Archives Dave writes

“if this isn’t a fascist Oligarchy, pray tell me what is”

They don’t want to believe this Dave..
They have been smacked in the face, stolen from, lied too
their children murdered, cities ruined, oceans screwed,
a welfare country, infastructure gone, schools closed,
their food poisoned, ect. ect. ect.
  And they still want to compare Democrats and Republicans

Am so glad to read an article about how this guy has done an awful job in Afghanistan. I, too, think he should be fired for a number of reasons. I think what he said about the civilian leadership is deplorable, unpatriotic, and stupid. Is this the type of soldier we want leading us or our younger soldiers at time of war? A War that needs to be stopped. Strip him of his stars and send him home with his tail between his legs.

Do we actually have military leaders who can actually WIN a war? The only war we have actually “won” in the last 100 years was WWII (with lots of help).

President Obama: Just fire this bastard and move on!

Go Right Young Man,

Your piece would indicate that you seem puzzled by
the state of the world today. The problem is that
without the counter balance of the Soviet Union,
America has gone completely off the rails. It has
been acting like a dictatorship around the globe,
declaring who is good, who is bad, who gets attacked,
who gets sanctioned, who gets aid, who gets weapons,
who is denied weapons, etc.

You talk about ‘democratic’ neighbors in one breath
and Iran, Hamas (who incidentally was also
democratically elected) and North Korea on the other.
But it is the US that has created a ‘divide and
conquer’ policy around the world. Much to its
chagrin, South America is beginning to unite after
decades of divide and conquer policy by the US. While
there was a cold war, that divide and rule strategy
made some sense at least, but now its all
unravelling.

It’s not about noble ideology at all and probably
never has been. It’s about power and greed. It’s
about resources and control of those resources. The
only exception to all of this is of course Israel,
(Israelis, like Americans, think they are
exceptional). Because the majority of the world’s
Jews live in America, the US is inextricably tied to
Israel and indulges, pampers and spoils its wilful
and unstable friend.

Much of the US’s former allies are tired of playing
this game where the rules and laws are arbitrary and
often illogical. I think the problem is that the
majority of Americans still don’t really understand
that the rest of the world doesn’t see America, they
way Americans do. Americans see themselves as a
shining example of virtue in the world (because we’ve
been indoctrinated with that notion since birth),
while the rest of the world now sees America as
domineering, aggressive, greedy and discriminatory
(this was not the case 20 years ago).

‘under the cloud of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran.’

Hans Buehler phoned me from Zurich in about 1995 to tell me ‘they’ HAD nukes.

Good news is that ‘they’ haven’t used them.

No response from Texas A&M president or professor Christopher Layne.  I mentioned Buehler’s phone call.

http://home.comcast.net/~bpayne37/whitman59/bushschool/bushschool.htm#layne

Here’s some pages on technology the former USSR uses to fuze it weapons systems.  And was used at Sandia Labs.

http://www.prosefights.org/scriptpollute/siliconlabs/harvard.htm

G.W. Hitler:
Let’s see…who’s the sucker and the suckee here?
Your very own link boldly stated that Chile has HALF
of the world’s supply.
And oh, btw I trust u aren’t one of the ‘suckers’ who still believe in ‘peak oil supply’...
“Figures do lie and liars do figure”!  I just LOVE
how statistics are thrown around by so called ‘experts’....Take the Gulf Oil supply: NO ONE, absolutely no one knows just how much ABIOTIC oil is
down there nor anyplace else in the world.
LITHIUM is in copious supplies around the planet just like abiotic oil….
Have one of these here all day suckers…

We’re there to punish the “evil doers” who attacked us on 9-11. No, wait, we’re there to catch Bin Laden. No, wait, we’re there to bring Democracy. Oh, and of course it has nothing to do with anything, but did you know there are trillions in tasty resources in Afghanistan? Every week our Troops-Around-The-World show, with blitkreig helmets and kevlar, bring a new reason why our boots are on somebody else’s ground. Next week our reason will be…?

