On Commanding-in-Chief
Catastrophe: n.
1. A great, often sudden calamity.
2. A complete failure; a fiasco: The food was cold, the guests quarreled–the whole dinner was a catastrophe.
3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot.
4. A sudden violent change in the earth’s surface; a cataclysm.[Greek katastroph, an overturning, ruin, conclusion, from katastrephein, to ruin, undo : kata-, cata- + strephein, to turn.]
For years now, I have been accused by sisters and brothers from right to left of being “catastrophist.”
There is an energy crisis coming.
“Catastrophist.”
The housing bubble will devastate the economy.
“What housing bubble, catastrophist?”
The war in Southwest Asia constitutes a strategic defeat of the United States government, now tied down in a two-front war.
… … …
On the first two, I can pretty much rest my case.
As to closing the case on that last assertion about the war, the main obstacle is a Chinese Wall of twittering ignorance that defines American culture. American culture is trained by media monopolies; and for them, the war is an entertainment commodity.
For the time being, the war-commodity serves best as background for that quadrennial personality contest that we call the general election. That’s how this “commander-in-chief” issue is being used to bewilder the public about the war itself. In the seemingly endless horse-race analysis of the upcoming elections, we can’t escape the ersatz erudition of public opinion-makers on the subject of whether John McCain or Barack Obama will make a more suitable Commander-in-Chief. Every echo-chamber is attuned. The blogosphere is abuzz. The blanket has been thrown over the war, but this commander-in-chief thing has become the media Big Ten top-model competition of public affairs.
What we generally hear from the chattering classes on this topic seems to be intentionally clueless, so I feel impelled to do some of my own chattering. I should warn you that my chatter on this matter is… well, catastrophist.
Before laying out the argument, there are some assumptions smuggled into the info-media drivel that need correcting.
First assumption: Military service makes one more suitable for the position of commander-in-chief. This one is universally attractive not simply on account of the American idealization of all things military, but because so many liberals latched onto the highly-gendered and ultimately irrelevant “chickenhawk” criticism of George W. Bush. This critique of Bush, even coming from the left that should have known better, implicitly accepts the assumption that military service translates into suitability to be a President… since Congress long ago ceded its war-making prerogative to the executive branch, making every US president now a de facto independent warlord.
There is the de jure command given in the Constitution; but then there is the reality that Congress has not only ceded the authority, they won’t even cut the purse strings to an unpopular war like Iraq. So the position of commander-in-chief is not only real and powerful, it concentrates the consequential impact of military adventures on that one person.
Having military experience might afford that person some potential insight into the military; and having been involved in a war does provide the opportunity to learn something about war. I emphasize “potential,” because it is not frequently actualized. Plenty of people can serve in the military, and even participate in one capacity or another in war, and still not have enough sense to pound sand. Conversely, plenty of people who have no military experience can attend to the strategic (read: politico-economic) goals of conflict, and delegate the tactical details to the lumpen-intelligentsia of the armed forces officer corps.
John McCain flew airplanes and dropped bombs. The only thing he commanded was an instrument panel. He did that 23 times in combat, before he was shot down and captured by the same Vietnamese he had been bombing. Before that, he was injured in a ship fire aboard the USS Forrestal. He had some harrowing (not synonymous with heroic) experiences, but there is no historical evidence that suffering automatically leads to increased intelligence or even empathy for others who suffer.
Ulysses Grant was a real commander of armed forces and a mediocre commander-in-chief who followed closely on the heels of Abraham Lincoln - a lawyer and career politician who had zero direct military experience… but who did win the bloodiest war in history at that time by directing Grant and others.
Franklin Roosevelt steered the US through the greatest military conflagration in history - with no military experience of his own - bobbing and weaving to let other nations take the brunt of the war, and positioning the US to climb onto the heap of 48 million bodies as the globe’s newly predominant nation… a position the US has held to this day.
Not making any moral points here. Lincoln and Roosevelt were as ruthless and cynical as any chief executive. They succeeded, is all I’m saying, as commanders-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.
The hoopla about McCain’s suitability as commander-in-chief might make a bit more sense if he had spent a real career in the military and become a flag officer, I suppose. But Wesley Clark - a sycophant who rose through the ranks, like Colin Powell, as a successful bureaucrat - makes me hesitate to say even that.
The point is, the military is one arm of the state; and before a former military person can employ the military intelligently, he (they are all he’s so far) has to get hold of the fact that military outcomes are determined not in the local, tactical context, but by strategic-political factors. This is why the general analysis of the tactical trends and dispositions in Iraq right now are both deceptive and self-deceptive. Commentators are either not at liberty to or capable of explaining the macrotrends that define the boundaries of political (and therefore military) action in Southwest Asia… and the world.
One of the better ideas embodied in the Constitution of the United States is the idea that civilian authority should be in firm control of the military. (”Civilian” is also supposed to imply a sovereign people, and in money-run elections reported by ruling class media, there is no sovereign people.)
The reason for that rule is that history taught past generations that military leaders who are successful in war are often brutal as well as stupid - a winning combination when the goal is simply to tear things up using a vast technological advantage.
It’s the machismo… a synonym for brutal stupidity.
Military stewardship of nations has a disastrous historical record; which is why the media’s focus on this aspect of the presidency is not only off the mark with regard to John McCain. His own “service” - the real or the idealized - is largely irrelevant.
The media focus also cops to the most dangerous accomplishment of the Bush administration: the publicly-accepted idea of a “global war on terror.”
Smuggled assumption Two.
There is no such thing, of course. There is a war to control Southwest Asia and its strategic resources. The “global war on terror” (GWOT) is a legal pretext that apparently slipped right past all those fine lawyers in Congress.
What GWOT does is consolidate US executive control over both domestic and foreign policy, by redefining the entire planet as a battlefield. This “global battlespace” justifies actions that are only sanctioned by international law on the battlefield.
“The whole world” cannot be shoehorned into any definition of a “battlefield” embodied in international law on the issue of war. That’s one of several reasons the US won’t sign onto the International Criminal Court.
The GWOT is simply rhetorical cover for a naked political power-grab. And this suits a Democratic executive just as nicely as it does a Republican one… as Congress has demonstrated in its perpetuation by word and deed of the GWOT myth.
That is why - even though its not a sexy issue - debunking the GWOT assumption of a “global battlespace” is one of the most crucial debates we can have about the war… it goes way beyond just Iraq, and set the stage for Guantanamo, rendition, et al.
