DENVER AUGUST 24th, 2008

"All we are saying, is give peace a chance."

Our brave children:

DNC report

From Antwar.com today: August 12, 2008 The American Military Crisis by Andrew Bacevich and Tom Engelhardt TomDispatch All you really need to know is that, at Robert Gates' Pentagon, they're still high on the term "the Long War." It's a phrase that first crept into our official vocabulary back in 2002 but was popularized by CENTCOM commander John Abizaid in 2004 – already a fairly long (war-)time ago. Now, Secretary of Defense Gates himself is plugging the term, as he did in April at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, quoting no less an authority than Leon Trotsky: "What has been called the Long War is likely to be many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world in differing degrees of size and intensity. This generational campaign cannot be wished away or put on a timetable. There are no exit strategies. To paraphrase the Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, we may not be interested in the Long War, but the Long War is interested in us." The Long War has also made it front and center in the new "national defense strategy," which is essentially a call to prepare for a future of two, three, many Afghanistans. ("For the foreseeable future, winning the Long War against violent extremist movements will be the central objective of the U.S.") If you thought for a moment that in the next presidency some portion of those many billions of dollars now being sucked into the black holes of Iraq and Afghanistan was about to go into rebuilding American infrastructure or some other frivolous task, think again. Just read between the lines of that new national defense strategy document where funding for future conventional wars against "rising powers" is to be maintained, while funding for "irregular warfare" is to rise. The Pentagonization of the U.S., in other words, shows no sign of slowing down. Here, by the way, is the emphasis in the new Gates Doctrine – from a recent Pentagon briefing by the secretary of defense – that should make us all worry. "The principal challenge, therefore, is how to ensure that the capabilities gained and counterinsurgency lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the lessons relearned from other places where we have engaged in irregular warfare over the last two decades, are institutionalized within the defense establishment." Back to the future? And here's a riddle for our moment: How long is a Long War, when you've been there before (as were, in the case of Afghanistan, Alexander the Great, the imperial Brits, and the Soviets)? On the illusions of victory and the many miscalculations of the Bush administration when it came to the nature of American military power, no one in recent years has been more incisive than Andrew Bacevich, who experienced an earlier version of the Long War firsthand in Vietnam. His new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism, has just been published. Short, sharp, to the point, it should be the book of the election season, if only anyone in power, or who might come to power, were listening. (The following piece, the first of two parts this week at TomDispatch, is adapted from section three of that book, "The Military Crisis.") But if you want the measure of our strange, dystopian moment, Barack Obama reportedly has a team of 300 foreign policy advisers – just about everyone ever found, however brain-dead, in a Democratic presidential rolodex – and yet Bacevich's name isn't among them. What else do we need to know? Tom Illusions of Victory How the United States did not reinvent war… but thought it did by Andrew Bacevich "War is the great auditor of institutions," the historian Corelli Barnett once observed. Since 9/11, the United States has undergone such an audit and been found wanting. That adverse judgment applies in full to America's armed forces. Valor does not offer the measure of an army's greatness, nor does fortitude, nor durability, nor technological sophistication. A great army is one that accomplishes its assigned mission. Since George W. Bush inaugurated his global war on terror, the armed forces of the United States have failed to meet that standard. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush conceived of a bold, offensive strategy, vowing to "take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge." The military offered the principal means for undertaking this offensive, and U.S. forces soon found themselves engaged on several fronts. Two of those fronts –- Afghanistan and Iraq – commanded priority attention. In each case, the assigned task was to deliver a knockout blow, leading to a quick, decisive, economical, politically meaningful victory. In each case, despite impressive displays of valor, fortitude, durability, and technological sophistication, America's military came up short. The problem lay not with the level of exertion but with the results achieved. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces failed to eliminate the leadership of al-Qaeda. Although they toppled the Taliban regime that had ruled most of that country, they failed to eliminate the Taliban movement, which soon began to claw its way back. Intended as a brief campaign, the Afghan War became a protracted one. Nearly seven years after it began, there is no end in sight. If anything, America's adversaries are gaining strength. The outcome remains much in doubt. In Iraq, events followed a similar pattern, with the appearance of easy success belied by subsequent developments. The U.S. invasion began on March 19, 2003. Six weeks later, against the backdrop of a White House-produced banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," President Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." This claim proved illusory. Writing shortly after the