.S. I can dig up references but me continuing to cite facts while you hurl unsubstantiated BS at me is proving to be pointless.
"Not secret and evident to whom besides yourself ? Do I need to wear a flaming aluminum foil hat to block the mind control rays if I am to understand this ?"
Maybe I should clarify, once again its NO SECRET that the U.S. toppled Iran's government to regain control of its oil fields. Again no one outside the twisted corridors of the Bush administration knows what their motivations are today. Its NO SECRET that energy companies are some of their biggest backers and beneficiaries. You may have heard there is a Supreme court case because environmental groups want to know which energy companies sat in Dick Cheney's office and helped him write the Energy bill still grinding through Congress.
"You, on the other hand, believe political support of special intersts is proof a vast 50-year old conspiracy by Republicans, involving the CIA, to take over all of the oil fields in the world."
Once again, please stop putting words in my mouth. I never said anything remotely resembling "50-year old conspiracy by Republicans". I just pointed out that its been done at least once, its been verified by one of the CIA's own, and I know that chaps your ass since you are trying to claim I made all this up. Chances are good its being done again in Venezuela. Who knows in Iraq. Its such a mess I don't think anyone can figure out what's going on there, including the Bush administration. I'm certainly willing to speculate that is possible Iraq was done partially to control its oil fields or at least get them back on the market. I have no proof, excepting the Foreign Minister of Poland flat out said last summer they were in the coalition to get a piece of Iraq's oil business.
"Quit quoting google at me and tell me what basis your speculation in the original post has some basis."
t m
Sorry to keep bursting your unsubstantiated rhetoric with facts but you started the mud slinging. I'm just pointing out the fact the U.S. IS PUTTING bases all over Central Asia. I'll grant that the motivation for them is anyone's guess outside the corridors of the Pentagon. They may well be there to just fight Islamic fundamentalism but every news source I've found places emphasis on protection of oil and gas fields and pipelines. For example:
"To reduce reliance on Persian Gulf oil, the Bush Administration has sought to strengthen relations with other non-OPEC, oil-rich countries. In February, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited Kazakhstan, promising security assistance for Kazakhstan's oil pipelines and facilities on the Caspian Sea, where an estimated 7-9 billion barrels of oil were recently discovered (the largest oil discovery anywhere in 30 years). Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey just signed a U.S.-backed deal to build an oil pipeline to bring that oil to ports on the Mediterranean. The U.S. has military ties with each."
Afghanistan has been in play for over a decade as the site of a pipeline to get the huge gas reserves in Turkmenistan to the Indian ocean. The Taliban was problematic to the U.S. companies trying to build this pipeline (Unocal and Bridas). Last I heard the new regime and the presence of U.S. troops have enabled the start on this project after more than a decade of trying though most of Afghanistan is still pretty shaky for a big, expensive, project like this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2608713.s
If the U.S. has military bases sitting on your soil they have a massive influence on what your country does and doesn't do, especially if you are a little third world country with no military.
For example its pretty unlikely you are going to try and nationalize oil fields being developed by a U.S. company and you are going to think twice before you redirect the oil contracts to an American adversary. Its also a trip wire to prevent any of your neighbors from laying claim to your oil fields.
U.S. military bases are the ideal police force to protect the interests of U.S. oil companies before they invest billions of dollars to develop oil fields and build pipelines. They enable development that might not happen in unstable parts of the world otherwise. To be pedantic these troops aren't generally sitting on the oil fields but they are in easy striking distance.
"The US has made some poor foreign policy decisions in its 200+ yr history, of that there can be no doubt... but I feel it's outweighed by the good (WW1, WW2, Eastern Bloc/Communism)"
I'll give you WW2. Yes America's role in World War 2 was an immensely positive thing. Stop pretending like the world is eternally in America's debt because of it and America can do no wrong because for this 4 years it did something good. The British, Canadians, Indians, Free French, New Zealanders, Aussies, Chinese and the Russians and a whole bunch of othere were there too. Many of them sacrificed a lot more than the U.S. did. World War 2 made the U.S. an economic, miliary and political superpower because it was about the only nation on the planet the war didn't devastate. The U.S. has gotten its reward for WW2 about a hundred times over.
Its not entirely clear who was right and wrong in WW1. It was a bloody mess fought for massively stupid reasons. Every nation involved should be deeply ashamed. In the end it just rearranged a bunch of colonial empires and laid the foundation for World War II. What exactly did the U.S. do that is so deserving of praise, other than throw in some troops as cannon fodder at the last minute that tipped the balance in a stalemate being fought for no real obvious reason.