The lawyer running against McCain is play-acting at having missed this pretextual fiction, too; because he talks about winning this GWOT himself. That commits him whether he likes it or not.
That is why after he wins the Presidency, Barack Obama - our new commander-in-chief - will find himself becoming the Lyndon Johnson of Afghanistan… and the US will continue sending troops to die for control of strategic resources through his entire term.
Meanwhile, the world and the nation will grow poorer and meaner. It may even be during Obama’s first term that the debt ledge, public and private, snaps off (catastrophically). As the ledge plummets into the abyss with all of us tumbling behind, so his popularity will plunge down with us as inexorably as Bush’s has. The war didn’t destroy Bush’s ratings; losing it did.
Obama will not only be caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of Wall Street and a pissed-off public; he will be trying to win an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and Iraq. All he will do is shift the center of gravity from Iraq to Afghanistan, which is already shifting as the Taliban expands its power into the interstices of the current NATO occupation.
I know, I know. You’ve heard the media say Obama wants to leave Iraq. That’s because they don’t listen and don’t want you to.
Obama has never called for a withdrawal from Iraq. He talks the al-Qaeda-babble just as enthusiastically as Dick Cheney, in fact, and has called for a permanent US occupation of Iraq, linguistically disguised as “overwatch” with Special Operations on call.
Any withdrawals (that is, troop draw-downs) remains contingent on “the Iraqis.” This means the squabbling cliques inside the Green Zone, not most Iraqis.
The trigger for discontinuing the occupation, then, is the “government of Iraq” taking measures that they are unlikely to take, and over which the US has nearly no control… meaning these redeployment triggers will never be pulled.
This bait-and-switch worked for Bush, and it will work for Obama until our sheer exhaustion with the war and the domestic economic crisis force a change on the Obama administration.
Obama started his campaign for commander-in-chief with the easy - and false - critique that the Bush administration was killing the wrong people. It’s not Iraqis we need to kill, but Afghans. His popular deception is not that Iraq is responsible for 9-11. His implication is that Afghanistan did 9-11 because bin Laden was there.
Again, not true, but why let that hold you back. The Taliban government of Afghanistan tried to give the US Osama bin Laden before 9-11. Since the US had invasion plans on the table, they didn’t want to lose the bin Laden pretext, and they refused.
The attacks of 9-11-01 were conducted by 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese, and two citizens of the United Arab Emirates. No Afghans. No Iraqis.
Here is something that is true about Afghanistan though. Guerrilla war against outsiders has always succeeded there. And it is succeeding now against the US and NATO. The loss of a US perimeter base near the Pakistani border last week is just a foreshadowing of where the war there is headed. This is the war that Obama wants to fight?
Yet he seems to have trapped himself in it already. He says that Afghanistan is being lost because there are too many US troops tied down in Iraq.
Does he propose then that the current institutional trend lines in the military be maintained? More expensive recruitment and lower recruitment standards, falling morale, an unsustainable operations tempo, the reward of criminality and incompetence in the leadership, and reliance on $180,000-a-year mercenaries to take up the slack?
Obama claims that he is going to fight terrorism by attacking Afghans instead of Iraqis, as well as maintain an “overwatch” presence of tens of thousands of troops in Iraq. Where will the troops come from?
Well, he has stated that he wants to expand the ground forces by 93,000 (both Army and Marines).
Lyndon Johnson started out like this, nickel-diming, and eventually found himself with 500,000 American troops occupying Vietnam. Several years later, the last US troops were literally driven out of Vietnam at gunpoint. Johnson didn’t run that war; the war ran him.
That’s where Obama is headed right now; and for the record, that does not mean there is no difference between him and McCain, or that I am encouraging electoral abstinence. Those are red herrings.
It means the war has in many respects escaped the calculable control of the American state no matter who the President is.
Obama will be the next chief executive of the American state - a state by, for, and of the business class. That’s the job description. That business class depends on the larger economy which is materially dependent on massive and unceasing throughputs of fossil hydrocarbons. That same economy has been overrun by rentier capitalists who have driven the global economy over a cliff.
Competitors are on the horizon, China, Russia, India, Brazil… but mostly Western Europe. The war is one central drama in a multiply-determined crisis that also includes immanent food shortages, water famines, radical climate shifts, and the general decay of inter-class stability.
Obama did not inherit Bush’s war, except in the details. He inherited a business class’s war that was inevitable (though not in its present form).
The United States was going to reposition its international military after the Cold War in any case; the old disposition for “containing” the Soviet Union was obsolete after all. And given the most obvious of considerations, the place to seek permanent and fully operational military bases abroad was in Southwest Asia. That’s where the hydrocarbons are; and when you have the hydrocarbons, you have the competition on a nose ring.
Following through with this is Obama’s job after the election. (We get to participate in the elections for which wealth-selected candidate will be the CEO; but we are not, alas, on the board of directors.)
Obama is a very smart guy - a genuine intellectual - who has jumped through a rare political window of opportunity, but there’s a punji-pit on the other side.
Bush’s approval numbers are abysmal in the face of a four-sided crisis: a bursting bubble of fictional value, skyrocketing fuel prices, an interminable unpopular war, and the collapse of ecosystems. Bush (ahistorically) gets all the blame. That’s the window of opportunity.
Obama has also run a brilliant and even technically audacious campaign (his policy pronouncements are anything but audacious).
I suspect he is going to win, and win big.
In other circumstances, he might win to become a brilliant CEO for the business class, and even make enough of the rest of us comfortable enough to remain complacent. But he is inheriting problems that are already - as they have been for the Bush administration - supra-political, impermeable to intervention by the actually-existing political system in which we live. He is inheriting a complex and world-historic impasse for the world and the US state.
And he will be the commander-in-chief for the United States Armed Forces.
He has already committed himself to the emergent consensus of that system. Southwest Asia will be secured for the US, by military force if necessary; or there will be a phase shift in American economics and politics that will sideline the entire system (and consensus).
There is not a shred of evidence (except in the public’s ever-hopeful imagination) that he intends to be anything more or less than other commanders-in-chief. Like the others, he will bend the military to the emergencies of empire - that is, secure the continuity of the existing system.
Maybe McCain will win, and none of this will matter to Obama. It will go the same way for McCain, and worse still if he elects to vicariously relive the pre-capture glory days by ordering bombing runs over Qom. He’d be the commander-in-chief. He can do that as commander-in-chief. And Congress will not stop him. Neither will we.
