Twitter
StumbleUpon
Facebook
Delicious
Digg
Newsvine
Google
Yahoo
TechnoratiTwo Wrongs Make Another Fiasco
Those of us who love F. Scott Fitzgerald must acknowledge that he did get one big thing wrong. There are second acts in American lives. (Just ask Marion Barry, or William Shatner.) The real question is whether everyone deserves a second act. Perhaps the most surreal aspect of our great Afghanistan debate is the Beltway credence given to the ravings of the unrepentant blunderers who dug us into this hole in the first place.
Let's be clear: Those who demanded that America divert its troops and treasure from Afghanistan to Iraq in 2002 and 2003 - when there was no Qaeda presence in Iraq - bear responsibility for the chaos in Afghanistan that ensued. Now they have the nerve to imperiously and tardily demand that America increase its 68,000-strong presence in Afghanistan to clean up their mess - even though the number of Qaeda insurgents there has dwindled to fewer than 100, according to the president's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones.
But why let facts get in the way? Just as these hawks insisted that Iraq was "the central front in the war on terror" when the central front was Afghanistan, so they insist that Afghanistan is the central front now that it has migrated to Pakistan. When the day comes for them to anoint Pakistan as the central front, it will be proof positive that Al Qaeda has consolidated its hold on Somalia and Yemen.
To appreciate this crowd's spotless record of failure, consider its noisiest standard-bearer, John McCain. He made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It's not just that he echoed the Bush administration's constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda's attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war "easily." Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would "probably get along" in post-Saddam Iraq because there was "not a history of clashes" between them.
What's more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could "in the long term" somehow "muddle through" in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to "muddle through" there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the "remarkable success" of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony "truce" ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb's up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn't even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
He takes no responsibility for any of this. Asked by Katie Couric last week about our failures in Afghanistan, McCain spoke as if he were an innocent bystander: "I think the reason why we didn't do a better job on Afghanistan is our attention - either rightly or wrongly - was on Iraq." As Tonto says to the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean ‘we,' white man?"
Along with his tribunes in Congress and the punditocracy, Wrong-Way McCain still presumes to give America its marching orders. With his Senate brethren in the Three Amigos, Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, he took to The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page to assert that "we have no choice" but to go all-in on Afghanistan - rightly or wrongly, presumably - just as we had in Iraq. Why? "The U.S. walked away from Afghanistan once before, following the Soviet collapse," they wrote. "The result was 9/11. We must not make that mistake again."
This shameless argument assumes - perhaps correctly - that no one in this country remembers anything. So let me provide a reminder: We already did make that mistake again when we walked away from Afghanistan to invade Iraq in 2003 - and we did so at the Three Amigos' urging. Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 - even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq. Now we're being asked to pay for their mistake by squandering stretched American resources in yet another country where Al Qaeda has largely vanished.
To make the case, the Amigos and their fellow travelers conflate the Taliban with Al Qaeda much as they long conflated Saddam's regime with Al Qaeda. But as Rajiv Chandrasekaran of The Washington Post reported on Thursday, American intelligence officials now say that "there are few, if any, links between Taliban commanders in Afghanistan today and senior Al Qaeda members" - a far cry from the tight Taliban-bin Laden alliance of 2001.
The rhetorical sleights of hand in the hawks' arguments don't end there. If you listen carefully to McCain and his neocon echo chamber, you'll notice certain tics. President Obama better make his decision by tomorrow, or Armageddon (if not mushroom clouds) will arrive. We must "win" in Afghanistan - but victory is left vaguely defined. That's because we will never build a functioning state in a country where there has never been one. Nor can we score a victory against the world's dispersed, stateless terrorists by getting bogged down in a hellish landscape that contains few of them.
