WARNING NOTICE: The raw material is 80% speculative. The 20% is so real as to warrant real alarm and extraordinary measures within the virtually non-existent US national counter-intelligence community that is generally inept at real-time cyber-monitoring in multiple languages across all cyber-domains (e.g. skype, steganography, etcetera). We also do not “own the street,” rule one in counter-intelligence–all fifteen slices of HUMINT are in the basement, foreign counter-intelligence (offensive and defensive) being the runts of a very weak litter. DHS has wasted a decade doing the wrong things wronger, and is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
There are strong confirmations that one or more nuclear weapons, known to have been stolen but kept from the public to “prevent panic,” may well be deployed in American cities by extremist elements with probable ties to a foreign intelligence agency.
This scenario was the basis of the television show “Jericho” several years ago. However, this time there are real culprits and real motivations, both the overthrow of the government of the United States and the naming of Iran as a “scapegoat.”
The plot has been tracked to groups within the Pentagon, several government agencies and wealthy and powerful extremist backers of Netanyahu and, in particular, the “Gulf Cartel” operating from Mexico that has penetrated nearly all levels of government, law enforcement and the military across the country.
Using surprisingly direct language, President Obama has officially confirmed this conspiracy.
Six days ago, the President of the United States, on his official public website, issued a warning about “government insiders” who were planning “violent acts” against the “government and the nation.”
As we proved in Vietnam, and are about to prove again in Afghanistan, you can win most battles in a tactical sense but still lose a war at the far more decisive strategic and grand-strategic levels of conflict. (Grand strategy is explained here.) Israel's grand strategy is to establish a Greater Israeli Apartheid State (by annexing Area C of the West Bank and Gazifying Areas A and B) by (1) keeping the US firmly in its camp so (2) it can ignore the growing disgust in the rest of the world. That grand strategy has worked in the short term, most recently by hyping the Iranian threat and now the Gaza mini war to distract attention from the growing encroachment of illegal Israeli settlers in Area C.* But that strategy is turning the world against it (see Israel is all but alone in the Middle East). While recent pronouncements by President Obama and Secretary Clinton suggest Israel's influence in US domestic politics remains as strong as ever, the political sands in the US may be slowly insensibly shifting toward ambivalence, if not outrage, in the United States as well — and, as a practical, the US has enormous problems elsewhere (in Afghanistan) as well as home that may well evolved to take precedence over the US blank check to Israel. So, is Israel on the slippery grand-strategic slope of winning its battles while losing war?
The Financial Times, Ian Bremmer, November 20, 2012
On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Israel as a “terrorist state”. Whether you find yourself nodding or shaking your head in response, take a moment to consider those words.
This judgment did not come from predictable quarters: from Syria’s soldiers, Iran’s mullahs, or even Saudi royals. Turkey is a moderate Muslim democracy, a member of Nato, one that has traditionally protected constructive relations with Israel. And Mr Erdogan did not simply denounce a particular Israeli action, as he did in 2010 following an Israeli raid on a Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza.
He labeled Israel itself as a source of terrorism.
What’s truly new about Israelis and Palestinians exchanging fire? It isn’t Israeli politics. Early elections are on the way, and there are few signs that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a serious leadership challenge. Nor is it the increasing number and accuracy of rockets fired by Hamas and its Al-Qassam brigades.
Israel‘s escalating air attacks on Gaza follow the depressingly familiar pattern that shapes this conflict. Overwhelming Israeli force slaughters innocent Palestinians, including children, which is preceded (and followed) by far more limited rocket attacks into Israel which kill a much smaller number, rocket attacks which are triggered by various forms of Israeli provocations — all of which, most crucially, takes place in the context of Israel's 45-year-old brutal occupation of the Palestinians (and, despite a “withdrawal” of troops, that includes Gaza, over which Israel continues to exercise extensive dominion). The debates over these episodes then follow an equally familiar pattern, strictly adhering to a decades-old script that, by design at this point, goes nowhere.
Meanwhile, most US media outlets are petrified of straying too far from pro-Israel orthodoxies. Time's Middle East correspondent Rania Abouzeid noted this morning on Twitter the typical template: “Just read report in major US paper about Gaza/Israel that put Israeli dead in 1st sentence. Palestinian in 6th paragraph.” Or just consider the BBC's headline. Worse, this morning's New York Times editorial self-consciously drapes itself with pro-Israel caveats and completely ignores the extensive civilian deaths in Gaza before identifying this as one of the only flaws it could find with the lethal Israeli assault: “The action also threatens to divert attention from what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly described as Israel's biggest security threat: Iran's nuclear program.”