Eastern Bloc/Communism. Its certainly open to debate whether the U.S. involvement was a plus or minus. The U.S. effort to stop Communism lead to the installation of a large number of right wing dictatorships that were as bad or worse than their Communist counterparts. I know the U.S., especially, the Reagan Republicans, can't resist claiming credit for the collapse of the U.S.S.R, thats just the American way to take credit for everything, but you have to give credit to Gorbachev and Yeltsin first. The collapse of the U.S.S.R, like most of the Eastern Bloc countries, was led from within, thats the best way for regime change to happen, and the credit should go to the peoples of those nations who stuck there necks way out to make it happen, not the U.S. whose main contribution during the time was just massive defense spending mostly with borrowed money.
I didn't say it was necessarily a bad thing that the Neocons are planning for the day when oil reserves are exhausted. As I alluded and someone else emphasized it would be a whole lot smarter if all the money and people being squandered in Iraq were instead working on alternative energy sources so the never ending chess game being played over oil reserves would stop mattering.
"Don't make me laugh. That's just plain stupid. Have our military forces sit on oil fields in Central Asia? International militaristic blackmail doesn't work, no matter how powerful your military is. The Soviets learned that lesson really well."
2 09 -attack01.htm
Enough already. Look up your facts before you keep sharing your misinformed wisdom. The U.S. does have troops sitting in just about every Central Asian country already, many of them in full blown bases. The U.S. negotiated for and paid most of these countries for basing rights ostensibly to enable the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but its not like they are going to leave now that they are there:
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2002/020
Its not like they are there just because lots of new oil and gas fields are coming on line in Central Asia. These bases sit right on the underbelly of Russia and China so they are of strategic importance too.
Not sure I have the time to rebut every instance of you saying I'm full of shit but I may just because you are trying to make my post look like BS when it wasn't.
"WTF? No. That's revisionist bullshit. Well before PH the Japanese were into conquest, Indonesia we had little real interest in, we had internal sources for oil that were much cheaper."
m 13 73/is_12_50/ai_68147614/pg_2
Geez before you people keep saying I'm a full of shit do a simple google search. Its simple historical fact that Roosevelt did lay an oil embargo on Japan in an attempt to slow their aggression in China. It might not be the only reason for Pearl Harbor but it helped start the rapid deterioration in relations that ended in Pearl Harbor:
http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_
"On July 24th, the Japanese army, with the reluctant acquiescence of the Vichy government in France, occupied key positions throughout Indo-China. And on July 26th, President Roosevelt ordered the freezing of all Japanese assets in the United States and the placing of all petroleum exports to Japan under embargo subject to licence. The British and Dutch governments quickly followed suit. To this day the record is unclear as to whether the President realised the full implications of his actions. Some memoirs of his entourage indicate that he intended to use the licensing authority as a diplomatic weapon -- a tap to be turned on or off for bargaining purposes. But the freeze made it almost impossible for Japan to continue paying cash for oil as before. In any case, this was a victory for the hardliners in the administration -- Secretary of War Stimson, Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and Secretary of the Interior Ickes -- who had been pressing for an oil embargo for months in the belief that it would force Japan to its knees."
Guess I'll just chalk this up to that never ending American desire to pretend Pearl Harbor happened out of the blue and America didn't do anything to provoke it.
Well I'm tired of right wing wackos like you trying to paint it all as conspiracy theory and that I'm a wacko making it up. Everything historical I'm posting you can corroborate from historical sources. You're making out like I'm claiming this is some grand and secret conspiracy. Its not. Why, because its not particularly secret.
When the president is from a family whose business is oil, the vice president is the former CEO of the worlds largest oil field service company and the head of NSA is a former board member of Chevron there sure isn't any reason why the U.S. is going to do anything that might benefit America's oil companies. Bah, what a wacky conspiracy theory that is.
There is simply to much historical data on what the Eisenhower administration did in Iran for you to pretend like it didn't happen they way I've described it. Look up TPAJAX. There is a 200 page document written in 1954 by Donald Wilbur, one of the CIA agents involved, floating around that describes it in detail. Excerpts:
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/04
The goal at the top of the list of reasons for the CIA coup was:
"to cause the fall of the Mossadeq government.and bring to power a government which would reach an equitable oil settlement."