Most tellingly, perhaps, those clamoring for an escalation in Afghanistan avoid mentioning the name of the country's president, Hamid Karzai, or the fraud-filled August election that conclusively delegitimized his government. To do so would require explaining why America should place its troops in alliance with a corrupt partner knee-deep in the narcotics trade. As long as Karzai and the election are airbrushed out of history, it can be disingenuously argued that nothing has changed on the ground since Obama's inauguration and that he has no right to revise his earlier judgment that Afghanistan is a "war of necessity."
Those demanding more combat troops for Afghanistan also avoid defining the real costs. The Congressional Research Service estimates that the war was running $2.6 billion a month in Pentagon expenses alone even before Obama added 20,000 troops this year. Surely fiscal conservatives like McCain and Graham who rant about deficits being "generational theft" have an obligation to explain what the added bill will be on an Afghanistan escalation and where the additional money will come from. But that would require them to use the dread words "sacrifice" and "higher taxes" when they want us to believe that this war, like Iraq, would be cost-free.
The real troop numbers are similarly elusive. Pre-emptively railing against the prospect of "half measures" by Obama, Lieberman asked MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell rhetorically last week whether it would be "real counterinsurgency" or "counterinsurgency light." But the measure Lieberman endorses - Gen. Stanley McChrystal's reported recommendation of 40,000 additional troops - is itself counterinsurgency light. In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn't achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan's population and just over a quarter of its land area.
Lieberman suggested to Mitchell that we could train an enhanced, centralized Afghan army to fill any gaps. In how many decades? The existing Afghan "army" is small, illiterate, impoverished and as factionalized as the government. For his part, McCain likes to justify McChrystal's number of 40,000 by imbuing it with the supposedly magical powers of the "surge" in Iraq. But it's rewriting history to say that the "surge" brought "victory" to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don't know who has "won" in Iraq.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is poorer, even larger and more populous, more fragmented and less historically susceptible to foreign intervention. Even if the countries were interchangeable, the wars are not. No one-size surge fits all. President Bush sent the additional troops to Iraq only after Sunni leaders in Anbar Province soured on Al Qaeda and reached out for American support. There is no equivalent "Anbar Awakening" in Afghanistan. Most Afghans "don't feel threatened by the Taliban in their daily lives" and "aren't asking for American protection," reported Richard Engel of NBC News last week. After eight years of war, many see Americans as occupiers.
Americans, meanwhile, want to see the fine print after eight years of fiasco with little accounting. While McCain and company remain frozen where they were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq tragedy. Polls persistently find that the country is skeptical about what should and can be accomplished in Afghanistan. They voted for Obama not least because they wanted a new post-9/11 vision of national security, and they will not again be so easily bullied by the blustering hawks' doomsday scenarios. That gives our deliberating president both the time and the political space to get this long war's second act right.
39 Comments so far
Show AllBrilliant, Jacksonian.
The lead-up to the Iraq invasion was caused by so many too clever by half. Like they had all read Brit cold war spy novels or had seen Elizabeth Taylor's best divorcee Coming In From the Cold in a John le Carre (sp?) novel/movie. Film Noire in the digital age. Could it be that the entire enterprise was cooked up not by the MIC, but by Washington DC Starbucks haunters just about to get WiFi?
Please don't throw me in the briar patch. Someday Chalabi will be exposed. He may be the Bernie Madoff of Iraq, the mere thought of which changes the equation.
As for Frank Rich, for whom I have great respect as a writer and researcher, I would love it if he could wax Protestant on the murder and execution of Saddam Hussein. This was, after all, a gross violation of International Law. Those on this site who object to the cover-up of 9/11 ought also pay attention to how the Death Penalty was applied after our Occupation of Iraq. Whatever one thinks of Saddam, he was an historical presence, and when you kill a Historical Presence, you kill history. In this case as in others, it had to have been intentional. It would be interesting to interview Chalabi on the hanging of Saddam.
-30-
Jacksonian
OleManRiver: ..."so many too clever by half..."
Nice turn of the phrase.
(And the rest was spot on too.)
