Something there is among certain elements of the left that gets weak kneed at the notion of Bu$hitler’s legions of myrmidons finally coming to their senses and Flipping On The Man. It serves to explain how the New Republic fell for the Scott Thomas Beauchamp diaries, and perhaps explains the tone of breathless, schoolyard tattletaling in this dKos diary entry. Whoever the diarist’s correspondent is, s/he clearly knows a bit of the inside lingo but still manages to get details glaringly wrong in a way that coincidentally serves to reinforce the Kossacks’ prejudices, garnering over a thousand comments when I first looked in this morning.
It’s not that there’s any one thing wrong in the post, which purports to tell the inside story of an upcoming US naval attack on Iran, but rather the accumulation of many, many little things that aren’t quite right:
She started in the Marines and after 8 years her term was up. She had served on a smaller Marine carrier, and found out through a friend knew there was an opening for a junior grade LSO in a training position on a supercarrier. She used the reference and the information and applied for a transfer to the United States Navy. Since she had experience landing F-18Cs and Cobra Gunships, and an unblemished combat record, she was ratcheted into the job, successfully changing from the Marines to the Navy. Her role is still aligned with the Marines since she generally is assigned to liason with the Marine units deploying off her carrier group.
A smaller “Marine” carrier would be a Navy LHA or LHD, embarking a Marine Air Combat Element, or ACE. They carry attack helicopters, transport helicopters and a small number of Harrier jump jets. They don’t (can’t) land F-18s.
It’s not impossible for an aviator to have an unblemished combat record flying Marine helicopters from amphibs and then have flown the FA-18 – a test pilot might do so – but it’s very, very rare. You bloom where you’re planted, and these days, with the Navy getting smaller and the Marine Corps under burden, transferring from the Corps to carrier aviation is well nigh unheard of.
As for hearing from a friend that a “junior grade” LSO position was available, that’s hooey. That’s not how it’s done, we don’t advertise for LSO’s, we grow them up from within the squadrons embarked aboard the carriers. Nor, for that matter, do we call them “supercarriers” any more, since they’re all supercarriers. The last ship not in the supercarrier weight class was the USS Midway, which weighed in at a bit less than 60,000 tons but was decommissioned 15 years ago.
“I know this will sound crazy coming from a Naval officer”, she said. “But we’re all just waiting for this administration to end. Things that happen at the senior officer level seem more and more to happen outside of the purview of XOs and other officers who typically have a say-so in daily combat and flight operations. Today, orders just come down from the mountaintop and there’s no questioning. In fact, there is no discussing it. I have seen more than one senior commander disappear and then three weeks later we find out that he has been replaced. That’s really weird. It’s also really weird because everyone who has disappeared has questioned whether or not we should be staging a massive attack on Iran.”
More hooey. The “say-so” of “daily” combat operations under the purview of XO’s is how to execute the mission, not whether or not it ought to be done, and anyway, XO’s do “heads, beds and haircuts” not national policy. And since the correspondent talks of doing “traps” and “FARP” training later in the post – events that are at the very beginning of the training cycle, and a year or more before the ship and air wing deploy – she’s nowhere near being in the fight in any case, with two ships on the line right now and at least one between her ship and deployment. Something doesn’t add up.
As for all of those “disappearing” senior officers, there are a couple of well-trodden paths to professional ignominy – DUIs and “zipper failures” are among the most common – but no one gets vanished for “questioning whether or not” we ought to attack Iran, or any other country for that matter and if they had, you can be sure we’d all have heard about it by now. It’s also passing strange to hear a former Marine complain that orders come down from the “mountain top”, as though at some time in the cherished past they use to bubble up from the mess decks. But even in such a bizarrely constructed paragraph, it’s hard to plausibly and consistently argue on the one hand that orders aren’t being questioned and that people are being relieved for doing so.
“We’re not stupid. Most of the members of the fleet read well enough to know what is going on world-wise. We also realize that anyone who has any doubts is in danger of having a long military career yanked out from under them. Keep in mind that most of the people I serve with are happy to be a part of the global war on terror. It’s just that the touch points are what we see since we are the ones out here who are supposedly implementing this grand strategy. But when you liason (sic) with administration officials who don’t know that Iranians don’t speak Arabic and have no idea what Iranians live like, then you start having second thoughts about whether these Administration officials are even competent.”
I have to wonder what administration official a lieutenant would be performing “liason” with, or who it is among those officials doesn’t know that Iranians speak Farsi or how the subject would have even come up. While this is exactly the kind of paragraph that people personally invested in the narrative of the administration as a bunch of wooden headed bumblers would drink down like fine wine, it rings as false as a football bat on a tin cymbal to anyone who understands the way the Navy – and junior officers within the Navy – actually work.
JO’s avoid talking to their embarked flag officer if ever they can manage to, and even a shipboard flag wouldn’t speak directly to political types on policy matters, reporting instead to a 3-star ashore, who reports to the 4-star joint force commander who reports to a theater combatant commander – Admiral Fallon, in this case. The COCOM would be the first guy to routinely coordinate with the political arms of government and would be in any event be rather unlikely to share with a shipboard lieutenant his observation that administration officials didn’t know that Iranians spoke Farsi even in the unlikely event that the opportunity presented itself.
