‘World lights up in blue, white and red in solidarity with France’
The murders of 127+ civilians were horrendous crimes, certainly, especially as those citizens never had one iota in the say of Western hegemonic geopolitics.
But why hasn’t the world lit up in red, white, and green, the colors of the lovely Lebanese flag? Dozens of civilians were bombed there, and in Iraq, as well.
Did the world mourn for the anywhere from 167,000 to a million (depending on the source) of Iraqi civilians killed since 2003, or who knows how many in Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Syria… ad nauseum?
Does the average westerner know how many are being killed all over sub-Saharan Africa with the help of CIA front groups acting as ‘destabilization forces’? Would they care if they did. No, of course not. They don’t look like them or share ‘our values’.
‘France promises a ‘merciless’ response’ (Hollande promising Islamic State)
Sarkozy: ““The war we must wage should be total.”
It’s not remotely possible that the Western allied nations under NATO could fail to know the genesis of IS was first ‘turning the desert to glass’ in Iraq, Bremer’s idiotic ‘de-Ba’athification program, reneging on promises made to help the Kurds in their revolution not once, but twice…
And then, oh my yes, the 1% R2P War in Libya, in which France bombed first because: Sarkoszy was facing an election. The US, of course, ‘led from behind’, but sent in all the weapons they could by way of proxies. And after a time, those seasoned fighters, armed to the teeth, headed to Syria, Iraq, and other geo-strategically hospital climates.
How many civilians were killed in Libya? Do the living appreciate the West killing their secular dictator now that the nation is in all-out civil war, with dozens upon dozens of militia groups fighting to control the oil?
As I understand it, it was France who began the West’s bombing in Syria first, as well.
But as I’d wondered about how terrified Muslim citizens in France must be now, then mused about the possibility that France will ask NATO to step into the fray further, I went to their Twit account and found this hypocritical fukkery:
Shocked are you, Jens? And what’s this about Democracy? And…who are ‘the Terr’ists again? Oh, you Masters of War…..
You’ve constructed this IS Colossus with your needs for global resource and resource delivery control, hegemony, cultural bigotry, the extreme hubris of American Exceptionalism, as well as the insane need for War Everlasting brought to us by the military/industrial/Congressional/news-o-tainment complex.
Not ‘Paris’, but related:
‘Def. Sec. Carter: Russia endangering world order’ (and China too, of course)
Now that you’ve created it, and kinda/sorta say you want to eradicate it, is the only way you see ‘forward’ more war? You seem to hate some ‘tyrants and dictators’, but love others…those in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, who by the way seem to love funding IS and related groups.
Has the GWOT gone so far past any tipping point now that ending all of these Occupations might bring peace to the world?
Another interesting headline in which she brings her prescription, and on the same day Ash made his bold assertion: ‘American-allied nations are secretly helping ISIS to grow – US Colonel Ann Wright’, an interview on RT.
There have been hints that behind the scenes, the administration has liked Putin’s air force flying missions over Syria, but again, a Tweet from NATO surprised me for my abject naiveté as to its actual meaning which was a twist on ‘Putin Revanchism’.
But seriously, you Masters of War and Gunboat Diplomacy: how’s your Democracy Project™ working out for the world, for folks here at home? Will they come for us next?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
well, jeebus; i went to the Guardian to grab the photo just now and found: ”France launches ‘massive’ airstrike on Isis stronghold in Syria after Paris attack; Fighter jets launch biggest raid to date targeting terrorist groups bastion in Raqqa’
thanks for this. i’ve been reading lots of The Bard lately and, apropos, one of the dudes at spyculture.com in their “CIA & Hollywood” series said, in the context of spycraft: there is no witchcraft, there is only stagecraft (sic). controlling what we see & hear, for those of us not in conflict zones, is the game.
ha; i need to read more Will, clearly. ooof, spyculture.com looks fascinating. i wish there were transcripts, as the one i’d like to hear is a full hour and a half, dagnabbit. i never watched the ‘homeland’ programs, but they look like some heavy-duty Imperial agitprop, eh?
(i stuck in bruce’s ‘call it democracy’ as you were commenting…if you have a yen for it.) ;-)
if you can only listen to one, “Enemy of the State” or “The Social Network.”
bookmarked on my word doc for this diary, and i thank you, jason.
added on edit: fancy this, though. bruce has been to mancos, co, in dipstick county (h/t: ed abbey) twice in recent years. mr. wd has gone to see him, and reckons he may be one of the top ten guitarists in this country. his prose and social justice politics are a sublime addition.
of course, he’s not always so One Love, either. ;-) (a version from long ago)
i’ve seen him twice but it’s been 20 years. of course i immediately watched “rocket launcher” too.
i’m sorry, bruce’s call it democracy? uh…maybe i can googlify it…
cockburn. long time no hear. thanks.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Observe, comrade, what these sophistic fuckheads project next:
OFM. OFM. HA HA HA HA HA HA.
If the Russians are concentrating the neo-Bolsheviks for destruction, aren’t the neo-Americans destroying the American legacy as well? The “color revolutionary” ISIS now spreads international terrorism, which must be put down. HA HA HA HA. The objective of this deadly puppetry being spectacular diversion.
The states of the world must be aligned in war against this hegemonic usurper, the neo-Islamiic Caliphate! What crap these crapitalist interlecturers are mired in. Morris Berman:
zounds, the morri berman quote is great; dunno if i knew of him…
but eeep, i hadn’t seen that the nato piece had an author; i’d been goofily looking on the left side of the page. turns out he’s Dmitry V. Shlapentokh, Associate Professor, Indiana University, Department of History. and jeezum crow, some verbose sumbitch he do be.
who knew putin’s ‘long game’ was so calculatingly clever, eh?
“Clever”, yes, a backhanded compliment and likewise a manipulative interpretation, as if the west was less devious and calculating.
The article, however, apparently makes the case that the Russians have learned how deal with Islamists since Afghanistan of the ’80s, even to use ISIL to leach out their domestic Islamist extremists. I wonder if the EU might be taking some advice from Russia on how deal with them now. Of course, this is a dilemma for the slaves to NATO leading to the question of what path NATO will pursue to perpetuate their enslavement.
Thus Putin advances a policy of containment on the American hegemonsters. Will Hegemonsters relent or will they persist?
Shlapentock has an interesting 2007 article titled “The totalitarian streak in the US” in which he claims
Part of his analysis in the article is embraced by the left, that being that the Cold War (and prior contests) forced the crapitalist leadership to make concessions to underclasses.
Shlapentock’s father is intriguing as well. However, the basis for his sociology is the recognition of combinatorics in social organization, meaning that one model is not sufficient for analysis and that “[t]he specifics of each society are determined by the relative role of each social organization and their interaction with each other.” This leads to the analysis of, in Orwellian terms, the inner and outer party and the “positive effects of fear in contemporary society”:
This could be read rather innocuously – how else would a society maintain law without fear of sanction – but smells like a legitimation of fear-mongering.
War-mongering is an inner party tool for maintaining order. Orwell anticipates Shlapentock, who appears much more comfortable with exploiting the masses for the maintenance of order:
For Shlapentokh, the goal of this exploitation is the criteria for success; he attributes “the many problems of post-Soviet Russia, beginning with the failure of democratization, should not be ascribed to the masses but to the new elites, which, having attained the means for personal enrichment, have in turn supported the authoritarian system so as to guarantee the stability of their own newly acquired wealth and status.”