fall of Baghdad, the influential neoconservatives David Frum and Richard Perle declared Operation Iraqi Freedom "a vivid and compelling demonstration of America's ability to win swift and total victory." Gen. Tommy Franks, commanding the force that invaded Iraq, modestly characterized the results of his handiwork as "unequaled in its excellence by anything in the annals of war." In retrospect, such judgments – and they were legion – can only be considered risible. A war thought to have ended on April 9, 2003, in Baghdad's al-Firdos Square was only just beginning. Fighting dragged on for years, exacting a cruel toll. Iraq became a reprise of Vietnam, although in some respects at least on a blessedly smaller scale. A New American Way of War? It wasn't supposed to be this way. Just a few short years ago, observers were proclaiming that the United States possessed military power such as the world had never seen. Here was the nation's strong suit. "The troops" appeared unbeatable. Writing in 2002, for example, Max Boot, a well-known commentator on military matters, attributed to the United States a level of martial excellence "that far surpasses the capabilities of such previous would-be hegemons as Rome, Britain, and Napoleonic France." With U.S. forces enjoying "unparalleled strength in every facet of warfare," allies, he wrote, had become an encumbrance: "We just don't need anyone else's help very much." Boot dubbed this the Doctrine of the Big Enchilada. Within a year, after U.S. troops had occupied Baghdad, he went further: America's army even outclassed Germany's Wehrmacht. The mastery displayed in knocking off Saddam, Boot gushed, made "fabled generals such as Erwin Rommel and Heinz Guderian seem positively incompetent by comparison." All of this turned out to be hot air. If the global war on terror has produced one undeniable conclusion, it is this: Estimates of U.S. military capabilities have turned out to be wildly overstated. The Bush administration's misplaced confidence in the efficacy of American arms represents a strategic misjudgment that has cost the country dearly. Even in an age of stealth, precision weapons, and instant communications, armed force is not a panacea. Even in a supposedly unipolar era, American military power turns out to be quite limited. How did it happen that Americans so utterly overappraised the utility of military power? The answer to that question lies at the intersection of three great illusions. According to the first illusion, the United States during the 1980s and 1990s had succeeded in reinventing armed conflict. The result was to make force more precise, more discriminating, and potentially more humane. The Pentagon had devised a new American Way of War, investing its forces with capabilities unlike any the world had ever seen. As President Bush exuberantly declared shortly after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, "We've applied the new powers of technology … to strike an enemy force with speed and incredible precision. By a combination of creative strategies and advanced technologies, we are redefining war on our terms. In this new era of warfare, we can target a regime, not a nation." The distinction between regime and nation was a crucial one. By employing these new military techniques, the United States could eliminate an obstreperous foreign leader and his cronies, while sparing the population over which that leader ruled. Putting a missile through the roof of a presidential palace made it unnecessary to incinerate an entire capital city, endowing force with hitherto undreamed-of political utility and easing ancient moral inhibitions on the use of force. Force had been a club; it now became a scalpel. By the time the president spoke, such sentiments had already become commonplace among many (although by no means all) military officers and national security experts. Here lay a formula for certain victory. Confidence in military prowess both reflected and reinforced a post-Cold War confidence in the universality of American values. Harnessed together, they made a seemingly unstoppable one-two punch. With that combination came expanded ambitions. In the 1990s, the very purpose of the Department of Defense changed. Sustaining American global preeminence, rather than mere national security, became its explicit function. In the most comprehensive articulation of this new American Way of War, the Joint Chiefs of Staff committed the armed services to achieving what they called "full-spectrum dominance" – unambiguous supremacy in all forms of warfare, to be achieved by tapping the potential of two "enablers" – "technological innovation and information superiority." Full-spectrum dominance stood in relation to military affairs as the political scientist Francis Fukuyama's well-known proclamation of "the end of history" stood in relation to ideology: Each claimed to have unlocked ultimate truths. According to Fukuyama, democratic capitalism represented the final stage in political economic evolution. According to the proponents of full-spectrum dominance, that concept represented the final stage in the evolution of modern warfare. In their first days and weeks, the successive invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq both seemed to affirm such claims. How Not to "Support the Troops" According to the second illusion, American civilian and military leaders subscribed to a common set of principles for employing their now-dominant forces. Adherence to these principles promised to prevent any recurrence of the sort of disaster that had befallen the nation in Vietnam. If politicians went off half-cocked, as President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had back in the 1960s, generals who had correctly discerned and assimilated the lessons of modern war could be counted on to rein them in. These principles found authoritative expression in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which specified criteria for deciding when and how to use force. Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense during most of the Reagan era, first articulated these principles in 1984. Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the early 1990s, expanded on them. Yet the doctrine's real authors were the members of the post-Vietnam officer corps. The Weinberger-Powell principles expressed the military's own lessons taken from that war. Those principles also expressed the determination of senior officers to prevent any recurrence of Vietnam. Henceforth, according to Weinberger and Powell, the United States would fight only when genuinely vital interests were at stake. It would do so in pursuit of concrete and attainable objectives. It would mobilize the necessary resources – political and moral as well as material – to win promptly and decisively. It would end conflicts expeditiously and then get out, leaving no loose ends. The spirit of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine was not permissive; its purpose was to curb the reckless or imprudent inclinations of bellicose civilians. According to the third illusion, the military and American society had successfully patched up the differences that produced something akin to divorce during the divisive Vietnam years. By the 1990s, a reconciliation of sorts was under way. In the wake of Operation Desert Storm, "the American people fell in love again with their armed forces." So, at least, Gen. Colin Powell, one of that war's great heroes, believed. Out of this love affair a new civil-military compact had evolved, one based on the confidence that, in times of duress, Americans could be counted on to "support the troops." Never again would the nation abandon its soldiers. The all-volunteer force (AVF) – despite its name, a professional military establishment – represented the chief manifestation of this new compact. By the 1990s, Americans were celebrating the AVF as the one component of the federal government that actually worked as advertised. The AVF embodied the nation's claim to the status of sole superpower; it was "America's Team." In the wake of the Cold War, the AVF sustained the global Pax Americana without interfering with the average American's pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness. What was not to like? Events since 9/11 have exposed these three illusions for what they were. When tested, the new American Way of War yielded more glitter than gold. The generals and admirals who touted the wonders of full spectrum dominance were guilty of flagrant professional malpractice, if not outright fraud. To judge by the record of the past twenty years, U.S. forces win decisively only when the enemy obligingly fights on American terms – and Saddam Hussein's demise has drastically reduced the likelihood of finding such accommodating adversaries in the future. As for loose ends, from Somalia to the Balkans, from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, they have been endemic. When it came to the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, civilian willingness to conform to its provisions proved to be highly contingent. Confronting Powell in 1993, Madeleine Albright famously demanded to know, "What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about, if we can't use it?" Mesmerized by the prospects of putting American soldiers to work to alleviate the world's ills, Albright soon enough got her way. An odd alliance that combined left-leaning do-gooders with jingoistic politicians and pundits succeeded in chipping away at constraints on the use of force. "Humanitarian intervention" became all the rage. Whatever restraining influence the generals exercised during the 1990s did not survive that decade. Lessons of Vietnam that had once seemed indelible were forgotten. Meanwhile, the reconciliation of the people and the army turned out to be a chimera. When the chips were down, "supporting the troops" elicited plenty of posturing but little by way of binding commitments. Far from producing a stampede of eager recruits keen to don a uniform, the events of 9/11 reaffirmed a widespread popular preference for hiring someone else's kid to chase terrorists, spread democracy, and ensure access to the world's energy reserves. In the midst of a global war of ostensibly earthshaking importance, Americans demonstrated a greater affinity for their hometown sports heroes than for the soldiers defending the distant precincts of the American imperium. Tom Brady makes millions playing quarterback in the NFL and rakes in millions more from endorsements. Pat Tillman quit professional football to become an army ranger and was killed in Afghanistan. Yet, of the two, Brady more fully embodies the contemporary understanding of the term patriot. Demolishing the Doctrine of the Big Enchilada While they persisted, however, these three illusions fostered gaudy expectations about the efficacy of American military might. Every president since Ronald Reagan has endorsed these expectations. Every president since Reagan has exploited his role as commander in chief to expand on the imperial prerogatives of his office. Each has also relied on military power to conceal or manage problems that stemmed from the nation's habits of profligacy. In the wake of 9/11, these puerile expectations – that armed force wielded by a strong-willed chief executive could do just about anything – reached an apotheosis of sorts. Having manifestly failed to anticipate or prevent a devastating attack on American soil, President Bush proceeded to use his ensuing global war on terror as a pretext for advancing grandiose new military ambitions married to claims of unbounded executive authority – all under the guise of keeping Americans "safe." With