Category Archives: War

Uncle Sam Aggression Is The Only ‘Good’ Kind Of Aggression

Foreign Policy, Media, Military, Neoconservatism, Russia, War

Unless you are the United States of America, “… you just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests,” said Secretary of State John Kerry to the chronically incurious David Gregory, on Meet The Press.

OK, Kerry did not disgorge the first 8 words not in quotation marks. But they are implied, given the historical facts. So I added them.

Another correction: Unlike the Russian government, the US government does not do anything that is in the interest of its people—although the think tank industry and the media-military-congressional complex would argue otherwise.

Agree or disagree with him; like it or not, Putin’s goal is “to protect Russian-speaking people in Crimea or other parts of Ukraine.” Which American community was Genghis Bush and B. Hussein protecting when they decimated Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the droned-upon countries?

To reiterate the question asked and answered in “The Warmongers: Not Looking Out For Us,” “More than anyone, who benefits when America goes to war? Those who ‘function within the nimbus of great power’ in D.C. and around it—the media-military-congressional-industrial complex.”

You see, the chattering and political classes cannot conceive of greatness outside the state because they are part of the state apparatus and depend on it for status and income. Conversely, individual Americans—who have nothing to gain and only losses to sustain from war—should never conflate their interests with those of the government and its emissaries, who have everything to gain from the great theatre that is war.

TOP-SECRET TWERKING

BAB's A List, Homeland Security, War

Top-Secret Twerking
By Myron Pauli

From the days of George Washington sneaking up on the Hessians in Trenton, we have harbored military secrets. We have, of course, also maintained a military “to secure these rights,” according to the Declaration of Independence.

And who does America recruit to “secure these rights” – a psychologically messed-up transgendered, 100 lb Welsh weakling named “Chelsea” Manning (Mistake 1). “We” then give this person a beyond-top secret clearance (Mistake 2). Perhaps the security investigators were too busy checking out the security risk caused by the member of my household with a police record – MY CAT!!! (This really happened!!!) – rather than investigate “Chelsea.”

The silliest part is how an Army private downloads 750,000 highly classified documents and gets away with it (Superbig Mistake 3). It is one thing to shoplift a candy bar from a store but this is emptying out the entire supermarket!

But surely the Defense Department learned from Manning – right? NO – apparently a GED high-school dropout named Edward Snowden also removes 2,000,000 beyond-top-secret documents from the NSA with no one the wiser until he heads off to China and outs himself. The government sucks up and stores a trillion words of information per inhabitant of Earth in Utah, but does not bother to protect its own supersecrets.

Rest assured that “privacy is respected.” If Snowden and Manning can just grab Megadocuments, how are we to be assured that Boris Badenov and Fu Manchu are not sitting at the NSA doing the very same on behalf of Putin and Xi?

Many documents are supposed to be “Sensitive, COMPARTMENTED Information.” “Compartmented” means that it should only be available to a extremely limited number of people – yet low-level employees like Snowden and Manning could steal millions of documents. Not only does the government ignore the Constitution but it ignores common-sense security protocols! Even former CIA boss John Deutch kept top secret documents on his internet-accessible home computer. How can these schnooks be trusted with our privacy?

Note that TOP SECRET is defined as information which could cause “exceptionally grave damage” to America. Stolen and released here were 3 million documents. HOW SPECIFICALLY did America suffer from this “exceptionally grave damage”??? Did Godzilla stomp over Maine? Was Iowa sucked up by a sinkhole? Did bubonic plague kill everyone in California? Was Duck Dynasty cancelled? Did employment in the US drop from 65% of adults to 58% ? – (yes – but this was related more to wasting trillions on idiotic wars than Snowden’s leaks)?

According to the news, the Pentagon has come out with an assessment of the 3 million “beyond exceptionally grave damage” incidents that have ruined life in America. Of course, it turns out that the “beyond exceptionally grave damage” is also TOP SECRET – yes, America has been destroyed but don’t tell a soul.

Or is the real scandal that trillions of $$$$ have been spent generating classified documents that are mostly worthless toilet paper, while this country remains utterly ignorant of anything that occurs overseas? That the US winds up funding and building up both sides in wars and pseudo-wars in third-world countries by people who generally hate our guts? That we have politicians who cannot find Niger on a map bloviating about the “evil of Snowden”? That the archived trillion-trillion bytes of searchable database on Americans is far more likely to be abused by paranoid politicians like Nixon, Clinton, Obama, and Christie against domestic political opponents than to sort out minutia between illiterate Taliban goat-herders in Afghanistan?