A culture of manipulation works best under existential threat, no?
yes, the brilliance of ‘purging the Islamist extremists’ was a good portion of what i found such a ‘clever long game’, and the second passage you quoted was ‘the twist’ on putin as revanchist.
as to the 2007 ‘totalitarian streak’ essay, it was my understanding as well that the Commies (strikers in the US) were indeed a good portion of what led to SS and other developing social safety net features. thank you for parsing his pop’s thinking as well. one clear counter-argument, albeit a small one, is that the death penalty has proven to be no deterrent to murder, yes?
whoa; thanks for pointing to the ‘phenomenologists’; i’m not sure that their conclusions were correct, but the theory of multiple realities is a bit of what we’d been discussing with realitychecker on another thread. the concept of ‘american reality’ is so subjective, isn’t it? and of course those variations are used to divide and conquer us by way of the pretenses of red v. blue teams, color and ethnicity, religion, straight v. not, etc. and maybe especially in dissent v. blithe acceptance of the status quo, even as more and more are immiserated.
‘war-mongering as an inner party tool’. hmmm, yes, i can see that.
as an OT aside, a hard rain turned to snow in the night, causing the low cloud cover and white trees to resemble a painting by corot. a herd of large stags has materialized through the fog, and the blurred specters are engaged in rather lackadaisical jousting as the rutting season commences.
Sounds magical. Is it common there to have fog and snow, together?
Some quantum physicists today have far more whacked out ideas of reality than this “multiple realities” concept. If “combinatorics” was so useful, it wouldn’t be surprising to see that individuals had partial models of reality and that “combining” them explained society better. For example, reality checkers police the masses in public “ideological processing” when reality checkers don’t understand the inner party ideology themselves. Their “partial reality” might be seen a self-repression in order to adjust to reality on the societal scale.
The ineffectiveness of the death penalty for murder will not deter the West as it grows increasingly punitive and fear-mongering.
it was not only breath-taking, but not very usual, especially since our annual precipitation is about 11 inches. this year has been blessedly different, following i dunno how many years of drought, with the soil dry down past two and a half feet. oddly, the deer people males were unfamiliar to me, which added to their chimeric appearances. bless them.
yes, iirc, i’d advised reality checker (whom i sadly seem t have pissed off, as he hasn’t reappeared) of some theoretical quantum physics, which discussions and graphics on Nova i watch repeatedly in hopes that it will wash over me so often that i…grok some of it. i’d mentioned as well, folks i’d done workshops with who saw many ‘planes’ of existence, and ‘the other side’.
is it political/societal self-repression or simply a failure to expand awareness out of their comfort zones as defined by the greater and surrounding population? (think of the agreement of linear time, for instance.) for some, as with a long-ago friend i’m in contact with now (seeking to make amends to him), who was jolted into a separate reality by the suicide of his son. yes, and even those indigenous who ‘see’ the world quite differently, in the way that some see people as luminous beings, and so on.
“is it political/societal self-repression or simply a failure to expand awareness out of their comfort zones as defined by the greater and surrounding population? ”
Either/or, comrade? If this expanded consciousness could be taught, it would be repressed, by selves and by cabals. I am not one to invest thought in mystical consciousness, if that’s where you’re pointing, as I think it is more easily misrepresented than “reality”. It has appealed to many elite fools and hucksters.
Of course, ridiculous exaggeration is a tool for masking the mind-boggling but true. If that can be taught, then both there has been a failure to spread it and a repression of it.
Anyway …
Al-Raqqa is the de-facto capital of the Islamic State and is full of civilians and the latest cowardly French bombing has killed dozens of these Syrian civilians according to direct reports from al-Raqqa. No one but their families and friends will be mourning these vicious killings.
The Islamic State doesn’t concentrate their forces in ‘bastions’ to be attacked by their enemies, they aren’t idiots. Heavy bombing of urban areas with large civilian populations is intentional targeting of non-combatants. We can expect this type of reactionary warfare to increase along with the collateral murder even as the bombers designate hospitals as military headquarters and school soccer fields as training camps.
The Ann Wright opinion piece is dated but I agree with much of what she says. The headline is misleading because if the IS aid was secret she wouldn’t know about it and actually she just assumes, without showing any evidence, it is coming from our Gulf allies. She then admits that most of the IS funding comes from internal sources such as oil.
If anyone can produce any solid evidence that any of our Gulf allies governments have or are providing aid to the IS I would admit my ignorance but I doubt any will surface. I don’t doubt that individuals and groups outside of their government’s control are supplying some funds and aid to the IS for their own reasons which may include a desire to overthrow their own rulers.
good grief; i’d never noticed that the interview was from 2014, not 2015. thanks for seeing that. and yes she did say that when pressed. you may indeed be correct that the funding from gulf allies is more by way of ‘private donations’, but googling led to this piece authored by ‘Lori Plotkin Boghardt, The Washington Institute For Near East Policy’s “There’s A Theory Saudi Arabia Funds The ISIS Extremists Taking Over Iraq — Here’s Why It’s Wrong”, but if you go to their website, one sees articles like ‘what the US gets from our alliance with israel’ and such.
if you had your way, wayoutwest, would you, and if your answer is ‘yes’, how would you, stop IS?
added on edit: where do you see ‘according to direct reports from al-Raqqa’?
That is a loaded question, WD, you’re handing me a loaded gun or an IED both of which are very dangerous as you already know. However I might respond CX will mess his Depends and sling the contents along with his word salad my direction.
I will say this, no Westerner or Western power has any right, responsibility or duty to make decisions for the Muslim world.
I didn’t have to search ‘Raqqa Syria’ to know that civilians were being killed by French, US or Russian bombing of populated cities, it’s a fact of war and it will continue and now even fewer people will care.
i don’t see how the question was inherently dangerous, wayoutwest, as you seem to hold heterodox viewpoints on a lot of this, but as above: you define yourself by what you wouldn’t do, not what you would do’. as to comrade x, you both get pretty personal at times, and it might be good to slow down on that. (and i’m also remembering the dark and vicious person at MoA who’d wished you dead.)
but aren’t ‘we’ way past this now? “I will say this, no Westerner or Western power has any right, responsibility or duty to make decisions for the Muslim world.”
right as rain, but since at least the time at which the allied powers divided up the map post wwI the colonizers have fucked over the muslim world, and the West (plus china) is recolonizing sub-saharan africa at an alarming rate; not all muslim, but many.
but right now, if you had your wish, what would your choice be? is it realistic that if the west stopped its occupation of the ME, that daesh/IS would be content with ‘being left alone’ or whatever you said? i did see this at the guardian, then grabbed and internal link that led me…to want to embed another ‘bombing’ by the USA: libya. i’ll include it in another comment.
“any of our Gulf allies governments have or are providing aid”. What, “sales” of matériel nor provision of “training” does not count as aid, doofus?
