John Steiner: Celebrating Chalmers Johnson

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Analysis, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, History, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Reform, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
John Steiner

Best of TomDispatch: Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire

Chalmers Johnson (RIP)

TomDispatch.com, 7 August 2011

EXTRACT

Three Good Reasons to Liquidate Our Empire and Ten Steps to Take to Do So

1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism

2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us

3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases

. . . . . . . .

Chalmers Johnson

10 Steps Toward Liquidating the Empire (Abridged)

Dismantling the American empire would, of course, involve many steps. Here are ten key places to begin:

1. We need to put a halt to the serious environmental damage done by our bases planet-wide. We also need to stop writing SOFAs that exempt us from any responsibility for cleaning up after ourselves.

2. Liquidating the empire will end the burden of carrying our empire of bases and so of the “opportunity costs” that go with them — the things we might otherwise do with our talents and resources but can't or won't.

3. As we already know (but often forget), imperialism breeds the use of torture.  Dismantling the empire would potentially mean a real end to the modern American record of using torture abroad.

4. We need to cut the ever-lengthening train of camp followers, dependents, civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and hucksters — along with their expensive medical facilities, housing requirements, swimming pools, clubs, golf courses, and so forth — that follow our military enclaves around the world.

5. We need to discredit the myth promoted by the military-industrial complex that our military establishment is valuable to us in terms of jobs, scientific research, and defense. These alleged advantages have long been discredited by serious economic research. Ending empire would make this happen.

6. As a self-respecting democratic nation, we need to stop being the world's largest exporter of arms and munitions and quit educating Third World militaries in the techniques of torture, military coups, and service as proxies for our imperialism.

7. Given the growing constraints on the federal budget, we should abolish the Reserve Officers' Training Corps and other long-standing programs that promote militarism in our schools.

8. We need to restore discipline and accountability in our armed forces by radically scaling back our reliance on civilian contractors, private military companies, and agents working for the military outside the chain of command and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Ending empire would make this possible.

9. We need to reduce, not increase, the size of our standing army and deal much more effectively with the wounds our soldiers receive and combat stress they undergo.

10. To repeat the main message of this essay, we must give up our inappropriate reliance on military force as the chief means of attempting to achieve foreign policy objectives.

Read full article with many links…

The Impact Today and Tomorrow of Chalmers Johnson

Steve Clemons

The Washington Note, 21 November 2010

Read full summary….

Phi Beta Iota:  The second article is a stunning review of the intellectual life of Chalmers Johnson, who was among many things a net assessments analyst for Allen Dulles.  He pioneered the study of “State Capitalism” and considered the US to be a greatly under-performing economy for its failure to move away from military unilateralism and toward sustainable development.

 

Winslow Wheeler: Analysis of US Bases Abroad

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 10 Security, Budgets & Funding, DoD, IO Deeds of War, Military, Peace Intelligence, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Winslow Wheeler
Carlton Meyer, a former Marine Corps officer and editor of G2mil has produced an insightful analysis of US foreign bases to close.  The defenders of the status quo on the bases question like to paint those who want to close foreign bases as “isolationist.”  That sort of guttersnipe-baiting is rendered ignorant by Meyer's analysis.  You can easily see that from his introduction and from his analysis throughout.  In fact, some might become a little nervous that Meyer has an awful lot of American intervention in mind in with the reduced base structure he would advocate for the future.  On the other hand, Meyer is also not a sucker for the dysfunctional war advocacy from the interventionists in Congress and elsewhere.
Contact him directly at editor@G2mil.com.

Dolphin: DARPA Runs Amok in Afghanistan

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Analysis, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Intelligence (government), IO Impotency, Military, Real Time, Waste (materials, food, etc)

More lipstick on a pig, anyone?

The plethora and pace of the development of these one-off “solutions”
is killing me ….the collective defense and intelligence community
apparently can't keep up with themselves in order to prove who is more
irrelevant…. we continue to throw good money after bad.

Will this ever end?

Exclusive: Inside Darpa’s Secret Afghan Spy Machine

Noah Shachtman

WIRED, 21 July 2011

The Pentagon’s top researchers have rushed a classified and controversial intelligence program into Afghanistan. Known as “Nexus 7,” and previously undisclosed as a war-zone surveillance effort, it ties together everything from spy radars to fruit prices in order to glean clues about Afghan instability.

The program has been pushed hard by the leadership of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They see Nexus 7 as both a breakthrough data-analysis tool and an opportunity to move beyond its traditional, long-range research role and into a more active wartime mission.

But those efforts are drawing fire from some frontline intel operators who see Nexus 7 as little more than a glorified grad-school project, wasting tens of millions on duplicative technology that has nothing to do with stopping the Taliban.

“There are no models and there are no algorithms,” says one person familiar with the program, echoing numerous others who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the program publicly. Just “200 lines of buggy Python code to do what imagery analysts do every day.”

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota:  The mind boggles at the idiocy of “reality mining” where the only reality that can be “computed” is digital, and actual reality is  a 15th century pre-analog illiterate society.  The comments at the end of the article are earthy and on target.  The US Government in the aggregate has lost both its intelligence and its integrity.