Anti communist hysteria was cited as a reason by the U.S. for the coup but the oil fields were the tangible thing the British and U.S. were after and got from the 1953 coup until the Shah was toppled in 1979.
I should add a correction to my previous post. On more research it appears British Petroleum did get some of its Iranian oil concession back after the coup. But it had 5 new American partners including the predecessors to Exxon, Mobil, Chevron and Texaco.
Another take on the coup though its from a left winger so I imagine you will dismiss it as conspiracy theory written by a wacko too:
http://www.globalpolicy.org/wtc/targets/2003/05
TPAJAX is the template for the U.S. compelling regime change to gain control of oil. The fact that the docs on it, written by the CIA, are now available sends your tin foil hat charges down in flames.
"I suspect that if the Army had shown a merciless Iron Hand in the immediate aftermath of the war -- shoot-on-sight curfews, round-ups, summary trials and executions -- we would have instilled a level of fear-based respect we don't have now, not to mention preservation of infrastructure and law and order."
I really hope you are just trolling. If so, good one. If you're not sorry to say it man but this is just sick. What's more sickening is some large percentage of Americans, mostly Republicans, probably think this would have been the way to go. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma sure seems to subscribe to your approach.
I hate to break it to you but 90+% of the Iraqi's are guilty of just about nothing but being unfortunate to have been born in the wrong place at the wrong time. What exactly have most of them done to you or the U.S. to justify this kind of scorched earth reprisal. I'm assuming you must have fallen for the Bush administration propaganda that Iraq was behind 9/11 and they were about to nuke American cities or fly drones over them spraying them with nerve gas or Anthrax. It was propaganda man. It wasn't true it was just BS a few people in the Bush administration used to whip up a war frenzy and sucker people in to supporting it. Unfortunately it worked because most people are dumb and gullible. A few percent of the Iraq population are complete dicks, a few percent of Americans are complete dicks. The rest of them are just people, like you and me, trying to get along in life. They really don't deserve to have the U.S. military rain death on them from above, or to be tortured, humiliated or killed for no reason.
You go down this road and you are no better than, or different from, the Nazi's.
"Let's see, the U.S. freed the Phillipines from a Spanish tyranny and rather than subsuming the islands, the U.S. eventually set them off on their own."
The U.S. did subsume the Phillipines for about 90 years. It wasn't until 1986 when Marcos was toppled and 1992 when the U.S. removed its huge military bases that it achieved something resembling real sovereignty.
Apparently you've never read the history of the initial American occupation of the Phillipines. The U.S.replaced Spanish tyranny with American tyranny.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."
Major Littleton W. T. Waller: How young?
Smith: Ten years and up.
--Exchange on October 1901, quote from the testimony at Smith's court martial by the New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902). General Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was popularly known as "Hell Roaring Jake" or "Howling Wilderness".
The civilian causalties as the U.S. fought the Phillipine insurgency was most probably in the hundreds of thousands.
"Most of the mideast prior to the actions of western oil companies were vaste wastelands traversed by ignorant nomads. The western oil companies discovered the oil, gave it value, and it then was stolen by the disgusting murderers that call themselves governments in the mideast."
Are you American, British or Israeli. Thank you for once again proving what an arrogant, imperialistic, bunch Westerners are. Some of the "murders that call themselves governments" are close friends of the Bush family and the best of allies of the U.S., the Saudi royal family, the Emir of Kuwait, etc. Either your respect the sovereignty of nations or you don't. If you think a western company can enter a country and take all its resources with little or no compensation to the country which owns the resources you are a blatant imperialist.
Mossadegh. The head of Iran the U.S. overthrew was Time "Man of the Year", fairly progressive, anti-communist and Truman wouldn't even consider overthrowing him, the Dulles brothers on the other hand could care less when there was a chance to seize control of Iran's oil for U.S. oil companies.
Not sure how well you are versed in history but Iraq sits on top of the cradle of civilization. There were great civilizations there when your Western ancestors were living in caves or sod huts and running around in animal skins.
The number system you use today, though possibly Indian in origin, was introduced to the West by Arabs. They have had rich civilizations, great empires, and some of the world's best scholars. There have been periods when Arab culture was far more advanced than Europe's.
Many of the misfortune's of the Arab world can be traced to military interventions from the West, including the Romans, the Crusades, British imperialism and now U.S. imperialism.
"The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself."
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Keep telling yourself that. Its simply not true. Chat with the average person in Iran, Guatemala, Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Dominican Republic, the Phillipines.