Fer Muhammad’s sake, CIA Company “Gulf allies” are the coalition of the Wahhabi and USrael (against the Shiite crescent of Iraq, Iran and Syria)! Simple as Hollande’s paraphrased threat by W. “You’re either With US; or we’re with The TERRISTS”! So next expect Hollande to Now MERCILESSLY Bomb Assad! HATO Neo-Colonially, makes perfect $EN$E!
was this meant as a response to wayoutwest, or just for general consumption, bruce? i’m at least half hoping so, since i…don’t quite grasp your meaning…
General Consumption quotes W, saying, “Ya can’t get Fooled AGAIN” (CAN You?)! He and his fellow PNACis committed genocide against their own citizens on 9/11 in order to PNAC Attack in revenge on Saddam (but, really to get his oil)! And the definition Of ISIS : US (CIA/Mossad/Bandar BusH, et al) to make Froggyman Hollande JUMP (along with all the U.S. Fundaments) in order to keep “intervening” (Obombing) throughout MENA (NOTE our recent manufactured “successes” of John “evaporation”; Libyan “al Qaeda” leader strake-off; and the suddenly momentumful Kurd’s liberation of a Yazidi CHRISTIAN mass grave in Sinjar!) Will CIA Company MIRACLES Against “Daesh” never cease? Oh, Tsar!
lol; it’s a fine state of affairs when the translation is no more scrutable than the initial one. but i admit that i find the possibility of 9/11 as an inside job so evil…that it will take publication of the redacted pages of ‘the report’ to convince me, if indeed that’s what they say. learning a bit about gladio opened that door a crack, but that heinous false flag was to discredit them commies.
but yes, plenty of recurring psy-ops afoot. my personal favorite has long been “Al qaeda # (1 or 2, take yer pick) just taken out!”
What ISIS means to existing Westphalian-style nation states (the folks gatehered at Putin’s urging in Vienna, for example) are a threat of trans-national movements establishing themselves as some form of political geography that undoes the system of nation states. Meanwhile, the corporate bid to do a similar rejiggering of the political geography through various “free trade agreements” goes unnoticed by most of the people who will be affected.
It is an interesting synchronicity that the Friday the 13th attack by DAESH forces, apparently staged from Brussels, occurred just prior to the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) on climate change in a year in which the effects of climate change are becoming unmistakeable.
From the G20 Summit in Turkey, Putin and Obama apparently huddled on Syria and the future of Assad. The sticky wicket about majority rule in Syria is that the majority is Sunni and either Moslem Brotherhood or Salfist, neither of which is suitable to the West. Most likely gambit is temporary restoration of Assad long enough to suppress DAESH, al Nusra Front and other non-Westphalians. Followed by elections (see Egypt 2011-2013) and someone satisfactory to the Westphalians, which for the moment includes Putin and Iran. Normalization of relations between US and Iran, opening to US business, and….My suspicion is that most of this occurs before January 2017 just to cut off sabotage from Hillary and the GOP (but that’s just a big SWAG).
Hollande’s hard line is obvious played against Marine Le Pen, whose National Front will likely win the regional elections because of austerity and refugees. But reportedly, he is a bit of a dud, the rump end of a bad line of “Socialist” politicians. So we have France going the way of John Major’s UK.
If there are airstrikes, there is either the decision to kill the hostages in order to kill the kidnappers or there is enough reconnaissance imagery and signals intelligence to provide the targeting folks with the illusion that there are DAESH installations there. In any case, they can report weapons expended; it worked for William Westmoreland.
The empire collapses of its own contradictions. Increasingly that looks like the House Republicans shutting down the government because the military has caused the debt to rise too high. (That is not the way that it will be perceived or reported by the Wall Street media however.)
It is a shitty time to be a refugee in this world, though. Isn’t it?
i think you may have explained ‘westphalian-like nations’ to me before, but if so, i’ve forgotten. but you’ve made such a good point about a similar political rejiggering by the ugly trade treaties. yes, it’s good to be reminded what’s going on in the deep badger bunkers as all eyes are…on the bleeding.
i must say that i really have zero expectations that anything truly meaningful will come out of the COP21 conferences; the targets are always so far into the future, aren’t they? rio, for instance, was a bad farce, and the only healthy thing i saw was the People’s side summits; they rawked.
marine le pen sounds like donald trump, at least according to the headlines; she seems to be her father’s daughter. ;-)
this is hilarious, though: “Increasingly that looks like the House Republicans shutting down the government because the military has caused the debt to rise too high”.
i’m knackered, ready for my date with michael caine (sadly not with miss piggy). give my love to miz THD if you would.
Their post-Westphalian state is a load of incoherent rubbish. Renamed the “Islamic State,”
This is blockhead propaganda which is also promoted by some western ideologues, for one reason because it has some correspondence with their vision of global domination by finance. It is likewise, a fraud. “They do not propose a particular national vision, but rather an internationalist utopia.” Sound familiar?
Y’all can have yer imaginary identities, beit Muslim, beit Lesbian, beit Redneck, beit African (and in any combination you can master) but you must obey the universal hidden hands.
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
OFM.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia
As opposed to caliphates or transnational corporations or invisible colleges. How exactly does the domain of political space get organized? Apparently it is up for grabs again after almost 300 years. It is the fundamental organizational principle of the United Nations (a federation of Westphalian nation-states).
ah; thank you. i’d checked the wiki for ‘westphalia’, but not ‘peace of westphlia’, so i was no more informed than when my key knowledge was the VW pop-up camper made there. ;-)
as comrade x, i’d read that IS/ISIL did want, and does hold, plenty of iraq and syria, but governance may not be at the top of their considerations, at least for now, eh?
but a tangential point of no small matter is the post-WWI map drawing of the ottoman empire so cavalierly and ignorantly, disregarding cultural bonds, histories, sects, and the like. one almost wonders…well, never mind.
i apologize for seeming to have breezed by your wistful question about being a shitty time to be a refugee. oh, my, yes, although i confess i often choose not to click into the headlines and photos of refugees crammed against fences, reaching for food or water, read of the reflexive border closings, the ‘quellings’ of riots… i’ve seen so many different estimates of the numbers, but what was insanely appalling this morning was the many admonitions against ‘allowing paris to prevent nations accepting refugees’.
now the only way i’m able to read that is: muslims are dangerous.
i read a bit of an essay at dissident voice (iirc) by a man who’d lived and worked in france, and he was of the opinion that (with a few class caveats), it’s the most racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic nation in europe.
the guardian’s coverage of both the ‘problem-solving’ meetings in turkey and vienna have left me frustrated with their conflicting information, but…i guess they write what they’re told to write.
i will that i’m heartened to see that more folks are writing about the deeper causes, if not inevitability, of ‘paris’. would that more citizens understand why that is! but of course, that is the question that must not be answered, isn’t it? ‘why do they hate us?’ let us count the reasons….
Juan Cole, Informed Comment: Is DAESH/ISIL a modern Raiding Pirate State
http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/modern-raiding-pirate.html
Juan Cole notices the non-Westphalian nature of the “state” that DAESH has established in Raqaa.
