Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback – Page 29

5.0 out of 5 stars Dick Cheney Pulls Noam Chomsky to the Center (Relatively Speaking)

October 18, 2007

Noam Chomsky

Edit of 15 Jun 09 to correct factual error in original review (nuclear deal with Iran under Gerald Ford, not Ronald Reagan, in 1974).

Chomsky is actually starting to win over the balanced middle with his common sense. I have long respected him, but it took Dick Cheney and his merry band of nakedly amoral and obliviously delusional henchmen to really bring home to America how much his straight talk and logical thinking can help us.

There is virtually no repetition from past works. This series of interviews took place in 2006 and early 2007, and I found a great deal here worth noting.

* In 70 New York Times editorials on Iraq, not once did they mention international law or the United Nations Charter. He uses this and several other examples to show how pallid, how myopic, how unprofessional our mainstream media has become.

* A wonderful section talks about how civil *obedience* of immoral and illegal orders is our biggest challenge in this era, and I agree. The “failure of generalship” in the Pentagon resulted from a well-meaning but profoundly misdirected confusion of loyalty to the civilian chain of command, however lunatic, with the integrity that each of our senior swore to the Constitution and to We the People in their Oath of Office.

* His knowledge of Lebanon, a country I have come to love as representative of all that is good in the Middle East, is most helpful. His many remarks, all documented, make it clear that Israel has been abducting people for decades, and that the Lebanese have quite properly come to equate US “freedom” with the “kiss of death.” I am especially impressed with his discussion of Hezbollah as having legitimacy based on providing social services to those ignored by past governments, and as having a significant strategic value to Iran as a flank on Israel. His observations on how the US consistently refuses to recognize honest elections that do not go as the policymakers (not the US public) wish, are valid.

* He reminds us that the US made an enormous strategic mistake in using Saudi Arabian extremist Islam as a counterpoint to Nasser's natural Arab nationalism. As Robert Baer puts it, we see no evil and slept with the devil like a common whore lusting for oil.

* His comments on China and the Shi'ites who sit on most of the reserves (including Saudi reserves in one corner of that country, are provocative. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that the USA needs to cede the oil to China and execute a Manhattan Project to leverage solar power from space, tidal power, air power, and–for storage–hydrogen power made with renewable resources.

* Chomsky's comments on Chavez track with my own understanding. Chavez is a serious and well-off revolutionary who is sharing energy with his Latin American brethren, and leading the independence of Latin America from the overbearing and often hypocritical and predatory US government and US multinational corporations.

* He offers compelling thoughts on how India is sacrificing hundreds of thousands of poor rural people who now commit suicide or migrate to cities after losing their lands, for the sake of the high technology investments. I wonder why India is not doing more to teach the poor “one cell call at a time.”

* His observations on US electoral fraud are brilliant. He points out that the fact that elections are stolen is much less important than the fact that the entire electoral process in the US is fraudulent, without substance, only posturing and platitudes.

* He discusses how the US public is completely divorced from the policy choices of the dual tyranny of the US (political) government and the US corporate sector.

* At every turn Chomsky offers common sense observations, for instance, Pakistan, not Iran, is vastly more likely to leak nuclear capabilities to jihadists. In passing, he points out that it was the US that gave the Shah of Iran an entire MIT nuclear program and substantive assistance that is now being harvested by Iran, in 1975. Kissinger, Cheney,Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz as well as Gerald Ford are mentioned by name.

* He observes that Israeli influence is vastly larger than the lobbying effort, because the entire US intellectual network has “bought into” the Israeli myths and lies. The American fascists (see American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America), the Christian fundamentalists, are actually anti-Semitic, but support Israel because of their belief in the apocalypse.

* The Internet is having a pernicious effect on dialog and debate and compromise, because it creates little cul-de-sacs for lunatics of like mind to find and reinforce one another, divorced from larger realities.

* Avian flu (and our lack of preparation for it) is vastly more dangerous than a nuclear event. (See my review of the DVD Pandemic).

