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Arraya
ParticipantWe are entering phase II of the Debtocalypse.
Participantmaybe you have evolved and included all of humanity in your tribal connection. Which can lead to depression
Participant[quote=briansd1]Arraya posted before about how nationalism can easily be manipulated with propaganda.
[/quote]Well, I think the fact we emerged as a social species, in a tribal setting, is the derivation of patriotism. The tribal mentality then widened to include religions, nation-states, ethnicities, etc..
I’d say there is probably an evolutionary developed trait for this tribal mentality because the cohesiveness was necessary for survival. It still is, really
The problem is people’s emotional connection to the collective can blind them, which becomes a source of manipulation. Especially with how stratified our societies have become over time, where, the interests of the top are opposed to those below.
Participant[quote=pri_dk]So another cranky old scientist who does not even study climate writes a letter.
[/quote]He must feel good about himself. He made it onto a list of profession industry shills and “experts” that argued that cigarettes causes no harm.
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/page/257775_Ivar_Giaevers_links_to_Exxon_M
[quote]Some might think that this does not prove a sell out – only a collaboration with these groups. That would require believing that a well known scientist with no history of climate research of his own comes out with a list of wingnut talking points that are easily scientifically refuted just because of the goodness of his heart – because he believes his contrary “science” so much that he had to speak out – but he does not bother to publish a single paper on the topic that can be peer reviewed.
If he truly had some data to take down climate science, he would publish it somewhere. But he hasn’t.
Of course he is getting paid. Of course Heartland pays its “experts.” There is no other motivation for a respected scientist to act so unscientifically and tarnish an otherwise sterling reputation.
Update:
From Real Climate… hat tip to PublicityStunted[/quote]Participant[quote=walterwhite]
Is obl a hero or a “hero”?[/quote]Life is full of paradoxes. It’s fascinating that the military used the code name “Geronimo” for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden
If the original ‘Geronimo’ had been trained as a militant and financed by the US government, was sent to organize unknown operations against various other groups, and then decided to change sides and fight against his original recruiters, would he be a traitor, a ‘terrorist’ or a freedom fighter? Pretty much depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?
Participant[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
Arraya: I agree that the intel was crap. I’ll take it one step further and say that the intel, regardless of time and situation, is generally fucked up and thus you have to operate off of what you have.[/quote]Yeah, I understand this, Alan. However, I would say they were not concerned with weapons and they certainly did not see it him as a threat. I would also say they thought they would find some reminisce of a weapons program. I also think the evidence is clear that they manipulated the data to make the case. In other words, “cooked” the data. Also, it’s no mistake that 80% of the population thought Saddam was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks in the run up to the war.
America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.
George W. BushSeriously, that quote is crazy talk.
To me, whether the intel indicated he had weapons or not is kind of a fake debate. I agree, they thought he might have something to hold up and say “Hey looks at this!” And *some* intel supported a possibility. But, that was not their motivation.
If he did have some weapons program, really, how far would he go if he started flinging Anthrax at his neighbors. Not very far. Well, if it was Iran there would be cheering in DC and Tel Aviv. His speculative weapons program was not conceivably a threat to the US. And after a decade of sanctions, what ever he possibly did have was incredibly weak at best.
I was just flipping through Chomsky’s “Power and Terror” in the book store today. If anybody’s interested in cutting through all the realpolitik concerning the middle east, this is a fantastic book for that.
Participant[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
Hussein not only had a well-developed chem- and bio-weapons capability, he had used it before and inflicted tens of thousands of casualties in so doing. .[/quote]Yes, it’s a well established fact that we helped with that in the early 80s. Then provided cover with the UN when Iran complained about it to them.
[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
You can assert the familiar neo-con conspiracy argument, but that runs into trouble when you look at the facts and facts from sources outside of the US and the US intelligence community (a point I made above)..[/quote]Talk about assertion. It’s a well known fact that the intelligence was crap and twisted by dozens of intellgence officers across the globe. The downy street memo was the M16 admitteding it was cooked as well as, at least a dozen, former intelligence and insiders in the US
Oh, are you saying we relied on some secret report from the netherlands that nobody knows about? That also turned out to be wrong?
The neo-cons have names and put out reports – it sure IS NOT secret that they were gunning for him in the mid 90s. No conspiracy needed, the publically announced the severity of the matter in 98 and 2000.
Colin Powel from Feb 2001. Maybe he did not get the secret Dutch report you are talking about.