the president denying any connection between the events of Sept. 11 and past U.S. policies, his declaration of a global war nipped in the bud whatever inclination the public might have entertained to reconsider those policies. In essence, Bush counted on war both to concentrate greater power in his own hands and to divert attention from the political, economic, and cultural bind in which the United States found itself as a result of its own past behavior. As long as U.S. forces sustained their reputation for invincibility, it remained possible to pretend that the constitutional order and the American way of life were in good health. The concept of waging an open-ended global campaign to eliminate terrorism retained a modicum of plausibility. After all, how could anyone or anything stop the unstoppable American soldier? Call that reputation into question, however, and everything else unravels. This is what occurred when the Iraq War went sour. The ills afflicting our political system, including a deeply irresponsible Congress, broken national security institutions, and above all an imperial commander in chief not up to the job, became all but impossible to ignore. So, too, did the self-destructive elements inherent in the American way of life – especially an increasingly costly addiction to foreign oil, universally deplored and almost as universally indulged. More noteworthy still, the prospect of waging war on a global scale for decades, if not generations, became preposterous. To anyone with eyes to see, the events of the past seven years have demolished the Doctrine of the Big Enchilada. A gung-ho journalist like Robert Kaplan might still believe that, with the dawn of the 21st century, the Pentagon had "appropriated the entire earth, and was ready to flood the most obscure areas of it with troops at a moment's notice," that planet Earth in its entirety had become "battle space for the American military." Yet any buck sergeant of even middling intelligence knew better than to buy such claptrap. With the Afghanistan War well into its seventh year and the Iraq War marking its fifth anniversary, a commentator like Michael Barone might express absolute certainty that "just about no mission is impossible for the United States military." But Barone was not facing the prospect of being ordered back to the war zone for his second or third combat tour. Between what President Bush called upon America's soldiers to do and what they were capable of doing loomed a huge gap that defines the military crisis besetting the United States today. For a nation accustomed to seeing military power as its trump card, the implications of that gap are monumental. Andrew Bacevich, professor of history and international relations at Boston University, retired from the U.S. Army with the rank of colonel. This piece is adapted from his new book, The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (Metropolitan Books, 2008). He is also the author of The New American Militarism, among other books. His writing has appeared in Foreign Affairs, the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal. A TomDispatch interview with him can be read by clicking here, and then here. [Note for TomDispatch readers: This is the first of a two-part series, "The American Military Crisis," adapted from Andrew Bacevich's new book, The Limits of Power. Next up: "Is Perpetual War Our Future? Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era."] From the book The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism by Andrew Bacevich, copyright © 2008 by Andrew Bacevich. Reprinted by arrangement with Metropolitan Books, an Imprint of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Digg this! comments on this article? send them to backtalk! 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The End of Victory Culture (Revised Edition) Digg this! Archives The American Military Crisis 8/12/2008 Living Through the Age of Denial in America 8/1/2008 The Military-Industrial Complex 7/28/2008 The Pentagon and the Hunt for Black Gold 7/18/2008 The Wedding Crashers 7/14/2008 Reality Bites Back: Why the US Won't Attack Iran 7/10/2008 The Bush Administration Strikes Oil in Iraq 7/8/2008 The Urge to Surge 6/30/2008 The Pentagon's Stealth Corporations 6/25/2008 No Blood for… Er… Um… 6/23/2008 The Greatest Story Never Told 6/16/2008 Garrisoning the Global Gas Station 6/13/2008 One Man's Online Journey Through Bush's Alphabet Soup 6/11/2008 Uncle Sam's Cyber Force Wants You! 6/6/2008 'Atrocity-Producing Situations' 6/4/2008 The Movie-Made War World of George W. Bush 6/2/2008 McCain (Mis)Speaks 5/30/2008 The Pentagon Takes Charge 5/28/2008 River of Resistance 5/23/2008 Irony Man 5/21/2008 Coming Down to Earth 5/7/2008 The Last War and the Next One 5/5/2008 The Iranian Chessboard 5/2/2008 Teaching Imperialism 101 4/30/2008 Selling the President's General 4/28/2008 A Pentagon's Who's Who of Your Life 4/25/2008 12 Answers to Questions No One Is Asking About Iraq 4/21/2008 Leaving Cheyenne Mountain: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Loathe the Bomb 4/18/2008 Nine Propositions on the U.S. Air War for Terror 4/11/2008 Petraeus' Ghost 4/9/2008 The General and the Trap 4/7/2008 Petraeus' Grand Delusions 4/4/2008 The End of Empire? 4/2/2008 The Pentagon's Battle Bugs 3/31/2008 Trust the Government to Do for the Economy What It Has Done for Iraq 3/28/2008 More Archives An editor in publishing for the last 25 years, Tom Engelhardt is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War era, now out in a revised edition with a new preface and afterword, and Mission Unaccomplished, TomDispatch Interviews with American Iconoclasts and Dissenters. He is at present consulting editor for Metropolitan Books, a fellow of the Nation Institute, and a teaching fellow at the journalism school of the University of California, Berkeley.