"Lest anyone forget, we still don't know who has "won" in Iraq. ". I beg to differ. The following is from my notes, Oct.2004:
Despite continuing controversy over the justification and prosecution of the war in Iraq-Nam, we can at least figure out who won: IRAN. In fact, Iran should be the current title holder for Most Crafty Nation.
For over 20 years Iran has hated both the US and Iraq but lacked the strength to tackle either one. Along comes Bush the Lesser. “Aha”, say the Iranians, “This is our kind of guy. We play our cards right, we can do some business on this guy.” Game it out:
Iran secretly recruits Ahmed Chalabi, an exiled Iraqi who has lived in and operated throughout the US and the mid-east. One of his operations got him convicted of fraud in Jordan. He, too, is an Iranian kind of guy. Iran tells Ahmed, “You go tell those American neo-cons what they want to hear, namely a lot of lies about WMD. You don’t have to be convincing – they’ll convince themselves. That will give them the excuse they want to go in and take out Saddam.
Soon, Saddam was gone, and Iraq was too weak to be a threat to Iran. Iran wins that round. Chalabi wins too. The neo-cons pay him…millions. He thinks maybe he also gets Saddam’s job. But Iran could still have a problem with the hated Americans. Not to worry.
Bush tells his people “Mission Accomplished!” They’re still trying to figure out what they accomplished. Iraq’s a shambles. There’s civil insurrection, a new recruiting ground for Al Quaeda and a total quagmire with no way out for the “Coalition of the Willing” (except for those like Spain and the Philippines who became unwilling and just walked away). The ongoing costs in blood and money are enormous. The money meter ticks along at a steady $billion per week. Now, America has few friends left and can’t afford to lift a finger against Iran.
So Iran wins again. Saddam's gone. Iraq is broken. Bush and his military are trapped. And it was all paid for by the American people. But it ain't over yet. The oil market is booming. Iraq’s got a lot of oil but they can’t ship because their pipelines are being blown up weekly by the insurgents.
But Iran’s got oil …and no war. So Iran’s making big money. With which they buy lots of nuclear technology from, who else, America’s good buddy, Pakistan!
It turns out that Pakistan also had Libya and North Korea on their customer list (but not Iraq). When Pakistan was caught selling nuclear technology to those countries, the responsible official, Mr. Kahn, said he just did it for the money. President of Vice Cheney said, “Oh, well that’s alright, then.” Dick respects priorities that align with his own. George respects whatever Dick tells him he respects.
America attacked Iraq for having nukes that weren’t there. Iran and North Korea admit they’ve got a nuclear program but America can’t do anything about it because they’re spread so thin they’re down to using the West Virginia National Guard (held over for another tour) to try to keep the lid on in Iraq until the November election.
Iran is very happy. They’ll maybe have Osama over for dinner, talk a little theocracy. But Chalabi doesn’t get Saddam’s job so he’s not so happy. He has to settle for the $33 million the US has paid him. He goes back to Iran and says “Look, I’m seeking new opportunities. What can I do for you today?”
“Ahmed,” say the Iranians,”you’re still our kind of guy”. (The actual Farsi expression translates “camel dung that speaks”.) “Tell you what you do. Go back to Washington. Hang out. Buy a few rounds. Keep your ear to the ground; see what you can find out. You get something interesting for us; we’ll take care of you.” Ahmed does it and soon gets some salable items. He rings up Teheran. “Hey guys, US intelligence has broken your code.” The Iranians are delighted. “Good Job! Now we can really mess with them.”
Collecting his gratuity, Ahmed says, “Before I go, tell me how you worked this out. I mean, how’d you know they were going to be that stupid?” The Iranians reply, “We read all Michael Moore's books".
####
Check out the essential facts of this grim but probably diluted account: www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/05/20/iraq/main618637.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmed_Chalabi
Jacksonian
This column should be required reading for every American citizen of or near voting age -- especially residents of Arizona, Connecticutt, and South Carolina.
It should be tattooed on every inch and orifice of William Kristol, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer.