Participant[quote=Allan from Fallbrook]
Arraya: How about Saddam’s use of chem weapons at Halabja and throughout the Iran – Iraq War? I’d also point out that Saddam was actively seeking to weaponize both anthrax and botulin for strategic/theater-wide use. While I now realize that the Iraq war was ill-considered, given that there were no WMDs (and the fallback excuse of removing Saddam as a dictator is thin soup, given how many of his ilk we’ve supported over the years), there was credible intel on his weapons program over the years, supported by events like Halabja. Further, the Brits, French and Germans had actionable intel on the same programs. It wasn’t cut from whole cloth as many on the Left assert (especially given that a good many Dems were also stridently for regime change).[/quote]
Well, it’s interesting. Saddam came to power in a coup a few months before the Iranian revolution. A few months after the revolution he attacked Iran.
It came out in congressional testimony that western firms “unwittingly and wittingly” helped him with his chemical weapons.
As well, when Iran went to the UN to complain about the chemical weapons, the US and Britain blocked any serious condemnation. So, I have a hard time when people condemn his use of chemical weapons, as some sort of horror without them acknowledging that western powers helped him with attaining them as well as protected him from international response. 1.5 million people died in that war.
As far as the intel we had, well yeah, we sold him the weapons back in the day so it’s understandable that we think he might have them. Though, I would say, that the aggregate of intel would not be labeled “actionable” by 2000. With an overall assumption, that he was not even a threat to his neighbors at that point. The, spotty at best, intel was trumped up by a magnitude. Most of the fear mongering was think tank twisting of data. This can be tracked back to a few think tanks.
Actually, there was practically an intelligence community revolt over the misuse of intelligence.
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon
From May 2002 until February 2003, I observed firsthand the formation of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans and watched the latter stages of the neoconservative capture of the policy-intelligence nexus in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. This seizure of the reins of U.S. Middle East policy was directly visible to many of us working in the Near East South Asia policy office, and yet there seemed to be little any of us could do about it.
I saw a narrow and deeply flawed policy favored by some executive appointees in the Pentagon used to manipulate and pressurize the traditional relationship between policymakers in the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies.
I witnessed neoconservative agenda bearers within OSP usurp measured and carefully considered assessments, and through suppression and distortion of intelligence analysis promulgate what were in fact falsehoods to both Congress and the executive office of the president.
The “downy street memo” was the acknowledgment by the M16 that the case was paper thin and not supported by the intelligence community.
What you have are either manipulations of facts based on extreme and detrimental paranoia(with nobel intent) with those manipulations expressed to the public as fact or the twisting was done for ulterior motives.
Regardless of motivations, which can never be proven,(though I think an analysis of the confluence of interests in power at the time could give a good hint), the complete abandonment of standard operating procedure, in the form of, I guess what you could call, intelligence management towards policy, turned out to be wrong.
Participant[quote=KSMountain]From the “it wasn’t just the neo-cons, and wasn’t a new idea” department:
[/quote]No, I agree. Like I said it was floating around think tanks since the mid 90s. Though, the PNAC document really laid out a plan that wanted him gone fast. But, I wonder who conceived that bill Clinton signed. Hmmmm?
PNAC From Jan 98
We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War. In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
snip
Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
Participant[quote=KSMountain]
Let me take a stab at a justification (acknowledging right up front that it IS weak, but it is more than zero): I believe that in that moment, at that time, after all the UN resolutions, after all the sanctions, after years of No-fly zones, after the Iran Iraq war, after gassing the Kurds, after Gulf War I, when he annexed Kuwait and massed troops just North of Saudi, after him going to great lengths to try to convince everyone that he had WMD, and THEN after 9/11 (try to remember how it felt when it was fresh), “we” (many of our leaders, not just neocons) just weren’t in a mood to take a chance. We wanted to experiment with pre-emptively “solving” the problem.
][/quote]He was a US strongman that became unpredictable and went rogue. I understand the policy of preemption and the rational behind it. However, to me it looks like there was ulterior motives. First and foremost, there was NO intelligence agency that thought he was a threat to anybody, but his own people. Actually Colin Powell was out in early 2000 talking about how he was a “junk yard dog with no teeth” living in constant fear. Yes, *some* thought he could *possibly* have, loosely defined, WMDs. And he liked to pretend he did as well. But so do a lot of tin pot dictators. They DID, however, completely twist facts and somebody slipped a the “Yellow Cake” charge in for good measure(I have an idea where that came from)
Sure, he was a piece of shit – but his real estate made him a powerful piece of shit.
