Thursday, July 15, 2004

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 4:54:36 PM     And new angle on why the terrorists.. http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&;c=Article&cid=1089024920296&call_pageid=968256290204&tacodalogin=no The true goal of the Islamists is to come to power in Muslim countries, and their problem until recently was that they could not win over enough local people to make their revolutions happen. Getting the U.S. to march into the Muslim world in pursuit of the terrorists was a potentially promising stratagem, since an invasion should produce endless images of American soldiers killing and humiliating Muslims. That might finally push enough people into the arms of the Islamists to get their stalled revolutions off the ground. Specifically, the Al Qaeda planners expected the U.S. to invade Afghanistan and get bogged down in the same long counter-guerrilla war that the Russians had experienced there, providing along the way years of horrifying images of American firepower killing innocent Muslims. Osama bin Laden and his colleagues were simply trying to relive their past success against the Russians and get some more mileage out of the Afghan scenario. In fact, their plan failed: the U.S. conquered Afghanistan quickly and at a low cost in lives. Even now, despite huge American neglect, Afghanistan has not produced a major resistance movement. The reason Al Qaeda is still in business in a big way is that the Bush administration then invaded Iraq. The Islamists were astonished, no doubt, but they knew how to exploit an opportunity when one was handed to them. And so the real game continues, while the public debate in the United States is conducted in terms that have only the most tangential contact with strategic reality. ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 4:47:31 PM     Start with - all from Chalmers Johnson at  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-johnson15jul15,1,6211433,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions China is easily the fastest-growing big economy in the world, with a growth rate of 9.1% last year. On June 28, the BBC reported that China had passed the U.S. as the world's biggest recipient of foreign direct investment. China attracted $53 billion worth of new factories in 2003, whereas the U.S. took in only $40 billion; India, $4 billion; and Russia, a measly $1 billion. and then see the context COMMENTARY Sailing Toward a Storm in China U.S. maneuvers could spark a war. By Chalmers Johnson Chalmers Johnson's latest book is "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic" (Metropolitan, 2004). July 15, 2004 Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan. This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster. At a minimum, a single carrier strike group includes the aircraft carrier itself (usually with nine or 10 squadrons and a total of about 85 aircraft), a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine and a combination ammunition, oiler and supply ship. Normally, the United States uses only one or at the most two carrier strike groups to show the flag in a trouble spot. In a combat situation it might deploy three or four, as it did for both wars with Iraq. Seven in one place is unheard of. and he ends with If left alone by U.S. militarists, China will almost surely, over time, become a democracy on the same pattern as that of South Korea and Taiwan (both of which had U.S.-sponsored military dictatorships until the late 1980s). But a strong mainland makes the anti-China lobby in the United States very nervous. It won't give up its decades-old animosity toward Beijing and jumps at any opportunity to stir up trouble — "defending Taiwan" is just a convenient cover story. These ideologues appear to be trying to precipitate a confrontation with China while they still have the chance. Today, they happen to have rabidly anti-Chinese governments in Taipei and Tokyo as allies, but these governments don't have the popular support of their own citizens. If American militarists are successful in sparking a war, the results are all too predictable: We will halt China's march away from communism and militarize its leadership, bankrupt ourselves, split Japan over whether to renew aggression against China and lose the war. We also will earn the lasting enmity of the most populous nation on Earth. ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 4:35:07 PM     The push for dominance in Iraq  among the US, the new government, and the complex network of insurgents threatens to make Iraq into the domino problem the US feared in Vietnam. A solid loss in Iraq would reconfigure the world picture. I think we all feel this, and have little idea what to do about it. ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 4:03:58 PM     from a review of the new film, I,Robot. People will often scoff when i say about how science is often in religious categories. The transformation of humanity for example. Note here the use of the word "salvation." The question is, how much of the science enterprise is embedded in relgious thinking, even if the traces appear to be faded beyond recognition? Books like Doug Noble's Religion and Science make a strong case for the depth of tradition July 15, 2004 Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/movies/15NOTE.html But these opposing visions coexist. On the one hand is the Frankenstein plot, on the other the quest for salvation; on the one hand is the danger of technology, on the other its promise. "I, Robot" can't quite decide. But perhaps when it comes to robots, we are all hybrids.       ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 12:23:28 PM     It is important to remember how solidly many of us resisted the war in Iraq. The congressional view that they acted on available information is just not correct. http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=1543 But that shouldn't stop us from asking how an "independent" press in a "free" country could have been so paralyzed for so long. It not only failed to seriously investigate administration rationales for war, but little took into account the myriad voices in the on-line, alternative, and world press that sought to do so. It was certainly no secret that a number of our Western allies (and other countries), administrators of various NGOs, and figures like Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix, head of the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission, had quite different pre-war views of the "Iraqi threat." ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 11:37:09 AM     Sometimes i feel like i should run three of these. One for what is problematic one for what is good and one for what is worth doing. But i won't, they all need to be here. But I am thinking through rearranging the topics. What is always worth doing is art, and doing something meaningful for someone else. ********

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 9:23:06 AM     It is hard to find helpful posts, i think because we are in a period of seeming decay. There is a time when a fruit rots, and the few first spots can be seen, then comes a phase where blight is everywhere. All our thoughts turn to the election as the next possible exit ramp from the chaos and ill will. But in the meanwhile Iraq continues to be be full of death and misery. The Philippine problem is acute and symbolic of the depth of the problem. We can expect executions to get worse in style, those who read history know the range of possibilities. Hersh continues to pound away http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/2004/07/14.html#a1922 The outrages have cost us the support of moderate Arabs, says Hersh. "They see us as a sexually perverse society." Hersh describes a Pentagon in crisis. The defense department budget is “in incredible chaos,” he says, with large sums of cash missing, including something like $1 billion that was supposed to be in Iraq. "The disaffecion inside the Pentagon is extremeley acute," Hersh says. He tells the story of an officer telling Rumsfeld how bad things are, and Rummy turning to a ranking general yes-man who reassured him that things are just fine. Says Hersh, "The Secretary of Defense is simply incapable of hearing what he doesn’t want to hear." The Iraqi insurgency, he says,was operating in 1-to-3 man cells a year ago, now in 10-15 man cells, and despite the harsh questioning, "we still know nothing about them...we have no tactical information.” He says the foreign element among insurgents is overstated, and that bogeyman Zarqawi is "a composite figure" hyped by our government. The war, he says, has escalated to "fullscale, increasingly intense military activity." ********