* Missile “defense” is actually code for allowing a first strike by the US on Russia or China, as a means to moderating their counter-strike. This is the first time I have heard it put this way, and I agree. All Americans should oppose “missile defense.”

* State secrecy is about keeping our own citizens ignorant of the crimes being done “in our name” not about keeping secrets from the enemies we a re covertly screwing over time and again.

* Darfur is being dumbed down, at the same time that the *millions* being genocided in the Congo are being ignored.

* He ends on two good notes. Like Thomas Jefferson (A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry”) he says that “educating the American people is the main thing to be done,” and love of the people is fundamental.

Great book, completely fresh and absolutely worth reading for the mainstream that might have in the past written Chomsky off as a perennial leftist, which he is not. Chomsky is what we must all seek to be: an educated engaged citizen.

2007/09/302009/10/17

Review: The Shock Doctrine–The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Disaster Relief, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Easily one of the top ten on the death of the American dream

September 30, 2007

Naomi Klein

I read this book while crossing the Atlantic. The author has done something extraordinary, the equivalent of Silent Spring for industrial-era capitalism as an immoral form of human organization. This book is unique but also tightly linked to the books that I list below.

The conclusion of the book focuses on how Wall Street has discovered how to profit from mega-disasters and financial melt-downs, and contrary to popular belief, Wall Street makes money from these economic down-turns. It is the individual, and the indigenous owners who are forced to sell below market, that lose, every time.

The author's opening focus is on privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending, each as mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with other nasty triggers demanded by the World Trade Organization, that have been systematically used to loot entire nations and their commonwealths–this is apart from the immoral predatory capitalism that uses bribes to clear areas of indigenous peoples so they can steal all the gold or other natural resources, and their only cost is the bribe, while the host peoples lose billions in natural resources.

The author teaches us that “disaster capitalism” is the next step above immoral predatory capitalism, in which wars and disasters have been privatized and the global military-industrial-prison-hospital complex has moved one step closer to displacing all governments.

She spends time discussion torture by dictators as a silent partner to the free-market crusade, and this is a good time to mention that the book is a standing condemnation of all that Milton Friedman and “the Chicago boys” inserted into the IMF and World Bank via their students.

She provides a helpful discussion of how believers in Armageddon, including the neo-conservatives, are motivated by the belief that there is such a thing as a clean slate, and that Africa without Africans, or Iraq without Iraqis, are both desirable for that reason.

She does a tremendous job of outlining the three shock waves of disaster capitalism:

1. Government Disaster/War out-sourced
2. Corporate looting
3. Police terrorism

A portion of the book focuses on the urgency of restoring unions and the middle class, unions because they protect fair wages that create a middle class. She stresses that the 1970's through the 1990's saw a global (but particularly southern hemisphere) campaign to use the cover of counter-terrorism to murder and terrorize union leaders. As a graduate of the Central American and Andean wars, I can certainly testify to the fact that government death squads were as about looting and killing opposition leaders, and I for one saw no terrorists, only indigenous people's at the end of their rope.

Interestingly the author singles out visionaries as being among the top targets for being hunted down and “disappeared.” Visionaries counter the government lies that seek to rule by secrecy, impose scarcity, and concentrate wealth within a small elite.

The author damningly documents how eager corporations have been to work with dictators to create police states that eliminate unions and enslave peoples at wages that cannot support a family, much less create a middle class.

She focuses on national debt and on government corruption as the two pillars of social destruction. As a student of E. O. Wilson and Medard Gabel, and many others, I can testify that there is plenty of money for all of us to be virtual billionaires, but it is corruption and greed at the top, enabled by secrecy, that have allowed a handful to create a global class war and impoverish the 90% that do the hard work (see my list on this one).

I am utterly blown away by the author's overall assessment, in the middle of the book, to wit, that crisis is now used routinely to side-step reasoned democracy and completely halt political and social reform while furthering the ends of those who seek to concentrate wealth and power exclusive of the larger body of We the People.