More jangling language here:
“But if you asked any of the flight officers whether they have a clear idea of what the goal of this strike is, your answer would sound like something out of a think tank policy paper. But it’s not like Kosovo or when we relieved the tsunami victims. There everyone could tell you in a sentence what we were here doing.”
The dKos diarist is quoting here, so I think it’s safe to point out that “flight officer” has a specific and restrictive meaning in naval aviation, referring to the weapons systems operators, navigators and mission specialists who, along with a Navy pilot, execute the aircraft mission in a multi-seat aircraft. The term “flight officer” itself is an awkward formulation – “naval flight officer” or NFO is the common term – and would never in any case be used in this way. Much more likely would be the more generic term “aviators” or even “aircrew.” We just don’t talk about ourselves that way, especially pilots – and all LSO’s are pilots.
Next up:
Last night in the galley, an ensign asked what right do we have to tell a sovereign nation that they can’t build a nuke. I mean the table got EF Hutton quiet. Not so much because the man was asking a question that was off culture. But that he was asking a good question. In fact, the discussion actually followed afterwards topside where someone in our group had to smoke a cigarette. The discussion was intelligent but also in lowered voices. It’s like we aren’t allowed to ask the questions that we always ask before combat. It’s almost as if the average seaman or soldier is doing all the policy work.”
The galley is where food is cooked for enlisted men, and an air wing ensign would have no business being there. There are no tables in the galley. Officers dine in a wardroom. Very few aviators smoke these days, and you certainly don’t go “topside” to do so – smoking galleries are on sponsons that give off the hangar bay. The questions we always ask before combat are all related to “how do I get in and do my job without getting bagged,” not whether or not it’s a job worth doing.
It’s almost as if the average seaman is a little out of his or her swim lane talking about things s/he has only heard about and in every case, getting it almost right. But missing.
Is there a plan to attack Iran? Absolutely there is: We plan for everything, always have. Before World War II we planned with equal intensity to fight Britain and Canada on the one hand, and Japan on the other. As you start heading towards a place that has an existing plan, you dust that puppy off, check the intel for updated threats and cross-check the other planner’s math. Having thus paid obeisance to the household gods of war planning, the entire package is laid aside until the next time you go by. Makes the time pass faster.
But every little bit of this story reads like BS to me, with the only real surprise being that there are so very many eager rubes in the world, waiting to be taken in by it.
So, as I said: I’m hoisting the flag.
Update: All gone. Mr. Macabee, meet Mr. Memory Hole. Mr. Memory Hole, meet…
Hey! Where’d he go?!?
I served on a birdfarm (Big-E) back in the 80’s. Even this old ‘blackshoe’ could see the holes big enough to drive a whole Air Wing through.
Bravo Zulu!
Lex:
” Every country acts in its national interest.”
Indeed. And I am for a firm defense of our *national* interest. But how exactly do we define our *national interest*? Unlike a market, where your power depends on the thickness of your wallet, the principle of a political system that claims to be democratic is supposed to be equality under the law. In the political process that defines our national interest, everybody should count.
However, if we judge the quality of our foreign policy on the basis not of special interests — big oil, large military contractors, etc. — but of the nation as a whole, including the less privileged majority of Americans, then our current foreign policy is a fiasco.
Regardless of how they got there, whether it was luck or effort (as I said, much depends on our ability to choose our parents, i.e. on luck), a lot of poor, working, and even middle-class people in the country are alienated from the government that, supposedly, represents them. How do we know? Well, less than half of the people who could in principle vote, don’t. They are either unregistered or registered but abstain.
Aside from electoral trickery that disenfranchises some, these people’s alienation from the political process is not unrelated (is chicken-and-egg cause and consequence) of the *fact* that our government’s priorities do not reflect our priorities as a diverse people. Katrina, our sucky health care system, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the taxcuts for the very rich, etc. exemplify what the interests and needs of poor and middle-class working people really mean to our government. The gov’t’s priorities are tied to special interests, to stingy, narrowly selfish, not very enlightened, big money.
From the point of view of our true national interest, our entire current foreign policy, the doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive strikes against our enemies (real or not), the use of our military and treasury to invade and occupy Iraq, all these things are disastrous.
Thanks to modern technology, lower com/transp costs, growing trade, migration, etc., the world is becoming smaller, more interdependent. Peace and stability (based on fairness, legitimate in the eyes of the global populace) are increasingly necessary. How can a global functional economy work without them.
Our current foreign policy seriously endangers our future as a coherent, respected nation, living in a workable peace with the world at large. That’s why, although international cooperation is viewed as naive by the Hobbesians, our current approach is what’s really naive.
> If the way of gaining more legitimacy on
> the world?ǨѢs stage is to sacrifice our
> own interest, then what exactly was the
> point?
Not sacrifice, but *subordinate* the special interests currently dominant of our foreign policy to our general national interest. Something that any self-respecting nation needs to do internally, through its own political process.
But even if our national interest subordinates the special interests, it will still be different from the interest of France, Iran, Brazil, etc. Yes, but different doesn’t necessarily mean mutually exclusive. And we still can decide *how* to deal with conflict of interests should they arise.
> Fortunately for us and the world, our
> system does in fact require
> transparency and the rule of law, not
> just internally but internationally.
We’ll see how robust this is. Under Bush, there’s have been a lot of power grabbing, secrecy in matters that need to be publicly discussed, and sheer lying and manipulation on important matters. We’ll see whether the damage can be easily mended. We may need more invasive constitutional surgery.