The “antiwar movement” has always been more an anti-Bush movement and an anti-defeat movement (nudged along by competing leftist cadres without their own popular bases); and it has shown no ability to employ anything except 60s-70s tactics and techniques, even though the ruling class has long ago adapted to them.
Neither Congress nor the people-at-large will stop McCain or Obama from war-mongering.
That’s one reason there has been so much emotional investment in Obama’s change rhetoric. A general election (a new king) is the current limit of our cultural imagination and the limit of our collective political will.
This in no way means the system will continue along. It simply means that these creatures of the system will not be the agents of its undoing. The weeds have been in the wheat for quite some time now, but pulling the weeds will kill the wheat. The harvest has to come before we can winnow and start fresh.
Making McCain out a devil does not make Obama a rescuing angel. Obamas’s mature, articulate confidence is certainly reassuring after eight years of a Yalie frat-rat smirking in the foreground of serial disasters; but there is such a thing as misplaced confidence… even feigned confidence.
Obama’s foreign policy is likely to be warmed-over Brzezinski-ism; and it was Brzezinski who was the architect of the conditions that put the Taliban in power in Afghanistan in the first place.
Brzezinski, prardoxically, is warning Obama of exactly what’s been said here, citing the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.
“We have to be careful…” Brzezinski warns Obama,
“…not to overestimate the appeal of the democratic Afghan elite, because we run the risk that our military presence will gradually turn the Afghan population entirely against us.
“I realize that in an electoral campaign you don’t want to antagonize large groups which are highly motivated. This is a very dangerous period of time with very unpredictable consequences. You have three countries [Iran, Israel and the U.S.] doing a kind of death dance on the basis of confusion, division and fear.
“If we end up with war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, [and] Iran at the same time, can anyone see a more damaging prospect for America’s world role than that? That’s the fundamental foreign policy dilemma at the back of this election. A four-front war would get us involved for years . . . It would be the end of American predominance.”
In fact, a two-front war is already contributing to the same thing.
What’s a commander-in-chief to do?
Welcome to GWOT world. Want that catastrophe with one lump or two?
Guy Montag:
Stan,
Nice allusion to Matthew 13:26 “weeds in the wheat.” I guess us Episcopalians follow the same lectionary readings as you Methodists.
I spent a day last week helping to harvest a grain field. We started with the sickle, moved up to the sycthe, and ended with the horsedrawn sicklebar with binder. Spent the afternoon gathering the bundles into shocks to dry in the fields. Aterwards, I was beat! (I keep myself in decent shape, but I’m 43 now, not the 19 year old Ranger who could run sub-six minute miles). I was chagrined when the instructors and interns went out again for another five hours til dark to get the hay in before it rained.
What are your odds now on war with Iran? (I’ve bet a six-pack Iran is bombed before the end of the year). I remember you’ve been a bit skeptical in the past. But, after Fallon was fired, then the Air Force Chief of Staff, and the on-going “diplomacy” I’m feeling a bit of an apocolyptic mood in the air (not to mention peak oil, etc). I’ve half tongue-in-cheek said that war with Iran would give the citizens someone to blame besides the politicans for the economy going down the tubes and oil prices up.
Things aren’t looking real good for the world my 3 and 6 year old children will inherit.
Guy Montag, Engine Co. 451
21 July 2008, 8:56 pmRobert Karaffa:
Perfect analysis. Timely reference to the wheat and weeds as well.
21 July 2008, 10:01 pmStan:
The downside of this piece is that I left the situation hanging — a sure way to lead people into despair and inaction.
The upside is that even though we exercise our influence on elections after a pretty thorough ruling class vetting, we do have other things to do for your two kids. Most of it falls under the category of relocalization.
Hey, Methodists and Episcopalians are in the same family tree.
22 July 2008, 8:43 amMichael Anderson:
Great piece of analysis….sometimes you have to let it hang (at least as a literary device) to get people thinking. I do feel sorry for folks in large cities, though. We are in the process of relocalizing (to a smaller area), and something it might be good to address is, as Greg Palast put it and I like to think about it; “American small-town small-mindedness”. How do we keep localized, patriarchal-feudal power structures from springing up that mimic the larger ones? Smaller scale may help, but it would be good to anticipate problems before they happen, perhaps?
22 July 2008, 2:04 pmStan:
Indeed. Past is not necessarily prologue, at least we can hope.
The three main philosophical currents I see out there are (classical) liberalism, marxism (not here but elsewhere during the 20 C and still influencing the left heavily), and romanticism (a holdover from the 18/19 C). Each has its problems, because none is well-adapted to the present.
Liberalism’s abstraction underwrites the dissolution of community and tends toward self-destruction that way. Marxism’s scientism, technological optimism, and centralism has been undermined by ecological science. And romanticism’s idealized nostalgia has a penchant for becoming reactionary.
We need to invent something new that accentuates the positives and eliminates the negatives. Growing a new agrarian movement that is intentional about anti-sexism and anti-racism is pretty central, I’d say. And moving into that niche in force with a vision of community-first-last-always is the best way to guard against survivalist adventurism.
22 July 2008, 4:47 pmCharles:
Good essay, Stan
Gotta say I fear that _if_ Barry wins, he’ll be in the trap you describe. For one thing, when he first started running, he wasn’t likely to think that he could really win. So, he probably doesn’t have a plan for avoiding the problems you describe…if he wins.
On the other hand, _somebody_ is going to be President, and to a certain extent, it is merely a robot position. No matter whose in it, they will function generally in the way you describe. If it is possible to do anything good in the position, I’d say of the two possible winners, Barry is more likely to do what tiny bit of good is possible, say a mild bolstering of domestic social programs. Also, he might function as an opposite of Reagan. That is, nurturing a new political _left_ instead of right, spirit, particularly in youth, that might make some changes in the longer run. The whole issue of so many Whites voting for a Black candidate for Pres is the most progressive aspect of the whole thing, as it is a progressive change among tens of millions, and it will take a change among the tens of millions to change the US state. Obama does say ” change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up”. There’s a chance he’s sincere about that, and would seek to rally “the bottom” to make him and the Congress at the top do better things. Maybe. Of course, part of the problem is that the American masses are not exactly progressive.
I think Obama’s background indicates he is personally more progressive than anybody who has gotten this far. As you imply, this won’t make any difference unless tens of millions somehow get militant and active. But if the masses were to activate, it would be better to have O in office than others.
When you think about it it’s not impossible. Consider that FDR ( and Lincoln) responded progressively to left mass shifts.