In a sense, the precarious nature of the oil market, made him too powerful and potentially very dangerous. So, I understand the rationale behind wanting to take him out beyond what was sold beyond just monetary gain.
Still, where we stand today, is Iraq has aligned with Iran due to ethnic ties. So, even from the conspiratorial view, it did not work out. To really make it work then need to take out Iran and I highly doubt that is going to happen.
Participant[quote=KSMountain]]
This is a little conspiratorial for my blood.[/quote]I don’t know what to say. It’s not really a matter of speculation. They wrote “rebuilding america’s defenses” and wrote a letter to clinton about invading Iraq in 98 or 97. “They” as in the vast majority of the Bush administration. Ironically, Bush was not a signatory. A few other high profile DC think tanks had similar plans. The PNAC crew seemed to be a culmination of a few think tanks.
[quote=KSMountain]]
Arraya are you saying Hillary and Biden were in on the conspiracy? Or were they like naive little rabbits that were duped by the Darth-vader like machinations of Cheney? I don’t believe that for a minute. I believe both of those two are able to think independently. [/quote]They are insiders, but did not sign the letter to clinton nor the PNAC document which was a think tank of the neoconservative flavor(which has it’s roots with political philosopher Leo Strauss).
Strauss taught that liberalism in its modern form contained within it an intrinsic tendency towards extreme relativism, which in turn led to two types of nihilism[12] The first was a “brutal” nihilism, expressed in Nazi and Marxist regimes. In On Tyranny, he wrote that these ideologies, both descendants of Enlightenment thought, tried to destroy all traditions, history, ethics, and moral standards and replace them by force under which nature and mankind are subjugated and conquered.[13] The second type – the “gentle” nihilism expressed in Western liberal democracies – was a kind of value-free aimlessness and a hedonistic “permissive egalitarianism”, which he saw as permeating the fabric of contemporary American society.[14][15] In the belief that 20th century relativism, scientism, historicism, and nihilism were all implicated in the deterioration of modern society and philosophy, Strauss sought to uncover the philosophical pathways that had led to this situation. The resultant study led him to advocate a tentative return to classical political philosophy as a starting point for judging political action.[1
When he speaks of liberalism, he is talking about capitalism. Which, I tend to agree with, to an extent.
ParticipantSpeaking of never forgetting.
About 50 teachers at a New Jersey school experienced a terrifying moment when a shooting rampage turned out to be a drill, but the teachers didn’t know it.
It happened Aug. 28 at the Phillipsburg New Jersey Early Learning Center.
A man burst into the library and started shooting. But the gun didn’t have any bullets, just blanks.
Teachers took cover under child-sized tables, crying and trembling.
“People are crying. The girl next to me is trembling and shaking. You heard people crying. You heard other people praying. It was pretty dramatic,” one teacher said.
The school district put the drill in place to test staff readiness.
The Phillipsburg School Board heard from angry teachers and parents Monday night.
The board is reviewing the drill.Participant[quote=walterwhite]Pat tillman gave up his football career and joined the army because of 9/11.
There is a connection betwen 9/11 and war.[/quote]
Well, of course there is. The Bush administration, prior to being in office, postulated that an event such as , in their words, a “New Pearl Harbor” would be necessary to garner public support for a new level of global militarization that they laid out in their “rebuilding americans defenses” doctrine in the late 90s. Hey, they said it, not me.
Regarding Pat.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1007-22.htm
I don’t believe it,” seethed Ann Coulter.Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was “f***ing illegal” and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman’s death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as “an American original–virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be.” She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article’s source was Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary.
Of course, the entire right wing pundit circuit decided Pat’s mother and Chomsky were lying.
Participant[quote=walterwhite]I don’t think there are 2 sides to every story; like the Iraq war; what’s the story to justify our actions? I haven’t heard it lately.[/quote]
It is an interesting question. The endless stream of narratives morphed over time until we were left with a big question mark and a dirty feeling. Kind of like a mass-psychological gang rape. Many people obviously still feel abused. Just watching “real time” history unfold with competing narratives should make you understand how difficult it is to get the whole picture of events that happened 70 years ago.
It’s pretty obvious they had their eyes on Iraq since the mid 90s. Interestingly, in a frontline episode, discussing the run up to war, they would have went to Iraq first if it was not for Colin Powell arguing it would not look good. Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld were arguing hard for just bypassing Afghanistan and going right to Iraq.
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