“And it also seems to me that few powerful countries in history have abused their position less than has the US since the end of World War II, partly because our “interests” include free markets and free minds as a way to support free trade.
I’m not impressed by this “free trade” stuff.
In principle, free trade is a form of cooperation with reciprocity enforced via prices. Good synergy.
But, as the economists note, even if two nations gain from voluntarily trading (as opposed to not), the issue of how the gains from trade are distributed within each nation is another matter. That’s why not everybody is as enthusiastic about free trade. NAFTA? What’s in it for U.S. workers? What’s in it for Mexican peasants? Etc.
This leads me to another point: I don’t think free trade agreements *as they are* are the embodiment of the Smithian doctrine of free trade. There’s so much “friction” between the pure doctrine and the practical result than they have only the name “free trade” in common. They suck for both the U.S. and its trade partners. Why? Because of the disproportionate weight of special interests (drug makers, technology companies, big farming interests, and the small economic elites that rule the partner countries, cronies). They determine the agenda. In the U.S. at least, such is the weight of big money in U.S. politics, which — as judge Scalia once implied — is as “natural” as water running down.
Even without special interests hijacking these agreements, the outcome of free markets (like the outcome of political democracies or any other institutional mechanism through which people may negotiate their mutual interests) depends on the premises. If two *fairly equal* (in power terms) partners trade voluntarily, chances are they will both benefit at the other end. However, if there’s too much asymmetry between the partners to start with, then free markets (or democracy, etc.) will only cover with Smithian ideology the abuse of the weak by the powerful. Economists say that asymmetry in information (one party in trade knowing what the other party doesn’t) unravels a market or turns into a caricature. That’s true, but ultimately largely unequal information boils down to largely unequal power.
This is why it will be so complicated for the U.S. to navigate the coming decades. Aside from Iran. That’s why we need to be effective global leaders.
Kevin R.C. ‘Hognose’ O’Brien:
> It scares the living daylights out of the Iranians.
Oh boy, here we go again. Have we learned anything?
Imagine a country five times as big as ours in territory and population, with immensely much more military power. Let’s call it Kanada.
Now suppose Kanada decides that our democracy is a farse. They allege it’s their patriotic duty to teach democracy to the Americans. They can marshall a few facts to make their case. Most U.S. citizens don’t vote; their vote is filtered through an anti-democratic electoral college that effectively cancels the principle of one-person, one-vote; one person in a rural, less populated (often conservative) state has more clout than one person in a large city (often less conservative), etc. On top of that, on a recent presidential election, our Supremes — as opposed to the actual votes of the citizens — designated that Gorge W Putsch from the Conservative party would be our president.
Suppose also that, since we don’t trust the Kanadians (they are demographically different, recently invaded and are occupying our neighbor Mexiko, plus we think like them in Hobbesian terms), Putsch decides to develop nuclear capabilities (suppose we don’t have them yet). But then Kanada uses the power of its global media to claim that we are becoming a threat to their security. They bribe, twist arms, etc. and align the UN Security Council against us. In that scenario, what will be the reaction of any self-respected American, *even of those who didn’t support Putsch and consider him a tragedy?
I, for once, will say: “F***k the Kanadians! The problems of our democracy are for Americans to fix. Our problem with Putsch is ours, not of the Kanadians. We don’t need no freaking Kanadians to teach us democracy and treat us like kids. Their system of government is not perfect either. If our political institutions fail or function, we decide whether to tolerate them, fix them, or overthrow them and build others from scratch.”
Now, if the Kanadians make noises threatening us, will we be scared? I guess. We’re human. But for the most part, we’ll be incensed, angry, and bent to fight them with whatever we have. We will circle the wagons and fight the Kanadians until the very end. Most people will reason that we need to postpone our internal disagreements to deal with the Kanadians first (although some sectarian idiots will undercut our efforts). We’ll deal with our disagreements after the Kanadians leave us alone. The priority will be to drive the Kanadians out. The Kanadians, with much better hardware, may bomb us and destroy much of our infrastructure. They may even occupy us temporarily. And they will use that as propaganda in Kanada to tell their people that their “surge” is working, blah, blah. We will recoil for a while, but they will never *ever* defeat us. As a nation, we will grow by fighting the Kanadians. Long live the United States of America! Down with Kanada!
And for the person who wrote that the U.S. should be readying an Iranian government in exile, consider in the hypothetical scenario above a group of Americans (lead by the despicable libirals Juan Kirry, Alex Gure, and Hiffary Clifton). Suppose these people don’t have the patriotism (and/or the guts) to deal with Putsch through our own political process, to persuade us American citizens to fix our problems domestically. Instead, they go out, lobby, and persuade the Kanadians to help them (a la Chalabi) overthrow Putsch and bomb us. What will we think of them? Disloyal m-f-rs! Traitors!
Lex:
> Every country acts in its national
> interest.
Indeed. And I am for a firm defense of our *national* interest. But how exactly do we define our *national interest*? Unlike a market, where your power depends on the thickness of your wallet, the principle of a political system that claims to be democratic is supposed to be equality under the law. In the political process that defines our national interest, everybody should count.
However, if we judge the quality of our foreign policy on the basis not of special interests — big oil, large military contractors, etc. — but of the nation as a whole, including the less privileged majority of Americans, then our current foreign policy is a fiasco.
