The whole situation in the middle east was eerily predicted in the great film, "Three Days of the Condor" more than 30 years ago. What once was a far-fetched plot point is now reality.

AEI? I'm not familiar with that production company.

I'm sure you know the acronym's meaning and may share, but mean-time we could have a contest to guess what that means? Could be lots of fun. -- I'll start -- American Executive Incompetents, or American Endeavors in Imperialism.

Well, the sequel is no surprise. It is about time to get a derivative blockbuster into production. The fear theme worked well enough last time and generated the box office numbers that produced the "mandate" we saw in the last big organized opion survey.

You can't have that title for this thread without mentioning "The Empire Strikes Back".

Still hate sequels?

I here this movie has opened to packed house in North Korea although there it's seen as a prequel to their own version of The Empire Strikes Back.

I like Godfather II as well. Maybe I hate when they make sequels when the original movie was bad.

AEI is the premier neoconservative think tank in America. The man who coined the phrase "neoconservatism" works there. Just scrolling though this list, I see

Dick Cheney's wife, *
the guy who claimed by 2004 there would be a great public square in Iraq "named after George W. Bush,"
the guy who wrote the "Axis of Evil" speech and his wife,
one the guys invovled with the Iran-Contra scandal and the forged Niger-Iraq uranium documents, who has been arguing we should have already invaded Iran AND Syria by now and who in 2002 said "If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support."
the lawyer who came up with the theory that the President has virtually unlimited powers against terrorism and Congress can't do anything about it, (the president could walk down the street shooting citizens and neither Congress or the Judiciary can do anything if the president it was necessary in the fight against terrorists, according to his theory)
the executive director of the Project for the New American Century--the folks who have been arguing for an invasion of Iraq since 1996, they are behind the thinking that led the Bush administration to minimize the threat from Al Qaeda, many, many people from PNAC got powerful jobs with the administration
the presidential candidate who just told the NY Times that North Korea and Iran are conspirators
the guy who claimed regime change in Iraq would set off a democratic revolution in Iran (Yeah, they threw out the moderate Khatami and elected Ahmadinejad)

and on and on.

In short these are the true believers. their to virtually every problem is to bomb something. In previous administrations these guys were the B team, the junior varsity. In the '70's they were claiming that the Soviets were about to outrun the United States militarily and that they had the economic might to do it. In the 80's they were howling when George Shultz told Reagan that Gorbachev was different from all other Soviet leaders and we should work with him. They were never given very much power before this Bush administration. They yanked their party to right, so much that institutions like the CIA or Joint Chiefs of Staff were seen as liberal.

What 9/11 gave them was an opportunity to implement long-held dreams and plans. Their response was not a new thinking about a new problem. Many of them were arguing in Sept 2001 to go into Iraq BEFORE Afghanistan. Eventually Bush realized the public wouldn't go along with that and that a public relations campaign had to be done first. So in early 2002 stories about the danger from Iraq kept popping up. I remember thinking that it very wierd, since Saddam was much, much weaker than he was in 1991. I also remember thinking, we haven't finished off Al Qaeda why are we worrying about this? The media went along with this campaign. There literally was a group in the White House that was formed to sell the Iraq to the American people. The American people went along with it for two reasons. The administration conflated Saddam and Al Qaeda and argued Iraq presented a very real threat to the US. Also the administration presented the Iraq war as fighting terrorism and the only step you could take to fight terrorism. It was invade Iraq or don't fight terrorism.

The article I linked to when I started this thread is the EXACT same sort of stuff we were hearing in early 2002, only this time the media is more skeptical given that none of the arguments for invading Iraq panned out. The intelligence communities (throughout the government) saw how badly the intelligence was used last time, are not willing to go along with another misconceived war. We learned last time that the invasion of Iraq planning started in 2001 and the decision to go to war was made by summer of 2002. That is, it was all set to go before the American people had a debate on it. I would say that right now it looks like Cheney and others are on board for an Iran war in 2007. Bush and Co. leave office in Jan 2009, so they need to do this now and they need to do between the two election cycles. The Times article is the second article to appear in the press that the White House is actively planning an Iran War. Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker just wrote an article where senior intelligence officials are saying the same thing that happened with Iraq intelligence is happening again.


* I think Dick Cheney will go down as the more important neoconservative in history. Remember that Cheney was not Bush's first choice at all. Without Cheney we don't get Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz or Feith. There is a whole host of positions that could get filled with realist thinkers and not ideologues.

OT: Rant (on)

I think you miss the point. We are spreading democracy, for god’s sake! (And my best friend's friend's arms and legs and head that got blown off 3 weeks ago carrying a god damn bomb near "camp victory Iraq"). He was good Navy diver and was featured a few times on Discovery channel. His mom was my homeroom teacher in high school and he graduated high school a year after I did in 94. I only met him a few times... But I'm sure all of the good guys dying in this war make it all worth it. Once everyone defaults to democracy over there, we’ll have peace. Right? I mean, why fix the problems we have here? Why should we put money into public schools when we can invest trillions into bombers? Who cares if intercity poor are locked up, forgotten, left behind, and failing through the cracks? Let's ban smoking in bars and then go bomb the sh*t out of the towel heads while people vandalize your car and sell drugs down the street right here in the good ol US of A! Never mind that I’m 1,000,000 times more likely to die tonight in Baltimore City from violent crime than from a terrorist act. Shit! Let’s spend a few billion defending a bridge someplace in Idaho… that’s the next terror target for sure. Awesome. Let’s pump tons of money into fighting “the war on drugs” “the war on alcoholism” “the war on nicotine” “the war on fat” “the war on terrorism” “the war on pornography” and “wars on everything else.” Sh*t! We are a warrior nation, no? It’s about time we took the gloves off and started mashing the rest of the planet. Iran, do as we say not as we do. We like holding the title of the only nation to nuke somebody (twice). Ah, but we thought it was the right thing to do… “It’ll save lives in the end, by ending the war as soon as possible.” I’m sure those pesky Japs wouldn’t agree with that assessment. Btw, thank god we left enough of those little buggers alive to employee us now in Toyota factories in Kentucky. They (the “Japs”) have been spending money educating their children for the last half century instead of sending them off to fight (and die… see below) in utterly worthless wars. Of course, we can thank ourselves (and our WW2 allies) for that. Germany and Japan can’t have large military budgets, so instead they do really crazy stuff like invest in children’s education, college, business, infrastructure, etc.