I wrote this with John Kerry and Michele Flourney in mind, but regardless of who is eventually made Secretary of Defense, the core concept remains: the center of gravity for massive change in the US Government and in the nature of how the US Government ineracts with the rest of the world, lies within the Department of Defense, not the Department of State.
John Kerry, Global Engagement, and National Integrity
It troubles me that John Kerry is resisting going to Defense when he can do a thousand times more good there instead of sitting at State being, as Madeline Albright so famously put it, a “gerbil on a wheel.” Defense is the center of gravity for the second Obama Administration, and the one place where John Kerry can truly make a difference. Appoint Michele Flournoy as Deputy and his obvious replacement down the road, and you have an almost instant substantive make-over of Defense. Regardless of who ends up being confirmed, what follows is a gameplan for moving DoD away from decades of doing the wrong things righter, and toward a future of doing the right things affordably, scalably, and admirably.
Note to readers: this blaster contains two clearly marked inserts that were not in my Time essay. Also, in introducing Seymour Melman's important work below, I should have mentioned that it was Melman's considered belief in the possibility of putting together a political coalition to facilitate the conversion of the defense industry to civilian production. Conversion is a exceedingly complex and highly controversial subject; and to date, conversion has not been accomplished in any meaningful way, but that does not mean conversion is impossible. Here, that possibility or impossibility is not at issue in this essay; my focus is on the very short term: namely how in the next few months the defense dependency may induce politicians who have been captured by the defense industry to react to the looming budget sequester by flinging the middle class off the fiscal cliff.
This recent essay – America the Third World Nation in Just 4 Easy Steps – describes how our political addiction to the free-trade ideology of neoliberal economics has helped to de-industrialize America and thereby impoverish much of the American middle class.
My essay describing the decline of manufacturing employment will give you a sense of the mind-boggling magnitude of what has happened. While “4 Easy Steps” makes passing references to the increasing dependence of the manufacturing sector on military spending, as well as the financialization of economy (but not the latter’s Siamese-twin ‘managerialism’), the authors do not develop these points. Without implying any criticism of this excellent essay, my aim today is to tweak your interest in these omissions, particularly America’s defense dependency.
The late Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia University wrote a prescient book, Profits Without Production (Knopf, 1983) that explained how the militarization and managerialization of our economy were becoming the central causes of the decline in America’s manufacturing competitiveness. This decline started in the 1970s, but Melman showed how it grew out of seeds planted by the permanent military mobilization of a huge defense industry in the 1950s.
The birth date for the permanent war economy was 30 September 1950.
On that day, President Harry Truman officially signed NSC-68, a document that became a blueprint for the containment strategy for waging the Cold War. Central to this strategy was the establishment of a large, permanently-mobilized defense manufacturing sector.
They justified the permanent mobilization, in part, with an economic rationalization reflecting their contention that the World War II production miracle proved the multiplier effects of Military Keynesianism, or in their words: “the economic effects of the [NSC-68] program might be to increase the gross national product by more than the amount being absorbed for additional military and foreign assistance purposes.”
The post-WWII economic boom in the U.S. (with our competitive performance aided in part by the lingering effects of the WWII damage to the world’s other major industrial economies) hid the adverse economic effects of the economic diversion attending to the permanent war economy unleashed by NSC-68. Nevertheless, by early 1961, the accumulating damage caused by the diversion was apparent to some insiders: President Eisenhower famously warned the nation about the rise of misplaced power posed by the rise of a large permanent standing arms industry, which he said, pointedly, was new in our national experience.
The accumulating damage wrought by the permanent war economy started to accelerate in the 1970s, and by 1980, the cancer metastasized: militarization and managerialization began to openly thrive at the expense of the traditional high-wage manufacturing sector, in effect, siphoning off money flows via a combination of government handouts and favorable tax treatment that in effect rewarded both the looting of the tax base and the draining of competitiveness and ingenuity from the civilian manufacturing sector (via the increased defense subsidy, leveraged buyouts, offshoring of jobs, emphasizing short-term focus to pump stock prices, etc.)