The Weekly Standard, the National Review, and the Wall Street Journal should be made to reprint the article in its entirety, while paying the Times a large royalty.
Congress should mandate it become a permanent plank on the G.O.P. platform.
On election eve 2010 (and beyond if necessary), it should be emblazoned across the sky, from sea to shining sea.
Perhaps something like it should be, but this particular exposition reads too much like 'poutrage' to me. Speaking of course only for myself, I have grown _very_ weary of the punditocrats who pretend the latest outrage was unlooked-for and is unprecedented, but who are moved only to write an indignant essay rather than to "stand on the piano and demand outrage action".
The reality is that what the criminals are doing now is the same thing, mutatis mutandis, that they did last year and the year before that, rinse and repeat. And that they will do again next year and the year after that, rinse and repeat. UNLESS WE GET OFF OUR ARSES AND STOP THEM.
Will we get off our arses and stop them, do you think?
"Then, too, they promoted their strategy as a way of preventing another 9/11 - even though no one culpable for 9/11 was in Iraq."
So...just who was found to be culpable?
"September 23-24, 2001: Secretary of State Powell Says White House Will Provide Evidence of Al-Qaeda Role in 9/11, but He Is Contradicted by White House"
"Secretary of State Colin Powell is asked in a television interview, “Will you release publicly a white paper which links [bin Laden] and his organization to this attack to put people at ease?” Powell responds, “We are hard at work bringing all the information together, intelligence information, law enforcement information. And I think in the near future we will be able to put out a paper, a document that will describe quite clearly the evidence that we have linking him to this attack.” [MSNBC, 9/23/2001] The next day, the New York Times reports that this report is expected to be published “within days… Officials say they are still arguing over how much information to release…” [New York Times, 9/24/2001] But later that day, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer says, “I think that there was just a misinterpretation of the exact words the secretary used on the Sunday shows.… I’m not aware of anybody who said white paper, and the secretary didn’t say anything about a white paper yesterday.” [White House, 9/24/2001] The New Yorker will report a short time later that, according to a senior CIA official, US intelligence had not yet developed enough information about the hijackers. “One day we’ll know, but at the moment we don’t know” (see Late September 2001). [New Yorker, 10/8/2001]
"But no such paper is ever released."
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a092301whitepaper
( active links at above )
"While McCain and company remain frozen where they were in 2001, many of their fellow citizens have learned from the Iraq tragedy. . . our deliberating president [has] both the time and the political space to get this long war's second act right."
Except Obama is also frozen in the re-named War on Terror.
Perhaps we should rename that certain department that decides who will be our next enemies and which country we will be 'compelled to invade next and on what pretext, whether spreading Democracy, stopping WMD or whatever else they can dream up from The Department of Defense to the Department of Offence. It certainly would be more clear and definitely more honest. But, most of our governmental departments are misnamed, for example the Treasury Department could easily be the Thievery Department or the EPA might be the EPD, Environmental Protection Denied.
The US has more than 700 bases in 132 countries. The US economy has been based on war for a very long time. We fight to enrich corporations. Gen Smedley Bulter got it right more than 50 years ago when he wrote "War is a Racket". US wars are the biggest money laundering schemes in history. How else could all of that money be transferred from taxpayer/workers to the CEOs of GE, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc.
Wars are not fought 'to keep us safe'. We have 45,000 dying every year because of lack of access to health care. How about keeping them safe!
Yes.
Great comment, thank you.
Okay, fine.
Our 'leaders' are well aware of all of the above.
So, Mr. Rich - tell us why We are really in Afghanistan, seeing as how you've eliminated all of the propaganda reasons.
How do you pen such a piece without telling us why our soldiers are really dying and why we're spending billions/month and why R-nuts are so gung-ho for more death and destruction?
Or maybe even FR doesn't know whatever the - er, I mean OUR - real agenda is... or maybe he's just not allowed to reveal it, seeing as how he's working for a rag that withheld the NSA illegal wiretap tale for over a year...