I don’t mean to be Pollyanish here. In the main, your dire forecast seems the more likely outcome. But O gives a tiny, tiny bit of hope. Really tiny.
C’est la vie. C’est la guerre.
Hey my grandfather was an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister, ( Get this: he was the General Secretary of the church; where have you heard that title before ? smile) uniting Methodists and Episcopalians, sort of .
22 July 2008, 4:53 pmMichael Anderson:
woo-Hoo! Almost forgot….one good hurricane! Admittedly I had put this one on the back burner, mentally.
From OGJ:
http://www.ogj.com/display_article/334962/7/ARTCL/none/none/MARKET-WATCH:-Tropical-storm-lifts-crude-futures-prices/?dcmp=OGJ.Daily.Update
22 July 2008, 5:12 pmStan:
A correspondent sent this along: ACRES USA.
http://www.acresusa.com/magazines/magazine.htm
I’d also recommend the Organic Consumers Association.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/
Only here might we start with Obama and the war, and end up talking about food. (:
I’m reading The Essential Agrarian Reader (highly recommended), wherein Norman Wirzba boils down the postmodernism that De an d I have critiqued on the gender front more than once… can’t resist this quote:
Said it before, and I’ll say it again. Pomo has been absorbed into the unacknowledged “metanarrative” … capitalism.
Getting back to Obama and war, here is Pepe Escobar’s latest on how the war is spreading right now into nuclear-armed Paklistan (note: the deeply corrupt Indian government is facing a severe political challenge from the ‘lower’ classes).
FULL
India background (six parts from a couple of years back):
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/072706_india_stage.shtml
23 July 2008, 4:38 amhttp://www.copvcia.com/free/ww3/080406_india_stage2.shtml
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/081406_india_stage3.shtml
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/092806_india_stage6.shtml
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/091506_india_stage5.php
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/members/092806_india_stage6.shtml
DeAnander:
it always comes back to food. how can it be otherwise?
for one thing, divorcing people from their food security is a primary weapon of colonisation and of control of labour — second to outright immediate murder, that is. when the only way you can eat is by spending money, and the only way you can get money is to work for a boss, you become de facto the slave of the boss class — they get to say whether you eat. socialist interventions like welfare, religious interventions like charity and soup kitchens, try to mitigate this institution of money-slavery but are themselves trapped in the money nexus because they themselves can only obtain food (to feed the poor) by spending money. when they stray too close to the real roots of the problem, by advocating land reform, squatting, guerrilla farming etc — then people get arrested or shot.
whenever we get to talking about justice or freedom, food is (so to speak) on the table; justice and freedom can be understood very tangibly in terms of who gets to eat, whether they get enough to eat, what they get to eat, and who gets to say whether they eat or not, what food is available to them, etc.
as Orlov points out, both the Soviet industrial elite and the N American industrial elite moved as fast as they could to eliminate the independent small farmer from the landscape. the reasoning was the same in both cases, I suspect: the small farmer was the person best positioned to defy or ignore the authority of the State/Bosses, having local food security. Russia was vastly productive (agriculturally that is) before the forced collectivisations; productivity declined sharply after industrialisation, but control of the population was “improved.” food scarcity is not always a misfortune if your real interest is in the maintenance of authority; if anything, food scarcity is a good thing for authoritarians, so long as they can dole out just enough from centralised stores to prevent outright chaos. ill-fed people can be kept just anxious and fatigued enough to refrain from rebellion, just alive enough to work, not quite desperate enough to revolt… certainly the rationing regime inflicted by the US blockade only helped to consolidate the power of the Hussein clan in Iraq… and we could probably think of many other examples where a government maintains its power by being “the hand that feeds you” and therefore unbitten.
Amartya Sen documented years ago that the smallholding farm (small scale family-tended polyculture) is more productive of food per hectare than the large plantation (of which industrial ag is the horrific logical conclusion — a prison camp for plants and animals). what industrial farming is productive of is control — of the food supply, of the land, of the population. under capitalism, money is just an expression of control… when farming produces money rather than food, it’s producing control rather than food.
never forget that one of the US objectives in Iraq was/is to destroy Iraqi agriculture, eliminate the local cultivars and replace them with patented GM seed — to make Iraqi farmers dependent on US/UK authority for seed and hence for food. to make their fields grow control, rather than food.
sometimes I think if I could go back and remove just one person from the stream of history it might be Justus von Liebig
but he in turn was only one more tip of the giant iceberg of the New Improved Patriarchy ushered in by the Industrial Revolution. the reductionism, the machine metaphor, and the perennial masculinist fantasy of total control and domination of life itself (starting with women and reproduction and generalising from there?), all were there like bacteria in a nutrient solution, slumbering memes like algae just waiting for hypernutrition to encourage a catastrophic bloom. along comes fossil fuel and the explosion in chemical tinkering, and now we have the hypernutrition and the algal bloom is on… running its course to full blown hypoxia and generalised die-off, unless we find some way to intervene.
it’s always about food. “civilisation” requires the destruction of food chains. the destruction of food chains topples civilisations.
sorry, I’m raving a bit — a lot of synthesis happening from various powerful books recently read. more later. but there’s no way to get away from food. 10 calories of fossil fuel for every calorie of “food” produced by the US agribiz nexus… to continue producing food in this way implies permanent occupation of Iraq and much of Central Asia now, and absolute certainty of collapse w/in a few decades at most. whether this is more, or less, central to the agenda than the USians’ attachment to their SUVs and cheap air travel is an open question. emotionally, people may be more attached to the cars and planes. but in terms of social stability, as has been pointed out by critics more astute than myself, we are about nine meals away from anarchy. Obama may very well have “no choice” about continuing the occupation of Iraq if he wants to continue putting food on the table in the way that it is presently done — a way that produces more money and control than food, and benefits primarily the finance capitalist and industrialist rather than the farmer, the eater, the plants, or the soil.
23 July 2008, 6:21 pmm.c.:
Digging around amongst the Univ. Chicago cadre of foreign policy strategists I came across Andrew Marshall{born 1921, grad. econ. degree Chicago, worked for the Rand Corp. first in 1949}, the first and only director of the DoD’s Office of Net Assessment, ONA(their in-house think tank) since 1973. Among his proteges according to wiki are Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby(who was Cheney’s Natl. Security Advisor as well as Chief of Staff) & Khalilzad. Nothing to suggest that he didn’t know Wohlstetter, Friedman and Strauss….