Regardless of how they got there, whether it was luck or effort (as I said, much depends on our ability to choose our parents, i.e. on luck), a lot of poor, working, and even middle-class people in the country are alienated from the government that, supposedly, represents them. How do we know? Well, less than half of the people who could in principle vote, don’t. They are either unregistered or registered but abstain.
Aside from electoral trickery that disenfranchises some, these people’s alienation from the political process is not unrelated (is chicken-and-egg cause and consequence) of the *fact* that our government’s priorities do not reflect our priorities as a diverse people. Katrina, our sucky health care system, the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the taxcuts for the very rich, etc. exemplify what the interests and needs of poor and middle-class working people really mean to our government. The gov’t’s priorities are tied to special interests, to stingy, narrowly selfish, not very enlightened, big money.
From the point of view of our true national interest, our entire current foreign policy, the doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive strikes against our enemies (real or not), the use of our military and treasury to invade and occupy Iraq, all these things are disastrous.
Thanks to modern technology, lower com/transp costs, growing trade, migration, etc., the world is becoming smaller, more interdependent. Peace and stability (based on fairness, legitimate in the eyes of the global populace) are increasingly necessary. How can a global functional economy work without them.
Our current foreign policy seriously endangers our future as a coherent, respected nation, living in a workable peace with the world at large. That’s why, although international cooperation is viewed as naive by the Hobbesians, our current approach is what’s really naive.
> If the way of gaining more legitimacy on
> the world’s stage is to sacrifice our
> own interest, then what exactly was the
> point?
Not sacrifice, but *subordinate* the special interests currently dominant of our foreign policy to our general national interest. Something that any self-respecting nation needs to do internally, through its own political process.
But even if our national interest subordinates the special interests, it will still be different from the interest of France, Iran, Brazil, etc. Yes, but different doesn’t necessarily mean mutually exclusive. And we still can decide *how* to deal with conflict of interests should they arise.
> Fortunately for us and the world, our
> system does in fact require
> transparency and the rule of law, not
> just internally but internationally.
We’ll see how robust this is. Under Bush, there’s have been a lot of power grabbing, secrecy in matters that need to be publicly discussed, and sheer lying and manipulation on important matters. We’ll see whether the damage can be easily mended. We may need more invasive constitutional surgery.
> And it also seems to me that few
> powerful countries in history have
> abused their position less than has
> the US since the end of World War II,
> partly because our “interests” include
> free markets and free minds as a way
> to support free trade.
I’m not impressed by this “free trade” stuff.
In principle, free trade is a form of cooperation with reciprocity enforced via prices. Good synergy.
But, as the economists note, even if two nations gain from voluntarily trading (as opposed to not), the issue of how the gains from trade are distributed within each nation is another matter. That’s why not everybody is as enthusiastic about free trade. NAFTA? What’s in it for U.S. workers? What’s in it for Mexican peasants? Etc.
This leads me to another point: I don’t think free trade agreements *as they are* are the embodiment of the Smithian doctrine of free trade. There’s so much “friction” between the pure doctrine and the practical result than they have only the name “free trade” in common. They suck for both the U.S. and its trade partners. Why? Because of the disproportionate weight of special interests (drug makers, technology companies, big farming interests, and the small economic elites that rule the partner countries, cronies). They determine the agenda. In the U.S. at least, such is the weight of big money in U.S. politics, which — as judge Scalia once implied — is as “natural” as water running down.
Even without special interests hijacking these agreements, the outcome of free markets (like the outcome of political democracies or any other institutional mechanism through which people may negotiate their mutual interests) depends on the premises. If two *fairly equal* (in power terms) partners trade voluntarily, chances are they will both benefit at the other end. However, if there’s too much asymmetry between the partners to start with, then free markets (or democracy, etc.) will only cover with Smithian ideology the abuse of the weak by the powerful. Economists say that asymmetry in information (one party in trade knowing what the other party doesn’t) unravels a market or turns into a caricature. That’s true, but ultimately largely unequal information boils down to largely unequal power.
This is why it will be so complicated for the U.S. to navigate the coming decades. Aside from Iran. That’s why we need to be effective global leaders.
Kevin R.C. ‘Hognose’ O’Brien:
> It scares the living daylights out of the Iranians.
Oh boy, here we go again. Have we learned anything?
Imagine a country five times as big as ours in territory and population, with immensely much more military power. Let’s call it Kanada.
Now suppose Kanada decides that our democracy is a farse. They allege it’s their patriotic duty to teach democracy to the Americans. They can marshall a few facts to make their case. Most U.S. citizens don’t vote; their vote is filtered through an anti-democratic electoral college that effectively cancels the principle of one-person, one-vote; one person in a rural, less populated (often conservative) state has more clout than one person in a large city (often less conservative), etc. On top of that, on a recent presidential election, our Supremes — as opposed to the actual votes of the citizens — designated that Gorge W Putsch from the Conservative party would be our president.
Suppose also that, since we don’t trust the Kanadians (they are demographically different, recently invaded and are occupying our neighbor Mexiko, plus we think like them in Hobbesian terms), Putsch decides to develop nuclear capabilities (suppose we don’t have them yet). But then Kanada uses the power of its global media to claim that we are becoming a threat to their security. They bribe, twist arms, etc. and align the UN Security Council against us. In that scenario, what will be the reaction of any self-respected American, *even of those who didn’t support Putsch and consider him a tragedy?