Olympian spirit.

Re-post from April.

Tuesday, April 01, 2008

The van of death

China is taking high tech to a whole new level. Could this be coming soon to a Wal-mart near you?

VAN SPECS

Cost: $37,500 to $75,000, depending on vehicle's size Length: 20 to 26 feet Top speed: 65 to 80 mph THREE SECTIONS Execution chamber: in the back, with blacked-out windows; seats beside the stretcher for a court doctor and guards; sterilizer for injection equipment; wash basin Observation area: in the middle, with a glass window separating it from execution area; can accommodate six people; official-in-charge oversees the execution through monitors connected to the prisoner and gives instruction via walkie-talkie. Driver area Production to date: at least 40 vehicles, made by Jinguan and two other companies in Jiangsu and Shandong provinces

Re-post from April 2008

Says Greg Palast today:

McCain's plan to spend endless billions on nuclear plants without a waste disposal system in place is like building a massive hotel without toilets. I suppose you can always tell the guests to poop in buckets until someone comes up with a plan for plumbing. But the stuff piles up. And unlike the fecal droppings of tourists, nuclear waste will stay hot and dangerous for a thousand generations.

Thuggery worthy of the Dick and Bush

From MSNBC/ Washington Post This Morning

By Edward Cody

updated 12:47 a.m. MT, Thurs., Aug. 7, 2008

To prevent (Olympic) protests inside their own borders, Chinese authorities recently threatened to take away one female activist's two babies as she tried to enter the country. A Tibetan woman surnamed Kemo was returning to China on July 18 after nearly two years in the United States, where she had had two children. She was stopped by a passport control officer, escorted to an interrogation room and asked whether she had ever participated in political protests.

Video China's extra eyes Aug. 6: With exclusive access inside the Olympic security command center, NBC’s Richard Engel reports on heightened security for the Games. Nightly News

"Yes, but a long time ago," Kemo said she replied, speaking on the condition that her first name not be used. Officers then showed her computer printouts of photos of her participating at various U.S. protests. "You are lying to us," an officer told her.

Officers pried the children away from her, slapping her and one of her children when he clutched her purse strap to prevent her from being taken away, she said.

The officer then gave her a choice: accept deportation and buy plane tickets to take her children back to the United States or go to jail and lose her children. After she bought the tickets, police escorted her to the next flight to New York and returned her children on the jetway to the airplane.

Climate Change?

Email exchange between Ray Hudson and me this morning:

----- Original Message -----

From: Ray Hudson

To: Kim Walker

Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 8:41 PM

Subject: Crumbling Away

Kim,

The propaganda of Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW) is crumbling all around the priests and zealots who abuse science. I know you will never admit that these clowns are wrong, and are doing “bad science”, but it is becoming more and more clear. Check out my last two posts in RU on the political spin thread. There is no valid scientific refutation of the issues I raise in these posts. None.

Gore is toast. He should be thrown in jail for lies and falsifying science to meet a political agenda!

R

Rainman,

I think it's quite obvious that the human race requires three environmental principles in order to thrive: clean air, clean water and fertile soil. Regardless of the debate concerning climate change these three elements are being destroyed at an exponential rate by the over-use of fossil fuels. The cause? Overconsumption/ production brought about by overpopulation. The Malthusian knot. That's the real crisis. I think we're about to witness the consequences, at least in terms of the atmosphere, in this communist Olympic bullshit. When people require respirators simply to breath and have to drink water out of bottles- we've got a problem. Don't you think? Personally I don't need Algore to alert me to this. I can plainly see the air being turned into smoke.

Kim

AFP News: DIA Involved in Spy vs Spy on the Internet

From Gary Bekkum yesterday:

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

AFP News: DIA Involved in Spy vs Spy on the Internet

According to this interesting news release from AFP:

... the Defense Intelligence Agency is being given a larger
mandate to pursue the "strategic offensive counter-intelligence operations" as part of a reorganization approved late last month.

Gary made this very point in his blog many months ago- especially in regards to the leaking of DIA information/disinformation on the forum, Reality Uncovered.

Is Reality Uncovered a tool of the DIA? Certainly at least 2 0f the half dozen active posters there boast of having 'security clearances' of some sort while a third, the site administrator, actively consorts with known intelligence operatives- who have even been known to post there on occasion.