Wonder when the Westphalian states notice the threat from “trade agreements”?
well, he does…and then doesn’t, as i read him. yes, population centers, but then the strategy (tactic?) of piracy, pierre lafitte and all. hard not to go in search of this old tune reflexively:
but sigh, O sigh. juan cole was one of the loudest cheerleaders for R2P libya, and i admit i’ve looked askance at him ever since. hard-hearted of me? i couldn’t possibly comment. ;-)
but yes, i see his analogy, sack one ship to fund the next adventure/sacking. not so much an overall plan, but attracting those islamists needing to act.. i was glad he’d mentioned: ‘if it were in fact daesh in paris’. i’ve seen other similar wonderings here and there.
Duh. All the idiotilogues continually spin the “development” of Mooslim Defenders. At first, terrorism’s statelessness was it’s most strategic asset and the reason for the difficulty of curtailing it. Now, idiots portray the development of a terrorist state not state as a means of amplifying the threat. In order to explain away the contradiction – that now a state cannot be restrained more easily – they must invent some bullshit about it being a non-Westphalian state, or a pirate state.
Fuck these comprador interlecturers.
Stupid readings of the minds of terrorists is a cover for hegemonsters. Can anyone believe Cole that Al-Qaeda miscalculated “that terrorist strikes could initiate the popular overthrow governments or make them withdraw from the fray”? On the second attack of WTC US fucking destroyed Iraq.
Anyway, I doubt Putin’s advisors take these idiot American interlecturers and their befuddled conceptions at face value.
you are making me hot, stop it. ISIS is like the wind baby, like the desert winds. there are as polymorphic & perverse as the desert itself. where does one sand dune begin and another end?
there is an oasis of meaning blooming in the desert wastes, full of other people’s palm trees: Israel. omg! a palestinian kid threw a rock at a tank! but ISIS, not so interested in Ft. Zion, are they? curious.
Jah ha ha. Blaze against the dying of the light, comrade! At first I was thinking you were channeling that mercenary interlecturer, John Arquilla (who I lambasted and survived). Oooo, netwar, I have a hardon thinking of the possibilities!
I’m sure the Arquilla’ites consort with Israhell’s precious military philosophers there – they know how secure it is!
The nation state hasn’t worked too well for Europe, where the concept developed, with centuries of war two WW’s and their dependence on colonialism and now capital dominance through the EU an attempt at one big state.
The comparison of the Caliphate with transnational corps doesn’t survive any scrutiny, one TNC seeks to control the world through NS’s while the Caliphate is for the Muslim world that had Western Nation State structures imposed on them at the point of a gun to maintain Western control with and by TNC’s.
Once the West’s military and economic control of the ME is broken I doubt the Muslim world will care much about what petty nation states do so long as they do it to each other and don’t threaten the Caliphate. That is probably wishful thinking about the West so as we are already seeing the IS is helping Western Civilization to accelerate the task of destroying itself.
this will be a link-loaded (laden?) comment, then i need to go take care of some real life stuff.
good grief. from RT, today:
“President Vladimir Putin says he’s shared Russian intelligence data on Islamic State financing with his G20 colleagues: the terrorists appear to be financed from 40 countries, including some G20 member states.
During the summit, “I provided examples based on our data on the financing of different Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) units by private individuals. This money, as we have established, comes from 40 countries and, there are some of the G20 members among them,” Putin told the journalists.
Putin also spoke of the urgent need to curb the illegal oil trade by IS.
“I’ve shown our colleagues photos taken from space and from aircraft which clearly demonstrate the scale of the illegal trade in oil and petroleum products,” he said.
“The motorcade of refueling vehicles stretched for dozens of kilometers, so that from a height of 4,000 to 5,000 meters they stretch beyond the horizon,” Putin added, comparing the convoy to gas and oil pipeline systems.”
one hour ago, the BBC: ‘IS conflict: US-led air strikes ‘destroy 116 IS oil trucks’
‘Poll: 40% of French would welcome authoritarian leadership’
aaaaand because…the IS factor:
‘Statement from Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook on U.S. strike in Libya’; Press Operations
To stretch beyond the horizon from that altitude, I believe the motorcade would be at least 150 miles long. If all vehicles were tanker trucks the oil to fill them would likely be worth over $200M.
Our wayout doofus pretends we compare the Caliphate with TNC’s but here we can see that the financiers profit and architect the “Western collapse”. Now why does our doofus consistently avoid that connection, hmmm? He thinks collapse is the only hope which is exactly what these architects would tell. Does he have a little juice on the Caliphate?
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
Wendy has asked that I should refrain from poking the old poof X with a stick and I will try but will or can he return to civilized behavior?
In answer to WD’s question about ‘wishes’.
I’ve wished for a few things to improve our world during my lifetime but have been sorely disappointed for my naiveté and wishful thinking. Even if I could wish away Western dominance and interference in the ME it is probably too late, too much blood has been spilled, too many families ruined, too many wishes crushed.
All I can wish for now is that some force or idea can bring about the dismantling, planned or violently, of Western civilization/capitalism and the depopulation of the planet to a level that the earth can support without its destruction and without the annihilation of what remains of the other inhabitants of the biosphere.
just to be clear, i’d asked that both of you might be a little less personal in your disagreements, not just you, wayoutwest. ;-)
i’ve been reading some of the essays coming in with their historical narratives of even ‘ancient history’ that have led to ‘paris’, including other attacks on paris that were unfamiliar to me. so far, i may have liked this one by vijay prashad the best, and while many take issue with the fact that constant financial immiseration can turn some to Islamist extremism, he reminds of Malian ‘ground troops’ kinda baiting a war (with a bit of help from italians and the CIA). but this part does concern ‘trade agreements’.
first he narrates some of the many things not done, not admitted…lessons never learned..
‘Living in Pitiless Times: Baghdad, Beirut and Paris’
“No one has taken seriously the call from the UN member states to revise trade agreements and financial policy so that their countries are not suffocated into chaos, the breeding ground of terror. In 1992, Mali’s liberal leader Alpha Oumar Konaré asked the west to forgive his country’s odious debt. He could not lead his people out of division and poverty if he had to keep paying the banks every month, and if his farmers got no relief from adverse trade policy. No one listened. The US brushed him off, saying “virtue is its own reward” – meaning, pay up. Konaré could not move his agenda. He left office. The country imploded. Al-Qaeda took Mali’s second city Timbuktu. The French bombed them in 2013. The country remains shattered. It is the outcome of a series of bad policies. Nobody bothers with them. They are only interested in al-Qaeda of the Maghreb and its movements.
Western policy-makers are like little boys playing with their little toys. They don’t see the human suffering and the terrible outcomes of their terrible polices.
We are in pitiless times. There is terrible violence. There is awful sadness.”
there are others, and one made me utterly sick to my stomach in its ‘cui bono’ speculation; i’ll consider bringing others; i dunno.
“Western policy-makers are like little boys playing with their little toys.” No. They are grown men; learning to destroy is part of their maturation, their “becoming adult”.