I, for once, will say: “F***k the Kanadians! The problems of our democracy are for Americans to fix. Our problem with Putsch is ours, not of the Kanadians. We don’t need no freaking Kanadians to teach us democracy and treat us like kids. Their system of government is not perfect either. If our political institutions fail or function, we decide whether to tolerate them, fix them, or overthrow them and build others from scratch.”
Now, if the Kanadians make noises threatening us, will we be scared? I guess. We’re human. But for the most part, we’ll be incensed, angry, and bent to fight them with whatever we have. We will circle the wagons and fight the Kanadians until the very end. Most people will reason that we need to postpone our internal disagreements to deal with the Kanadians first (although some sectarian idiots will undercut our efforts). We’ll deal with our disagreements after the Kanadians leave us alone. The priority will be to drive the Kanadians out. The Kanadians, with much better hardware, may bomb us and destroy much of our infrastructure. They may even occupy us temporarily. And they will use that as propaganda in Kanada to tell their people that their “surge” is working, blah, blah. We will recoil for a while, but they will never *ever* defeat us. As a nation, we will grow by fighting the Kanadians. Long live the United States of America! Down with Kanada!
And for the person who wrote that the U.S. should be readying an Iranian government in exile, consider in the hypothetical scenario above a group of Americans (lead by the despicable libirals Juan Kirry, Alex Gure, and Hiffary Clifton). Suppose these people don’t have the patriotism (and/or the guts) to deal with Putsch through our own political process, to persuade us American citizens to fix our problems domestically. Instead, they go out, lobby, and persuade the Kanadians to help them (a la Chalabi) overthrow Putsch and bomb us. What will we think of them? Disloyal m-f-rs! Traitors!
[...] or Dad’s favorite chair — to see that the DKos crowd is still the same passel of mouthbreathing, gullible liars they always were – and that ConYank is still on the too-easy job of publicly humiliating them when [...]
Emilio,
I should probably open a separate thread or even a private correspondence with you, so far have we drifted from the original topic and so fundamental our differences. This will take time, and effort, and at the end we’ll understand one another somewhat better, but – I suspect – agree no more or less than when we started. This is nothing less than the side by side comparison of cognitive lenses, in which two people of different philosophical persuasions look at the same thing and perceive different realities. But what the hell.
Since “special interest” is a word that people use to describe politically active groups they disagree with – you hoist out “big oil” and the military industrial complex, but you might as well have added big pharma and Halliburton, I would reply with government employee unions, NOW, NARAL, the NEA, the ADA, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Trial Bar lobby, and all of those other Pauls who don’t mind rummaging around in Peter’s pocket, etc. – perhaps it would be better to say that our democracy reflects a tension between the self-organizing groups of politically active people with the apathetic on the sidelines.
Since there are no structural barriers to the apathetic registering and voting, and since a great deal of effort is spent by various people fruitlessly attempting to whip those same people to the polls by strenuously appealing to their naked self-interest, your complaint about our democracy being somehow less legitimate than it ought to be rings hollow to me, all the more so since I cannot readily envision a replacement system that does not have even more flaws than does our own, and yes – that includes proportional representation, if you’re curious.
Thus having (in my own mind at least) removed the foundation stone from your position, the rest of your argument on the “suckiness” of our system I decline to refute in detail – I hope you understand. I will state that your desire to “subordinate” the current special interests reads as a desire to elevate those special interests more congenial to your own preferences. For that, we use the ballot box.
re: From the point of view of our true national interest, our entire current foreign policy, the doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive strikes against our enemies (real or not), the use of our military and treasury to invade and occupy Iraq, all these things are disastrous.
That is an expression of faith, and you are welcome to it. Just please remember that history would not have frozen on 22 March 2003 had not we invaded Iraq and deposed a murderous tyrant who had pursued WMD in the past (liberating 25 million minds along the way) had in fact used them against his own people as well as his enemies, and who had declined to sufficiently explain what he had done with those programs as it was his affirmative requirement to have done based on the 1991 cease fire agreements and UN sanctions. Well-intentioned sanctions, which I helped enforce but which resulted in immoral consequences including the deaths of up to 300,000 Iraqis, many of them children while not preventing Saddam from playing his nasty little games, nor building stately pleasure domes for a despicable regime and which were on the very brink of collapsing in any case.
Since you mention France, is it not curious that the biggest political casualties in France and Germany have been those who opposed our intervention in Iraq, while their replacement heads of government are remarkably more amenable to American foreign policy (and its current president) than were there obstreperous predecessors? Inconvenient facts, I know – but worth pondering on.
re:” Under Bush, there’s have been a lot of power grabbing, secrecy in matters that need to be publicly discussed, and sheer lying and manipulation on important matters.
Argument by assertion. There is always a tension between the various co-equal branches of government, and since Vietnam and Watergate the legislature’s star has been in ascendance. In wartime though it is natural for the executive to assert primacy in those areas provided to him by the constitution. “Secrecy” is used by partisans of one sort or another to talk about the process by which the political sausage is made (remember Hillarycare?) rather than the merits of the sausage itself and “lying and manipulation” are bumper sticker words that have no meaning apart from their use to help provide cover for politicians who voted for military action and then sought to protect themselves from the consequences of their votes.
