Afghanistan is the largest and the most difficult crisis Obama confronts away from home. And here the trap was fashioned largely by himself. He said, all through the presidential campaign, that Iraq was the wrong war but Afghanistan was the right one. It was ‘a war of necessity’, he said this summer. And he has implied that he would accept his generals’ definition of the proper scale of such a war. Now it appears that Afghanistan is being lost, indeed that it cannot be controlled with fewer than half a million troops on the ground for a decade or more. The generals are for adding troops, as in Vietnam, in increments of tens of thousands. Their current request was leaked to Bob Woodward, who published it in the Washington Post on 21 September, after Obama asked that it be kept from the public for a longer interval while he deliberated. The leak was an act of military politics if not insubordination; its aim was to show the president the cost of resisting the generals.
The US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
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But we are entering a new, more global era of state capture, and the US government (or, more precisely, its credit) was handed over – rather meekly – during the past 12 months.
The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
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Voices Lost are a fundamental source of innovation once heard–diversity matters at all levels. It merits comment that “status quo” bureaucracies are death-beds, antithetical to innovation. This is why there is a “spike” or “lifeboat” theory of change. OSS and EIN may one day be recognized as the lifeboat that saved US Intelligence from oblivion. We are not holding our breath, but the reality is that there is more innovation in intelligence outside the wire–not federal, not expensive, and most certainly not secret–but the White House is too busy to realize it is being fed expensive waste.
Golda vs. Goldstone: A Cultural Evolution of Getting Away With Murder
The date when the United States became Israel's unquestioning benefactor can the fixed with precision: June 8, 1967, the fourth day of the six-day 1967 Arab-Israeli War.
It was on this day that Israel's air and naval forces attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 US Navy sailors, in what is still the worst loss of naval personnel due to hostile fire since the end of WWII. It was on this day that the Johnson Administration aborted a rescue mission in the process of being mounted by aircraft of the US Navy's 6th Fleet. With the cooperation of the US Congress, the Johnson Administration put into motion a series of responses and non-responses that cumulatively resulted a complete whitewash any serious investigation into the question of whether not Israel deliberately chose to attack a neutral US naval vessel sailing in international waters, 14 miles off the Sinai Peninsula. To date, the Liberty incident is the only major naval disaster that has not precipitated an in-depth investigation by the US Congress.
EXCLUSIVE: U.S. ignored warnings before deadly Afghan attack…Three intelligence reports dismissed days before eight U.S. soldiers killed
Bill Gertz, October 16, 2009
Army Maj. T.G. Taylor, a spokesman for the Army's Task Force Mountain Warrior, told The Times that the three reports did not stand out among hundreds of others and that the intelligence was deemed to be not specific and uncorroborated.
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The Economist October 17, 2009 Cover Story
Obama's War: Why the Afghanistan war deserves more resources, commitment and political will
The coalition, however, lacks three essential components of a successful strategy. It needs a credible, legitimate government to work with, the resources to do the job and the belief that America’s president is behind this war.
Many Afghans find it bizarre that the West should devote so much money to Mr Karzai, yet be unable to hold him to account over something so basic as stuffing ballot boxes on an industrial scale. For most, however, the local and provincial leaders matter more than the distant central government.
Phi Beta Iota: In the interest of the public's appreciation for the current situation, below are three graphics illustrating the current political situation and issue-bias spread; followed by a list of books with one point: We the People are ready to take our country back from Wall Street and the craven Demopublicans that have sold us out. Joe Biden might possibly be the key to a non-violent restoration of the Constitution, the Republic, and a nation able to integrate strategy, integrity, and living within its means.
Paul Ray's Empty Middle
Paul Ray, co-author of The Cultural Creatives, is probably the finest pollster in America because he cuts deep into values rather than just positions.
With full credit to Michael Crane and his Political Junkies Handbook,which provided the original map of all the political factions (we added the art), the JPEG to the right illustrates the death of democracy at the hands of the two-party tyranny acting Of, By, and For the Banks–the special interests. Every Member now serving, with a tiny handful of exceptions, is CORRUPT, both financially, and in terms of “party line” discipline betraying their constituencies, and in terms of abdicating their Article 1 responsibilities for balancing the power of the Executive. America is not a democracy in Helsinki Accord terms–it is a quasi-fascist corporate state in which the White House is theater, policy is not based on reality, and the budget has been bankrupted several times over because Goldman Sachs has been given free rein over the Treasury for the last four Administrations.