MIC ;even those drones cost(make the ones who supply the hellcats for them) large $$$ per mission
Regarding the F.Scott quip, it's not a question of anyone 'deserving' a second act.
I don't think Fitzgerald equated a second act with a second chance.
Rather, I think he meant Americans tend to go from the first act straight to the third act.
We can all ponder what that may mean.
Unlimited Stupid Assholes march steadfastly to "Victory".
Damn. This guy is smart. He's one of the few brilliant reasons I still read that rag.
Obama should follow the advice of the 3 Amigos (McCain, Liarman, Crackers Graham) and ratchet up the AfPak war because a great good will come out of doing so, which is the end of empire.
Your post reeks of impotent cynicism. Your "great good" if it comes to pass, will be paid for in tankers full of human blood and misery.
This article is riddled with false premises that are given as facts. As such all conclusions made are suspect.
There was no TIGHT relationship between the Taliban and Al Qaeda in 2001.
The Problem was not shifting focus from Aghanistan to Iraq. it was invading and occupying Afghanistan in the first place.
It was not Sunnis souring on Al Qaeda that lead to the Anbar awakening. Al Qaeda was never a major player. It was them recognizing they had all but lost to the Shiites and could not continue fighting both the Shiites and the Americans while maintaining any sort of influence inside iraq.
As the BBC recently revealed, Al Qaeda is a fiction created by the West. It a convenient FICTION created out of next to nothing .It is akin to the hysteria created around those "Violent Communist revolutionaries" in Europe through the 50's 60's and 70s later to be found to be fronts for the CIA and right wing forces inside of Europe trying to create the ILLUSION of a threat.
See operation Gladio for more. pay attention to the term "false flag"
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
What is your specific BBC source on this? I'd like to watch or listen to it. Does this BBC source postulate who they think the real attackers were on 9/11?
The Documentary is "The Power of Nightmares" broadcast by BBC2 and produced by Adam Curtis.
There no speculation on who was behind 9/11. It merely a report on how "al Qaeda" was seized upon by Politicians in the West as this Monolithic power with its tentacles in every nation when in fact it was little more then a collection of Radicals, small in numbers and loosely affiliated, who did not even have a name for themselves or even a leader.
It akin to an intelligence agency labeling all those that read Common dreams and Post here as members of a "Terrorist group" and then giving us a title with the media then compliant in building us into a force that will bring "Democracy to its knees".
harvey wasserman:
What about OUT OF AFGHANISTAN NOW eludes the corporate media?
In the end, blood will be needlessly spilled, we will be truly bankrupted, and the last Americans will leave by helicopter from yet another embassy rooftop.
But no corporate official will be charged with corruption or murder, their gated community houses and capital assets will remain intact and their children will continue to reap the benefits of privilege and the best education and health care money can buy.
I'm sorry, the helicopters from the roof tops just hurts the grunts. It doesn't touch the MIC. No lessons will be learned because modern wars are not about might versus right; they are about defrauding one people and killing some other people. Your premise that getting pushed out of Afghanistan will change the outlook of the perpetrators is flawed.
I recommend the writings of C. Wright Mills.
Well called.
And libs will help elect more cons again.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
This is an excellent article until right near the end where Frank Rich falls into line with the prevailing political & MSM mantra about Iraq: "The surge has worked."
None of the politicians or Big Media will do their homework on that nonsense either.
They preach "the awakening councils - the awakening councils!" as if that has suddenly ended all the problems there. If the surge worked, then why does the U.S. still have 120,000 troops in Iraq (roughly twice the number in Afghanistan) with no end in sight? The secret answer? OIL. There is still all that OIL to consider. Iraq has oil and Afghanistan has mountains and desert for pipelines to pass through. The MIC, were it pushed to choose, would cling to the oil rich nation no matter how failed or incomplete the "surge" is.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but last I heard the Shiite government in Iraq wasn't paying the bribes to the Sunni sheiks on time, or integrating the police forces as previously stipulated, or resolving the oil sharing agreement between the Sunni, Shiia and Kurdish groups. There has been no comprehensive Marshall Plan to rebuild Iraq or Afghanistan. "Beacons of Democracy" to that region? So much Bush blow. Last I heard, the U.S. field commander on the ground was asking for a post-surge military build-up in northern Iraq.