“G. W. Hitler:
Better go back to the drawing board and do a hell of a lot more homework Bro:
There are MILES AND MILES of lithium all over!!!
Check it out: the US and Chili have some of the largest supplies. “

Perhaps I should have said China is doing more to control the lithium market than anyone else.  But the US reserve is a paltry joke compared to what the top producers have and compared to what’s available in Afghanistan.  See below.

In 2007, the global lithium carbonate demand was 93,000 tons, up 7.4% year on year. The CAGR in the recent ten years is over 7%, showing a robust growth. Chile, China and Argentina are the top three countries in terms of production capacity of lithium carbonate. In 2007, the three countries met 94% of the world’s total demand of lithium carbonate. Of the three countries, China saw the fastest growth in its lithium carbonate production capacity and its share in the global lithium carbonate market increased to 26% in 2007 from 21% in 2006.

and more importantly this:

http://www.moneyweek.com/investments/commodities/investing-in-commodities-chinas-lithium-war-44723.aspx

So, suck it.

JDmysticDJ, June 23 at 11:51 am

-

I am saddened to note that you understood nothing I wrote here today.

Moral of the story: 
Never trust a general whose name begins with Mc or Mac.  Lincoln/McClellan; Truman/MacArthur; Obama/McKiernan/McChrystal. The one thing they have in common: All had to be fired by their president.

Robert Scheer,

Congratulations on a well articulated article. I’m sure
that there are thousands of people who whole-heartedly
agree with you.

Goodbye McChrystal. Now Americans troops go home!

“No better was President Obama’s embrace of this man who has now betrayed him. One hopes that Obama now responds to the serious concerns this article raises about his failed policy and not merely to the barbs from the general he once so admired.”

Don’t count on it. The Cluster F*ck of the Obama adminstration will continue, without anywhere to turn, and no where to run to.

When you sell your soul to the Devil even if you gain the whole world, eventually he comes knocking on your door wanting to collect. That day has arrived.

Go Right Young Man

I have been engaged, of late, in trying to point out to many here on truthdig that there is a clear dichotomy between Democrat and Republican philosophies, and that there is a lesser evil. Thank you, you have validated my argument perfectly.

Your recent post is like a text book example of Neocon philosophy, full of paranoid falsehoods that should be evident to all. You advocate not just continuing the current madness, but escalating it. Your “Great Game” philosophy sees the world as an entity that must be conquered, and subjected to U.S. hegemony. The results of your philosophy are evident, and measured in blood, misery, and squandered resources.

Recent events have discredited your vile fascist beliefs, and you are only part of a small minority of diehards. I only respond to your idiotic comments because I fear a resurgence of your murderous philosophy, and because I want to impress upon people the danger of allowing people of your ilk to once again gain control of our government.

Guyz:
Take a close look at McChrystal’s face on here…A real close look.
If one draws a meridian down his face, you will note an EXTREME difference in the hemispheres.
In psychological terms this speaks volumes.

G. W. Hitler:
Better go back to the drawing board and do a hell of a lot more homework Bro:
There are MILES AND MILES of lithium all over!!!
Check it out: the US and Chili have some of the largest supplies.

It was the word fuck that got McChrystal in trouble.  Not the use of it.  The code of it.

Here’s the deal:  If David Gergen is hanging out with McChrystal and McChrystal says “fuck,” then Professional Commentator Gergen knows everything after that is off the record. 

This is the way of the things with the rich and the powerful or the corporate or the media manager.  They’ll say something stupid then say: “That’s off the record,”  as if writing is some sort of game where writer agrees to be the pet of the powerful and the affluent and write only approved commentary. 

The other thing is it’s beaten in the heads of newspaper journalists, talk show hosts, and professional commentators that the news must be suitable for children.  So, when people start dropping F bombs, it’s obviously off the record.

The problem is McChrystal was working with a writer for Rolling Stone—a magazine where people do not live in the illusory world of all is sweet, where men and women (not necessarily in that order) engage in a little sodomy now and then and are happy about it, where the F bomb is an adjective, a verb, a gerund, a pronoun, a noun, and occasionally an expletive, where pot is medicine, where Bob Dylan is cool and Tool doesn’t quite blend in with the crowd. 

