As some of you know, I pay a few bills by writing proprietary pieces for both From The Wilderness and Sanders Research Associates. These are paid sites, so I can’t immediately republish what I send them. But I am letting anyone who is interested know that they can subscribe, or check with someone who does.

The two latest are (1) “The Global Battlefield for FTW and (2) Phallic Judo for SRA. Below are two front-end excerpts:

THE GLOBAL BATTLEFIELD – WE ARE STANDING ON IT
The Evolution of the Bush-Rumsfeld War Doctrine

By Stan Goff

Money and Mediocrity

“General purpose money is what allows people to trade tracts of rain forest for Coca-Cola.”

-Alf Hornborg

It’s also what allows some of the most mediocre political and military intellects in the last century (and that is a highly competitive claim) to create one of the most dangerous and decisive historical conjunctures we may ever witness… and hopefully survive.

It appeared in the most arcane of headlines, this desperate new phase in the empire that had been gestating in the tense womb of the Pentagon-White House nexus.

“US military rethinking the two-war strategy”

It wasn’t actually the military as a whole reconsidering anything, we find upon reading the article. This is a leak from high-level Pentagon insiders to the press, and more than one insider. There is an artful rebellion taking place among generals.

The first line of the article reads: “The U.S. military, under stress from fighting in Iraq and protecting America from terrorism, is debating whether it can remain ready to fight two big wars at once, according to defense officials.” Further along, we find out that the “civilian and military officials, who asked not to be identified, confirmed a report in Tuesday’s New York Times that top Defense Department planners were challenging longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at once.”

Officials, plural. If the leak were a felony, like the Plame case, this would add conspiracy to the charge.

So what is going on, and why did this leak come at the same time that the Department of Defense published its strange and alarming “Strategy for Homeland Defense and Civil Support”? To answer that rhetorical question, I will have to go to the strategy document itself, hot off the presses… … … …

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PHALLIC JUDO

Stan Goff

It seems obligatory right now to write something about the London bombings. Right or left, how can one ignore a set of well-planned, coordinated attacks against the transportation infrastructure of a city that, along with Tel Aviv perhaps, has taken more security precautions against bombings than any metropolis in the world?

Nearly everything we have read over the last week has three common parts: a ritual denunciation of the bombers, an expression of sympathy for the victims, and a very circumspect analysis of some sort. If we are reading something from the left, the fourth part will be a comparison of the London casualties to the casualties of Anglo-American state terrorism. If we are reading something from the right, that fourth item will be a brave admonition not to “back down” in the face of terror.

Bold agendas and timid analyses are the twin characteristics that seem to unite both right and left commentary at this point. So I want to try something different. I want to analyze an agenda, in a recklessly hypothetical way – knowing full well that in a short time I could be proven enormously wrong by the emergence of unsupportive facts… though I doubt it, or I wouldn’t write it.

I want to examine the hypothetical agenda of Osama bin Laden, using gender as my point of departure. I think he has mastered a uniquely effective international art of war, which I will call “phallic judo… … …