Chuck Spinney: The Afgan Misadventure in One Paragraph

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, 11 Society, Budgets & Funding, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military, Officers Call, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Chuck Spinney

First, the paragraph:

“The enterprise has proved to be a model of how not to go about such things, breaking all the rules of grand strategy: getting in without having any idea of how to get out; almost wilful misdiagnosis of the challenges; changing objectives, and no coherent or consistent plan; mission creep on an heroic scale; disunity of political and military command, also on an heroic scale; diversion of attention and resources [to Iraq] at a critical stage in the adventure; poor choice of local allies, who rapidly became more of a problem than a solution; unwillingness to co-opt the neighbours into the project, and thus address the mission-critical problem of external sanctuary and support; military advice, long on institutional self-interest, but woefully short on serious objective analysis of the problems of pacifying a broken country with largely non-existent institutions of government and security; weak political leadership, notably in subjecting to proper scrutiny militarily heavy approaches, and in explaining to the increasingly, and now decisively, sceptical domestic press and public the benefits of expending so much treasure and blood.”

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles
British ambassador in Kabul and as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan

The Afghan misadventure

By Lionel Barber, Financial Times, 22/07/11

Phi Beta Iota:  A full reading of “The Afghan misadventure” by Lionel Barber is highly recommended.  The ends with several lessons not understood in Washington, and a marvelous description of NATO as a “tethered goat.”  He also recommends these three books:

Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this link to reference the article – http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/0feac042-b395-11e0-b56c-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1SxSELLAY

Cables From Kabul: The Inside Story of the West’s Afghanistan Campaign, by Sherard Cowper-Coles, Harper Press, 352 pages

The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts and the Failures of Great Powers, by Peter Tomsen, PublicAffairs, 912 pages

Dead Men Risen: The Welsh Guards and the Real Story of Britain’s War in Afghanistan, by Toby Harnden, Quercus, 640 pages

DefDog: US Approach to Security Insane?

07 Other Atrocities, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Waste (materials, food, etc)
DefDog Recommends....

Anyone who believes we are winning the War on Terror doesn't understand the goals of AQ.  They wanted us to be afraid and to spend our money, both of which the government is doing in spades…..one really has to ask, then, who is winning?

Is high security backfiring in U.S.?

By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent

NEW YORK – As a foreign correspondent for NBC News, I haven’t spent much time in the United States during the last decade. I return only occasionally to check in with colleagues, visit family, or, this last time, to research a documentary for MSNBC.

The documentary, still in the works, is about the Global War on Terrorism, and what it has done to our military, economy and American society in general. Perhaps because the subject was on my mind, I found a recent travel experience especially meaningful.

Through my work I travel to some of the busiest airports in high-risk areas. Just this year I have been in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran, Bahrain, Libya, France, Italy and many other countries. But I have yet to feel so angry, so embarrassed or so scrutinized as I did going through airport security for a flight from Los Angeles International Airport to New York’s JFK while visiting home.

. . . . .

I’ve watched American troops fight, and sometimes die, to drive the Taliban and al-Qaida from Afghanistan, and to secure free elections in Iraq. They have been fighting for other people to be free. I was horrified to see that despite their sacrifices we’d let ourselves become a nation that appears to be driven by fear.

. . . . .

But at the airport, watching a 7-year-old girl go through a full body scan in public – just so she could fly out of the city of Los Angeles – made me wonder how much we have lost.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota:  The Founding Fathers do not approve….

Thomas Jefferson: A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.

Thomas Jefferson: Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

James Madison: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

Tax Cuts & Elective Wars Created the Deficit….

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Waste (materials, food, etc)
Chuck Spinney Recommends...

This op-ed was written by one of my closest friends, who happens to be an old fashioned Republican in the best sense of the term.

Chuck Spinney
Nice, France
The big deficit facing the U.S. is mostly Republican in origin, the Congressional Budget Office says. The Bush tax cuts alone have added $3 trillion in red ink, yet the party wants to double down on its failed policy.

By Mike Lofgren

June 26, 2011

. . . . . . .

Polarization based on juvenile talk radio sloganeering is dragging this country to the cliff's edge. If neither the Democrats nor the party I have served for three decades is willing to act like adults, perhaps it's time for a party that is willing to step into the void.

Van Jones Ascendant: Rebuild the Dream

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics, Methods & Process, Policies, Strategy, Waste (materials, food, etc)
John Steiner

VAN JONES:

We are not broke.

Taxing the super-rich will not kill the economy.

Most patriotic thing we can do is NOT taking down the US Government.

All three of those are big lies.

Let's rebuild the dream.

Van Jones

In the coming weeks, people all across the country will come together for American Dream house meetings. Let's talk about what a new American Dream looks like and commit to stand together to make it happen.

Find an American Dream house meeting near you. We want YOU to be part of this movement, from the very beginning.

Rebuild the Dream

See Also:

Van Jones and The Roots To Launch “Rebuild the Dream” Calling For Investment in Middle Class