Just as the loss of their cold war antagonist allowed these monsters to abandon social commitments, the loss of their crapitalist fantasies provoked their torture of the rest of the world.
i agree with vijay vehemently, at least as per my interpretation of his words and experience. the shortest version i can offer is that:
they are neighborhood bullies. bullies are wounded, empty, angry souls who have likely been abused psychically or physically, or both. the easiest way to assuage their mental pains is to bully others (which is addictive and thus short-lived satisfaction). most often were never encouraged toward individuating, becoming accountable, checking in with their inner lives (consciences?)…and instead filling all their gnawing, empty, inner spaces with the lust for power, money, or violence. among so many in the political class, all three can be fed.
they have never matured, and show it. all their ‘benefits’ are external, really even worse than most children.
the presidency is one of the jobs for which applying for…should automatically disqualify one, in my estimation. and fancy which military and intelligence peeps go to the top of the heap, and why.
“really even worse than most children.” Yeah, except you mean almost all. So you contradict your own thesis at the end. The gawdness thanks you because you were profaning children. The most important aspect that your psychologizing neglects is the acculturation of these bastards. Sure, they are likely wounded and angry and abused and … but, … but they are recruited and developed for money, power, and violence. They abuse their kids, then, so they will be recruited for money, power, and violence. Time to be a man, Georgie-boy and show the world what you’re made of …
Look how humiliating British “public” school had to be to make the necessary “adult” monsters …
you really don’t seem to care how absurd you have to wax to feel as though you’ve ‘won’ an argument, do you, comrade? Pfffffft.
Absurd? What, you don’t think Georgie wasn’t a man until he could be a warrior like daddy?
It’s a defective simile, no matter how insulting.
Better practice for next time.
dubya tried to please daddy, even to the point of a second gulf war to ‘take out saddam’, ‘march to bagdaddy’, as daddy may have rued in private. for his fukkery and fakery, he got the end of daddy’s cruel jibes in his ghost-written memoirs, close to: dubya was a loose cannon idjit’. ingrate. ;-)
nope, they were both broken, empty punks who were raised under authoritarian rule themselves. fuck me, look who prescott was! gawd only knows who their spouses were.
silly to argue about it; we see it all so very differently, as do we on…whatever you said about mysticism not tricking your intellect or something.
Mystical conciousness more easily misrepresented than “reality”. How can you see it differently if you can’t hear what I say?
whaaaaaaa? you inhabit my gorgeous website, and now you claim you can demand logic from me…as well as caring about your every uttered thesis? arrrgh!
look at the folks at the G20. they do have differences, but the rest of the G’s on the planet see 20 G’s scramblin’ to rape everything in sight.
as for the individuals…they all mirror each other’s & affirm each other’s behavior, all reflect to each other the habits & beliefs of their…wait for it, class. one function of the MSM is to confirm for the uppers that they are behaving appropriately, are happy, successful, knowledgeable of the world & qualifed experts, deserve their good fortune, etc. the attempts at socialization into class bias & rationalizing violence never stop. i’m not denying there are Inner Party members who know the score but there are many means by which to coerce & manipulate those outside, even just slightly outside. Each has a herd to teach him how to moo; mooing otherwise is a risky.
Except those in the outer party have the opportunity to prove themselves predators too …
their own G-20 skull and bones society, with frau frumpy as the house mother?
O. Wayout
doofuswished for improvements but now he cheer leads advanced monkeywrenching and beyond.You can bet that the majority of the elites who believe 90% depopulation is the only hope adjust their investment portfolios accordingly. But no, wayout
doofusstill has a shred of compassion left, so he’s holding off.HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
The US Strategic Air Command stands ready for the President’s orders to make your wish of depopulation come true. There is at least one pre-condition that I have for a candidate for President, not granting that wish through the Strategic Air Command. I used to have confidence that a President would at least think about it for a minute or two. This current crop of hopefuls, however,….There a few real fruit loops who might squeak through with “fear….fear….fear”.
If I am not mistaken, Marx said that capitalism was fully capable of dismantling itself. David Harvey argues that in seventeen different ways. Most of us are working to figure out what we specifically will do when that occurs. Others are hoping for the US Strategic Air Command and the Second Coming of the Lord in Glory.
The question is how many of the other members of the biosphere will still be around to celebrate our departure.
If the nutz in Vienna who think they can pull our chestnuts out of the fire pull it off, hope that the US leadership is smart enough to give up the Middle East and stop the folly of forward deployment. Because there are some old Cold Warriors itching to “finish the job” like they did Saddam.
What is really up for grabs then is the global commons — international waters, international airspace, near-Earth outer space, Antarctica and any unclaimed rock in the oceans.
“Marx said that capitalism was fully capable of dismantling itself.” Yeah? I’m sure his prescription is locked away now.
Some would argue the capitalists got a whiff of that magic formula in 2007-2008. Others argue that socializing the losses bailed them out. I think Marx’s insight was of the dog catches the car variety. If government actually did disappear as the current crop claims to want, there would be no one to keep them from defrauding each other.
I remain to be convinced of the reality of spontaneous collapse.
you thinkin’ NORAD, rather, THD? ain’t SaC gone with the wind?
but oh, my; i know you and miz THD are creating community for the future days. i wish we could, but cuz i can’t get out and about…we’ll need to rest on our laurels. of course, i used to have the bumpeer sticker:
COME THE RAPTURE….CAN I HAVE YOUR CAR?
you would not believe how many Xianists waited at my car for me to come out from grocery stores…to (ahem)…set me straight.
other unclaimed kinda commons: our souls, or whatever bits of us never die, just change…form? planes? sides?
hoka hey; it’s always a good day to die!
Our souls unclaimed? On the contrary, them’s the fuel of the masters. The kwistians had the idea to keep them inviolate but that wasn’t as profitable.
I think the name of the new puppy is United States Strategic Command. Those 2000 warheads each side of the US-Russia divide are still available for use.
Yes, the bumper sticker. That’s right. Make it real.
I grew up in a small South Carolina city that had two preachers holding forth daily (yep, one white and one black) on opposite corners of the courthouse square, a blues-gospel blind black singer holding forth in front of the largest department store (now demolished and become a downtown park – Wren Park as it were). Jehovahs Witnesses made the rounds once a month house-to-house. And Chick Tracts were always showing up in restroom stalls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick_tract
And some crank paid for a quarter-page ad in the local newspaper once a week, always entitled “WHY THE HEATHEN RAGE”
And this town was in the shadow of the city with the World’s Most Unusual University — well, maybe then but not anymore. Oral Roberts, Regent, and a bunch of new ones, each the brilliant offspring of an entrepreneurial preacher or a guilty pizza billionaire.
hoka hey, indeed.
holy smoke (and i’ll forgo any jests about your early exposures…)
but my in-laws are these exact folks, down to knowing harry potter was The Debil. once i told mr. wd that we should send them a ouija board for christmas. Xianist graphic novels in toilets (gotta be some sick jokes there, never mind.)
Only post-Stonewall could one think about jokes involving Chick Tracts in restroom stalls — sick or otherwise. At the time it looked like some zealot who had run out of other places to place his “witness” before people who were already so “witnessed” and “churched” that they were bored silly with the repetition of the same 14 things from the Bibble. The ones about nuclear war apocaplypse almost became indistinguishable from shrunken (the cliche those days was “unSanforized”) grade B black-and-white comic books. This was early 1960s, almost contemporary with the invasion of the Beatles and when in some locations in the South, anonymous folks were setting buses on fire and beating up civil rights workers–and murdering black army officers for the gall of becoming officers. Now that that region is calmed down from those days, they are shivering in the boots over Syrian refugees. Land of the free, home of the brave…proud to be an American because …don’t call on me…no new taxes. Yep Depends bravery.
yep, the bible belt seems to be the Depends Bravery cavalry, all right. or should i say ‘cavalry’, rather. wish i’d been able to hear the blind black blues testifier, though. when i’d pictured him later on, i thought of dear marvin booker in denver, who ‘witnessed’ MLK speech passages. beautiful smile, homeless, iirc, and killed inside the DPD for trying to fetch his…only pair of shoes…as they were calling him to ‘booking’ after hours and hours. goddam.
but thanks for putting the Comic into historical perspective; what a Guernica of a collage you drew for us.
