Haitians live in a make-shift camp close to the airport. Port au Prince Haiti was rocked by a massive earthquake, Tuesday January 12, devastating the city and leaving thousands dead. Photo Marco Dormino
31 December 2010
FILE – In this Nov. 13, 2010 file photo, an ambulance worker prepares to remove the corpse of a man lying dead in a portable bathroom of a refugee camp in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2010 crisis has piled upon crisis in Haiti. More than 230,000 are believed to have died in the quake, and more than a million remain homeless. A cholera epidemic broke out in the fall, and in its midst a dysfunctional election was held, its results still unclear. Photo: Ramon Espinosa / AP
Phi Beta Iota: When did it go out of style for warriors to speak the truth and only the truth? Lies kill our own and dishonor our Republic. It is time for integrity to come back into being. Advanced Cyber/Information Operations (IO) are about truth & trust. No amount of courage at the tactical level can overcome a dishonest, unaffordable, intellectually-bankrupt strategy.
American forces invaded Afghanistan more than nine years ago, and we still don't know whom we're fighting. It's hard to know who did the better job of playing us for fools a few weeks ago – the Afghan who passed himself off as the “moderate” Taliban leader, who was rewarded with American cash for his performance, or Hamid Karzai.
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With the lion's share of Iraq‘s southern oil fields in Chinese hands and the Kurdish nationalists determined to control the country's largest oil reserves, more fighting in Iraq is inevitable. This sort of thing would almost be funny, in an insane sort of way, if such military leadership did not result in the pointless loss of American lives, undermine American strategic interests and erode the security and prosperity of the American people – the things the nation's four-stars are sworn to defend.
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When the budget ax falls, many inconvenient facts will come to light, unmasking the great deception that America confronted a serious military threat in the aftermath of Sept. 11, a deception promoted and fostered by politicians and ambitious generals who sought to gain from it. It will horrify and discourage Americans to learn we've bankrupted ourselves in a fight that always was analogous to clubbing baby seals. From 2001 onward, we never confronted armies, air forces or capable air defenses. Bottom line: There was no existential military threat to the United States or its NATO allies emanating from Afghanistan or the Middle East. There is none today.
For the time being, no one will say these things. It's easier to go, in Winston Churchill's words, “from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” and nurture the money flow to Washington.
Retired Col. Douglas Macgregor, a decorated combat veteran, is executive vice president of Burke-Macgregor Group. His newest book, Warrior's Rage, was published by Naval Institute Press. See also his earlier books, Breaking the Phalanx and Transformation Under Fire.
By Simon Johnson (bio), Baseline Scenario, 30 December 2010
Our leading bankers looted the state, plunged the world into deep recession, and cost us 8 million jobs. And now many of them stand by with sharpened knives and enhanced bonuses – also most willing to suggest how the salaries and jobs of others can be further cut. Think about the morality of that one.
Will no one think hard about what this means for our budget and our political system until it is too late?
At Peter Thiel’s invitation-only “Breakthrough Philanthropy” event in San Francisco on December 7, which brought together Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs with eight of the most visionary non-profits, Patri Friedman, grandson of legendary economist Milton Friedman, presented one of the most radical, imaginative concepts I’ve heard in some time. Here’s the text of his four-minute talk (video below — other Breakthrough Philanthropy speaker videos here). — A. Angelica
Every year, our phones get smarter, our cars safer, and our medical treatments more advanced. We all benefit from startups and established companies competing through constant innovation. So why is it that in one of the most advanced countries in the world, we’re still using the legal technology … of 1787? I mean, if you drove a car from 1787, it would be a horse!