Rant off; time to go sit in traffic for 40 minutes then off to the bar as people my own age sit in humvees somewhere on the other side of the planet trying to keep out of the way of a raging civil war.


http://wjz.com/local/local_story_217101647.html
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-md.co.koth06aug06,0,2551638.story?coll=bal-iraq-headlines

The real rant is thinking we could beat up the world. Except for a few wierd years called the Cold War, we never had believed that before.

We're doing a pretty good job beating ourselves up right now also.

The U.S. Department of Education recently dropped Evolutional Biology from the list of courses eligible for Federal education grants.

This is part of how conservative Christian clerics are putting the lid on science, much in the same way that conservative Moslem clerics did it in the Middle East 1,000 years ago, when the Middle East was the United States of its day, leading the world in science, engineering, and the arts. Those conservative clerics thought science got in the way of thinking about God, so they pressed the rulers to have it all banned.
One generation later, everybody was dumbed down and they had to go back to herding camels and growing dates. This from being proud world leaders in science, engineering, and the arts.

Hmmm....

>AEI is the premier neoconservative think tank in America.

Ahh, yes. This evaded me last night. I just learned about them and how long they have been around recently. Clearly the ideals and people who wrought our current situation.

Hopefully America is gradually re-learning lessions that we should have retained from only about 35 years ago. I hope for some increased level of rationality but remain nervous after 2004.

As I was looking up stuff for my post I learned that AEI, The Project for the New American Century (now defunct) and the Weekly Standard magazine were all based in the same building. I guess that made things easier since a lot of those folks had ties to all three, or in some cases were related to people who worked at the other group.

I generally agree with everthing you've said, except: "“It’ll save lives in the end, by ending the war as soon as possible.” I’m sure those pesky Japs wouldn’t agree with that assessment."

The Japanese government and the people of Japan do disagree with this statement and they say so every year at their "Peace Statement" on the anniversary of the bomb. The Japanese people were dying by the tens of thousands every day in the allied firebombing of Japanese cities with no end in sight. At the time, it was the highest honor for a Japanese person to die for their emperor and chldren and old men were preparing for that final battle and highest honor.

Don't forget who started that war.

n,

are you saying the Japanese are officially stating every year that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were wrong?

No, the Japanese are saying at their annual bell-ringing ceremony that it was a terrible end to a terrible war, but it was the end.

I don't have a photo of it but there is a poster at the Hiroshima Peace Museum with quotes from Japanese survivors of the war, and a few of them include the sentiment that they were glad that the war was over because alternative of a prolonged invasion of Japan by the allies would have killed many thousands more Japanese citizens.

I really tire of people who try to rewrite history and speak for others without knowing the facts.

Steve M.

Good points. The fire-bombing DID kill many more than the nuclear bombs did.

In the Documentary Fog of War, Robert McNamara talks about this ethical issue.

We were firebombing large parts of Japanese cities. The film shows how the damage would have affected similar sized American cities...."16% of Kansas City destroyed, 27% of Buffalo,....." He asked what was the difference between that and an atom bomb? The Atom bomb is just quicker.

I was unaware of the firebombing of Japan, one part of a fascinating documentary.

"Good points. The fire-bombing DID kill many more than the nuclear bombs did. "

Technically, "Little Boy" was a crude fission atomic bomb that's easy to duplicate. "Fat Man" which was dropped on Nagasaki was a fusion (nuclear) bomb.

Steve M.

No, they were both fission bombs (energy released through "splitting" U325, producing lighter elements). bombs
Fusion (or hydrogen) bombs were developed after the war.

edit: the so called Hydrogen bomb hit a Lithium nucleus with a proton, producing Helium + energy. These weapons were initiated by a fission trigger.

Actually, they both contained a box full of Madonna movies.

I'm gonna go troll around a political forum and wait for a video editing discussion to break out...... ;)

I posted this link before but here we go again. Series of great BBC documentaries about how the neocon evil doers -- and their twins -- "the terrorists" came to power:

link here

I can remember a time when the whole world loved America. Things began to change with the beginning of the cold war in the 1950's. America became obsessed with power. It committed one atrocity after another in pursuing the 'scourge' of communism, when all the time it was quite possible to co-exist with a different political system after all, as witness the current very friendly relations with China. We are now engaged in the new war against 'terrorists'. What Gerorge W Bush and his neo-cons, really mean is that the Christians and Jews will have a war against Muslims. Now wouldn't that be a nice little earner! It could go on for years. After all is said and done, consider this: Without engaging in a major conflict every 10 years, the American economy would collapse. I hate being a doomsayer, but the evidence is inescapable. American led wars will become deadlier, dirtier and infinitely more unpopular thoughout the world. In the end, America itself, will become it's own worst enemy. Eventually, the cost of war will drain every last cent from the pockets of it's citizens. There will be nowhere to go except down.

Goshep, most of this thread has been about history. That stuff that has a habit of repeating itself when ignored. But hey, you don't need to go near this thread; says "WayOT: political".