Black Bag Operations Network

Its not hard to spot the daily talking point. You read a few quotes in a few interviews and a new phrase appears in the echo chamber and reverberates throught the mainstream media. Today’s utterance is WORLD WAR III!

Don’t believe me? Take a look.

This is the PNAC whack jobs’ wet dream come true. A self fulfilling prophecy in action. If there are any analogies to WW II that hold up, it looks like the US is playing Germany’s role and Bush is starring in Hitler’s. This might be a good time to remind our military leaders that they pledged allegiance to defend the constitution and not the people in office. Resolve that as you see fit.

I’m plenty freaked out by this development. You should be too.

I have lost all respect for Condoleeza Rice.

Primarily I have lost it because she keeps trying to draw the line from 9/11 to Iraq and there is no line to draw. I found her “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” comment to be pure posturing. Blix and the UN wanted more time to find the “smoking gun” that was Saddam’s WMDs. He couldn’t find the gun, because it didn’t exist. We all know how that turned out.

This week, Rice again tried to draw the line by insisting that the situation in Iraq has nothing to do with instability in the middle east.

Only Iraq was chosen as a target because of its central location in the middle east. The idea being that democracy would start there and spread out in all directions. Nifty pipe(line) dream there. Crooks and Liars has a bit of a recent interview with the key bits here:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Extremists now appear to have been emboldened. The moderates appear to be in retreat. There is no peace process. There is war. How do you answer administration critics who say that the administration’s actions have unleashed, have helped unleash the very hostilities you hoped to contain?

RICE: Well, first of all, those hostilities were not very well contained as we found out on September 11th, so the notion that policies that finally confront extremism are actually causing extremism, I find grotesque.

Again with the propaganda. Pre Iraq, bin Laden and al qaeda were about as influential as Charles Manson and his family. The key difference is that Osama had disposable income to fund a bigger Helter Skelter. We didn’t fall for Manson’s plot, but Rice fell for Osama’s hook line and sinker. Through the ham handed handling of our foreign policy and repeated failure to exhuast diplomatic channels before going to the last resort of military force, we have elevated the Manson of the middle east to near-martyr status and multiplied is recruiting efforts a thousand fold. We squandered all of the good will and sympathy for 9/11 by holding accountable an entire country (and the wrong one at that).

Zero cred

The train bombings in Mumbai might seem to contradict my previous post.  But I don’t think so.  This isn’t a “war”.  Its a crime.  Perpetrated by organized criminals.

The reaction to such an act must be manifold.  Find the perpetrators and try them as criminals.  Seek to understand their motivations.  Get to the root cause/belief that lead them to this act.  Through information dissemination, education, and outreach, work to change the conditions that reinforce this belief.

The usual causes of mass violence are severe inequities and a perceived lack of options.  (I admit that mental illness may be an exception)  When people believe they have options and avenues to address their circumstances, they will work within the framework to effect change.  When they don’t, they smash the framework.

More cops, more oppression, more surveillance, more guns, more bombs, more incarceration does not remove the will to do violence from the disadvantaged.  This is the fallacy of the “war on terror”.

Otherwise, we are just wasting our money, our future, and our youth.

I object to the use of the term. It makes about as much sense as a “war on caution” or a “war on diplomacy”, which, now that I think of it, seems to be what the White House is all about.

You can’t have a war on a tactic. This isn’t a war. We are not a nation at war. This is a giant money laundering operation that was planned and begun before 9/11 and has been made easier because one millionaire crackpot with a dozen followers got lucky with a single attack. This is about draining the treasury while hiding behind the voluminous robes of religion. These are not conservatives, they are well organized radical propagandists brutally focused and synchronized in their mass media tuned message delivery. They do not govern, they waste our time with pointless non-binding resolutions nobody cares about, fiddling while real problems are ignored because they are hard and will cost money that they are already channeling into their own pockets. Meanwhile they foment the terror they claim to be fighting because they have wacked a beehive that would have been better left alone.

The entrenched Democrats are no better, but they are at least disorganized and more money will likely remain in government working for the taxpayers, simply because they haven’t figured out how to drain it as efficiently as war profiteers do. Given proper pressure, they might even spend the money on something good – like universal health care and education – something that could have been done for a fraction of the cost of the Iraq war.