The author is damning across the board of the failures of neoliberalism, which has been a “second pillage” of the looting of state-owned enterprises, following the first pillage, the looting of the natural resources of the commonwealth being targeted.

As part of this the author explicitly accuses the IMF of deliberately fostering crises in part by fabricating and manipulating statistics, or as the author puts it, “statistical malpractice.”

The author suggests that unlike the Mexican bail-out, when Rubin was seeking to protect Wall Street investments, Asia was allowed to collapse financially because the US wanted to put an end to the prospects of their being a “third” way that was more balanced than either capitalism for the few on one side, or socialism for all on the other. This is especially noteworthy because Latin America is today pursuing a similar “third way” and very likely to succeed.

The author declares that Donald Rumsfeld's over-riding objective as Secretary of Defense was the privatization of war. The author tells us that he declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy on 10 September (this is the same day that Congresswoman McKinney's was grilling him on the missing 2.3 trillion dollars). On 11 September the missile won Rumsfeld his war with the Pentagon bureaucracy *and* it destroyed the computers with all the records on the missing money.

The author goes on to document how the Bush Administration privatized Homeland Security across the board.

As the book draws to a close she reviews the history of corporate-driven foreign policy, summing it up in three steps:

1. Corporation suffers set-back in a foreign country
2. Politicians loyal to the corporation demonize the foreign country
3. Politicians “sell” US public on the need for regime change.

The author scorns political appointees, noting that their “service” these days is little more than a pre-raid reconnaissance.

She concludes by suggesting that disaster apartheid is leaving 25-60% of the populations as an underclass, destroyed middle classes, and creating walled cities for the elite, death and suffering for everyone else. Dubai is one such walled city.

Corporations are red-lining the world, using stocks, currency, and real estate markets to crash economies, buy cheap, and then restore with a sharp re-concentration of wealth.

Ending on a positive note, she suggests that We the People are in the process of reconstructing our own world, and while I did not see mention of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) or Interra and the other community-oriented systems, I believe she is correct, and that the Earth Intelligence Network, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, the People's Budget Office, are all part of taking back the power and the commonwealth.

This is a great and necessary book. Others (the first two DVDs) listed below reinforce her findings.

The Corporation
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

2007/09/242009/10/17

Review: A Peace to End All Peace–The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East

5 Star, Country/Regional, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History

Supporting Links and Passing Praise

September 24, 2007

David Fromkin

I am forty books behind in actual reading, but I had the pleasure of scanning this book while on the sidelines of my son's football practice, and it is, as so aptly described by the best of the reviews, breathtaking.

The sentence that grabbed me is in the final paragraph, where the author sums up the roots of the Middle Eastern troubles as being directly on the heads of the English in particular, who lied, cheated, and stole without mercy. He says of Loyd George: “His political deviousness and his moral and financial laxness were never forgotten.” Would that this were so, for Dick Cheney and George Bush are our Lloyd George.

I have written a full summative review of a book that complement's this author's sensible account, and reading that review before reading this book could be helpful. The other books also support the view that we are our own worst enemy, that there is plenty of money with which to make the world heaven on earth, but rule by secrecy, predatory capitalism, and fascism disguised as democracy has looted the planet and picked the pocket of the individual taxpayer while destroying the middle class. We are repeating history, in part because we have one of the most poorly educated populations with respect to history and global cultures, than ever before. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency has taken to complaining recently that he cannot find enough qualified recruits in our shallow pool of “worldly” talent.

The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

The key point of the above book is that the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of nation-states as soverign entities with unrestricted powers within their own borders–borders created by the English and other invasive colonizing powers with the US the most active in the last 200 years–were huge mistakes. We should instead have at least made Indigenous Peoples co-equal, and understood, and respected, tribal boundaries established over centuries. Ignorance and hubris/arrogance combine with greed at the corporate and dictator levels (see Ambassador Palmer's book on “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil” to understand why our White House loves 42 of the 44 dictators on the planet, and Tim Weiner's “Legacy of Ashies” for why CIA went straight into the business of supporting dictators as proxy bullies). Paul Bremer had it right: the root cause of terrorism is us. See my comment for a note on Chinese Irregular Warfare that just took force off the table as a US option.