By my tally the mass bombings are up versus last year's pace. I've heard no clear end-game for withdrawing from Iraq down to even 50,000 troops, let alone a complete withdrawal--which I am not likely to see in my lifetime.
Team Bush and the MSM pulled an Orwellian bait & switch to focus on Iraq and do a low level affliction of Afghanistan. Team Obama and the MSM seem poised to do the reverse from Iraq to Afghanistan while leaving a bigger affliction force in Iraq.
"Frank Rich falls into line with the prevailing political & MSM mantra about Iraq: 'The surge has worked.'
Did you miss this line?: "But it's rewriting history to say that the 'surge' brought 'victory' to Iraq. What it did was stanch the catastrophic bleeding in an unnecessary war McCain had helped gin up. Lest anyone forget, we still don't know who has 'won' in Iraq."
Clearly, Rich doesn't think "the surge has worked". He was pointing out that even given such a false premise, it wouldn't apply to Afghanistan. And he clearly is no apologist for the war in Iraq.
Rich glosses over certain facts, but he is certainly pointing in the right direction.
Cicero: "Freedom is participation in power."
I acknowledge the line you cite, but in other relevant sentences Rich sort of goes along to get along with other MSM characterizations of the situation in Iraq. I think the level of bloodshed inside Iraq is worse than we have been told here in the U.S. I'm not sure enough of the "catastrophic bleeding" has actually been staunched or that underlying tensions aren't ripe for another major outburst of it a the first convenient opportunity. And there are reasons why the Sunnis, Kurds and Shiia don't necessarily want the true level of bloodshed to be understood in the U.S. They are both still playing the game of wait-and-see regarding the U.S.: Quietly arming and preparing for the possibility that the U.S. will eventually pull out so many troops that they themselves will actually have to deal with internal security questions for their respective sectarian, ethnic and tribal groups, a legitimate police force or forces tolerable to each group, and a national oil sharing agreement. Neither the Shiites nor the Sunni like to admit it, but they are more than a little afraid of too complete a U.S. pull-out. The U.S. incentive to be there remains the oil and the U.S. is not laying the real political, economic, institutional and infrastructural groundwork necessary to effect a true pull-out. All the basic underlying post-Saddam conflicts of interest are still there between those various groups and until real groundwork is laid for a path out (even if our military-petrol-industrial complex wanted a way out, which I don't think they do) the U.S. military will be there in significant numbers costing us billions of dollars every month.
Yes, very sad. I wonder if Iraq is destined to be a broken "client state" of the U.S. for a long time. I've always been an advocate of the U.S. simply getting out of Iraq. The main argument I've heard for staying is that Iraq would fall into "chaos" or civil war if we pulled out. My rebuttal to that is Iraq is in chaos now, with us there, and no, we aren't laying the groundwork for a peaceful, self-sufficient Iraq, as you say-- in other words, we're not doing any good over there. Based on the reality of what's going on I can only conclude that we are there to maintain a kind of broken, beaten-down status quo while we try to control their oil.
It's a grand chessgame, indeed, until all the pieces get swept off the table by bankruptcy, nuclear war, climate change, ... we should be minding our own store. Of course, the unevolved, 19th century style thinkers in Washington want to continue down the same old road of imperialism and colonialism that will not work into the 21st century.
The greatest threat to American financial, environmental and constitutional sustainability comes from Washington D.C., not Kabul, Islamabad or Tehran.
Wall Street Bankers, in collusion with our public servants in the capital city, heisted $23 trillion dollars of taxpayer wealth. Ahmadinejad was nowhere to be seen.