Your subconscious wish does highlight the world demographic that is most responsible for the killing of the planet, the US, Europe and Russia. A nuke exchange would be nasty but life adapts as we have seen around Chernobyl
The bombing wouldn’t kill a significant percentage of the world population but the effects of shutting down the Beast would spread rapidly especially to China who depend on our overconsumption to feed their growing consumption.
Wendyedavis, another turn of the wheel and here I am again. Thanks for the post as it is good to hear yours and the other voices. Trying to answer some of the same short recollections of ME history around here, in discussion as to why the “terrorists,” are terrorizing and most don’t get it when I say we showed ’em the “proper,” way to do it and even armed them. TarheelDem had the trade treaty distraction down pat, and on the micro-scale, the distraction tactic is being used overtime in the badger state, special session to codify campaign coordination, hide all donor ID, prosecution of just any political crimes under the John Doe is no longer permitted and the nationally touted model for election fairness and the government integrity watchdoging, the Government Accountability Board is disbanded. No good deed (investigating the gov) goes unpunished.
It’s been left up to a state website and Al Jazeera America to report our endangered water as the literal privatization and full commodification of our state’s water resources under Walker appointed legal cronies, ruled that high capacity industrial wells can’t be regulated under the public trust doctrine water rights, existing here since WI was a territory, 30 years before statehood. Drifting off soon in the domestic test plot for the oligarchs, I’ll say good night. Three parts linked within the story: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/11/11/wisconsins-water-woes-politicized-natural-resources-agency-threatens.html
All the best that’s left – feels like a home here
hola, amigo; so nice to see you. yeah, bugger, i’ve been reading about WI water on some eco-site or other. i’ll read the AJ links, but for tonight i’m about to turn into a pumpkin, so more tomorrow.
for tonight for your autumn planting, a song we both love:
sleep well, dream well, better days must be ahead…yes?
Living in NM and reading about ‘water problems’ in WI seems a bit of hyperbole but there is plenty of cheese to go with the whine. You do have environmental regulation problems, as we all do, but are unable to convince enough of your residents to vote the bums out and change policies. It’s the same here in NM, it seems most people just don’t trust or tolerate corrupt democrats like they used to.
Identifying one lake that is losing volume from well pumping out of 15.000 lakes in your state is probably viewed as Chicken Little histrionics by many people. and three thousand wells pumping from a quadrillion gallon groundwater reservoir is hardly full commodification or privatization of state water resources. The court decision will limit this problem and protect land values and water levels at these vacation getaways has already limited new well permits.
The whining by the farmer, in the AJ article, about finding nitrates in his well water and blaming it on other farmers was hilarious, if you farm you pollute groundwater and surface water just as other farmers do even organic farms can create these problems.
‘the whining farmer’ was likely referring to the fact that the huge increase in CAFOs spraying raw cow manure onto their fields, and leaching into the groundwater is not…exactly healthful.
“Last tested in 2014, Cochart’s water has tested positive for coliform bacteria, salmonella, bovine viruses, and was found to have elevated levels of nitrates (greater than 10 parts per million). Coliform bacteria can cause intestinal illnesses, and elevated nitrates in drinking water can cause blue baby syndrome — a blood disorder — or even death in infants.”
oh, the configuration of the land is quite porous.
the silica dust (also right sidebar) is also a danger, as are the taconite mines.
who knows what toxins might be leaching into the big lakes? dnr doesn’t have enough staff to check, by golly. fuck scott walker and his minions. and all of a sudden you believe in the voting process? ha.
grim news marches in walkerstan, nonq. what an odious piece of rubbish he is. i did look for the popular resistance newsletter that had some of it, but i’d deleted it already. earthfirst newswire had the taconite mine story (with inside links), but it’s not the site i’d vaguely recalled. it’s noteworthy that we often have to go to RT and AJE for a lot of stories.
walker’s quotes were just grotesque. he mightta said: “kill a spotted owl for christ!”
no mistaking the venue message here, ash!
it appears that some great lessons have been learned by the US hegemon, and some USian states as well:
‘U.S. approves $1.29 bln sale of smart bombs to Saudi Arabia’ reuters
‘NNSA, Air Force Complete Successful B61-12 Life Extension Program Development Flight Test at Tonopah Test Range’, from their website.
“This test is the last of three development flight tests for the B61-12 Life Extension Program (LEP).
The B61-12 LEP refurbishes both nuclear and non-nuclear components to extend the bomb’s service life while improving its safety, security and reliability. The LEP will reuse or remanufacture existing components to the maximum extent possible.”
Orwellian double-speak, as RT notes: “But the B61-12's $8 billion upgrade has sparked debate between anti-proliferation advocates and Washington over whether the newly improved bomb is actually a new weapon, and therefore a violation of President Obama's position of not making new nuclear weapons. However, the NNSA maintains that the nuclear weapon will have no more capabilities than previous B61 weapons, and will not be GPS-guided.
Established by Congress in 2000, NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency within the US Department of Energy, which is responsible for “enhancing national security through the military application of nuclear science.”
The contradiction in nuclear deterrence is that the technology is so horrible to use but deterrence depends on everyone thinking you are crazy enough to use it. As long as everyone thought you were really doing something, it would be possible to increase your deterrence just with a news article like this one. But most nuclear powers’s intelligence services are smarter than believing just a news article (but it does up the stories of “worst case”).
Safer is better than unsafer. A credible story or even the reality of better targeting increases deterrence but it also allows the illusion or reducing “collateral damage”, which makes it easier to say Yes to a launch.
There are only a small number of nuclear nations. None of them are declared enemies of each other (even India and Pakistan). Finding the collective political will to build down to zero nuclear weapons and continue aggressive inspection is what is needed. The nuclear industry now is probably the largest hangup; nuclear power is being demobilized; ending nuclear weapons completely ends their industry except for a small business in isotopes and medical applications. And Fukushima still pops up in the news; their PR has not recovered.
safer is better, but it’s another obama con, imo. an $8 billion upgrade for a gravity nuke with no gps? it’s akin to his parsing his ‘no renditions by the usa: his attorneys figured out that timing was all. if prisoners could be seen as stopping at torture sites for what, three or four days, then moving to another…it was not rendition for torture. bada-bing.
nuke industry is the largest hangup, you think? i can’t imagine so, with all due respect. by the way, you never mentioned israel’s who knows how many nukes, and their lit of enemies. and bibi may be juuuuut nuts enough.
india/pakistan? wish i’d finished the interview with arundahati roy now, especially re: kashmir. and oh, fiddlesticks, i never made it back to lambert’s thingie.
i will admit that i almost cried when i saw that evo is determined to get nuclear power plants; guess the environment’s ‘citizens rights’ means…well, never mind. ;-)
odd, by the by, that SC is blue on the refugee map, yes? and while CO/hickenlooper are blue, tea party scott tipton is waxing a big NO bird finger. he was just an ignorant ‘indian trader’ in cortez when i knew him; now he’s just ignorant. think he may even have been a client; i’m sure his wife was.