I don’t have room to try to impress the benefits of free trade upon you if you continue to remain unimpressed. I only ask you to Google up Smoot-Hawley for the counter-argument or take some undergrad-level economic courses. A non-Marxist would make a be good professor, if you can find one in the academy (they are, these days, found almost nowhere else).
We could easily craft free trade agreements that would provide assistance to the Mexican peasant, and if the Mexican peasants ever organize in sufficient numbers to control the levers of their own democracy, I’m sure we shall. In the meantime, your presumption seems to be that we should organize our trade along the lines of succoring the disenfranchised – noble in theory, but in practicality it’s better to negotiate in national interest and let the general economic benefits accrue to everyone through a market-driven process, the distribution of those benefits regulated by the social policies of the affected democracy.
So much for unequal relationships.
Look, if you seek to impose your preferences, or those of a like minded cohort on the market, you would not be the first to do so – almost inevitably to the detriment of everyone concerned. Funny thing, but the beneficial effects of the aggregated preferences of all 300 million of us easily trump the choices of the 10, 100 or 1000 elite minds that you could empower in an economic star chamber. Markets are not perfect, and we do have bubbles. But they almost correct and they are usually far superior to the bureaucratic management of government’s dead hand.
In your Kanada example you manage to trot out worn tropes on our constitutionally-enshrined electoral college – not to mention the 2000 election in Florida, will you people never get tired of stroking your little pet grievances? – while also managing the non-trivial feat of making a moral equivalence between the worlds oldest functioning democracy and the Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq. It’s beneath my contempt and I won’t spend a moment further thinking on it.
Honestly, Emilio – you seem so very unhappy with the system here, and barring a huge social catastrophe it’s very unlikely that even the most liberal representatives of the party that most closely reflects your concerns would ever change the country in a way that comports to your preferences.
Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier somewhere else?
Emilio,
I should probably open a separate thread or even a private correspondence with you, so far have we drifted from the original topic and so fundamental our differences. This will take time, and effort, and at the end we’ll understand one another somewhat better, but – I suspect – agree no more or less than when we started. This is nothing less than the side by side comparison of cognitive lenses, in which two people of different philosophical persuasions look at the same thing and perceive different realities. But what the hell.
Since “special interest” is a word that people use to describe politically active groups they disagree with – you hoist out “big oil” and the military industrial complex, but you might as well have added big pharma and Halliburton, I would reply with government employee unions, NOW, NARAL, the NEA, the ADA, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Trial Bar lobby, and all of those other Pauls who don’t mind rummaging around in Peter’s pocket, etc. – perhaps it would be better to say that our democracy reflects a tension between the self-organizing groups of politically active people with the apathetic on the sidelines.
Since there are no structural barriers to the apathetic registering and voting, and since a great deal of effort is spent by various people fruitlessly attempting to whip those same people to the polls by strenuously appealing to their naked self-interest, your complaint about our democracy being somehow less legitimate than it ought to be rings hollow to me, all the more so since I cannot readily envision a replacement system that does not have even more flaws than does our own, and yes – that includes proportional representation, if you’re curious.
Thus having (in my own mind at least) removed the foundation stone from your position, the rest of your argument on the “suckiness” of our system I decline to refute in detail – I hope you understand. I will state that your desire to “subordinate” the current special interests reads as a desire to elevate those special interests more congenial to your own preferences. For that, we use the ballot box.
re: From the point of view of our true national interest, our entire current foreign policy, the doctrine of unilateralism and preemptive strikes against our enemies (real or not), the use of our military and treasury to invade and occupy Iraq, all these things are disastrous.
That is an expression of faith, and you are welcome to it. Just please remember that history would not have frozen on 22 March 2003 had not we invaded Iraq and deposed a murderous tyrant who had pursued WMD in the past (liberating 25 million minds along the way) had in fact used them against his own people as well as his enemies, and who had declined to sufficiently explain what he had done with those programs as it was his affirmative requirement to have done based on the 1991 cease fire agreements and UN sanctions. Well-intentioned sanctions, which I helped enforce but which resulted in immoral consequences including the deaths of up to 300,000 Iraqis, many of them children while not preventing Saddam from playing his nasty little games, nor building stately pleasure domes for a despicable regime and which were on the very brink of collapsing in any case.
Since you mention France, is it not curious that the biggest political casualties in France and Germany have been those who opposed our intervention in Iraq, while their replacement heads of government are remarkably more amenable to American foreign policy (and its current president) than were there obstreperous predecessors? Inconvenient facts, I know – but worth pondering on.
re:” Under Bush, there’s have been a lot of power grabbing, secrecy in matters that need to be publicly discussed, and sheer lying and manipulation on important matters.
Argument by assertion. There is always a tension between the various co-equal branches of government, and since Vietnam and Watergate the legislature’s star has been in ascendance. In wartime though it is natural for the executive to assert primacy in those areas provided to him by the constitution. “Secrecy” is used by partisans of one sort or another to talk about the process by which the political sausage is made (remember Hillarycare?) rather than the merits of the sausage itself and “lying and manipulation” are bumper sticker words that have no meaning apart from their use to help provide cover for politicians who voted for military action and then sought to protect themselves from the consequences of their votes.
I don’t have room to try to impress the benefits of free trade upon you if you continue to remain unimpressed. I only ask you to Google up Smoot-Hawley for the counter-argument or take some undergrad-level economic courses. A non-Marxist would make a be good professor, if you can find one in the academy (they are, these days, found almost nowhere else).