The Phillipines endured a brutal, genocidal occupation by the U.S. from the end of the Spanish American war up to World War II. After World War II the U.S. backs the massively corrupt rule of the Marcos regime. I'll post this same link I post everytime an American says how good they've been to the world:
http://www.isp.nwu.edu/~fprefect/politics/timel
Some parts of it are overdone and a stretch but it has all the names and dates for all the misery the U.S. has inflicted on the world in the last century which you can corroborate easily if you choose to not believe this source.
In 1953 Iranian Nationalists gained power at a time when the British were looting 88% of Iran's oil revenues. The Iranians demanded a more equitable deal and offered the British 25%. Blockeds and boycotts ensued. The British ran crying to the U.S. and Truman. Truman ignored them. When Eisenhower took power it happened the Dulles brothers, head of the CIA and Secretary of State were lawyers form Anglo-American oil. The Dulles brothers used the CIA to topple the Iranian government and installed the Shah of Iran, who was every bit as despotic as Saddam was as far as the secret police, torture and disappearing people went. Rather than giving the British their oil contracts back they were given to, you guessed it, American oil companies. The reason the U.S. Embassy in Tehran was seized was revenge for all the misery the U.S. inflicted on Iran under the Shah.
This also points out that the U.S. has in fact been using its military and intelligence power to win control of oil fields for American companies since World War II at least. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor because the U.S. was embargoing Japan's access to U.S. controlled oil fields in Indonesia.
To date control of oil fields has been primarily for the economic benefit of the seven sisters(the big oil companies formed from the break up of Standard Oil though there are a lot less than seven now thanks to mergers). They have immense influence in U.S. politics, especially on the Republican's. George H.W. Bush's main career before politics was at Zapata Oil which built off shore oil rigs and ships to do contract drilling for the big oil companies and many foreign governments. Its widely suspected Zapata was also a CIA front, since there ships tended to be parked just offshore of every hotspot in the world. Zapata is also a key factor in the closeness of the Bush family to the royal families in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Halliburton's oil operations closely resemble those of Zapata.
In the future as oil reserves start to run out strategic control of the oil fields will determine the economic winners and losers of this century at least until somebody comes to their senses and starts investing billions in developing alternative energy sources instead of fighting over the current fossil fuel sources.
China's oil consumption in particular is exploding at double digit annual percentage growth and its a contibutor to the current tight oil market. The Neocons are in fact looking ahead to when the day there isn't enough oil to meet demand. When that day comes they will look pretty smart when they have the U.S. military sitting in the middle of all the old oil fields in the Middle East and all the new ones in Central Asia. When that day comes some people will get the oil their economies need and some nations will go dark.
Another pretty good read is the New Yorker column on Copper Green:
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http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa
This SAP (Specal Access Program a.k.a Top Top Secret) was a highly successful program to kill, capture and use exceptional interrogation techniques, especially sexual humiliation tactics, against high value Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently there is an old book call "The Arab Mind" the neocons are using as their bible on how to interrogate Arabs.
Unfortunately Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone decided to apply the same techniques on taxi drivers in the prisons in Iraq. They went from using highly secure interrogation sites to a big insecure prison in the middle of Iraq. They went from using highly trained, disciplined and cleared special forces to do the interrogation to untrained, undisciplined Army reservists(ordinary people). The CIA was so disgusted with Rumsefeld and Cambone's efforts they withdrew, both because they knew the secrecy would be blown thanks to DOD sloppiness and they ethically objected in taking these extra legal tactics from use on top Al Qaeda, who probably deserve it, to Iraqi prisoners in a conventional war. The Army's own number suggest 60% of the Iraqi prisoners are wrongfully detained. The Red Cross thinks its more like 70-90%.
All indications are Rumsfeld, Myers, and Cambone are between a rock and a hard place, they either commit perjury in front of Congress by denying knowledge of this project or rat it out and commit treason by exposing a top secret project. George W. is the only one who can declassify the program so the people really responsible are held accountable and that appears to be Rumsfeld, Meyers and Cambone.
If this article is true, and it appears its sourced by people in the CIA and DOD who are exacting revenge on Rumsfeld and Cambone for there arrogance and stupidity then Rumsfeld is flat out lieing when he pretends like he didn't know about what was going on in Iraq and in fact ordered it. Its fundamentally wrong to charge a bunch of reservists, ordinary citizens, for following orders when they implemented this top secret program.