On the positive side, but Amazon only allows ten active links, see
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks
Barry Carter, Infinite Wealth
C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
J. F. Rischard, HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Robert Steele, The New Craft of Intelligence
Robert Steele, The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Thomas Stewart, Wealth of Knowledge
Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth
E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life
Medaard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires (forthcoming)

I hope this contextual connecting of some dots is viewed as helpful. This is not a “pretend” review!

2007/09/032009/12/04

Review: The Road to 9/11–Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America

6 Star Top 10%, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, History

Stunning Work of Immense Value to Every American

September 3, 2007

Peter Dale Scott

I put this book down in something of a daze. This is one of the top five books relevant to understanding Dick Cheney, 9/11, Iraq, and the demise of the Republic.

This author is a Nobel-level researcher who has specialized in cover-ups and conspiracies, who with this book has fourteen serious books in being, a few of them poetry of a serious nature.

The book begins with a lovely list of nineteen trailblazers that is galringly incomplete, but a nice touch and worthy of note.

As I worked my way through the book I was thinking to myself that this author has brought together, in one volume in which half the pages are endnotes, much of what I have been trying to address in my 950+ reviews and my lists on Cheney and 9/11 and anti-Americanism.

The author is superbly credible and well-written in documenting the many miscalculations that have been the result of the intersection between Saudi Arabia, Texas and Geneva, and aggravated (my own view) by Zionists and Israeli genocide against the Palestinians and the Lebanese. I have a note, “tontos utiles,” which is what Americans are called in Latin America: “useful idiots.” In reality, Cheney is not an idiot, he is simply the most amoral war criminal to ever sit in the Oval Office.

The author is extremely good at showing how Cheney's power emerged with the creation of the Continuity of Operations (COG) parallel government during the Reagan Administration. I am quite certain that Dick Cheney was controlling every aspect of US Government operations on 9/11, and I believe this book and the other books listed below to the point that I feel the 9/11 Commission was a cover-up, and We the People must indict and impeach Dick Cheney or be forever disgraced in the eyes of the world as accomplices to his murderous misdeeds and his 25 high crimes and misdemeanors.

The author ends the book beautifully, with a call for Open Politics that ends with glossary of open politics. Readers may be interested in my keynote speech to Gnomedex in Seattle, “Open Everything, which will shortly be available at my web site as a 9 minute download, with the slides easily found at my website/GNOME.

The author is an English professor, and I can think of no higher praise for his work than to say he is the most erudite patriot I have ever read. This is a moving thoughtful work of enormous importance to those who wish to save the Republic and the Constitution from the criminals and traiors that have hijacked the three branches of the federal government.

There are 27 secessionist movements for good reason. If we do not act now, before 2008, every one of those 27 secessionist movements will have every right to withdraw from what has become the most dangerous rogue nation on the planet. What is being done “in our name” is immoral, unaffordable, unsustainable, and unnecessary. It's time we took the Republic back.

2007/09/032009/10/17

Review: War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, War & Face of Battle

Compellingly Clear Foundation for Avoiding Global Collapse

September 3, 2007

Peter Turchin

I bought this book at the same time that I bought The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology), and it is one of several that will be the foundation for my own forthcoming work, “WAR(-) & PEACE(+): Open=Wealth=Peace.

Other books vital to my perspecitve that complement this one:
The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State
The Vulnerability of Empire (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs)
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (American Empire Project)

It is on the basis of having read and reviewewd those books first, that I find a deep appreciation for what this author has done. I've struggled with the book for a couple of months, because this is not light reading. This is deep history, a form of historical dynamics of “science” that is called Cleodynamics. This is such a tough nut to crack that I am going to write my review in reverse order.

1) The author ends with E pluribus unum. Cooperation is essential to the long-term prosperity of man. To this I would add my own motto, E Veritate Potens–We the People are made powerful through truth.