We could easily craft free trade agreements that would provide assistance to the Mexican peasant, and if the Mexican peasants ever organize in sufficient numbers to control the levers of their own democracy, I’m sure we shall. In the meantime, your presumption seems to be that we should organize our trade along the lines of succoring the disenfranchised – noble in theory, but in practicality it’s better to negotiate in national interest and let the general economic benefits accrue to everyone through a market-driven process, the distribution of those benefits regulated by the social policies of the affected democracy.
So much for unequal relationships.
Look, if you seek to impose your preferences, or those of a like minded cohort on the market, you would not be the first to do so – almost inevitably to the detriment of everyone concerned. Funny thing, but the beneficial effects of the aggregated preferences of all 300 million of us easily trump the choices of the 10, 100 or 1000 elite minds that you could empower in an economic star chamber. Markets are not perfect, and we do have bubbles. But they almost correct and they are usually far superior to the bureaucratic management of government’s dead hand.
In your Kanada example you manage to trot out worn tropes on our constitutionally-enshrined electoral college – not to mention the 2000 election in Florida, will you people never get tired of stroking your little pet grievances? – while also managing the non-trivial feat of making a moral equivalence between the worlds oldest functioning democracy and the Ba’athist tyranny in Iraq. It’s beneath my contempt and I won’t spend a moment further thinking on it.
Honestly, Emilio – you seem so very unhappy with the system here, and barring a huge social catastrophe it’s very unlikely that even the most liberal representatives of the party that most closely reflects your concerns would ever change the country in a way that comports to your preferences.
Are you sure you wouldn’t be happier somewhere else?
You guys (fighter pilots, etc) are very good at what you do. You should understand that other people are good at their jobs, too. There are other ways to fight besides straight ahead combat.
Mossad’s slogan is “By means of deception, thou shalt wage war.” They are as well trained to do that as you are to fly a plane. They spend years getting everything in place, planting a mole, and then fire a deadly shot. And they are always looking more than one move ahead.
You may be right about this particular case. Yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and this may be one of those times. It is possible that Maccabee is who he presents himself to be, and he just made up a story and thought he could get away with it. But there are other possibilities, and yes, conspiracies do exist. That’s why the US is fighting Israel’s war in the first place, as you would discover if you applied your debunking skills to other problems.
Capt. Russ Wittenberg, himself a pilot, says regarding Flight 77, which allegedly hit the Pentagon: “The airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles. To expect this alleged airplane to run these maneuvers with a total amateur at the controls is simply ludicrous…”
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Wittenberg
You guys (fighter pilots, etc) are very good at what you do. You should understand that other people are good at their jobs, too. There are other ways to fight besides straight ahead combat.
Mossad’s slogan is “By means of deception, thou shalt wage war.” They are as well trained to do that as you are to fly a plane. They spend years getting everything in place, planting a mole, and then fire a deadly shot. And they are always looking more than one move ahead.
You may be right about this particular case. Yes, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, and this may be one of those times. It is possible that Maccabee is who he presents himself to be, and he just made up a story and thought he could get away with it. But there are other possibilities, and yes, conspiracies do exist. That’s why the US is fighting Israel’s war in the first place, as you would discover if you applied your debunking skills to other problems.
Capt. Russ Wittenberg, himself a pilot, says regarding Flight 77, which allegedly hit the Pentagon: “The airplane could not have flown at those speeds which they said it did without going into what they call a high speed stall. The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles. … To expect this alleged airplane to run these maneuvers with a total amateur at the controls is simply ludicrous…”
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Wittenberg
Ah, a truther. That explains a lot, thanks.
You and everyone in the armed forces would be well advised to remember that in a war crimes trial, “I was just following orders” is not a valid defense.
“Ah, a truther. That explains a lot, thanks.”
Is that what you would say to Capt. Wittenberg if you were talking to him face to face?
You mean that whole thing about not being required to obey illegal orders that they taught us on the first day?
Thanks for the refresher.
You know, I’ve got a pretty high tolerance for intellectual heterodoxy, and I don’t even mind hosting the occasional conspiracy theorist who see the JOOOOS behind every door just for the entertainment value that’s in it. But I don’t much like threats, even the veiled type and I bore easily. You, my friend, are boring me.
You only get one warning. That was it.
Dude, do you even know what a “high speed stall” is? I do, and you don’t stall a jet by flying it low and fast.
Forget it. I’m clearly not going to be able to reason you out of a position you were never reasoned into.
Lex, you have not tried to reason me out of my position.
You know nothing about my personal history, or how I arrived at my position. The question is, how did Captain Wittenberg arrive at *his* position? According to the link, which you apparently did not read, he is a “Former Air Force fighter pilot with over 100 combat missions. Retired commercial airline pilot for Pan Am and United Airlines for 35 years, flying Boeing 707, 720, 727, 737, 747, 757, 767, and 777 ’s. Had previously flown the actual two United Airlines airplanes that were hijacked on 9/11 (Flight 93, which impacted in Pennsylvania, and Flight 175, the second plane to hit the WTC).”
I guess he knows what a high speed stall is, even if he didn’t express himself as clearly as he could have.
He didn’t say you stall a jet by flying it low and fast. He said “The airplane won’t go that fast if you start pulling those high G maneuvers at those bank angles.”