U.S. based multinational oil companies, in secret meetings with then Vice president Dick Cheney in 2001, carved up sections on maps displaying Iraq's most desired oilfields. Musharaff was not present.
Monopolistic telecommunications firms placed illegal taps on every American's phone with the secret authorization of our most clandestine spy agencies. Hugo Chavez was never part of any planning.
Until the public realizes who the genuine threats to the country are and is able to confront them the destruction of the country will continue at light-speed.
Hopefully that day of awakening will arrive soon.
Well said and an excellent summary of pointing out who the real enemies are. It's too bad that the Nobel Peace Prize will further muddy the waters. :(
Yes sir. Washington is the threat to America at this point. I believe Americans are indeed waking up to the anti-American elements in our government. They are indeed.
"What I would say is that the news media should do a penetrating exposé and take a look. I wish they would. I wish the American media would take a great look at the views of the people in Congress and find out if they are pro-America or anti-America."
-Michelle Bachmann appearing on HARDBALL with Chris Mattews on October 17, 2008
Sioux Rose
CYGNUS: All too true. The control of media is the likely reason why few are able to distinguish between genuine and contrived (or should I say manufactured) enemies. The deregulation of the FCC (under Clinton, like Nafta and the cessation of The Glass-Steagall Act) has figured prominently into the American dream turned nightmare scenario, and not just for citizens of the homeland.
This control of the media was in place long before Clinton.
There is a clip from an old CNN broadcast dating back to 1991 and the first Gulf War circulating on the web. (wheter it wnt live on TV Is unanswered but you will get the point by watching it)
It starts with the announcer speaking to "her man on the ground in Saudi Arabia". She cautions him to "please take cover.." if there a threat of attack as the news Broadcast is not as important as his life.
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/cnns-fake-coverage-of-the-gulf-war/blog-92821/
Watch this..it faked. it was broadcast from INSIDE the CNN studios. The on the ground crew was PRETENDING to be in Saudi Arabia.
It actually quite funny.
Sioux Rose
GW NORTH: Up until the l980's the media really DID show diversified views. Look at Phil Donahue's program, as one example? That's where I saw the authors of "Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans," interviewed. That book was probably the bible to Kenny Lay, Arthur Anderson, and those smartest guys in the room at Enron's planned-debacle table. Seems to me MANY of the strategies utilized then became the basic modus operandi for the high stakes players on Wall st. ("A derivative by any other name would smell as...")
The deregulation of media, in particular, cleared the way for a handful of corporations to own all mainstream media outlets. Although the argument today is that the Internet has cut into the revenue stream of periodicals (due to its unlimited access, and large menu of free content), newspapers, like radio and TV stations, began to pretty much aggregate opinions along very authoritarian lines.
Music presents another example. MY generation grew up on peace songs, protest songs, social justice lyrics. Today those are very hard to come by. Look what happened to the Dixie Chics? The tight control of radio markets, since so many are under the umbrella/ownership of conservative corporations means that those with radical messages generally get no air time. It REALLY has come down to that.
Here on CD we speak about how seldom persons like Dennis Kucinich, or Ralph Nader or Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein show up as guests on the ubiquitous talk shows. Who IS there are generals, right wing ditto heads, columnists for conservative periodicals like The Washington Post, etc. And so many persons think that TV presents ALL sides of issues, after all, the ring wing drums into their followers that it's a "left wing" or "liberal" media.
The tone, tenor, and thematic content of media has changed in the past 35 years dramatically. As a freelance writer, I feel the changes in that I have had to learn to live on 25% of what I used to earn. I mean that!
Exactly right.
Barack Obama has demonstrated himself to be just another stooge working for corporate interests and the military-industrial-congressional-media-prison complex.
Nobel Peace Prize?.. Really??
Keep the 'change'
Et tu, Rich? And why again, must Obama be forced by his followers to do what he knows is correct in Iraqiranistan (that is, come home from it NOW)?