uncle scam!!! maybe he just has to let it all sink in.

Posted by: annie | Mar 18 2006 21:32 utc | 4

I = If

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Mar 18 2006 21:45 utc | 6

NYT Book Review on ‘American Theocracy,’ by Kevin Phillips
Clear and Present Dangers

Phillips .. identifies three broad and related trends — none of them new to the Bush years but all of them, he believes, exacerbated by this administration’s policies — that together threaten the future of the United States and the world.
…
The United States has embraced a kind of “petro-imperialism,” Phillips writes, “the key aspect of which is the U.S. military’s transformation into a global oil-protection force,” and which “puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs.”
…
On the far right is a still obscure but, Phillips says, rapidly growing group of “Christian Reconstructionists” who believe in a “Taliban-like” reversal of women’s rights, who describe the separation of church and state as a “myth” and who call openly for a theocratic government shaped by Christian doctrine.
…
the national debt — currently over $8 trillion — is only the tip of the iceberg. There has also been an explosion of corporate debt, state and local bonded debt, international debt through huge trade imbalances, and consumer debt (mostly in the form of credit-card balances and aggressively marketed home-mortgage packages). Taken together, this present and future debt may exceed $70 trillion.
The creation of a national-debt culture, Phillips argues, although exacerbated by the policies of the Bush administration, has been the work of many people over many decades — among them Alan Greenspan, who, he acidly notes, blithely and irresponsibly ignored the rising debt to avoid pricking the stock-market bubble it helped produce. It is most of all a product of the “financialization” of the American economy — the turn away from manufacturing and toward an economy based on moving and managing money, a trend encouraged, Phillips argues persuasively, by the preoccupation with oil and (somewhat less persuasively) with evangelical belief in the imminent rapture, which makes planning for the future unnecessary.

Fits a lot of the analysis done here at the moon.

Posted by: b | Mar 18 2006 23:24 utc | 8

North Korea was just tossed in so it wasn’t as obvious that this was an American crusade against Islamic countries. Considering that up until the mention of N. Korea was made, we hadn’t heard a peep out of that country for years and years. It was Bush adding it in that aroused the ire of Kim Jong-Il and started this battle of words and threats. I remember Kim stating how surprised he was to find his country on the list since he hadn’t threatened America at all.
This three-year-old article from the New Yorker magazine brings up the question of why N. Korea was added at the last moment.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030113ta_talk_hertzberg

Posted by: Ensley | Mar 19 2006 0:38 utc | 10

On this third anniversary of the invasion, I decided to go check out the rally and march here in San Francisco. Some things I noticed…
Socialists everywhere. I think I came home with 5 different socialist newspaper. Half the kiosks set up were associated with some socialist organization. The next thing I noticed was someone holding a big sign saying “ET says end the war, and I will come!” Apparently there’s a group called the Raelians. They were there early with the socialists, passing out their pamphlets.
However, they were not the strangest pamphleteers on this day. While on the march, someone handed me a paper about the problems of the Psychocrats, which appeared to be an anti-war screed from a Scientologist’s perspective.
Yet nothing was as weird as the young woman there with a t-shirt showing Rosie the Riveter, saying We Can Do It! and saying Hillary 2008 along the bottom. She was also wearing a peace button.
Across the street, behind the stage, was the anti-protest protest. When I arrived, it was about 30 people flying Israeli flags, holding signs about ANSWER’s racism and saying “Pro-Israeli, Pro-Peace”. Fair enough – while I’m not pro-Israel, I can understand frustrations with ANSWER’s perhaps too-strident anti-Zionism. There was a man across the street holding up a sign that said “End This Jew War.” Yet the Israeli Peace section soon became the pro-war cheering section. One young man held up a sign saying “End Commie Occupation of San Francisco.” Others dressed like suicide bombers and held up signs in Arabic – who knows what they said. Some had signs which said simple “Osama Hearts Protesters”. I do not know why the pro-Israel, pro-peace people were associating with this bit of jingoism. Some strange coalition building.
The people were, by and large, much older than I expected. Some children, some teens, a lot of young people, but more middle-aged and older people.
The speeches were interesting less because of what they said than what they didn’t say. There’s little difference content-wise in the speeches not than there would have been 2 years ago. A few mentions of Katrina. However, there was no mention of Operation Bomb The Hell Out Of Iraqis, or whatever it is, which started a few days ago. Nobody – anywhere – seems to care about this. In the battle for the media, maybe this is a good thing, but those are real bombs, dopping on real people, whether it’s discussed or not.
There was a distinct dearth of clever signs. Shortly after I arrived, after seeing a Katrina-related booth, I thought of one – Make Levees Not War. But I never saw one which made me laugh, or gasp.
The whole exercise struck me as rather tired. It has been done before. The war goes on. The protests go on. We take a walk in the sun, maybe make a few new friends. There are vibrant colors, but very few vibrant ideas. This is, perhaps, what happens in an illiberal democracy where people invest their political feelings into votes which are determined beforehand.
What can we do but march?