Uri Avnery's Column

Hollow Time "If I Forget Thee, Umm Touba…" Different Planets Why Not? Satan's Counsel Ole - Ole, Ole, Ole All Quiet on the Gaza Front An Apology No, I Can't! When the Kettle Calls the Pot Black Escaping Forwards With Friends Like These… 1948 "…Namely the State of Israel" The Military Option The Lion and the Gazelle Manifest Destiny? "Not You! You!!!" "Death to the Arabs!" TWO AMERICAS More...

Hollow Time August 2, 2008 EHUD OLMERT'S resignation speech reached us on our way back from a demonstration. We were protesting the death of Ahmad Moussa, aged 10, who was murdered during a demonstration against the Separation Fence at Na'ilin village - the fence that robs the village of most of its land in order to give it to the nearby settlement. A soldier aimed and shot the child with live ammunition at close range. The protesters stood under the windows of the Minister of Defense's apartment in the luxurious Akirov Towers in Tel-Aviv and shouted: "Ehud Barak, Minister of Defense / How many children have you murdered so far?" A short while later, Olmert spoke about his strenuous efforts to achieve peace, and promised to continue them until his last day in office. The two events - the demonstration and the speech - are bound together. Together they provide an accurate picture of the era: peace speeches in the air and atrocities on the ground. I AM not about to join the choir of retrospective heroes, who are now falling upon Olmert's political corpse and tearing it to pieces. Not an attractive sight. I have seen this happen several times in my life, and every time it disgusts me. This phenomenon is not particular to Israel. It can be found in the history and literature of many times and places: "The Rise and Fall of…" It's an old story. People grovel in the dust at the feet of their hero. The ambitious and avaricious prance around him. Court-poets and court-jesters sing his praises, and their modern successors - the media people - extol his virtues. And then, one day, he falls from his pedestal and they trample all over him without mercy and without shame. This is the mob that idolized Moshe Dayan after the Six-day War, and then smashed his statue into pieces after the Yom-Kippur war. The mob that kicked David Ben-Gurion viciously after years of boundless flattery. That toppled Golda Meir after following her blindly. I certainly struggled against all three of them when they were at the height of their power, but the rush of the political mob to trample upon their bodies after they had fallen was simply loathsome. Now this is happening again. I have never been captivated by the charms of Ehud Olmert. I have followed his career from the moment he appeared on the stage to the moment he announced his resignation. I saw nothing to arouse my admiration. But now, when I see and hear the outpouring of abuse upon him by those who exalted him to high heavens only yesterday, I feel like averting my eyes. The right to criticize him is reserved for those who have struggled against him over the years. HE IS a total politician, and nothing else. Not a statesman. Not a leader. Not a man with a vision. Only a political technician. Intelligent. A very smooth speaker. I friend among friends. A politician for whom power is the aim, not a means to achieve an aim. The first time I came across him was almost 40 years ago. He was then an assistant of Shmuel Tamir, in the most concrete sense: he assisted him in carrying his bags. Before this, something had happened that was to characterize the whole career of this ambitious man. Tamir, then a young Knesset member for the Herut party (today's Likud), thought he had an opportunity to topple Menachem Begin and take over the party. He tried to push him out during the party convention, and for a moment it seemed that he would succeed. Begin, then 53, seemed totally worn-out after suffering six consecutive election defeats. Olmert, then 21, jumped onto the rebels' bandwagon and made a passionate speech against the legendary leader. But his calculations were faulty. Begin sprang into action and delivered a death blow to the conspirators. They were thrown out of the party in disgrace. Olmert remained with the tiny faction around Tamir, which presented itself as a moderate party, attuned to the peace-seeking mood of the country at the time, mocking the nationalistic stance of Herut ("Both sides of the Jordan belong to us"). But then the Six-day War changed the public mood completely, the weathercock turned and Tamir coined the popular slogan "Liberated Territory shall not be Returned!" Without batting an eyelid, Olmert the moderate turned into Olmert the extremist. But in that small faction there were too many chiefs and not enough Injuns. The road to advancement was blocked. Before long, Olmert engineered a split in order to become the No. 2 in an even smaller faction. He later split that one too and pushed out its veteran leader, Eliezer Shostak. The proceedings bordered on farce: Olmert ran off with the faction's rubber stamp. After the 1973 elections, Olmert return to the Likud at long last and became candidate No. 24 on the party's election list. Before that he had not been idle: he finished law school and flourished financially, using his connections in the Knesset and the corridors of power for his clients' benefit. That's when he perfected the method of exploiting the connections between power and money, a method that he practiced ever since and that eventually caused his downfall. In the Knesset, the young member was looking for a way to attract attention. At the time, the media invented "organized crime", long before it came into being. (A wag jested: "In Israel, nothing is organized. So how come crime is suddenly organized?") Olmert smelled a horse he could ride on. He made rousing speeches, waved papers in the style of Joe McCarthy, presented himself as a valiant fighter against the criminals and reaped a lot of publicity. It was an empty performance: even the police chiefs confirmed that it did not contribute anything to the struggle