23 July 2008, 8:41 pmStan:
As Gareth Porter points out in AT, when you set aside the justificatory rhetoric, the goal in Afghanistan/Iraq has always been simple and consistent: permanent bases.
This is not some moral (or by inference, immoral) decsion, but an inescapable necessity from the point of view of the US state. Not the Republican state, the US state.
If the US loses access to foreign oil, that state will lose its ability to rule. The biggest consumer of oil is — alas — the US military. It’s an iatrogenic process, or carcinogenic… you choose the metaphor you like best.
The US state will not surrender its rule first, then fail to deliver services that keep sectors of the US economy and population afloat. It will, and has (Katrina, eg), surrendered its service component, with the weakest weeded out first (while derivatives traders are bailed out). Inevitably, abject dependence of the domestic population will be combined with naked violence to keep things in order… as we see now in Iraq/Afghanistan (the same war).
Obama is not capable of resolving this; because the US state is incapable of resolving it.
26 July 2008, 5:31 amGuy Montag:
Stan,
Isn’t the way to go combining relocalization & agrarianism (latest buzzword for the old idea of the traditional anarchists like Kropotkin or Tolstoy or Wendell Berry) with church? How about a “post-carbon church” or a “permachurch.”
The “emergent church” movement seems to have some potential. I noticed that the “Church Basement Roadshow” featuring three emergent leaders will be at the New Community Church in Raleigh 7PM Wed July 30.
26 July 2008, 8:11 pmThese guys are definitely “God-Botherers”. Worth checking out.
Stan:
Don’t know that I’ll be able to catch the CBR in Raleigh; and I’m not familiar with it. It says “three forty-year-old guys” acting like olde tyme evangelists. Might be a bit gimmicky for me; but if it shift the focus of Christianity back to the mission embodied in the Beatitudes, then I’m fer it. First question that pops into my head is where are the women.
I definitely don’t believe Berry, Tolstoy and Kropotkin are the same, except that they each are suspicious of the state. Kropotkin preached enemization (something want to explore much more deeply at some point with regard to Marxism and feminism, too… enemization is Masculine); and the practico-ideological basis of Jesus’ mission was love… of neighbor (the one nearby) and enemy (holding out the possibility of redemption).
I don’t thing the new agrarianism constantly suggested by Berry and explicated by Wirzba (and Susan Witt, and Vandana Shiva, and Herman Daly, and Barbarta Kingsolver, etc etc) is a recycling of past idealisms. That was my point about romanticism. It wants to go back; but time’s arrow heads in only one direction (there’s that Second Law of Thermodynamics again). There are techniques that can be re-employed from the past; but a planet with almost 7 billion humans and nuclear weapons and the internet is not the same as Tolstoy’s world.
Not even genetically. Yesterday I heard a radio program that pointed out how the enumeration of cells that make up a human comes to 10 (to the 13th). The number of bacterial cells that reside in and also constitute the human body’s biome is 10 (to the 14th). In numbers, we are 90% “germs.” Many of these bacteria actually “turn on” various human genes within certain developmental windows. So a suburban American, who has lived in an environment defined by “war on germs” is not even genetically the same as someone who grew up on a peasant farm.
Relocalization, by definition, is anti-reactionary, because it cannot be developed successfully wihtout taking into account the actual local conditions. For me, that’s not Tolstoy’s or Kropotkin’s Russia; and it’s not even Berry’s rural Kentucky. Ethically, for me, it must bend toward feminism, and do so intentionally. I’ll riff elsewhere on the “effeminate Jesus” who most directly undermined a masculinity constructed as domination, as well as why the failure to recognize and deal with male power creates the ultimate hidden default that inevitably leads back to domination systems.
Wirzba writes:
(italics added)
27 July 2008, 6:50 amStan:
Reading on in this Wirzba essay (included in The Essential Agrarian Reader), he talks about “wisdom” and the age:
The extended quote beyond this is so rich in insight that I am posting it as an free-standing thread here. Please reply to this thread there, and not here, so the Obama & war subject might slip back in.
28 July 2008, 6:54 amTimothy R. Anderson:
It will not be in President Bush’s day today to comment publicly
on the bombings in Iraq TODAY.
That’s the Bush way of being Commander-In-Chief !
Timothy R. Anderson
28 July 2008, 12:17 pmRhisiart Gwilym:
Siwmae Stan,
Great post. Your stuff always helps me to get clearer my perceptions about what’s happening in the US and in its imperial wars. I never had any illusions about Obama’s ultimate trajectory, but your deeper knowledge fills in the blanks for me.
A few comments:
1) Concerning GWOT: I prefer the alternative descriptive title ‘The War Against Terror’, because it produces a more suitably ridiculous acronym. Don’t know if you have the word in American, but in British it means: 1) Slang word for human female exterior genitalia; 2) An utter, utter idiot.
Sexist denigration of a most noble and necessary human organ, I admit. But a universally known and used word in British English, and not about to go out of fashion in its perjorative usage. Pretty apt, it seems to me.
2) “In numbers, we are 90% “germs.” Many of these bacteria actually “turn on” various human genes within certain developmental windows. So a suburban American, who has lived in an environment defined by “war on germs” is not even genetically the same as someone who grew up on a peasant farm.”
That’s one of your keepers, Stan. Especially the first sentence: a modern aphorism!
3) De has it right, I suspect: Nine meals away from anarchy is a shorter fuse than energy hypercrisis by 2012. That’s why I’m kulaking away feverishly on my guerrilla miniperma these sweltering summer days. Perhaps due to an Irish strand in my ancestry — fanciful thought, but who knows what patrimonic morphogenesis may be operating — my potato crop is looking good. The aim is to have enough tubers clamped in the traditional way this Autumn to supply me with at least two pounds a day average right through to next year’s harvest, plus surplus spuds to aid partner, friends, neighbours, etc. Other crops for this year looking good too. First shot at Fukuoka-method winter grain sowing soon this year.
Either way, whether food crisis or energy crisis comes first, you’re right, I think, that Oceania has a hopeless war on its hands in SW Asia. Will the last US troops leave by helicopter from the roof of the US ‘embassy’ (read ‘vice-regal palace’) in the Green Zone, in a replay of the departure from Saigon? Or will they just have to surrender to Arab insurgents because all the bases are out of food and no supply lines are left functioning? Looks as if one way or another it will drag down to an ultimate USukis defeat, anyway. With how many brown people genocided by then, I wonder. The number must be well towards two million already. And after the US imperial corpocracy finally loses any grip it still has on the Caspian-Hormuz Sweetoil Corridor, what happens to metropolitan Oceania then? Even Dmitri O. could well be underplaying how bad it will be. Relocalisation with a historic vengeance, no doubt, then. Will the States even stay United?