Capt. Russ Wittenberg, himself a pilot, says regarding Flight 77, which allegedly hit the Pentagon
Allegedly?
I suppose for those who chose to sit in the darkness, ignore reality and pretend to have great insight and vision – yes, you can toss around such words lightly.
For those of us who were there, who recovered the bodies (what there were), the wreckage and worked with and consoled the families, there is no “alleged.”
Away and back to your truther corner where you can indulge in your misbegotten fantasies.
Lex- apologies, but as we approach the 6th anniversary of 9/11 I find myself with less and less patience with such as these – and I suppose I’d better stop at this point…
-SJS
Masterful takedown on Emilio, Cap’n, with that Billion put on the S&P, I think He might want to get out of town!
For those of us who were there, who recovered the bodies (what there were), the wreckage and worked with and consoled the families, there is no “alleged.”
Let’s be clear about what is and is not alleged. Of course something hit the Pentagon, and there were bodies to be recovered, injured people to be cared for, and families to be consoled. All this is not alleged, it’s simply a fact. What is alleged is that Flight 77 hit the Pentagon.
The same site I referred to before has a statement from someone who, like you, was at the Pentagon on September 11.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/#Kwiatkowski
According to the site, she is “Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski, PhD, U.S. Air Force (ret) – Former Political-Military Affairs Officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Also served on the staff of the Director of the National Security Agency. 20-year Air Force career.”
Her statement, in part: “There was a dearth of visible debris on the relatively unmarked [Pentagon] lawn, where I stood only minutes after the impact. Beyond this strange absence of airliner debris, there was no sign of the kind of damage to the Pentagon structure one would expect from the impact of a large airliner…
“I saw nothing of significance at the point of impact – no airplane metal or cargo debris was blowing on the lawn in front of the damaged building as smoke billowed from within the Pentagon. … all of us staring at the Pentagon that morning were indeed looking for such debris, but what we expected to see was not evident.”
I guess you wouldn’t want to waste your valuable time trying to reason her out of her position, since she wasn’t reasoned into it in the first place.
This will be my last post, after which you can have the last word. I am always willing to listen to reason, but that’s not what I’m getting here.
Lex,
Please shut this kook down.
Nose
“Former political-affairs officer”
Yep, there’s someone who is qualified to investigate a crash site…but one would sooner make progress arguing with paint on a wall I suppose.
-SJS
Proverbs 1:22
Lyle, do you have any least idea how fingers-in-the-porridge crazy you guys sound talking about this? Do the embarrassed glances and nervous smiles of your family, friends and associates go over your heads when this comes up, or do you all just pretend not to notice?
I wouldn’t know Capt. Wittenberg if I ran over him in my driveway, but I’m pretty certain that every time he flew his airliner he intended to bring it back for a safe landing with the pax intact. It’s amazing what you can do with an airplane once.
Four airplanes took off that day with four sets of passengers, four sets of Al Qaeda terrorists and four sets of families and friends that never saw their loved ones again. Your nasty little tinfoil theories make a mockery of their deaths and a travesty of the grief they left behind.
Nothing here is as you see it. There was no conspiracy which included anyone but the Islamist terrorists who took credit for the crime. You are not bringing light to the deluded masses. It wasn’t the Mossad. It wasn’t the US government. It wasn’t the US military, National Transportation Safety Board, Federal Aviation Administration, or anyone else acting in collusion with them. That includes the Illuminati, the Trilateral Commission, the UN, the World Bank, the Skull and Bones and Popular Mechanics. And yes, pace Rosie O’Donnel, fire can melt steel.
Now run along and play with your truther friends.
Cap’n,
Positively amazing what can go on inside the heads of some people. When are they going to learn?
I just watched a History Channel show on the 9/11 Conspiracy Theories (I think it was the History Channel) a few days ago. It took me a few days to wade through it and make the time to listen to it, but I was stunned about the claims the truthers are making about 9/11 now. They are evolving their claims and getting more and more outrageous.
The most interesting aspects were that the conspiracy-theorists are driven to create a narrative that has brings meaning to a violent and cataclimic event. It becomes a faith-like thing to them. Those of us with acutal, you know, faith, seem to see the reality of the situation in a more grounded way. Our faith in God, as opposed to most Leftists who deny God or the need for God, leaves them with nothing to help them through such unspeakable events.
Anyway, that was one very noticable thing to me when they were interviewing all the truthers who obviously were searching for meaning, and they had nothing to sustain them through that despair.
My two cents — very late in the game.
Truthers are loons.
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The truthers are simply folks for whom the idea of one man (Oswald, McVeigh, etc) or 19 men, getting his crazy on, and killing a bunch of folk who never did them harm is literally unthinkable.
So they grasp at any straw because they need to attach meaning to meaningless destruction and death. They will go to any lengths, abandon logic, embrace whatever myths they must, to escape the awful fact that sometimes evil nutjobs do horrible things.
Unfortuately, I have encountered some of them. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it’s painful for me to listen to so much myth from such ignorant (but likely well-meaning) folks.
As a pilot, I’m sure it really gives you heartburn to hear the truthers talk about the flying. You have my sympathy — I have had my fill as well.
You might be amused to know how ungodly irritating it is for (a) a former air traffic controller; (b) withtraining in demolitions; (c) who wound up an engineer working thru college at a superalloy manufacturer — and so understanding strength of materials at high temperature . . .
I CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE!
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