At best, after Abdul blows up his backpack, we may find that he had earlier been “talking Jihad” with Ishmael and we subsequently kill Ishmael and 50 others at a wedding party proudly announcing that we have killed “Ishmael the potential terrorist,” while forgetting the relatives of the other 50 who are new terrorist recruits.

What America has made is an NSA “Keystone-Kops-Gestapo” that is as inept as it is insidious – sucking up a whirlwind of mostly useless data and the 4th Amendment in the process. While the NSA archives our tweeting and our twerking, let us not forget Benjamin Franklin’s advice: “those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither”. The “exceptionally grave damage” is to our freedoms!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.

A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson

Barack Obama, Bush, Foreign Policy, Israel, Military, Nationhood, War

“A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Barack Hussein Obama at war and George W. Bush at war: How does the 44th president of the United States differ from the 43rd?

If nothing else, former Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has settled that question. Bush sent troops to fight futile battles without flinching; Obama did the same with some reservation.

Hardly a peacemaker, Obama questioned the mission in Afghanistan and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself—to the detriment of the grunts on the ground—a long-term commitment to the theatre of war in that country.

Like Obama, 82 percent of Americans oppose the war the president is being panned for having embraced publicly, but agonized over privately. On Afghanistan, Obama is more aligned with the American people—and the truth—than the former defense secretary and his Republican champions.

This I say with reluctance. I awarded Barack Obama brownie points thrice in his tenure: for doing not a thing about the 2011–2012 protests in Iran, for ceasing the criminalization of cancer and AIDS patients for their medicinal use of illegal substances, and for breaking with Bush and his neocons in refusing to step on the Russian Bear’s claws. Obama scrapped the missile-defense shield in Russia’s backyard.

Yet this revelation in Gates’ ‘Duty,’ a book that hangs on one hook, has Republicans gurgling with pleasure. Limitless is the GOP’s zest and zeal for ignoring the negative right of the American people to be free of the Sisyphean (and Jacobean) struggle to save the world.

If anything, it sounds as though Gates might have had misgivings of his own about the missions in which his “soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines” were dying for nothing.

A bereft Gates tells of ‘evening sessions’ during which he’d write condolence letters ‘to the families of service members killed in action.’ There ‘probably wasn’t a single evening in nearly 4 1/2 years when I didn’t — when I didn’t weep,’ he confessed. Gates relates how focused he became ‘on the strain on our troops and on their families.’ After all, ‘they’d been at war for 10 years.’ ‘My highest priority,’ he averred in an interview with NPR, was ‘trying to avoid new conflict … in terms of recommending against intervention in Libya,’ and expressing ‘concerns about going to war in Syria, much less in Iran.’

It just seemed to me that some of the areas where we were looking at potential conflict were more in the category of wars of choice. And it was those that I was trying to protect the troops from.

Having fought for the survival of his people—and never to democratize or ‘save’ another—Ariel Sharon was far less of a study in contradictions than poor Mr. Gates. …

Read the complete column. “A Soldier In The Style Of ‘Stonewall’ Jackson” is on WND.

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UPDATED: Robert Gates Aka ‘Yoda’ Aka Yaddah-Yaddah, Blah, Blah, Blah …

Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, Military, Republicans, War

Let’s see where on the continuum of stupidity are Republicans situated with respect to the recent revelations of former defense secretary Robert M. Gates.

Eighty two percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan. Like most Americans, B. Hussein Obama, hardly a peacemaker, questioned the mission in that G-d-forsaken hellhole of a country, and was skeptical of the military brass’s motivation in securing for itself a long-term commitment to that theatre of war.

So far, it sounds good to this writer—who has approved of Obama a total of perhaps twice.

What’s Gates, “whose nickname in the Obama White House was Yoda,” on about?

Yoda, Yaddah-Yaddah, Blah, Blah, Blah.

UPDATED (1/13): I heard that Gates cried himself to sleep over the (wasted) lives he was sending to battle. Could he too have had misgivings about the mission?

* NPR Interview.
* WSJ Gates Archive.