We are starting to see all the oedipal overtomes that led to the war in Iraq. Remember, Bus Sr. was also a fighter pilot, but one who actually served in combat, not just a codpiece packer who struts down the flight deck of a carrier.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 13 2006 7:05 utc | 3

Cheney in a Box

Cheney is “dead-ender”. He won’t go peacefully.

This could get ugly, very ugly…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 13 2006 8:36 utc | 5

@ Uncle $cam – the Uruknet link has some of it right, but lumping Brzezinski in with Baker and Bush senior is probably a stretch, isn’t it?
I have no doubts that this mid-term reaped the harvest of how Cheney has let the U.S. military and intelligence communities out to dry.
It was an avalanche of bad news, exquisitely timed and sourced for maximum impact and credibility for Fratboy and The Waddler. But Cheney has no credibility left, and 41&42 will save their legacies by letting Cheney go stand in front of the approaching truck.

Posted by: SteinL | Nov 13 2006 9:00 utc | 7

Well SteinL, you may be right, Zbig could be a stretch, but then again, perhaps the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside the enigma of 41’s long spook life is much more complicated than many know. Brzezinski was on poppy’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for a short time and Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski are chums.
Funny how the rabbit hole and the cast of characters always seem to have the six degree’s of seperation thing going doesn’t it.
In addition, these house of mirror fiascos are chimera’s. Compartmentalized laberynths. Spy vs spy projects of ‘the company’. Zbig may have been a Floater* or “useful idiot”. Who knows with these things. Further, perhaps the author of the article knows something we do not.
These enterprise’s are so foggy, obfuscated and purposely obscure as to be maddening. One tends to over look, forget or not even bother to see the whole of the kitchen-sink drama. Take what most people know about Iran/Contra or any other black project for that matter. These things are so much more, SO MUCH DEEPER than what the names suggest. For example,
There is something very special about Iran-Contra. It wasn’t just one more government scandal like, say, Iraqgate. It was far larger, deeper, and more multi-faceted. In fact, the very name “Iran-Contra,” is a kind of coverup, implying that it consisted of nothing more than selling arms to Iran and diverting the proceeds to the Contras.
I’ve been trying to get my head around it for a while, and I still can’t say I have an absolutely clear idea of what was really going on. The best I can put it is that it was the test drive of a new machine which had been in the building for the previous 15 years or so, and that anybody who had been involved with the building of that machine was in on it.
At the heart of it was the coalition George H.W. Bush had been putting together starting when he was CIA director in 1976: The rogue CIA guys like Shackley and Clines. The Neocons. The warhawks and old-timey anti-communists and crazy generals, many of them left over from the China Lobby of the 50’s and 60’s. But those were just the core elements — there were many other parties involved.
For example, the Israelis were there in spades. The aftermath of the 1973 war and the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 had set them to selling arms to anybody available, and they were dealing with both the Iranians and the Contras long before Mossad agent David Kimche got together with Bud McFarlane to bring the US into things.
The Arabs were involved as well — most notably, Adnan Kashoggi — mainly through their ties to Bush and the rogue CIA.
So was the World Anti-Communist league, which served as Ollie North’s main conduit to the Contras, and with it a whole set of connections to European fascists (including P2), Latin American death squads, and the Reverend Moon.
There too were the New Rightists — most of them alumni of Young Americans for Freedom — who in the 70’s had gotten pulled into groups like the World Anti-Communist League and in the 80’s set up a slew of pro-Contra organizations, many of them entangled in some way with Moon’s Unification Church. The names of members of those groups keep coming up in Republican politics (and particularly in GOP campaign psy-ops dirty tricks) every bit as often as the more senior and “official” representatives of Iran-Contra.
And then there’s the drug aspect — both the cocaine which got moved around as part of the Contra arms trade and the heroin which had flowed freely through Iran before the overthrow of the shah and with which Bush’s rogue CIA guys were intimately involved.
And on top of that, BCCI — which is to say arms, drugs, money-laundering, and dreams of controlling the world’s economy.
And *all* these forces were part of Iran-Contra and using it as a test run, a first attempt to exercise their power.
As to the nature of what that beast really was, that’s where I’m still straining to get a clear image. My best guess at this point is that it represented a coming-together of several different right-wing elements — American, British, European, and East Asian — which had decided in the wake of the 1968-69 popular uprisings that they had to shift their attention from the fading specter of communism to this new threat to their accumulated wealth and power
I believe also that a central aspect of this coming-together was a decision that they would have to operate by largely covert and special ops-type methods rather than by anything representing traditional warfare. Even the traditional CIA was too government-based and too straight arrow for what they had in mind.
Despite what some people like to suggest here, conspiracies are not eternal. They are born, they serve a purpose, and then they die along with their leading members. But older conspiracies do tend to seed newer ones. Whatever came together between 1969 and the early 80’s had its roots in fascism (both European and Asian) and in the pro-fascist maneuverings of Prescott Bush, Allen Dulles, and their friends. However, most of its components were entirely new — new as a coalition of formerly disparate elements, new in terms of its methodology, new in its immediate goals and objectives.
(Significantly, Dulles had died in 1969 and Prescott Bush in 1972 — signs of the passing of the old guard.)
That conspiracy developed in the shadows through the 70’s, gained public legitimacy and influence when Reagan became president, first flexed its muscles in Iran-Contra, and is now the hydra-headed monster that assails us from every side.
And *that* is why “Iran-Contra” means ever so much mere than merely some shady arms dealing involving the Contras and the Iranians.
*Floater: a person used one-time, occasionally, or even unknowingly for an intelligence operation.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 13 2006 9:58 utc | 9

Start looking for episodes of behavioral imbalance in the Preznit.
How would we tell?