In short, it’s the real world—or at least a different world, one that acknowledges a bit more of reality and popular culture than the muzzled journalists of DC can acknowledge. 

Sure, if McChrystal had gone out with Tiger and played hide the hard one with Sammie Rhodes and Amber Rayne—oh, yes, the Washington press corp would have pulled out the stops.  Sodomy after all is a sin.  Sodomy offends the Puritan establishment. Sodomy has no place in the public arena because it’s not fit for newspapers and certainly no one in public life should be involved in any kind of non-coital intercourse. It corrupts the brain. 

But McChrystal could have said “fuck” all he wanted. And he could have said stupid shit and then his little media munchkin could have said, “that’s off the record,” and everything would have been cool. 

Too bad he was dealing with Rolling Stone.

Ho-ho-ho he-he-he ha-ha-ha!  Hunter would have been proud. 

A general didn’t learn about the bats soon enough.

Blah, blah, blah…
I would suggest you read this and think;

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to
and you have found out the exact measure of injustice
and wrong which will be imposed upon them,and these
will continue till they are resisted with either words
or blows,or with both~
Frederick Douglas

Two sets of masters of wars-people are waging warfare for heart and minds of afghans, but one set is also waging warfare for heart and minds of europeans and americans.
OK! Maybe also some asians and afrikans?

But generals, broadly, are never happy with governmental-media efforts to win hearts and/or minds of people.

In US, wars are winning minds {per 98% vote for wars} of the pop but not hearts. Administration lost own people’s hearts the moment govt threw away $trns and people began losing homes, jobs, marriages.

Of course, it is a mere assumption that US invaded afgh’n to find the seven or was 770? ‘terrorists’ there and thus win hearts-minds of pashtuns, et al.

I am saying this in view of the fact that US is winning hearts of ‘jews’ [maybe even minds?] by simply giving them money-arms and best jobs in wishingtown, media, advisory, etc.

But dear folks, uncle is not that much funni. He was not born yesterday.
So he and auntie sarah know why they r in afgh’n, but wld never tell u.
What cld it be? Anyone venturing to say?

But we all remember why uncle-aunt team was in mexico,dakotahs;lands of zunis, navajo, hopis, sioux, apaches.

Mind u, panama, granada, nicaragua,puerto rico, vietnam, korea were attacked solely for the purposes of book writing and movie making! tnx

In the back of my mind, I keep wondering—does he WANT to get fired? The situation in Afghanistan looks more and more untenable. What better way to get out than by using a “hippy” media outlet to slam an increasingly unpopular president. “Just telling the truth” about personalities won’t have the long-term career repercussions for McChrystal of quitting outright at the worst moment of the war or of getting fired for openly fighting with the Pres on war policy.

Maybe the worst punishment BHO could give is keeping him in the job.

“suggesting magnanimity is often seen by such governments as weakness that in turn encourages aggression”

HA!!!  That’s rich.  Pray, what offenses have we been so generous in forgiving?  Another country’s unwillingness to knuckle under to Dubyutz’s frat-boy hubris perhaps?  Or was it Angela Merkel’s overt display of disgust at his Rolfing technique?

Anybody who defends high-ranking US military officers simply has no idea what a bunch of industry shills many of them are.  Advancement in the military is a pyramid scheme with the American taxpayer perpetually occupying the bottom level.  Once we pay enough for officers to reach a certain rank, they leave the military and go to work as lobbyists for the defense industry. 

The Rolling Stone piece was merely McChrystal’s exit strategy.

After 17 months of the Obama presidency we are starting to see the sort of chaos that results from America’s lack of strategic vision or advocacy of its own values.

Suddenly, allies such as democratic Colombia, Israel and India cannot count on American support in their rivalries with aggressive neighbors, while overt enemies such as Iran, Hamas and North Korea wonder whether a brief window has opened for aggrandizement without repercussions.