against crime. But it was a good example of what later came to be known as "spin". IN 1977, Menachem Begin came to power. But he had not the least intention of promoting the man who, 11 years earlier, had tried to stick a knife in his back. Among his other strengths, Begin had a good memory. When Olmert saw that his career in the Knesset was going nowhere, he decided in 1993 to make an Olympic jump: he declared his candidacy for the office of Mayor of Jerusalem. Mayor Teddy Kollek was popular, but old and tired. Olmert won. Today there is general agreement about his tenure: he was a bad mayor. The city deteriorated, poverty increased, young people left for other places and the Arab neighborhoods were criminally neglected. In 1996, he pushed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into opening a tunnel leading from the Western Wall to the Muslim quarter, causing a conflagration that killed 17 Israeli soldiers and almost 100 Palestinians. He never expressed any remorse. He also pushed for the creation of the Har Homa settlement between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which has caused unending friction with the Palestinian community. All the recent attacks in Jerusalem were carried out by youngsters who grew up in the Arab neighborhoods adjacent to Har Homa. Olmert presented himself as the Judaizer of Jerusalem and as a fearless national fighter. But when he ran for Likud chairman in 1999, he was easily beaten by Ariel Sharon. He got only the 32nd place on the Likud election list (out of 38 who won Knesset seats). His rational reaction was to get on Sharon's wagon and push him into leaving the Likud and creating a new party, Kadima. That was a successful bet, testifying to his sharp political senses. Under Sharon he became the de facto No. 2 of the new party and Sharon's official "Deputy Prime Minister" (as a consolation prize, after Sharon could not give him the Treasury but only the far less important Ministry of Industry and Trade). At the time it looked like an empty title, but when Sharon suffered a stroke, Olmert adroitly took over his job. The long and meandering road had finally led to the summit. SHARON'S SUCCESSOR was his opposite in almost every respect. Sharon was a rather maladroit politician and a poor speaker, but a determined leader with a clear political vision. He had an aim and strove towards it consistently. Olmert is a politician, soul and body, a complete opportunist and a smooth speaker, but lacks charisma and has no vision. He is satisfied with the routine mantra of a democratic, Jewish state. After coming to power through the accident of Sharon's stroke, he tried at first to look as if he was following the same path. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the settlement blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak "Palestinian state". For this purpose he carried out the Gaza "separation". Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine. His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal. The media, which had applauded enthusiastically at the beginning of the war, attacked him after the event for its "faulty execution", but ignored the main failure: the very decision to go to war without a clear and realistic aim and without a political and military strategy. His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equaled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system. After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the "political process" - negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians. This choice is significant: his sensitive political nose smelled that this is now the really popular thing: not Greater Israel, not the settlements, but peace negotiations and "two states for two peoples" - the more so as this was already popular with the US and Europe. This week, Arab leaders complained that now "the political process will begin again from Square One." That is a complete misunderstanding: the "process" has never left Square One. It was wholly without content, wholly "spin". The "process" has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a "shelf agreement" a substitute for a real peace agreement. There was never any possibility that Olmert would dare to provoke the settlers. The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step toward peace has been taken. The historic peace initiative of the Arab League has been buried. The secular, peace-seeking Palestinian leadership has been almost destroyed, paving the way for the Hamas takeover in the Gaza strip, and perhaps also in the West Bank. Not one single hut in a settlement was dismantled, and the settlements have been enlarged everywhere. In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). They both cultivated close relations with billionaires. They both trailed behind them a cloud of corruption wherever they went. This did not hurt Sharon. He radiated leadership, and the scandals did not really harm him. He was robust enough to carry them on his back. Olmert, being much more fragile, was crushed by them. In the end, he has fallen: not because of the criminal war, not because of his lack of seriousness in pursuing peace, not because of the appointment of a Minister of Justice whose aim is to destroy the judicial system, but because of cash in envelopes and free trips abroad. WHEN FUTURE historians look for a way to characterize this chapter in the annals of the state, one word will readily present itself, the one the writer David Grossman applied in a similar context: hollow. It was a hollow era. A hole in time. A meaningless period, devoid of content (though not for those who paid the price with their lives, destruction and ruins.) And that is also the suitable title for Olmert himself. A hollow politician, devoid of vision. Anyone researching the headlines of these two years will find a lot of drama there. A lot of initiatives. A lot of slogans. A lot of spin. A lot of hot air. And the sum of all this: nothing. A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system.