2) The author ends on a hopeful note, suggesting that it is possible to design institutiions (I would say, networks) that can foster cooperation and distribute wealth (I would say, create new wealth). There is a remarkable coincidence between this author's sociological views, and two books in particular, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks) and The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

3) The author attributes the current clashes of civilization with the4 energizing of the Islamic endges where they confront the West (Israel is included in that bloc), Orthodox, Hindu, and Sinic civilizations. I know from other readings that these edges also suffer from water scarcity, and the greatest crime that Israel is committing against the Arab nations is the covert theft of their water through very long underground pipes that violate political borders.

4) Growing inequality, growing debt, brings down empires. The author paraphrases Toynbee in saying “Great empories dies not by murder but by suicide.” Quite right. We've killed 3,000 of our own and created 75,000 amputtees while murdering hundreds of thousands because our The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead was all too willing to “go along” with massive blatant lies, and all too complacent to exercise our civic responsibilities to participate in the dialog.

The failure of our generals and admirals to confront illegal orders from Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz–the failure particularly to challenge their many lies to Congress and the public–got us into perfect position for total collapse. The 27 secessionist movement are most likely to gain their objectives cause the “empire” is deeply enmeshed in a far-away war it cannot win, a war that continues to hollow out our Armed Forces at the same time that it accelerates our loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the rest of the world.

The decline of collective capabilities for action, “asabaya” that this author discusses match up very well with the observations of the author of the book first cited above, to wit, when the empire can no longer make coherent affordable sustainable decisions, the empire implodes, defaulting one or two levels down.

Throughout the book there is a tension between “the landscape of fear” and the possibilities of hope. One thing history cannot tell us, although the author explores this as best he can, is how the wealth of networks could unleash the entrepreneurial energy of the five billion poor, to the point that we achieve the title of Medard Gabel's superb forthcoming book, “Seven Billion Billionaires.” Self-governance, tr5ansparent budgets that destroy corruption, self-correcting localized resilience and networks that eliminate waste and over-production, these all appear to be on the horizon.

Having been in Viet-Nam from 1963-1967, and being an avid reader of books on the intelligence failures and leadership lies of that era, I find a remarkable coincidence between the asibaya of Islam and the asibaya of Viet-Nam, and the manner in which mendacious leaders and incompetent or timid intelligence professionals conspire to waste blood, treasure, and spirit in a self-deating manner (less the elites that enrich themselves through war profiteering).

I have a note, this may be the first 21st Century social science reference (published in 2006)

Early on in the work the author focuses on the religous controversies that plagued the Roman Empire, and we reeview the critical role of religion as a symbolic market, a divider for many, a uniter for some. It was a glue for Russia, it is neutral for Malaysia and Indonesia, and fraught with peril for Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and even Turkey.

Early on the author focuses on how fragmentation blockes collective action and leads to defeat in detail. He emphasizes the importance of social cohesion while noting that climate and ecological boundaries matter. So doesthe truth. I was much impressed by The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink and The Republican War on Science as well as Tempting Faith and I am quite certain that history will find this current Administration to have been the most villanous, traitorous, spendthrift, and corrupt in our entire history of just over two centuriues. What stuns me is how our culture has become so insensitive, our civic nature so watered down, that the people are like pigs waiting for slaughter.

The book opens with a central observation, that political boundaries work only when they coincide with cultural rights. Absolutely vital point, one reason why I concur with Philip Alott's observations, and one reason I believe we need to overturn the Treaty of WEestphalia and start over with a combination of culturally valid boundaries and regional networks for managing water, eneergy, food, shelter, and security.

The author begin with a discussion of three central concepts:

1) Meta-ethnic frontier theory and asabaya cycles

2) Demographic-structural secular cycles; and

3) Fathers and sons cycles.

The author uses and discusses mathematical models in support of the work, but does not burden the reader with the formulas.