3) About that new eclectic: Ran Prieur, John Michael Greer, and lots of other ‘impractical dreamers’, even including this fool (hah! See my scars and welder-burns. See my calloused hands. See all those practical, WORKING things that I’ve made. ‘Impractical’ indeed….!) are dreaming constantly of new combinations of ancient, modern, and still-to-be-invented. Seems to me that, the now-unavoidable catastrophes (plural) notwithstanding, this will be a great flowering time of buoyant human inventiveness and sheer creativity; perforce, even “In the Hollow of the Deep Sea Wave”.
4) “The attacks of 9-11-01 were conducted by 15 Saudis, one Egyptian, one Lebanese, and two citizens of the United Arab Emirates. No Afghans. No Iraqis.”
Right statement as far as it goes, Stan. But there’s more to add, isn’t there:
“These brown men were, of course, no more than pawns: decoys and/or patsies and/or double-bluffed suckers; those of them who were there at all, and not somewhere else entirely, having their identities hijacked. And they weren’t the true architects and managers of the atrocities, of course. That part was done by the controlling conspirators, who were — and are — members of the USAmerican ‘elites’. (Identities not yet known with certainty, though Cheney and General Richard Myers are two prime suspects)”
As part of the grim rite of passage through which the US must go, willy nilly, over the next decade or so under the compulsion of geophysical imperatives, facing that excruciating (for many Westerners) truth is a necessary catharsis. No reunification of the Western schizophrenia until it’s faced.
We — some of the citizen journalists posting to Medialens in Britain and to Mediabite in Eire — have a soundly-moderated conversation (strictly good science and sound reasoning; no red-herring-and-strawman chop-logic tolerated) about that matter started up on Mediabite’s Message Board. Worth a look. More coming soon.
Power to you arms Stan, De and all posting here!
Hwyl fawr, Rhisiart G
28 July 2008, 1:05 pmPaul Appell:
As an Obama supporter and someone whose entire entire income(except for my time in the Army) has come from farming, I offer this view. I just finished our wheat harvest a couple weeks ago here in central IL. Right behind the combine we followed with the drill planting soybeans. In our part of the country double cropping is sucessful less than half the time. The high price of soybeans and the hope of a good crop prompted me to do this. My support of Obama is similiar. I am under no illusion that he will end all wars etc. Chances for success may well be less than with the soybeans, but that is my mindset. I have only personally talked with Obama once, but I feel he is the best to go with at this time and I like his empathy.
29 July 2008, 7:53 amI am not happy about the state of the world that my grandkids are going to get. I take solace in knowing that no matter how bad it gets, I can always provide them with food and shelter here on the farm.
I got to get going for my morning run. Yea, I know this is also considered a misdirected effort by some as I am never going to be an Olympian like my good friend Tim Broe who was out Sunday. But just like former world record holder in the marathon, Steve Jones , who was out to the farm a few weeks ago, I still run. I also still support less than ideal candidates because for me in my small pond it makes life liveable.
Charles:
Obama is not capable of resolving this; because the US state is incapable of resolving it.
^^^
29 July 2008, 4:09 pmCB: This is correct. Obama’s campaign has only reform potential, not revolutionary potential.
Charles:
One of the prerequisites of wage labor, and one of the historic conditions for capital, is free labor and the exchange of free labor against money, in order to reproduce money and to convert it into values, in order to be consumed by money, not as use value for enjoyment, but as use value for money. Another prerequisite is the separation of free labor from the objective conditions of its realization — from the means and material of labor. This means above all that the workers must be separated from the land, which functions as his natural laboratory. This means the dissolution both of free petty landownership and of communal landed property, based on the oriental commune.
STAN: Oriental commune?
29 July 2008, 4:10 pmCharles:
_his_ natural laboratory ?
30 July 2008, 1:12 pmLisa:
Excellent and important interview
Nick Turse interviewed by RealNews.com
http://www.tomdispatch.com/p/tdvideo/turse07252008
30 July 2008, 6:05 pmLisa:
The Military-Industrial Complex
It’s Much Later Than You Think
By Chalmers Johnson
http://tomdispatch.com/post/174959/chalmers_johnson_warning_mercenaries_at_work
30 July 2008, 6:06 pmDave:
Stan, it has been really interesting and enlightening to follow your intellectual and analytical journey through your writing these past several years. I sense an evolution in your perspectives that I recognize from my own journey but compressed, or accelerated. As the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq was a trigger event for many of us old guys from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War of the 70’s, I have found myself revisiting my thoughts and understandings from those days and how that relates to my understanding of today. In so doing I find the parallels between our thinking.
What you touch on, a bit in the article and more fully in these comments, reflects an insight I first discovered in the writing of Ed Abbey. I think Ed, more than any of my mentors-never-met, helped me understand the circular futility of all the “isms” and “ists” of the industrial and post-industrial era. They are each and every one founded on the faulty premise of inexhaustible resources and most posit perpetual growth which Ed notes is “the philosophy of the cancer cell.”
It is encouraging to find you arrive at the conclusion that a reinvention (evolution is perhaps a better word) of human society is the job; not reform of political systems - or at least that is what I perceive you to have concluded.
From Grace Lee Boggs to S. Brian Wilson, more and more long term activists have arrived at this juncture. It is about community in a sense that the women and men of Chiapas understand a hell of a lot better than most in this country do.
You note that there are many lessons of the past that need relearning for life today and I agree. Most of those lessons, I assert, are tied to place as much as anything and hence the lessons of the indigenous, first, people are often some of the most important as nowhere have subsequent cultures understood place better, most horribly worse. The world today is full of 7 billion humans. That cannot be sustained, quite obviously. But, as (if?) the species finds ways to persist past the looming calamities you see, and that I see as well, the understanding of place will become critical. Communities based on “place” are the means of perpetuating the species, at least that is how I see it.
31 July 2008, 7:10 pmLisa:
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/intelligence_guidance_conflict_south_ossetia
Red Alert Intelligence Guidance: The Conflict in South Ossetia
Stratfor Today » August 8, 2008 | 1737 GMT
Editor’s Note: The following is an internal Stratfor document produced to provide high-level guidance to our analysts. This document is not a forecast, but rather a series of guidelines for understanding and evaluating events, as well as suggestions on areas for focus.
