- Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.—Gravity’s Rainbow
‘Is it about a bicycle?’ he asked.—The Third Policeman
Tag Archives: militarism
Pseudoregrets
Another year, another anniversary of the Iraq invasion, and another dreary round of self-justifications from so-called liberals for having supported it. Glenn Greenwald discusses the drivel that came out of a Slate series of articles by the usual pundits and comes to a sad conclusion:
[N]ot a single one of them appears to have learned the [...]
20/20
Apropos Rummy’s departure, a pundit had this to say (among other things):
Indeed, Rumsfeld’s dominance of the cabinet and the Bush administration may have guaranteed that America chose the entirely wrong paradigm for the past five years. Notwithstanding the spectacular violence of the Sept. 11 attacks, America might have done better had it not chosen a [...]
Willpower
Ever since the news of the foiled alleged liquid-explosive multiple-airliner plot in the UK, I’ve been racking my brain trying to recall where I’d read that the primary approach to terrorism should be internationally cooperative police work, not large-scale military operations, but that this notion had been discredited. Here we seemed to have an instance of such [...]
Clarification
Yesterday I asked a quasi-rhetorical question:
… but would this administration be smart enough to accept the invitation to depart?
This obviously assumes the US has the best interests of Iraqis at heart. There are several competing assumptions:
The Iraq invasion was actually an imperial venture. Thus the rationale for staying is the creation of ”forward bases,” protection of oil/Israel/etc., [...]
Pugilist
Since his campaign headquarters is on the same block as my illustrious place of daytime employ, James Webb’s thumbnail self-characterization is constantly popping up during my periodic escapes from the asylum.* The former Assistant Secretary of Defense (under Reagan) is running for Senate as a Democrat, and just about every car on the block has [...]
Solutions
Molly Ivins writes:
Last week, Bush visited Yuma, Ariz., to tour a portion of the U.S.-Mexico border by Border Patrol buggy. Maybe Jorge was doing a little measuring for the $3.2-million-a-mile fence the Senate recently approved, which I guarantee will be really helpful.
Are they insane? As Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano observes, “Show me a 50-foot wall, [...]
Hummer
H1 down, H2 and H3 to go.
Katrina vanden Heuvel over at The Nation isn’t optimistic:
The good news out of Detroit is that the largest version of the Hummer—the 10,000 pound, less than 10 mpg, $150,000 Hummer H1—is being scrapped by General Motors due to lagging sales.
But, on the flip side, sales for the entire Hummer [...]
Pentagon
What a coincidence (see the previous post). Over at Salon, Farhad Manjoo interviews James Carroll, author of a “biography” of the Pentagon, House of War. “[I]f Carroll’s book actually reads … like a story not just of the Pentagon but of the last half-century of American foreign policy,” Manjoo writes, “well, that’s the point.” He [...]
Escalator