Posted by: billmon | Nov 13 2006 14:56 utc | 11

uncle- you’re on the right track. greg grandin points out in his latest book that it was in latin america that all of these various factions of the right — hawks, fascists, neocons, anti-communists, religious right, rogue intel, etc — finally came together. the arms deals are only the tip of an ominous iceberg.

Posted by: b real | Nov 13 2006 15:45 utc | 13

The ever-evolving, ever-Increasing Importance of professional Investigative journalist Robert Parry has formed and shaped the template for an understanding landscape of what we know about this ideological virtual machine program* of Iran/Contra. Like the “Java Virtual Machine” that allows Java programs to be “Write Once, Run Anywhere” Parry has outlined a topology with which we can start to see into the Möbius strip of the corporate/spook knot theory.
As Bernhard points out in his April 24, 2006 Drumheller post sparked by fauxreal, indeed, Parry and others (Josh Marshall, Digby etc…) are mapping the virtual leviathan (thought matrix)that has taken form. These memetic Magician’s and their mutant Magik of social pychology and “behavioral economics” their grand corporate Goetia and Pythagorean number’s system has called into being (made flesh) through viral and tangible physcical control. We like to think of ourselves as self-directed, autonomous agents yet there are a myriad of factors beyond our control influencing and directing our behaviors. The War Profiteers have created an entity.
This entity has become a parasite feeding on us individually and as a nation/state through neuroscience, mass behavior modification cultural appropriation etc.. One big Ouroboros. We have a multi-fascited Demon to destroy.

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 13 2006 19:44 utc | 15

More mad ramblings of a fool…
The Octopus is the Matrix vivified. perhaps, because of the new democrat the Octopus, aka the Leviathan has just spewed some ink and escaped…
The Dems are in, not because they presented a viable platform, but rather by default. What’s most discouraging is Pelosi/Dean’s/conyers announcement that there will be no impeachment process. But there will be more “hay” by way of a minimum wage increase to keep the sheep distracted. When there’s been a repeal of the Patriot Act and certain parties are in prison, then I’ll put my gladrags on.
Until then I will attack windmills, with all the madness of a certvantes, with “Man of la Mancha” zeal.
The Corporate Egregore

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 13 2006 21:32 utc | 17

oh great. now the whole world will read about my billmonenis envy. 🙂

Posted by: fauxreal | Nov 13 2006 23:35 utc | 19

oh great. now the whole world will read about my billmonenis envy. 🙂
Ha! that would require that someone actually reads my screeds, which I highly doubt, outside of a few MOA’s whom nod and and think, ‘there he goes again’, then distance themselves or whom politely don’t reply at all…lmao

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 14 2006 0:32 utc | 21

@ Uncle (and others)…
Just because we don’t reply doesn’t mean we don’t drink, thankfully and digest. There are some extremely intelligent, insightful and well tuned-in folks here, generating one the best signal-to-noise cocktails of any of the sites I visit. I don’t wish to negatively affect this delicious inebriant when I have nothing to add.

Posted by: Pyrrho | Nov 14 2006 1:23 utc | 23

I third Pyrrho.

Posted by: Bea | Nov 14 2006 1:36 utc | 25

no other way to articulate my hypothesis at this time
You’ve doing a great job Uncle. I got a whole bunch out of your screeds on this thread. Elaborating rather than just offering your mines of data. Please don’t loose heart. Rhetorical. I know you wouldn’t ever.
I don’t hit all of your links but do read and try to digest most of your screeds. I couldn’t even begin to assimilate all of the data you present. But I do learn from what you post and appreciate it highly.
And I fourth Pyrrho.

Posted by: Juannie | Nov 14 2006 3:35 utc | 27

Amen – Pyrrho # 23 — I digest huge, massive insights and information here. I feel it is beside the point to keep commenting to what is being said. Once in a while I speak up — but I hate to add to stuff already said. Keep it up — we are reading and thinking and processing…

Posted by: Elie | Nov 14 2006 3:58 utc | 29

uncle wrote: And then there’s the drug aspect — both the cocaine which got moved around as part of the Contra arms trade and the heroin which had flowed freely through Iran before the overthrow of the shah and with which Bush’s rogue CIA guys were intimately involved.
the shah’s younger bro, mahmoud pahlevi, was a big narcotics trafficker & the family had long owned serious opium fields. douglas valentine’s strength of the wolf: the secret history of america’s war on drugs, touches on it & the u.s. involvement. you can search inside the book at amazon on the string “the iran connection” (page 169-170) or “pahlevi”, to browse.

Posted by: b real | Nov 14 2006 4:21 utc | 31

opps, ment to add this (see below) for a lighter touch, attention artist’s and lover there of…
Viva le Banksy! : Irangraffiti

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Nov 14 2006 7:07 utc | 33