If independent, democratic, governments are formed in the Middle East, they won't follow Washington's orders.
Lamis Andoni
09 Mar 2011 11:45 GMT
Al Jazeera
Barack Obama, the US president, has still not fully grasped the essence of the revolutions underway in the Arab world. He genuinely seems to believe that the people rallying for democracy in the region are making a pro-Western, if not pro-Israeli, statement.
ASADABAD, Afghanistan: Emotional Afghan President Hamid Karzai on Saturday urged international troops to “stop their operations in our land”, his strongest salvo yet in a row over mistaken civilian killings.
Karzai's comments came after a week in which a relative of his was killed in a raid by foreign forces and he rejected an apology by the US commander of troops General David Petraeus for the deaths of nine children in a NATO strike.
“I would like to ask NATO and the US with honour and humbleness and not with arrogance to stop their operations in our land,” Karzai said, visiting the dead children's relatives in Kunar province, eastern Afghanistan.
Polling from Pew and Gallup reveals major public misconceptions about the defense budget. Fifty-eight percent of Americans know that Pentagon spending is larger than any other nation, but almost none know it is up to seven times that of China. Most had no idea the defense budget is larger than federal spending for education, Medicare or interest on the debt.
The scurrilous in Washington promote the misimpression of an under-funded Pentagon. They imply it is smaller than during the Cold War by saying it was at 8 percent of gross domestic product in the late 1960s, but only 4 percent of GDP now. Therefore, it's gone down and is now low, right?
Some use hyperventilated rhetoric to pressure for more defense dollars. Sadly, this category now must include Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who termed “catastrophic” the recommendations of the Obama deficit commission to merely maintain defense spending at its post-WWII high, and who deemed a “crisis” the idea of a 1 percent – $5 billion – reduction in the 2011 defense budget compared to 2010.
Phi Beta Iota: Lying is not patriotic. Screwing most of the people most of the time is neither patriotic nor sensible. The irresponsibility of the US Government today, across all domains, is breathtakingly insane. It's not stupid–this is the last phrase of legalized looting of the Republic–but it is insane in relation to the Constitution and the values that are supposed to be the foundation of the Republic.
One of the mysteries of the intelligence world is why the redoubtable Charlie Allen of CIA was always so popular with line analysts and so unpopular with management. In the book Long Strange Journey, Patrick Eddington its author recounts his experiences in a course on warning intelligence that Allen initiated when he was the National Intelligence Officer (IO) for Warning. Eddington came away from the course impressed with Allen’s energy, enthusiasm, and, although he did not specifically so, seriousness of purpose. Reading this and remembering my own impressions of Allen the solution to the mystery of Allen’s popularity with the working stiffs became apparent.
Like the actual collectors and analysts, Allen actually treated the production and dissemination of accurate intelligence as important and serious matter. He treated the analysts and their mission as something that really mattered. He raised so much ire among the IC senior management (including CIA) because they did not and, I suspect, still do not take the production of accurate intelligence as important at all compared to what they see as their principal responsibility which is to continually increase the size and budget of their agencies. Allen as a senior himself was looked upon at best a eccentric because his priorities ran against the grain of his fellow seniors. I had hoped that General Clapper (USAF ret.) would recognize the current charade and try to turn things around, but this clearly in not in the cards.
Phi Beta Iota: We used to admire Jim Clapper, so much so that a member of our collective issued a press release in his defense when Donald Rumsfeld fired him for telling the truth. General Clapper appears to have forgotten how to tell the truth, and he is not leading the US Intelligence Community, he is administering it with cronies assigned to administer the various agencies. There is no longer intelligence at the top of the intelligence community. It is time for a full-spectrum house cleaning, to include the conversion of the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, which is not needed, into the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Peace Operations, which IS needed. Mike Vickers is not qualified for either position.
Media Spin: Clapper told the truth. Reality: Clapper is out of touch with reality–he cannot even outline the ten high-level threats to humanity or explain why continued fragmentation of the US Government is the greatest threat to our near term as well as a long term stability and prosperity. Russia and China are not military threats to the US but rather economic threats, and in the case of China, a demographic and scientific & technology threat. The Old Guard is dead, may they rest in peace. Sadly, there is no bench within the US Intelligence Community OR the contractor world. We anticipate nothing beneficial for our $90 billion a year.
My colleague Clay Shirky called it “Cognitive Surplus” in his recent book. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams refer to it as “MacroWikinomics” in theirs.
What is cognitive surplus? The trillion hours of free time enjoyed by the world's educated population every year. Don and Tony describe MacroWikinomics as mass distributed collaboration on scales we've never seen before thanks to technology.
We're familiar with deficits and shortages, writes, Clay, but when it comes to surplus social capital, things quickly become unpredictable—especially when this capital scales thanks to the use of social networking platforms and Web 2.0 technologies. But then again, says Clay, “Many of the unexpected uses of communication tools are surprising because our old beliefs about human nature were so lousy.”
Phi Beta Iota: Over bagels and lox yesterday, Doug Rushkoff summarized his intention for ContactCon: “to take us back to 1992, but this time with 2012 technology and human understanding.” Here is what the US Government was told in 1992 about crowd-sourcing. 20 years and 1 trillion dollars later (20 years, average of 50 billion a year), we still have the world's most expensive ineffective wasteland pretending to “do” intelligence. The lunacy continues.
The great events in tthe Arab world are part of a wider hidtorical process of worldwide democrativ advance.But the distrous events of the post-9/11 decade have made it far slower and more conflictual than needed, says Martin Shaw*
EXTRACT: “…everywhere, the unifying thread is opposition to authoritarianism and aspiration to democratic rule; and the sense of a psychological break with the dictatorial past is unmistakable.”
Phi Beta Iota: One of the most concise, thoughtful, and inspiring summaries of both the present prospects and the recent failed past, all in the context of the past half century.