Phi Beta Iota: There is a germ of a good idea here, that of creating viable alternatives for governance and sustenance as a model for others–the spike theory of change. It is however also remarkably utopian given the fact that between Bush Junior and Obama we have gone from 25 to 175 failed states and rising. Imagine Waterworld Somalian style. Ralph Peter nailed it long ago when he pointed out that the only path to wine, women, and wealth for the bulk of the population in failed states was at the point of a gun. Utopians simply do not get the reality that we live in a Whole System and until we can create a World that Works for All, these lovely ideas are nothing more than liberal speculative fancies. This web site and everyone associated with it are in the aggregate commited to restoring America the Beautiful, a Republic with liberty and justice for all. Seasteading–and geodesic domes–are great ideas that will only be beneficial if we can create a prosperous world at peace.
One of President Obama's unintended achievements has been to bring the moral bankruptcy of the Orwellian-named Middle East Peace Process into sharp relief: By trying to bribe Netanyahu into returning to the bargaining table with an offer of 20 additional F-35 Fighters in return for a 90 day extension of a phony settlement freeze, and then seeing Netanyahu stuffing it to Obama, theater of the absurd came into full view. Perhaps, however, the crisis is darkest before the dawn. Jeff Halper (bio), an Israeli activist with American roots, lays out the possibility that Obama's failure inadvertently opened the door for what would certainly be a messy and painful, but possibly successful game-changing scenario for way out of this intractable conflict.
I admire Halper and his good works, but I am not so optimistic. All revolutions are pathways into the future fueled by any interplay of chance and necessity; and therefore, their outcomes are, by definition, unknowable: apartheid in South Africa may have produced F. W. de Klerk and Nelson Mandella; but in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), it produced Ian Smith and Robert Mugabe. In Israel, apartheid has produced Binyamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and a unifying mixture of neofascism and narcissism on one side, but no one of Mandella's moral stature or even an opposing unifying ideal on the other. That said, Halper's essay is very important and worth thinking about. Chuck
Phi Beta Iota: This is an EXTRAORDINARY piece of balanced thinking, relevant to all who wish for peace and shared prosperity in the Middle East and elsewhere. Gaza is Ground Zero for the moral and intellectual failure of US “national security” and foreign policy, and this one article puts it all into focus.
In fact, the more we learn about what the plotters were up to, as well as the efforts to stop them, the more troubling the DNI’s ignorance becomes.
Three facts, in particular, have emerged that make this lapse inexcusable.
First, the State Department says the plotters had the U.S. embassy in London in their sites. On Monday, a Foggy Bottom spokesman confirmed that the embassy was on the plotters’ “targeting list.”
Second, according to the Guardian (UK), the alleged would-be terrorists were arrested “after several months of surveillance and monitoring by police and MI5 officers.”
Third, the UK press has reported that the plotters were, at the very least, inspired by the notorious al Qaeda cleric Anwar al Awlaki. … Awlaki is currently one of the most wanted terrorists in the world.
Phi Beta Iota: The DNI has been sand-bagged by three people and himself. Neither John Brennan (kitchen DNI at the White House), Leon Panetta (cheerleader for the CIA), or Michael E. Leiter (lawyer fronting the National Counterterrorism Center) appear to have any direct interest in seeing Jim Clapper succeed. Unfortunately, Jim Clapper has also sand-bagged himself by accepting “business as usual” and contenting himself with improvements on the margins–doing the wrong things righter. There is not a single piece of the US secret world that is working the way it should, in part because the entire mess lacks the legitimacy derived from relevance, and in part because the one thing Jim Clapper could have done on his own authority–the creation of an Open Source Center and an embedded Multinational Decision Support Centre–he has not done. Since the obvious needs to be spelled out, here are the two reasons why the OSC/MDSC are essential: 1) to begin providing the 96% of the decision-support not now provided to everyone including the President but explicitly not provided by classified to anyone below the President including policy, acquisition, and operations action officers; and b) to create the baseline for evaluating the Return on Investment (RoI) for the mis-begotten pieces of the secret world that are not, by any stretch of the imagination, worth the $90 billion a year they are costing us now. If there were one person among the seniors actually capable of making a difference, it should have been Jim Clapper. Happy New Year…