From this and the many other books I have been privileged to review these past six years of infamy, I share the author's hopeful conclusion. It is now possible to demonstrate to people that

1) There are not enough guns to kill us all

2) We can liberate the poor by connecting them to free knowledge one cell phone call at a time (with millions of volunteers using telelanguage.com to offer micro-tutorials on anything in any language);

3) We can demand trasparent budgets published a week prior to voting, and thus eliminate all the secret earmarks and corruption;

4) We can apply millions of eyeballs to all trade records and stop corporate looting of poor countries via corruption

5) We can throw out corporate personality, implement localized home rule, and demand localized resilience in water and energy and food.

On balance, as appalled as I am about the treachery and venality of the Cheney White House, I can but Praise God for sending this dark cloud to shock America back into reading non-fiction and thinking for itself.

I have three sons, and helping the poor is going to be my way of protecting the future of my children and their children. Earth is an aquariaqm. We have 5-10 years to balance it, or we are toast. Corruption, not global warming, is the gravest threat to humanity.

2007/08/242009/12/04

Review DVD: The Wind and the Lion

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Reviews (DVD Only)

Honor Above War, Love Above Loyalty

August 24, 2007

Sean Connery, Chris Aller

I sometimes tire of non-fiction (reality) and escape into DVDs, but many of them are either reality or a sembalnce of reality that merits respect. This is such a film.

I would also add a note of caution to those who would demean this film as “corny.” NOT right. This film was ahead of its time. In this film, the moderate Islamists (represented by Sean Connery) are upset with foreign presence (Western Europe), and the USA with its bully Theodore and its aggressive Marines, are in the wrong until the Marines are led back on track by the female American protagonist (Candice Bergen) and free the Lion of Islam to fight again.

TAKEAWAY: Americans can be, are, morally wrong (as are all immoral predatory nations), and moderate Islamists are, in their own place that we have invaded, morally correct. Our God is NOT, as LtGen Jerry Boykin, one of my top five greatest generals ever (out of 75 or so I have known, most never more than a Colonel with a facelift) greater than theirs. Our God is CO-Equal to theirs, and the sooner we put Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger behind bars, the sooner we eliminate our 750 bases overseas, the sooner the world can restore balance. Legitimacy and morality are the two strategic pillars that America has abondoned its in prostitution to Saudi oil and 42 of 44 dictators, and we can never be America the Beautiful, America the Good, unless we right ourselves.

As a patriotic estranges Republican I will say this clearly: America and Israel are the scourges of the world, followed by Saudi Aribia. We have sown the dragon's teeth, and I weep for what we have become: virtual colonialists, unilateralist military confusing might with right, and a cheating culture that ignores the class war led by our predatory immoral Wall Street band of merry thieves laundering drug money and covering up the complicity of Dick Cheney and Rudy Gulliani in the murder of most who died on 9-11 from controlled demolitions (NYC) or a missile (the Pentagon).

Where, or where, is the American Eagle that we need so desperately? See the image I have posted above to understand where we need to go if our children, if all children, are to have a future.

2007/08/112009/10/16

Review: Foreign Follies–America’s New Global Empire

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason

Definitive Statement on How Real Conservatives Despise Bush Lies and Cheney High Crimes,

August 11, 2007

Doug Bandow

Published in 2006, this collection of essays ranges from the late 1990's to its year of publication, and I was quite astonished to discover two things fairly quickly into the work:

First, the author is a conservative–a true conservative–and firmly opposed to what he calls “promiscuous intervention” or elective wars or global rampant empire-building. I was expecting a left of center diatribe against the follies of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Not so. The author is consistent–he railed against the follies of the Clinton-Clinton Administration first, and this followed over.

Second, as an estranged moderate Republican who believes in fiscal conservatism, a small government, and not supporting dictators or decadent despots like the debauched Saudi “royal” family of swindlers, pedophiles, and perverts, I was stunned to find my conservative roots reaffirmed, and the neo-conservatives, the false conservatives, soundly lambasted for their chicken-hawk enlargement of the military-industrial complex.

