Global Paradigms

The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Empire The New Empire Times December 20, 2010 64 B.E. (Bush Era) Editor: Judith Miller President McCain Lauds Free Election in Occuppied Iran VP Liberman Warns Turkey Not to Interfere By Jeff Gannon (With exceprts from Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack II ) WASHINGTON — Responding to growing unease over the war in Iran, President John McCain laid out a multipart, stay-the-course "strategy for victory" Wednesday and urged Americans to muster the "time and patience" to carry it out. McCain refused to set a timetable for the withdrawal of U.S. troops, but expressed confidence that Iranian security forces will increasingly take over for them. He also acknowledged past mistakes and warned that "there will be tough days ahead" before the troops come home. So far, some 20,100 U.S. troops have died since the Iran invasion in March 2010. The United States invaded Iran following the 09/9/9 attack on the headquartes of the Ameri...

Tom Friedman Reporting: Too Sexy for his Socks From time to time I'll try to entertain you with profiles of (living) People I Cannot Stand (PICS), not including my ex-wife. I thought I'll innaugurate this section by introducing you to one of those PICS, Tom Friedman from the NYT. I first inter-faced with the Oracle from Davos in a dinner at the Singaporean Embassy. The organizers weren't probably aware of the guy's Big Ego and they seated him next to a group of losers that included your humble servant and "working journalists" from news agenices, etc. the kind that you don't see playing Talking Heads on television. In the next table the Embassy had seated all the VIPs like, you know, Dr. K. and Al ("I'm in Charge Here") Haig, and Tom just couldn't stand it. You could feel the vibes, "Hey, what am I doing here with these human garbage when I could have been sitting there with Bill Gates and Hillary Clinton." He was suffering. And...

America(n) in the Middle East: Nowhere to Go I saw Stephan Gaghan's Syriana today, starring George Clooney plus an extra thirty pounds (above in what is supposed to be Tehran) as Bob Barnes, a CIA Middle East operative who is betrayed by his bosses in Langley, who in turn are the puppets of their Masters, the members of what I describe in my new book Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East (see link) as the "petro-military complex: The political-business nexus of U.S. government officials, oil executives and the oligarchs ruling the Arab oil states (add to these the autocrats in charge of the newely independent oil producing states in Central Asia). The very talented Gaghan who had also written the script for Traffic , the cynical and depressing film about America's "war on drugs," did a marvelous job in the equally cynical and depressing Syriana . "Syriana" is a fictious oil emirate in the Persian Gulf and the character of Clooney/Barnes and the ...

She Ain't Heavy, She's My Secretary of State In a recent column in the posted on antiwar.com, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being 'Condi,'" http://antiwar.com/hadar/?articleid=6689 I suggested that our secretary of state Condoleeza Rice is kind of a, well, lightweight, especially when you compare her to predecessors like, say, George Marshall, John Foster Dulles, Dean Acheson, and of course, Henry Kissinger. Yes, I expected some criticism. But you should have read some of the hate email I've been receiving. I've been accused of, among other things, being a racist and a misogynist, who isn't capable of dealing with the reality of strong women, and a powerful African-American female at that. "You probably hated your mommy," suggested one reader. You get the idea. But no apology from moi, guys. I'm an equal opportunity basher, and proud of being one. As Princeton Professor L. Carl Brown, noted in a review of my earlier book Quagmire: Am...

Now.. that's a Good European Ally Condi the Lightweight is once again in one of those image-making trips around the world, this time in Europe where she is trying to make sure that our allies understand that Uncle Bush knows what's good for them. So what's really the Big Deal if we established a few secret detention centers a.k.a. "tortue chambers" in some of the former communist states in eastern Europe (didn't we win the Cold War to get rid of their torture chambers?) that have joined the European Union? We did kidnap a German citizen who we had suspected of terrorism, doing one of those "renditions" (after we tortured him we discovered that he wasn't a terrorist. Never mind...) but the Germans and the other Europeans should understand that we did it for their own good. And, yes, the CIA abducted a radical Islamic cleric in Italy and flew him to Egypt where he was tortured and also made a phone call to his radical Moslem pals in Italy and warn...

