Pundits who screw-up: No big deal...
Matt Barganier desconstructs Andrew Sullivan's mea sorta culpa on Iraq in Time magazine (Sullivan seen above in a thoughtful pose on Bill Maher's "Real Time"). There have been many of those in recent weeks (including by WFB and Fukuyama ). In an commentary published last year, Oops! I helped start a War which was about one of the earlier apologizing-war-aplogists, I pointed out to the contrast between the way the losers who operate in the market (including financial analysts) are punished and the reality in which the losers in the political game (including foreign policy analysts) rarely get punished: Imagine: for a few years you were investing the money you had saved for your daughter's college education in one of those moderately conservative plans that provided some increase in the value of the investment without exposing it to major risks. But then your financial planner – let's call him Ken P. – got in touch with you and came up with a really great ide...
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This article came up the other day when googling; I remembered the Tonkin Gulf revelations coming out in detail a couple months ago. The Vietnam history lesson is the one our nation is familiar with whether or not it applies. So let's see.
The SEATO treaty gave us the theoretical moral authority to enter Vietnam in force. LBJ was in the historical moment of hitting the American Left with the reality of Empire and the Global Right with the Realpolitick of Civil Rights. Substitute Cheney for GWB and maybe you have a case. My thought is that Israel is the parallel to Vietnam and the result when you do everything right and still feel unrewarded by your efforts.
The feeling was since 1979 that the US relied on gadget intel rather than assets on the ground. So now that's solved... If securing the Afghan/Pakistan region was an issue, then our Good war/Bad war posturing in Congress will secure funding until 2020. Iraq has treasure worth fighting for(not just oil) and entrepreneur/pirates will do so now that the US has opened Pandora's Box.
The battle in Tehran is for the hearts and minds of the hip-hop generation, the youth. Ahmadinejad (who has the charisma of Obama) is being set up by powers that be as an example of what happens when you get unreasonable. There is an underlying desire in the US for embassy hostage payback and the current military posturing combined with 24/7 satelite news diplomacy will thread it's way thru the Ides of March.
My favorite reading this week was "Interview of a Senior Administration Official by the Traveling Press" @whitehouse.gov. I think the best face on things would be to convict Scooter of something and give him a year and a half at a country club. It would put everyone in future years (Judith Miller types too)on notice of what's up.
"You say you want a revolution, well you know...we all want to change the world"
Thanks WHB
In the same decade that an imaginary attack on a U.S. vessel led to war in Vietnam, a real attack on another U.S. vessel had no consequences at all: Israel's attempt to murder the crew of the USS Liberty in 1967. In that case, not only did LBJ tolerate the attack, he actually intervened to prevent U.S. military assets in the area from coming to the aid of the stricken vessel.
Some things get amplified, some things get buried, and the nature of the actual events themselves are almost irrelevant.
This business of looking for 'morality' in global affairs is a fool's errand.
No wise man has the power to reason away
What seems to be
Is always better than nothing..."
Hello
My son has an interesting intuitive sense. He had a different take on GP's post than I did. I asked him to pick out one thing to focus on and he said "In Iraq, we
have a unipolar system". Perhaps because "unipolar" is a seldom seen word; not in my older dictionary. Of
course if you plug"unipolar system" into Google you get plenty. I see the dominant forces today of Globalization and Corporatism as being inherently multipolar-battle is waged within the system and marked to market in whatever time interval you wish, tick by tick. Traders see ninety seconds as an eternity whereas one could see the period of 1963 to 2001 as a distinct but brief period.
The American figure W. Deen Mohammed taught me the idea of Islam as being that we are all Muslims, we just don't know it. My sense of healthy life is that man's desire of oneness is exactly half the deal, the other half being the uniqueness of every human spirit-six billion and counting.
In the U.S. and Israel there is an uncertainty of just where the moral center is. As long as we retain that doubt, we will keep the high ground, as ugly as it seems.
And as lame as it sounds, the History Channel comes up with a lot of stuff I missed along the way, for example the Liberty attack.
"Teach your children well
Your father"s hell
Will slowly go by"
Thanks WHB