In the Middle East, Israel is being tested as never before by Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and now Turkey — under the cloud of a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Apparently, they all think that suddenly the U.S. is no longer Israel’s protector, and the opportunity for aggressively upping the ante should not be missed.

North Korea warns that Seoul might be “a sea of flame,” while jittery Japan cannot seem to stabilize its government. Turkey is starting to sound more like the old Ottoman sultanate eager for a showdown with the West than a NATO ally.

Along with Brazil and Russia, Turkey is seeking to water down American efforts to stop Iranian nuclear proliferation. Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez now insults an obsequious Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as much as he once did a tough-talking George W. Bush. In fact, the more we reached out in 2009 to Iran, Russia, Syria, Turkey and Venezuela, the more they all now seem ever more hostile — suggesting magnanimity is often seen by such governments as weakness that in turn encourages aggression.

A cash-flush China in turn wonders why it should finance record U.S. borrowing for entitlements it cannot afford for its own people. We seem to gratuitously offend our oldest and best ally, the British, in novel ways each week. The Social European Union is in a meltdown, and many of its key members suspect that America no longer sees itself as a leader of shared Western interests. Or that if it does, it is now too broke to do much anyway.

In all these crises, reaching out to enemies and taking friends for granted is not proving to be a coherent foreign policy. Instead, it is a prescription for a disaster not seen since 1979, when another messianic American president thought he could charm the world by making our enemies like us.

And we all know how that ended.

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2010/02/08/right-of-way/

It’s quite simple:  Afghanistan = lithium.
China now controls the lions share of lithium in the world.  If we control Afghanistan, China loses its leverage over the battery tech industry.  But what it really means is that if the American oil industry controls a vast lithium reserve in Afghanistan, they can manipulate the battery tech industry.  And call me a conspiracy nut, but I suspect that the best interests of the American people won’t be at the top of their list of concerns.

It is not McChrystal who owes Obama an apology. It is Obama who owes an
apology to the people of American and the people of Afghanistan.

Before the decision was made to send more troops into Afghanistan, McChrystal
and other top US military men met for weeks with President Obama. During
months of agonizing closed-door ‘analysis and reflection’, we’re asked to
believe neither Obama nor any General said “We’re entering an insurgency,
fewer than a dozen of our men and women speak the language, fewer than that
know anything of the culture, we’ll be going directly into citizens’ homes, farms
and villages, we’ll be heavily armed with high-tech lethal weapons, and we wont
be able to tell friend from foe. What do you think the chances are that we will
be facing continued guerilla warfare and civilian insurgency, similar to Iraq, and
that our men will continue to be placed in untenable situations in a losing
effort, similar to Iraq?”

America has ‘civilian leadership’ of the military, in part, so the military wont
make decisions in its own interests and those of America’s formidable military
industrial complex. But, instead, make decisions in the interest of the American
people.

Obama has failed, not in Afghanistan, but in deciding to escalate, rather than
leave Afghanistan.

Yes, you can say ‘he campaigned on escalation’, but if the die was cast, why all
the agonizing prior to the decision? Politicians and Presidents frequently do not
do what they’ve campaigned on and even alter their decisions when new facts
are revealed.

But Obama appeared to be reconsidering all options, agonize and then clearly
make the wrong decision.

Obama owes the American people and the Afghan people an apology. To the
extent McChrystal was instrumental in contributing to the disastrous decision,
he, too, owes the American people and the Afghan people an apology.

Hence, it’s not only McChrystal who should go, but Obama as well. This
President has made too many catastrophically wrong decisions. Afghanistan is
simply the one in the news right now.

The only egotistical flake in this mess is BHO.

The problem with Democracy is that it is a sport where big money wins Ardee. Constituents are handicapped as it is almost impossible to overcome the advantage that money provides in the electoral process. Power of the voter has to a great degree been nullified. We shall see if the “Runaway General” wins this round.

ardee:
You say “the problem with Democracy is that it is a participatory sport”...
The only ones actually participating are the collusive Global Corpsters and Banksters such as the IMF,  BIF (Bank for Intl Settlements - Hitler’s bank), and undoubtedly Goldman Sachs/Federal Reserve who, as you may remember, could’nt/wouldn’t account for TWO TRILLION when Bernanke was question by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
If this isn’t a Fascist Oligarchy, pray tell me what is?