The Latest from Rense

And now- from that font of 'Jew wisdom' comes this.

Is Rense an advocate of a New Holocaust? A Jew hater par excellence? To my mind he is- but hasn't got the balls to state his real position. Is Vladimir Putin a true Christian? YES- according to Rense- because he hates Jews. That's all that's required to be in Rense's favor. He's a one trick pony, afterall.

Disclosure




I received this from Bob Collins today. This is indeed a significant disclosure.

Mc
to undisclosed-re.

show details 6:14 PM (13 hours ago)


Reply


FYI--Big Surprise, very new for a lot of people, see Ed's comments below.....Best.....Robert Collins

Edgar Mitchell wrote:
> Bob, sorry you missed the very beginning of all this. That was the point. I grew up in the Roswell area. I was almost 17 and senior in high school when it happened. Family were ranchers and cattle people. We knew all the ranchers and towns people in the area, including where the UFO impacted. In spite of official denials and threats about talking, the local lore told the story. After my space flight, and being a local boy, people involved, not only the locals, trusted me with their stories, because they were getting older and wanted the truth out, but were afraid to say it publicly; so considered me a trustworthy source to carry their story onward. Been telling it all that way, if anyone bothered to ask my opinion, since the Pentagon incident 11 years ago. Only now, suddenly, it got international media attention. Edgar M
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Mc [mailto:Mc@donet.com]
> Sent: Saturday, August 02, 2008 2:19 PM
> To: undisclosed-recipients:
> Subject: Re: ON TV Since Last on Email
>
> Hi Ed, I know the Pentagon story, but what this about "being in Roswell" when the incident happened? Never heard that one for whatever that might mean. Please clue me in. And while I have you see the OM post on New Paris.....Rmc
>
> lucianarchy.proboards2...hread=3509
>
>
> Barbara Wade wrote:
>> When I left email, I was JUST IN TIME TO SEE EDGAR MITCHELL on "Hannity's America". I took notes. He TOLD MORE this time. He said that because he was in Roswell when the "incident" happened, plus being an astronaut and scientist, many locals and scientists wanted to tell him what THEY knew. They showed Walter Haut's death-bed statement. Then he said something I never heard him say before. He said that in 1997, he was at the PENTAGON FOR A DISCLOSURE MEETING! A Vice-Admiral found out THE DISCLOSURE PROGRAM IS IN THE PENTAGON! The Vice-Admiral was TOLD that "HE HAD NO NEED TO KNOW", so he wasn't let in. They mentioned that Gordon Cooper observed a UFO incident and had PHOTOS OF IT, BUT HIS PHOTOS WERE CONFISCATED!
>> Barbara

And this from an email from Ron Pandolfi to Rick Doty concerning Bob Collins:

7/13/2008 10:38 PM: Ronald Pandolfi wrote:

Rick,

Some wing nuts within the UFO Community might not think much of Robert Collins, but within the senior ranks of the intelligence and defense communities, there are many who consider him an honest and respectable citizen who served this country well. Go after Collins in court, and you are going to have us testifying on his behalf. And we are prepared to open the books.

Ron

The significance of the foregoing is that 'disclosure' has now been entirely taken out of Doty's hands. He obviously fucked it up. While we may never know the full story concerning his involvement with Green, Pandolfi, Martinez, Bill Ryan and Serpo, I think we can safely conclude that Doty has been summarily shit-canned. Ed Mitchell and Captain Collins are now in ascendant in my opinion.

The 'core story' of alien visitation (invasion) originates in Roswell in 1947. The UFO cover-up by the US government was designed to deal specifically with that event and ensuing events related to it. That Ed Mitchell was both there at the time and has since gained credibility as an astronaut who has walked on the moon makes him an ideal vehicle for disclosure. Expect more from him- and other astronauts- shortly. Bob Collins will undoubtedly also be in the loop.

I had originally broached this subject at Amkon but have since left that forum which turned out to be full of anti-semitic faux conspiracists and mindless chit-chatterers. All my future posts with reference to disclosure will henceforth be posted here.