Haley announced today that SC would try to prevent location of Syrian refugees in South Carolina. Right-wing social media has been scaring them with mashups of Syrians at European ports-of-entry intercut with Boko Haram running wild in Nigeria, and footage from somewhere else in Africa. Really stuff that makes Breitbart respectable. Peddled by Facebook shares.
Evo is a fool if he thinks that nuclear power helps him. All it does is paints a target on him. Sad fact is that countries realize that after they’ve wasted all the resources to obtain nuclear technology.
Has Israel ever tested a nuclear weapon? GlobalSecurity.org says this:
So how is it that Israel has such high credibility that it really does have nuclear weapons without any directly observable nuclear program? Part of it is its sophistication in other technology because Israel has as yet no nuclear power reactors and is opposed to civilian nuclear power generation. But Israel had France build a reactor at Dimona, and that reactor is the main source of Israel’s credibility for its unacknowledged nuclear weapons program. It is possible that they have absolutely nothing but a bluff, but not likely. That’s the very interesting psychological weaponry that has to be built into a nuclear program to be a successful deterrent.
I would not take the reported specifications of a nation’s weapons at face value except that they most likely comply with the last verified agreements, parsed as carefully as possible to allow maximum flexibility and possible loopholes.
It is politically possible, given US and Russian rapprochement over Syria (if not complete agreement) for Obama and Putin to draw down another tranche of weapons to the point that China, India, and Pakistan could become negotiating partners. At which point, pressure on Israel becomes possible if there is US will.
The very fascinating thing about nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons is that they all turn out to be very problematic to use politically because of the strategic dynamic of inducing a runaway arms race and the tactical costs of protection necessary to protect troops who have to enter attacked territory. The motive of genocide also becomes more obvious with actual use of these weapons. All of them are counter-population weapons; none very useful for counter-force or counter-value purpose (to use the technical jargon of national security).
Because the US nuclear weapons program really is hidden across a number of government programs, we really do not know what this “modernization” amounts to. Likely Russia and China already have a good idea about what we are doing and how it plays against their programs. France might also have independent ideas about the strategic position of its nuclear force. It’s what the modernization is doing beyond the arms limitation parsing, the safety updating, and yield management that all of the nuclear powers will be interested in. It can politically mean either further build-down or some technical gimmick will trigger a new arms race. The handwriting on the wall is “no nukes”. Everyone will be trying to delay that until they see that they have some advantage from that. (Planetary survival is not a sufficient motive apparently.)
it seems that by now over half the govs are rejecting syrians in diaspora. i also read that boko haram has killed more that isis/daesh, who knows?
as far as israel’s open nukes secrets, even da wiki pretty much makes a slam dunk case for ‘yeppers’, although i didn’t was into the ‘discussions’ tab to know what is possibly organized disinformation, what is not. but i remember now: “We will not be the first country to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East” nixonesque verbiage, it seems.
what means ‘build down’, please? and yes, evo is a fool for this. i’m thinking build up, of course, especially given the fact that US military systems makers are going cray with profits and stock rises. likely france’s too, of course. i hadn’t known until recently what major armaments purveyors they are.
Build down — mutually agree to verified process that goes from 20,000 warheads apiece to 2,000 warheads apiece – essentially what the US and the Soviet Union/Russia have done over almost 30 years now.
That 2,000 is still more than enough to do serious damage to the planet.
Ta; yes, START and SORT. i was unfamiliar with ‘build down’ i like it. but while hunting even to recall those treaty names, i found from january: ‘Russia ends US nuclear security alliance; Accord worked to keep stockpiles secure‘
“Official word came in a terse, three-page agreement signed on Dec. 16. A copy was obtained by the Globe, and a description of the Moscow meeting was provided by three people who attended the session or were briefed on it. They declined to be identified for security reasons.
Russia’s change of heart was not unexpected.
The Globe reported in August that US officials were concerned about the future of the programs, because of increased diplomatic hostilities between the United States and Russia. The New York Times reported in November that it appeared likely many of the programs would end.” (because: russia ‘invaded crimea, supported an armed invasion of the donbass, etc.)
now one can look at that a lot of different ways, but one might just see russia’s larger point. and do they need the expertise in dismantling only the US can supply? i have some vague memories of folks laughing about how little susan rice had accomplished over ‘building down’ with russia, and hillary’s promise of securing loose nukes in pakistan. but then wasn’t it she who’d convinced benazir bhutto to go back home?
and ah, yes: ‘Why Paris Climate Change Talks Won’t Allow Protesters’
(i’ll skip the great sean penn, as he was a Grand Celeb at the grand opening of the Marriott…haiti.) :-)
Per the Poppy Bush CIA Company playbook, RIGHT En cue:
http://www.sott.net/article/306625-Hollandes-reaction-to-Paris-attacks-Amend-constitution-to-allow-for-State-powers-similar-to-US-Patriot-Act-bomb-Syrian-infrastructure
maybe not quite as outrageous, but the govs claiming the right to reject syrian refugees because: japanese internment camps!!! OMG.
dunno if the schengen agreement will be vacated, but the folks atnaked capitalism said that there are too many other roads, trails, etc. for border closings to be meaningfully effective. i have no idea, myownself.
but this i think was the most interesting part of the piece:
“A couple of things stand out here. First, note that according to the source cited above, the French (using US “intelligence”) are hitting targets where there are no fighters. The Russians, on the other hand, are hitting anything and everything which could hint at what many have alluded to all along – namely that the US is either i) intentionally avoiding ISIS, ii) scared of collateral damage, or iii) some combination of both and that’s now finding its way into French strikes via the provision of intelligence from Washington to Paris. Second, the Russians are the ones doing the real damage to ISIS although there is of course the allegation that they are targeting hospitals because these days, everyone has to accuse everyone else of bombing hospitals.
daily sheeple, lol. reminds me of Tbogg, and ‘moar drones!!!” bu yeah, i had seen that…and that ‘what a great idea that the FreeDumb act could be put on hold; it has helped so very much to Keep.Us.Safe!™
The burning Bush hits just keep on coming; LeapFrogging the propaganda:
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/french-government-knew-terror-attack-was-imminent_112015
Jest like US waz BushWhacked by his 9/11 “Reichstag Feuer” putsch!
Years ago and in real time, I wrote a dearth of columns denouncing the behavior of the Bush/Cheney’s Manifesto when it came to their cavalier dismissal for “nation building” and yet, I am not surprised when another columnist writes of the “feckless” Left when it comes to espousing our great pride in that we must support France, while the Middle East burns in flames.
Consequently, my displeasure for America’s Legacy for Criminal Stupidity by our political leaders and their heftiness for war-mongering, shows no political dissipation.
