In the winter of 2002, a close friend, a liberal staffer on capital hill, asked me if I thought the crazy fulminations of the neocons and the tough-guy rantings of an insecure President [1] could result in a war with Iraq? My answer was something like ‘read the Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and you will get a good idea of how these pressures can take on a life of their own and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.'
President Obama — perhaps inadvertently — is playing the same game with regard to Iran by trying to neutralize his political opposition at home with a dangerous mutation of Bill Clinton's cynical triangulationstrategy. In this case, the goal of the triangulation strategy is to pull the rug out from under the Republican warmongers like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. If he can co-opt the domestic political pressures for war against Iran, Mr. Obama may well think he can better position himself for the upcoming presidential election. But in so doing, he would be running a real risk of starting yet another ill-conceived war, whether he wants to or not. (Patrick Seale explains one way the march to war could spin out of Obama's control at this link.) To make matters worse, Mr. Obama is a man who has demonstrated that he talks a good line but fails to deliver on his promises when under pressure — just ask the Arabs about his Cairo speech or progressives who believed his promises about health care reform and “change your can believe in.” Whether or not triangulating questions of war and peace is a question of Obama's free will is quite beside the point: a malleable man is playing with the most dangerous kind of fire.
My last post, Beating the War Drums in Versailles on the Potomac, described the buildup of domestic political pressures to launch an attack on Iran in the name of prempting Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the fact that there is no solid intelligence proving the Iranians have embarked on a program to acquire those weapons. This aim of this post is to alert interested readers to another analysis in the same vein, but analyzed from a different angle. In The Winners and Losers of US policy on Iran, an op-ed that appeared in Al Jazeera (English) on 23 December, Jasmine Ramsey provides a useful insight in to the warmongering pressures on a president prone to appeasing his opposition for domestic political reasons.
The new year is shaping up to be a very dangerous one, because appeasing an external aggressor, like Adolf Hitler, is not the only kind of appeasement strategy that leads to war.
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[1] Any president who feels it is necessary to brag about being “The Decider” is insecure by self-definition.
The same week Obama declared an end to the Iraq War, Congress brought the US closer to confrontation with Iran
Jasmine Ramsey, Al Jazeera, 23 Dec 2011
In the same week that President Obama declared an end to the Iraq War, Congress brought Americans closer to confrontation with Iran. The whimper with which America's presence in Iraq ended was also drowned out by Republican presidential hopefuls beating war drums. This is America nearly four years into Obama's leadership. The President may have begun his term by trying to pursue a different path with Iran, but his acquiescence to domestic lobbying has made the results of his policies indistinguishable from his predecessor. Ironically, his attempts to appease pro-Israel advocates have only invited more onerous demands while leaving would-be supporters disillusioned.
As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy.
The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:
Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.
Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.
Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.
Buddy Roemer is a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. He served in Congress from 1981-88 as one of the last truly conservative Democrats who crossed the aisle to back the Reagan agenda. He later was governor of Louisiana and switched party affiliation to the GOP. A longtime business executive, Mr. Roemer founded and was CEO of Business First Bank, a small community lender with $650 million is assets.
Memorable Line: “I'm a Methodist boy, and I believe in miracles.”
Memorable Line: “I want Washington DC to stop being the capital for corruption.”
Article below, based on views of three or so retired senior military officers, two of them former Service TJAGs, takes an unfortunate tack on Manning's treachery. Their contention is that command and systemic failures set conditions for Manning to compromise documents. They assert that since he was “juniorest guy in the office,” everybody but him was responsible for what he did. I disagree. Responsibility for security is absolutely an individual one. Individuals sign general nondisclosure agreement SF-312 and other program-specific non-disclosure agreements as a priori conditions of access. Rules are stated up front. Personnel security clearances, training, and indoctrination are approaches used for our side. Gates, guards, guns, and all technical computer stuff are oriented against adversaries. Manning should have been able to work in a totally open storage area with hardcopy and softcopy documents of all classifications immediately at hand without anyone having to worry about him. Further, as we know, decision to commit treason is a profoundly individual one, often facilitated and rationalized by adversaries through considerations of sex, money, ideology, compromise, ego, excitement, etc. Individuals are supposed to individually withstand and deflect such adversary facilitations and inducements. So, in my mind, Manning is party at fault here. If justice system cannot generate a capital conviction for him, then he should go way of Jonathan Pollard, Israeli agent within NIS — life in prison, throw away key, No compassion on my part for either.
