Phi Beta Iota: Reprinted in full to allow emphasis and easier reading. Original source at logo, “as is.” Recommended by our physical gold colleagues.
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Several financial events this week indicate something big is about to happen, something that may make the 2008 credit crisis seem rather benign. First, the IMF announced that it is liquidating its gold holdings, the world's 3rd largest stash after the US and Germany. Buyers included the governments of India, Sri Lanka and Mauritius. Do you think the IMF would be selling gold at a market bottom? Bubble #1 about to burst- Gold.
Last night President Obama crossed the Rubicon and made the Afghan War his war. Will this decision come back to haunt him? Juan Cole argues that this is likely to be the case, because Obama's escalation decision is based on a flawed analogy.
Reasoning by analogy is powerful albeit particularly dangerous form of thinking. A valid analogy can unleash the creative mind to see new connections that were previously not seen, but a false analogy can capture the imagination and cause one to see and believe visions of things as they are not. False analogies are perhaps the most powerful mental engine for taking an otherwise rational decision maker off the cliff. Nevertheless, The courtiers in the Court of Versailles on the Potomac, addicted as they are to snappy sound bytes, love analogies, the more simple minded the snapping sound, the better.
Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan
Full Story Online
author of widely read blog Informed Comment explains how Obama has been taken to the cleaners and induced to bet his Presidency by buying into the fatally flawed Beltway Consensus that (1) the Iraq Surge was an unambiguous success and (2) its corollary, namely the analogy to Afghanistan that posits a similar kind of surge will produce a similar “success” in Afghanistan. Cole makes his argument by using the simple technique of describing and comparing likenesses and differences, something Obama and his advisors should have done.
Phi Beta Iota: The Salon story is complemented by the below blog from the same author.
10. The biggest threat of derailment comes from an American public facing 17 percent true unemployment and a collapsing economy who are being told we need to spend an extra $30 billion to fight less than 100 al-Qaeda guys in the mountains of Afghanistan, even after the National Security Adviser admitted that they are not a security threat to the US.
Nov. 19 (Bloomberg) — Brazil won the World Trade Organization’s approval to start retaliating against the U.S. because of subsidies paid to American cotton farmers.
The WTO gave Brazil permission in August to impose $294.7 million in sanctions against U.S. goods — the second-highest amount ever permitted by the Geneva-based trade arbiter — and Brazil’s government earlier this month released a list of 222 products that may be subject to increased duties. The list includes cotton and other agricultural and textile products as well as U.S. exports such as electronics, cosmetics, ketchup, cars, chewing gum, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals.
WTO judges found in September 2004 that as much as $4 billion in annual U.S. payments to cotton farmers violated global trade rules by encouraging excess production and driving down world prices. In June 2008, they upheld a finding that the U.S., the world’s largest exporter of the fiber, hadn’t done enough to scrap aid to its cotton producers.
Amidst reports that the Department of Homeland Security is adding 30,000 positions, below are two items on the continued expansion of the surveillance state.
This is a 2000-2002 slide that bears on the extraordinary possibilities inherent in creating a global multinational open source information sharing and sense-making grid. The 80-20 rule really does seem to stand up under most circumstances. White Hat (Stabilization & Reconstruction, Peaceful Preventive Measures) are especially responsible to shared open source information across all boundaries.
o the left is the map we created when it was clear the USA was going to invade Iraq and blow what should have been the surgical demise of Osama Bin Laden. This slide was created for and used in the opening briefing to the SES course on national security at the Western Management Development Center, and in 19 briefings around the country to the American Committees on Foreign Relations (ACFR).
Notes: If bin Laden could have asked his maker for the most helpful possible American reaction to 9-11, he could not have done better than the Bush Administration’s ill-considered conventional military attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq. The US is now an occupying force in Iraq, and in Afghanistan it has lost control of the entire country, where under US “non-control” the opium crop has doubled, enriching all the warlords, who will be almost impossible to dislodge without resuming combat operations. We have started a six-front 100-year war.
To the right is a later version used in private briefings.
Tom Friedman had an especially fatuous column in Sunday's New YorkTimes, which is saying something given his well-established capacity for smug self-assurance. According to Friedman, the big challenge we face in the Arab and Islamic world is “the Narrative” — his patronizing term for Muslim views about America's supposedly negative role in the region.
Steve Walt
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I heard a different take on this subject at a recent conference on U.S. relations with the Islamic world. In addition to hearing a diverse set of views from different Islamic countries, one of the other participants (a prominent English journalist) put it quite simply. “If the United States wants to improve its image in the Islamic world,” he said, “it should stop killing Muslims.”
Phi Beta Iota: The chart is below the fold, or at the Full Story Online