Jaango
i’m not sure that i’m taking your meaning, jaango, but The West, post-contrived-insurgencies, seems to create more death, destruction, and havoc when it tries ‘nation building’, for certain. the puppet governments installed (libya, iraq, and via back-channels turkey, and who knows wth in afghanistan) either are intentionally created to bring more death and destruction to ‘some’, thereby permitting more ‘rescue operation. (read: control).
who will stop us is one of the interesting questions, isn’t it? or will we implode by stalled inertia? (is that the term i want?) the conversations on marxist predictions and all…
please excuse my absence; i’ll bring a note from the mancos rural water company tomorrow. in their usual fashion, they snapped the phone cable that serves our canyon while digging to replace a culvert. so…no phone or internet since mid-day yesterday.
i need to take care of a raft of other communications first, then i’ll be back oh, and mr. wd and i reckon that the county boys were at least battin’ .500: they didn’t smash up the rural water pipe, as well. yahooo! ;-)
pulled us back from the edge, the phone repair folks finally did.
oh, i’d grabbed this from trnn yesterday, and for brings a lot of history that i hadn’t known, and i hope he’s correct in what he says about france’s colonial past.
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=15109
larry wilkerson’s apparent advice/prescription is on the sidebar, but…i haven’t read it.
Glen does a great job of researching and delivering the real history of the French in Algeria and especially their terrorism in the Paris Massacre of 1961, I didn’t realize that the Vichy maintained their positions of power so long after the war.
Why he can’t apply the same rigor and research to Afghanistan is a puzzle. The statement ‘the CIA, KSA and Europe invested $billions to create the international Jihadist network, originally headquartered in Afghanistan’ is at best ignorance and worst revisionist history. The conflation of the huge Afghan MJ, who received almost all of this funding, with the small Arab group that later became al-Qaeda seems to have more to do with his and others butt-hurt caused by the US, KSA, European, Chinese supported Russian defeat and the fall of the USSR than the rise of Jihadi Islam.
The fact that he and others conveniently ignore the huge contributions of the Chinese to arm and train the MJ and the smaller contribution of the Iranians to other rebel groups in Afghanistan is telling, they deserve some credit/blame too.
This warping of documented history does serve to erase the fact that the Russian installation of a puppet regime followed by their invasion of Afghanistan is what inspired the MJ to fight before the US sent any funds and attracted the Arab Jihadi such as OBL and others to defend Islam from the Godless Commies. This historical amnesia also helps with their support for the new and improved God-fearing, bloody Russian Christian crusade against the now more powerful forces of Sunni Islam and their support for Iran and China who were Russia’s enemies in the Afghan conflict.
nice catch, peter; i’d blown by it, but all i’ve been able to find about china’s involvement is that the ISI in pakistan bought chinese (their allies) weapons who smuggled them to the mujahideen (which i’d always thought was spelled ‘mujahAdeen’).
but as for MJ, da wiki says that they organized first fighting the british in the late 19th century, and the ‘afghanistan’ section says:
“Many Muslims from other countries assisted the various mujahideen groups in Afghanistan. Some groups of these veterans became significant players in later conflicts in and around the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden, originally from a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, was a prominent organizer and financier of an all-Arab Islamist group of foreign volunteers; his Maktab al-Khadamat funnelled money, arms, and Muslim fighters from around the Muslim world into Afghanistan, with the assistance and support of the Saudi and Pakistani governments.[12] These foreign fighters became known as “Afghan Arabs” and their efforts were coordinated by Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.
Mujahideen forces caused serious casualties to the Soviet forces, and made the war very costly for the Soviet Union. In 1989 the Soviet Union withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. Many districts and cities then fell to the mujahideen; in 1992 the DRA’s last president, Mohammad Najibullah, was overthrown.
However, the mujahideen did not establish a united government, and many of the larger mujahideen groups began to fight each other over power in Kabul. After several years of devastating fighting, a village mullah named Mohammed Omar organized a new armed movement with the backing of Pakistan. This movement became known as the Taliban (“students” in Pashto), referring to how most Taliban had grown up in refugee camps in Pakistan during the 1980s and were taught in the Saudi-backed Wahhabi madrassas, religious schools known for teaching an orthodox interpretation of Islam. Veteran mujahideen confronted this radical splinter group in 1996.” (the rest of the entry)
now i’d thought the taliban were not quite the MJ, as they were among other things, the organizers of village life in various tribal areas, but AQ, so
apparently i’m wrong. but then, it’s da Wiki.
oh, and i’d wondered why the chinese were sponsoring recent ‘peace talks’ with the afghan taliban (a non-jirga?) and read a bit of the wiki on sino-afghan relations. really checkered and complicated. but apparently in recent years they’ve ‘invested heavily’ in reconstruction (not many millions, actually), but are going to develop copper mines there.
and ahead of the peace talks, china asked for afghan police/security forces to arrest some ‘militant uighurs‘, and they did. now that chinese barbaric treatment of the uighurs and the xinjiang region is darkly criminal.
I wasn’t sure about the timeline for Mullah Omar and the Taliban joining forces but the Taliban were trained and armed in Pakistan by the ISI before they returned to Afghanistan to confront the War Lord MJ. I did read that Mullah Omar hung one of these War Lords from the barrel of his tank for buggering young boys as an example of intolerable tribal behavior that the US seems to tolerate in our Afghan campaign.
The other fact is that OBL and AQ were long gone from Afghanistan before the Taliban formed. They returned to Saudi Arabia as heroes for a very short period and then were rejected by the KSA over the US forces in the country and Kuwait leading to their hasty and undercover departure with OBL being stripped of his KSA citizenship soon after.
There hasn’t been much written about the Chinese involvement in that Afghan war but what I found showed major involvement with training camps in Pakistan that were later moved into mainland China and large number of arms supplied.
i’ll need to read all that a third time to try to absorb it, and take it under advisement.
but the county boys cut the phone/internet cable again, and they just came back again after almost six hours. sure hope there weren’t any emergency vehicles needing calling.
i may just put up an open thread in the a.m. in case they have another mishap; at least you all could carry on w/ whatever suits your fancies. :-)
oh, and i had just read the col. wilkerson interview on trnn; not much there as to his prescriptions.
So China is trying to pull the Afghan Taliban into a political alliance to deal in some political way with China’s Uighur militancy. Russia and China, unlike the US, have immediate national interests in what happens in the -stans, including Afghanistan. Nominally all of the -statns have some sort of standing with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. That includes the the current Afghanistan regime. So China is dealing with both sides of the equation. Of course, resource contracts are the best form of diplomacy.
The question is how the transition from warfare to political negotiation unfolds and when. If Russia and China can end the warfare between the Taliban and the Kabul regime, it is much easier to persuade the US to leave and declare its mission complete. Russia, China, or both, and possibly India and Iran as well, are candidates for the “support group” of frontline states.
sorry i’m so brain-dead by now, bu we might also ask: “and for how long?’ now stir in brennan, pakistan (ack!) to the peace talk mix. i have a couple more links, but i still haven’t had time to check out the longer version of the cusack/arundahati roy interview hfcMofo sent me a few days ago. somehow, of course, a scan talked of modi, and i hope will speak of kashmir.
‘Afghan talks not feasible amid turmoil, US told’
sleep well.