The author opens early with the statement that America is no longer a Republic, and I completely agree. The author, affiliated with the Cato Institute, has given me a new and deeper appreciation for that organization's intellectual and constitutional line of reasoning.

The early part of the book is a superb collection of varied arguments for completely avoiding foreign adventurism that enriches a few in the military-industrial complex, at three great costs:

1) Loss of lives and limbs among our brave troops;
2) Loss of natural treasure we cannot space on others
3) Loss of morality and rise of vulnerability to hatred occasioned by our foreign presence

The latter point merits special emphasis. The author's views are totally consistent with my own reading and world experience:

1) Morality, as Will and Ariel Durant tell us in their The Lessons of History, is a strategic asset of incalculable proportions. Others, such as Max Manwaring, in The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century tell us that security–long-term security, can only come from legitimacy, legitimacy in the eyes of both our own citizens and denizens in every clime and place where we venture.

2) Bin Laden is on solid ground to use terrorism against us, an asymmetric method that is necessary for smaller actors, and the author is clear in validating the degree to which we merit and invite such terrorist attacks by intervening and by supporting debauched dictators like the Saudis. The author states clearly: “We must reduce the sources of foreign hostility to the US.” The author quotes Pape, author of Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism among others on how suicidal terrorism is correlated with US occupations overseas, *not* with radical Islam per se. He goes on to say, as my colleague Robert Baer has documented in See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, that “American commitment to the Saudi royal family is a moral blemish and a practical danger. See also Ambassador Mark Palmer's denunciation of our support for 42 of the 44 remaining dictators in Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.

In 1999 the author penned this statement against the Clinton Administration that applies equally today to the Bush-Cheney Administration: “Indeed, where the President and his aides are arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent, others must lead.” I agree with this author of the strategic logic of terrorism against US misbehavior, and point the interested reader to Pape's book above.

I am heartened to read this conservative author's sensible denunciation of both the lies of Bush and Cheney to all Americans, and of the idiocy of the neo-conservatives in striving for increased unconstitutional executive power, and in believing in an “immaculate presidency” that can do no wrong. He clearly labels Bush as wrong and as owing all Americans an apology. He properly dismisses the “stay the course” propaganda by pointing out that when you are on the wrong road, you get off at the first available exit.

He segues from that to a proper denunciation of American support for a genocidal racist Israel and offers this lovely quote: “Crackpot theology is no substitute for thoughtful analysis is developing foreign policy.”

The author offers an elegant essay against conscription and the draft. As a taxpayer who now seems that 75% of my taxes are misspent on elective war, secret earmarks, and fraudulent procurements that benefit a small elite while destroying the working poor and the vanishing middle class, I am now all for eliminating federal taxes and forcing the federal government to apply to the states for funding of “common” needs. War is not in our common interest, and we should not have allowed our Congress and our Executive to become spendthrifts with out money–as Davy Crockett learned–it is not theirs to give!

I part with the author only on the subject of Taiwan–he is wrong to see Taiwan as a beacon of freedom. Chang Kai Sheik was one of the greatest war criminals and thieves on the planet in his time, and a cursory reading of the literature, for example, the books by Sterling and Peggy Seagraves, will quickly document that Taiwan is both an inherent part of China, and not at all a bastion of freedom as much as limpet fish sucking the blood from the American's so naïve as to believe these cheating miscreants.

Over-all I found this author to be inspiring. He neglects to address the war crimes of the extremist Republicans, nor does he venture to comment on the very high probability that Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein (and their insurance co-conspirators) are guilty along with Donald Rumsfeld of the mass murder of most of those who died on 9-11 to controlled demolitions in NYC and a missile into the Pentagon. Evidently there are some areas where “true blue” conservatives do not dare venture. For those interested in this aspect of the *other* neo-conservative crime of the century see my lists on 9-11 books and DVDs, and on evaluating Cheney, and most especially, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, where my review lists 23 of the 25 high crimes and misdemeanors of Dick Cheney that are documented in the public record (for the other two, see Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11)

Category: Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Review: What We Say Goes