This was a good article by Scheer, even though some
of the truths hurt.

The only point he glossed over was the fact that our
initial foray into Afghanistan was appreciated by the
people there, and accomplished good. Where we (Bush)
failed was in the subsequent redefinition of the
mission into some fuzzy logic civic engineering.

It is hard not to fault President Obama for
continuing down that misguided path, but I would
point out a couple of relevant considerations.

First, the military are expert at setting concrete
goals and developing plans to achieve those goals.
They don’t do things willy-nilly. So, it’s expected
that any officer would provide the President with
specific detail about accomplishing a purpose, such
that the President could assess if the purpose was
attainable and the detail sufficient.

President Obama cannot be faulted for supporting the
expertise of the military. The fact is also true than
Al Qaeda was there. Let’s not forget they killed
thousands of innocent Americans, and have no qualms
about killing any of us here.

Second, while some criticism of the President is
valid, some isn’t. People like to believe they’re
literary experts because they read a summary of
Hamlet. But those who bother to actually read the
play understand it better, and we, friends, must face
the truth that we’re in the category of the former.

The situation in that region is far more complex than
anybody commenting on this board realizes. There are
nuclear interests, and there are true enemies of the
United States, and (good or bad) that region has a
lot of the natural resources YOU need to keep your
comfy lifestyle going.

We may have to walk away from Afghanistan. We’d
better realize, though, the danger to our country
will still be there.

Scheer winds his column up by stating: “they may as well keep McChrystal in charge for he remains a true believer in sinking deeper into the quagmire”...
I have my doubts about that and suspect that McChrystal
now sees the light at the end of a tunnel teeming with Taliban. He dreads the likelihood of becoming another
scapegoat as did General Westmoreland and Robert McNamara.

This “spat” between the two, Obama and McChrystal, or Tweedledum and Tweedledumber in Hollywood parlance, is basically a result of our being enmeshed ( thanks Georgie) in an unwinnable war.

Now that it has been revealed that Afghanistan sits on about a trillion or so dollars worth of exotic mineral wealth we see a semi-exact parallel to Iraq. After more than eight years of war in that oil rich entity we still see neither electricity nor clean water in Baghdad despite the billions in oil wealth being pumped out of the ground there. It does beg the question as to where exactly is that money going?

I blame neither Obama nor McChrystal, but an electorate seemingly far too easily manipulated or far too disinterested to make things right. The problem with Democracy is that it is a participatory sport…..

Hey,

Just a little more blowing stuff up and we win, again and again and over and over until we “win”.

I actually feel sympathy for this man who tries to prove that peace can come from violence because we produced him with our arrogance.

Let’s not feel sorry for him though considering that he has very dangerous un-democratically elected power.

“The lionization of McChrystal in much of the reporting which ignored his egregious role in the cover-up of torture in Iraq and his key role in distorting the facts in order to politically exploit the “friendly fire” death of Pat Tillman, a true hero, has been a journalistic low point.”

Exactly. Few in the media have commented on McChrystal’s role in torture at Camp Nama and his central role in the Tillman cover-up.  It appears to be more offensive to say “Bite me”.

Coincidentally, I just finished up a document I’ve been working on the past month that may be of interest to your and your readers.

“The Emperor’s General”—President Obama and the Whitewash of Gen. McChrystal’s Role in the Cover-Up of Pat Tillman’s Friendly-Fire Death

See http://www.feralfirefighter.blogspot.com

The “Emperor’s General” discusses the bi-partisan effort by Congress & President Obama to protect McChrystal from punishment for his actions.  Some of those involved were Congressman Waxman, Senator Webb, Senator McCain. 

The media covered for McChrystal as well.  Particularly Thom Shanker at the NYT; see “Lies ... Borne Out by Facts, If Not the Truth”

I also call out Andrew Exum at CNAS.