After 19 months in military prisons — much of the time in solitary confinement — Pfc. Bradley Manning finally emerged over the past week from the netherworld to which he has been confined since his arrest in the largest breach of classified information in U.S. history.
Seven days of hearings at Fort Meade, Md., produced what the prosecution called “overwhelming” evidence that the low-ranking Army intelligence analyst was the one who sent hundreds of thousands of military reports and diplomatic cables to the transparency website WikiLeaks.
But the hearing also produced equally compelling evidence of the larger issue that is often overlooked in discussions of Manning’s alleged misdeeds: the systematic breakdown in security that enabled a low-ranking enlisted man to abscond with a staggering quantity of classified Pentagonand State Department documents.
We are going to move from denial to realization. Physical world events will drive the process of realization. The primary trend is between stability and instability. We are moving from a multi-class system running from Super Elite to Unperson into a model of have's and have-nots, the unpersons. Labor has become a problem because less than 500 million are involved in life support activities thereby leaving more than 7 billion people very vulnerable to dependency (and treated as expendable containers). We are watching a redistribution process bound towards divestiture as more people become unpersons. Destruction of paper assets, debt collapse, bank failure, and war are all part of the redistribution process. With more unpeople, it becomes easier to reduce population through death and abuse. Our current economic structure has at least six trajectories of support; the physical world, human capital, transportation, technology, rule of law,and money.
Fukishima, Katrina, Gulf of Mexico oil spill — all examples of entire populations treated as “unpersons.”
Two four star Marine generals have written a stunning op-ed in the New York Times which demands that President Obama veto the National Defense Authorization Act, a bill that allows the government to use the military to indefinitely detain American citizens without due process.
Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, both 4 star Marine generals, published the piece on December 12. The op-ed starts with a direct demand that President Obama veto the NDAA bill in order to protect our country from the “false choice between our safety and ideals.”
It then gets into one of the most blatant anti American treasonous provisions in the history of the United States.
One provision would authorize the military to indefinitely detain without charge people suspected of involvement with terrorism, including United States citizens apprehended on American soil. Due process would be a thing of the past.
Some claim that this provision would merely codify existing practice. Current law empowers the military to detain people caught on the battlefield, but this provision would expand the battlefield to include the United States — and hand Osama bin Laden an unearned victory long after his well-earned demise.
The generals then go on to cite the fact that most in the military have not even asked for this extreme new power.
Sadly, many at the Pentagon are openly planning on unleashing the military on the American people and if we do not see more high level military personal speak out against this and other tyrannical bills America is finished as we know it.
CNN has done a very good job at framing how Ron Paul is drawing out the anti-government / anti-establishment vote.
They have done less well at using the talking points they were obviously given by a Zionist group, attacking Ron Paul for appearing on the Alex Jones show, for commenting immediately after 9/11 that the Bush Administration was over-joyed because it gave them a pretext for war on Iraq, and–from the Wall Street Journal but clearly part of some talking points paper–for connecting 9/11 and attacks on the US to what the US has done in the Middle East [to which we would add, US support for all but two dictators for the past fifty years].
It's bad enough that we have to deal with Republican candidates and a Democratic incumbent unable to discern the truth, much less articulate it. To have a broad attack unleashed against Ron Paul–one with enough money behind it to draw in CNN and the Wall Street Journal, is of grave concern. He speaks truth–those that seek to diminish him profit from lies.
Sample Headlines [Clearly an Orchestrated Funded Campaign]
It seemed improbable that the best-known American propagandist for our enemies could be near the top of the pack in the Iowa contest, but there it is. [Dorothy Rabinowitz]