Occuppying Fallujah: Empire Bombing Belgrade: Empire-Lite Veteran diplomatic correspondent Robin Wright provides in today's Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12-04/AR2005120400965.html an interesting and fair assessment of the failure of the members of the Democrats to challenge the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq. In a front-page story she concludes that "among the Democratic foreign policy elite, dominated by people who previously served in the top ranks of government, there are stark differences -- and significant vagueness -- about a viable alternative." Reading the piece I didn't discover any "stark differences" between the Democratic usual suspects in the foregn policy/national security arenas that reside in the think tanks and consulting outfits in the Washington-Boston corridor, like Richard Holbrooke and Madeleine Albright and some genius named Derek Chollet ("foreign policy adviser to 2004 Democrat...

Dreams “are chief nourishers in life's feast,” according to Shakespeare's age-old claim by Macbeath. Indeed, while dreams offer a private means to explore inner reality and to gain unique, undeniable, personal experiences, psychologists also recognize that there is overwhelming evidence that dreams can be used to improve waking life, often immeasurably as storehouses of creativity. Many people often remember no dreams at all, and even when they do, it is almost exclusively upon awakening. But scientists are now exploring now what they term as “lucid dreams.” In that condition, one realizes that he or she is dreaming while the dream is still happening. The dreamer becomes aware that the world being experienced, although appearing very believable is actually a dream and that his or her physical body is elsewhere safe asleep in bed. With this new understanding, the lucid dreamer is free to explore remarkable worlds limited only by imagination. The increased clarity lucid state oft...

November 7, 2005 Issue Copyright © 2005 The American Conservative Bad For You Too? How the Iraq War disappointed Israel By Leon Hadar There is an old joke about an Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and a Jew who are asked to write an essay about an elephant. The Englishman writes about “The Elephant and the British Empire.” The Frenchman writes about “The Love Life of the Elephant.” The pedantic German writes a large treatise on “The Toenail of the Elephant.” And the Jew writes on “The Elephant and the Jewish Problem.” It’s a Jewish joke dating back to the time when the fate of the insecure Jewish community in Europe depended very much on political and social changes in the surrounding non-Jewish environment. It pokes fun at the tendency of anxious Jews at that time to assess the latest news from this or that world capital—the Russian czar has the flu, the price of grain is going up, red shoes are becoming more fashionable—by whether or not it was “good for the Jews.” When Jewish surv...

Business Times - 22 Nov 2005 Bush: the Lord North of today By LEON HADAR WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT SINCE I've been spending so much time in recent months reading and writing about US President George W Bush, his neoconservative advisers and the mess in Iraq, I decided to take some time off these current topics and read a very well-written and very well-researched life history of one of America's Founding Fathers, Alexander Hamilton. But I had to read only a few pages of the massive biography by Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton, Penguin Books, 2004) before I was transported from the late 18th century to the start of the 21st century, to Bush, the neocons and Iraq. Here is how Hamilton, in an impressive and shrewd insight into the psychology of power, described the futile efforts by the then British prime minister, Lord North, to suppress the insurgency by the American colonists against the occupying imperial power: 'The premier has advanced too far to recede with safety; he is...

Before President George W. Bush had left Washington to attend the leaders summit of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in South Korea and to visit Japan, China and Mongolia, a top U.S. official had warned American reporters that they shouldn’t expect the trip to lead to major diplomatic breakthroughs. Now that President Bush has returned back from Asia it’s be safe to conclude that as a headline in the Washington Post put it, "Bush’s Asia Trip Meets Low Expectations." Not only did the U.S. President fail to get a respite from domestic problems during his eight-day Asia tour. He also didn’t have a lot opportunities to demonstrate the energetic leadership upon which he prides himself. President Bush did have many photo opportunities during the trip and he delivered a few inspiring speeches -- saluting freedom in Kyoto, joining the other APEC leaders in a group photo, attending church services in Beijing, taking part in official festivities in Ulan Bator. But the col...