Given the speed with which the Russians reacted to Georgia’s incursion into South Ossetia, Moscow was clearly ready to intervene. We suspect the Georgians were set up for this in some way, but at this point the buildup to the conflict no longer matters. What matters is the message that Russia is sending to the West.
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev summed this message up best: “Historically Russia has been, and will continue to be, a guarantor of security for peoples of the Caucasus.”
Strategically, we said Russia would respond to Kosovo’s independence, and they have. Russia is now declaring the Caucasus to be part of its sphere of influence. We have spoken for months of how Russia would find a window of opportunity to redefine the region. This is happening now.
All too familiar with the sight of Russian tanks, the Baltic countries are terrified of what they face in the long run, and they should be. This is the first major Russian intervention since the fall of the Soviet Union. Yes, Russia has been involved elsewhere. Yes, Russia has fought. But this is on a new order of confidence and indifference to general opinion. We will look at this as a defining moment.
The most important reaction will not be in the United States or Western Europe. It is the reaction in the former Soviet states that matters most right now. That is the real audience for this. Watch the reaction of Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Nagorno-Karabakh and the Balts. How will Russia’s moves affect them psychologically?
The Russians hold a trump card with the Americans: Iran. They can flood Iran with weapons at will. The main U.S. counter is in Ukraine and Central Asia, but is not nearly as painful.
Tactically, there is only one issue: Will the Russians attack Georgia on the ground? If they are going to, the Russians have likely made that decision days ago.
Focus on whether Russia invades Georgia proper. Then watch the former Soviet states. The United States and Germany
9 August 2008, 1:29 amStan:
Bear in mind when reading Stratfor that is is a collection of ex-CIA types. Bring the salt.
9 August 2008, 6:01 amLisa:
South Ossetia: The War has Begun!
9 August 2008, 12:53 pmby Andrei Areshev
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9772
——————————
Russia says Georgian forces expelled from South Ossetian capital
RIA Novosti
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9776
——————————
South Ossetia under Georgian attack
Global Research, August 8, 2008
rbc.ru
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9771
—————————–
South Ossetia says over 1,000 dead after Georgian attack
Global Research, August 8, 2008
RIA Novosti
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=9773
Timothy R. Anderson:
And another thing about being Commander-In-Chief. If I, militarily
intellectually challenged though I am, was Commander-In-Chief I would not rest well knowing that the folks I is commanding is still, in 2008, participating in a war that began in October 2001 ( Afghanistan ) and a war that began in March 2003 ( Iraq ). Nay,
I would not rest ! So if anyone asks what’s the big deal about
Commander-In-Chief Bush’s lack of competency anyway ? That ’s my
answer ! And if persons still don’t ” get” what I’m attempting to
be communicating to them, I suggest that they listen to
The Stone Roses ‘ song called ” How Do You Sleep ”
Timothy R. Anderson
9 August 2008, 1:06 pmLisa:
NATO encouraged Georgia – Russian envoyDmitry Rogozin, Russia’s envoy to NATO (AFP Photo / Alexander Nemenov)
August 9, 2008, 4:36
NATO encouraged Georgia – Russian envoy
Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, has sent an official note to representatives of all member countries in Brussels in connection with Georgia’s military actions against South Ossetia. He’s calling on them not to support Mikhail Saakashvili.
“Russia has already begun consultations with the ambassadors of the NATO countries and consultations with NATO military representatives will be held tomorrow,” Rogozin said. “We will caution them against continuing to further support of Saakashvili.”
Rogozin says Georgian aggression against South Ossetia is obvious.
“It is an undisguised aggression accompanied by a mass propaganda war,” he said.
Rogozin has linked Friday’s onslaught to the support given to Saakashvili at the recent NATO summit in Bucharest. At the meeting, Rogozin says, it “was hinted Georgia has prospects in NATO.”
South Ossetia close to humanitarian disaster – Russian FM
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says he hopes Georgia’s Western partners take note of what has happened in South Ossetia and draw conclusions.
“It all confirms our numerous warnings addressed to the international community that it is necessary to pay attention to massive arms purchasing by Georgia during several years. Now we see how these arms and Georgian special troops who had been trained by foreign specialists are used,” he said.
The FM also accused the Georgian authorities of ignoring the UN Security Council’s call to observe a ceasefire during the Olympic Games in Beijing
Full article:
http://russiatoday.com/news/news/28660
9 August 2008, 6:04 pmLisa:
South Ossetia: Inside Georgia but dependent on Russia
By The Irish Times
09/08/08 “The Irish Times’ — South Ossetia is a territory of around 4,000sq km (1,544sq mls), situated about 100km north of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, on the southern slopes of the Caucasus mountains.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s spurred a separatist movement in South Ossetia, which had always felt more affinity with Russia than with Georgia.
It broke away from Georgian rule in a war in 1991-92, in which several thousand people died, and continues to maintain close ties with the neighbouring Russian region of North Ossetia, on the north side of the Caucasus.
The majority of the roughly 70,000 people are ethnically distinct from Georgians, and speak their own language, related to Farsi.
Full article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20466.htm
9 August 2008, 6:08 pmLisa:
War between Russia and Georgia orchestrated from USA
By Pravda
09/08/08 “Pravda” — The US administration urged for an immediate cease-fire in the conflict between Russia and Georgia over the unrecognized republic of South Ossetia.
In the meantime, Russian officials believe that it was the USA that orchestrated the current conflict. The chairman of the State Duma Committee for Security, Vladimir Vasilyev, believes that the current conflict is South Ossetia is very reminiscent to the wars in Iraq and Kosovo.
“The things that were happening in Kosovo, the things that were happening in Iraq – we are now following the same path. The further the situation unfolds, the more the world will understand that Georgia would never be able to do all this without America. South Ossetian defense officials used to make statements about imminent aggression from Georgia, but the latter denied everything, whereas the US Department of State released no comments on the matter. In essence, they have prepared the force, which destroys everything in South Ossetia, attacks civilians and hospitals. They are responsible for this. The world community will learn about it,” the official said.