Posted by: Rowan | Mar 19 2006 2:01 utc | 12

“The United States has embraced a kind of “petro-imperialism,” Phillips writes, “the key aspect of which is the U.S. military’s transformation into a global oil-protection force,” and which “puts up a democratic facade, emphasizes freedom of the seas (or pipeline routes) and seeks to secure, protect, drill and ship oil, not administer everyday affairs.” from the Kevin Phillips piece Bernhard posted above.
Is this why I keep seeing stories about the US Navy fighting pirates in what amounts to international waters these past few months (particularly, it seems, near Somalia)…? This might sound like a naïve question, but what gives any nation the global jurisdiction to summarily “enforce the peace” wherever and whenever they feel it is appropriate? Speaking as someone who has considered turning to piracy (my career as a graverobber and highwayman didn’t pan out) in an attempt to be left alone by these thugs, this annoys me fairly considerably.

Posted by: Monolycus | Mar 19 2006 3:09 utc | 14

Now,
I like THIS

Posted by: Groucho | Mar 19 2006 3:28 utc | 16

I’ve re-read this Marshal outline again, and I cant see anywhere where he is saying that the current chaos in Iraq is (from the neo-con point of view) a desirable or planned outcome. He summarizes their plan as such:
……………………………………………………………
The hawks’ grand plan differs depending on whom you speak to, but the basic outline runs like this: The United States establishes a reasonably democratic, pro-Western government in Iraq–assume it falls somewhere between Turkey and Jordan on the spectrum of democracy and the rule of law. Not perfect, representative democracy, certainly, but a system infinitely preferable to Saddam’s. The example of a democratic Iraq will radically change the political dynamics of the Middle East. When Palestinians see average Iraqis beginning to enjoy real freedom and economic opportunity, they’ll want the same themselves. With that happy prospect on one hand and implacable United States will on the other, they’ll demand that the Palestinian Authority reform politically and negotiate with Israel. That in turn will lead to a real peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians. A democratic Iraq will also hasten the fall of the fundamentalist Shi’a mullahs in Iran, whose citizens are gradually adopting anti-fanatic, pro-Western sympathies. A democratized Iran would create a string of democratic, pro-Western governments (Turkey, Iraq, and Iran) stretching across the historical heartland of Islam. Without a hostile Iraq towering over it, Jordan’s pro-Western Hashemite monarchy would likely come into full bloom. Syria would be no more than a pale reminder of the bad old days. (If they made trouble, a U.S. invasion would take care of them, too.) And to the tiny Gulf emirates making hesitant steps toward democratization, the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt would no longer look like examples of stability and strength in a benighted region, but holdouts against the democratic tide. Once the dust settles, we could decide whether to ignore them as harmless throwbacks to the bad old days or deal with them, too. We’d be in a much stronger position to do so since we’d no longer require their friendship to help us manage ugly regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria.
……………………………………………………………
So if this grand plan for reforming the ME begins with the reformation, top to bottom, of Iraq — its a little hard to see whats gone down henseforth, as anything remotely capable of elliciting envy, let alone an active empitus for liberal revolution. It seems to me that everything the US has done in Iraq so far, has been done according to the neo-con template. Its just that everything they’ve done has failed, and the resultant chaos, is simply the consequence of that failure. Although Marshall does quote a few of the crazier neo-con versions, like Max Boot, most of the efforts undertaken in Iraq do not reflect these perspectives in policy, although they might be assumed in a last ditch hail Mary effort, having all else failed. This would entail either a major escalation in military profile or some coup-detad scenario. (on the other thread anyonomus Debs is Dead proposes another possibility, although it is not very neo-con in inception).
I find it doubly ironic, first, that the neo-con policy(s) in Iraq of privitization, de-Baathification, cultural cluelessness, and both the ham-fistedness of US military action, and the intentional efforts of keeping the Iraqi security forces impotent and under-armed — have not only allowed the insurgency to develop, but have actually encouraged it to do so. Secondly, and perhaps an even greater irony, is that the war, framed as a neo-liberal task of bringing freedom, democracy, and the american way of life to the oppressed and tortured people of Iraq has become the mission, the mission itself then has carried the seeds of its own discontent, and even failure. The overt appeal to the exceptionalist american mentality has had its benifits, including the continued support defient at the lack of WMD and the missing al-Qaeda connection but, with this support framed so intrinsically in americana comes also a whole host of heightened hopes and expectations for an idealistic outcome. It has also placed restrictions in the formation of (Iraqi) political structure so as to maintain some conformity to the “purple finger” image of democratization in progress, inadvertanly giving Iraqi politicians themselves the currency of proof that the system is working. Essentially, this is a propaganda scheme constructed out of intrinsic american beliefs, that in order to function, must be reflected in the (political) facts, and so therefore have had an effect (on the Iraqi government itself) to produce these facts (as policy) — which have had the effect of actually undermining the neo-con position itself (by having to conform to its own ideals). And because these facts are in relation to the (heightened) expectations, when the facts deny the expectations, there is a reletive, subsequent, and precipitous drop in support. It took 10 years in Vietnam to reach the levels of support that Iraq has found in only 3. And with (W) at 33% approval and almost 70% regarding the whole affair as a “mistake”, and at a cost of 7 billion a month, clearly, this could’nt be the desired result.

Posted by: anna missed | Mar 19 2006 8:37 utc | 18

Read Billmon. There’s nothing else to say.

Posted by: Aigin | Mar 19 2006 18:33 utc | 20