Full article:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20469.htm
9 August 2008, 6:10 pmLisa:
Georgia: oil, neocons, cold war and our credibility
by Jerome a Paris
Sun Aug 10th, 2008 at 05:08:31 AM EST
Just as a bit of background, let me state here for the record that I wrote my PhD on the independence of Ukraine, and have thus studied how Russia behaves with its neighbors rather intensively. Following that, I worked for several years financing oil&gas projects in Russia and the Caspian; in particular, I worked on te financing of the BTC pipeline that goes from Azerbaijan to Turkey via Georgia (I wrote about it on DailyKos 3 years ago). Oil companies don’t need the money: what they want is for other parties like banks to share the political risks associated with their projects. Which means that in turn, the job of a banker working on these projects is to understand those political risks. And it is quite obvious that the relationship between Russia and the Caucasus countries, including Georgia, was at the heart of my work.
Full article:
http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2008/8/9/102157/8633
10 August 2008, 2:40 pmLisa:
The warmongers have lost yet another war
by Jerome a Paris
Sun Aug 10, 2008 at 05:04:06 AM PDT
Neocons are people that see danger everywhere and seem to crave military solutions in all cases. They endlessly blather about how we need to stand firm against bullies or other threats (Russia being near the top of the list), and protect our brave allies on the front lines, and along with them, democracy, freedom and our honor. They mock cowardly European who think appeasement (read - any diplomacy) might have a chance. They fuel conflicts and perpetually tout military options.
And yet, whenever given the opportunity to stand up to their words (and sent other people to fight, of course, they don’t do that themselves), the results are surprisingly poor.
After the catastrophic invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the neocons have just lost a third war, in Georgia.
Full article:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/8/10/73347/0903/840/565639
10 August 2008, 2:41 pmm.c.:
In addition to Albert Wohlstetter, there were people like Hyman Rickover(he took history & psychology courses at the Univ. Chicago). The Straussian idea of having complex technological systems like nuclear weapons & energy is that it requires a level of technocrats/bureaucrats who the elected political leadership must increasingly rely upon, in addition to a large corporate logistical support system. Wind & Solar energy undercut this. How complex is a wind turbine? High school level? Think also of the ramifications to the plebian workers in movies like Silkwood. Jimmy Carter got his start working for Rickover by the way.
10 August 2008, 3:15 pmLisa:
Georgia: Vladimir Putin leads from front to send US a bullish message
The fighting in Georgia has answered the question that world leaders have been asking since Vladimir Putin stepped down as President this year: who runs Russia?
…The Kremlin’s opposition to Washington’s plans and its new-found self-assertiveness were two key traits of Mr Putin’s eight-year presidency. Russia’s strong reaction to the crisis is meant to send a bullish message to Washington: “This is our backyard. Stay away. We know your game.”
Full article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4499726.ece
10 August 2008, 7:41 pmLisa:
From Times Online
August 8, 2008
Analysis: why the Russia-Georgia conflict matters to the West
It would be a serious mistake for the international community to regard the dramatic escalation of violence in Georgia as just another flare-up in the Caucasus.
The names of the flashpoints may be unfamiliar, the territory remote and the dispute parochial, but the battle under way will have important repercussions beyond the region…
The West, in particular America, has stoked the regional fire. At the Nato summit in Bucharest this year it pressed for Georgia and Ukraine’s membership of the alliance. The move was blocked by the Europeans but Nato did give a commitment to offer the two countries membership later. That move was seen in Moscow as a challenge to its dominance in what it calls the “near abroad”, the former Soviet republics.
Since then Russia has made clear in word and deed that it will do anything to prevent Nato’s expansion on its western and southern flanks.
Full article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4486297.ece
10 August 2008, 7:46 pmLisa:
From Times Online
August 8, 2008
Analysis: energy pipeline that supplies West threatened by war Georgia conflict
The conflict that has erupted in the Caucasus has set alarm bells ringing because of Georgia’s pivotal role in the global energy market.
Georgia has no significant oil or gas reserves of its own but it is a key transit point for oil from the Caspian and central Asia destined for Europe and the US.
Crucially, it is the only practical route from this increasingly important producer region that avoids both Russia and Iran…
The BTC pipeline, which cost $3 billion to build, is a key plank of US foreign policy because it reduces Western reliance on oil from both the Middle East and Russia.
Full article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article4484849.ece
10 August 2008, 7:49 pmLisa:
At JFK Airport, Denying Basic Rights Is Just Another Day at the Office
By Emily Feder, AlterNet. Posted August 18, 2008.
I was recently stopped by Homeland Security as I was returning from a trip to Syria. What I saw in the hours that followed shocked and disturbed me.
Full article:
http://www.alternet.org/rights/95351/at_jfk_airport%2C_denying_basic_rights_is_just_another_day_at_the_office/
18 August 2008, 11:13 pmTimothy R. Anderson:
The Commander-In-Chief aspect of being the President of the United States Of America includes being accountable to military
recruiters ; particularly during an era when there’s no military draft !
I think the role of being a military recruiter, today, here in the United States Of America, has descended itself into a
very, very lonely position …….
Some recruiters are killing themselves.
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20081223/NEWS01/812230323
The upbeat mood of those who defend our current President , President Bush is at odds with the reality. Reality is that President Bush failed to “rally the world” to the cause of his Global Assault On Terrorists And All Who Dare To Live Near Them .
It costs money to chase bad guys far far away. It would’ve helped if President Bush could’ve persuaded numerous other countries’ government leaders to send in their military personnel. It costs a lot of money to chase bad guys far, far away ; perhaps the result would’ve been different if the Bush Administration could’ve got other countries to spend their money……………
President Bush failed at getting help. Now the American military
has a very, very difficult task to master.
Timothy R. Anderson
29 December 2008, 2:26 pmTimothy R.:
Afghanistan remains a place of instability. More American military servicemembers have died in Afghanistan so far this year than did during ALL of the entire year 2007 ……. Perhaps I should type that in a different series of words to emphasize what I’m getting at !
From Jan. 1, 2010 to today June 8, 2010, MORE U.S. military servicemembers have DIED in AFGHANISTAN than the year 2007 ; the entire year ! ..
not nice at all. Not good at all. Not good.
One day the folks in Washington D.C. might give the civilian population some respect. One day the civilian population will provide
so few volunteers into the ” all-volunteer ” U.S. military that the folks in Washington D.C. WILL bring back the MILITARY DRAFT. Possibly this Friday, who knows ?
Oh, I’m exaggerating am I ? Please take the time to read all the words of this news-article . . please
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1889152,00.html
President Bush FAILED to get help in his blood thirst land grab wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. As does President Obama.
Timothy R. Anderson
8 June 2010, 12:45 pm