A discourse on US economic & military hegemony sin 1945

A economic history lesson
After WWII, the US stood alone as the sole economic powerhouse , not decimated by the war. Germany, France, Japan and to some extent England, all had to rebuild their economies pretty much from scratch. It was particularly troublesome for France - because of the Allied invasion & Germany because of the Allied bombing runs and occupation.

Meanwhile in 1945 the US accounted for half the world's manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves. By the time Japan surrendered the American fleet was larger than all other fleets in the world combined. Postwar - A History of Europe Since 1945 pg 105

By the end of the 1960s towards the early 70, three crucial events coalesced to question the tenets of Kensian economic theory (Tax/Spend policy geared towards smoothing out lows & highs in cycles. 1) Marshall Plan aid was being paid off from the European & Japanese. 2) these same countries went thru turbulent overhauling both economically and geographically, by means of occupation and ethnic relocation. The central reason being so the mistakes of post WWI would not be repeated. 3) OPEC formed to exercise authority of the world's growing dependence on fossil fuels.

By the end of the 1970, religious zealots and neoconservative war hawks, scapegoated the economic woes of the country on a one term president - Jimmy Carter.

Their agenda was two-fold, 1) blame the decline on the lower classes - by using rhetoric like welfare queens driving Cadillacs, and a recent overthrow of a CIA operative, the Shah of Iran 2) Try to justify simultaneous tax breaks and record deficit spending - which 1988 presidential candidate Michael Dukakis characterized as "A blank check of prosperity"
This scheme worked because it laid claim to the country's sense of patriotism & religious devotion.

This same scheme was based on supply side economic theory which led to the stock market crash of 1929 & ensuing great depression. More recently it was the single biggest factor involved in the housing & credit boom/bust.

Fortunately the blog & online community have become a significant grass-roots, backyard fence community, to bring like minded people together, in hopes of combating the emotional tools used by those in bed with the military industrial complex.

Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism

The University of Chicago's Robert Pape studied every suicide attack committed world-wide from 315 suicide terrorism campaigns around the world from 1980 through 2003 and 462 individual suicide terrorists.: The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any one of the world's religions. In fact, the leading instigators of suicide attacks are the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion…

Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.

Pape's volume has been widely noticed by press, public, and policymakers alike, and has earned praise from Michael Scheuer (author of Imperial Hubris - Why the West is Losing the War on Terror
In a 60 Minutes interview by Steve Kroft, originally aired 11/14/04, Scheuer displayed his in-depth understanding of what motivates Bin Laden and his followers as such:

Right or wrong, he says Muslims are beginning to view the United States as a colonial power with Israel as its surrogate, and with a military presence in three of the holiest places in Islam: the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, and Jerusalem. And he says it is time to review and debate American policy in the region, even our relationship with Israel.

"No one wants to abandon the Israelis. But I think the perception is, and I think it's probably an accurate perception, that the tail is leading the dog - that we are giving the Israelis carte blanche ability to exercise whatever they want to do in their area," says Scheuer. "And if that's what the American people want, then that's what the policy should be, of course. But the idea that anything in the United States is too sensitive to discuss or too dangerous to discuss is really, I think, absurd."

Is he talking about appeasement?

"I'm not talking about appeasement. There's no way out of this war at the moment," says Scheuer. "It's not a choice between war and peace. It's a choice between war and endless war. It's not appeasement. I think it's better even to call it American self-interest."

Scheuer believes that al Qaeda is no longer just a terrorist organization that can be defeated by killing or capturing its leaders. Now, he says it's a global insurgency that's spreading revolutionary fervor throughout the Muslim world.

"Most dramatically, and perhaps least noticed, is the violence inside Saudi Arabia itself. Saudi Arabia was, until just a few years ago, probably one of the most safe countries on earth. And now the paper is daily full of activities and shootouts between Islamists who supported Osama bin Laden and the government there."

But if bin Laden is much stronger than he was, why haven't there been more attacks on the United States?

"One of the great intellectual failures of the American intelligence community, and especially the counterterrorism community, is to assume if someone hasn't attacked us, it's because he can't or because we've defeated him," says Scheuer. "Bin Laden has consistently shown himself to be immune to outside pressure. When he wants to do something, he does it on his own schedule."

"You've written no one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States," says Kroft. "You believe that's going to happen?"

"I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable," says Scheuer.

A nuclear weapon? "A nuclear weapon of some dimension, whether it's actually a nuclear weapon, or a dirty bomb, or some kind of radiological device," says Scheuer. "Yes, I think it's probably a near thing."

What evidence is there that bin Laden's actually working to do this? "He's told us it. Bin Laden is remarkably eager for Americans to know why he doesn't like us, what he intends to do about it and then following up and doing something about it in terms of military actions," says Scheuer. "He's told us that, 'We are going to acquire a weapon of mass destruction, and if we acquire it, we will use it.'"

The end-game may require is reigning in the Israeli - Palestinian situation and declaring an end to our involovement in Iraq. Anything short of this, will be viewed as a justification for more suicide attacks by fanatics.
Sabre-rattling towards Iran is not helping. But that's a subject for another day.

Iraq Oil Bonanza for Hunt

Iraq Oil Bonanza for Hunt; Advice for General Petraeus

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment. Posted September 10, 2007.

Former State Department diplomat John Brown has some advice for General Petraeus: which is that the US is occupying Iraq, and therefore will never really have the allegiance of the people, just as the Soviets could not actually convince the Czechs about that universal workers' solidarity thing.

My Texas oil theory of the Cheney wing's decision to go to war against Iraq got some (admittedly ex post facto) support on Sunday when it was announced that Hunt Oil is doing a deal for petroleum development in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Such Kurdistan deals are not typically being put through the federal government in Baghdad, and Oil Minister Hussein Shahristani is threatening to cancel them out if they are not approved centrally.)

Guns and Brains

Guns and Brains go their separate ways, to the detriment of both

Earlier this week, I received an invitation to a September conference on land and air power in counterinsurgency—routine enough, except that it is to be co-hosted by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of Harvard’s Kennedy School. The day I received the invitation, I was at another conference, where I spoke on a panel about social scientists working with the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. These events suggest one unlikely and hopeful outcome of the sad wars we’re living with.

I grew up during the Vietnam era and belong to a generation of educated liberals who came of age with a visceral dislike of the military. In the seventies and eighties, it was almost a reflex on Ivy League university campuses, where officer training was sometimes banned, to regard anyone in uniform as funny, if not sinister. At the same time, on military bases, anti-intellectualism became a badge of honor, a subscription to The New Yorker the mark of an oddball, and the words “liberal” and “academic” terms of abuse.

Here’s a crude generalization: after the sixties, intellect and patriotism went separate ways, to the detriment of both. This mutual hostility made intellectuals less responsible and soldiers less thoughtful. We’ve come to think of this antagonism as natural and inevitable, as it is between cats and dogs, but in fact it was a product of recent political and cultural changes in American life. The estrangement was compounded by professionalization on both sides and the adoption of inward-looking and jargon-ridden specializations: the all-volunteer military and the social-theory crowd became equally isolated American subcultures.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have begun to close the divide. I think the reasons are these: first, September 11th made military service more attractive to the kind of college students who used to find it unthinkable. It’s no longer unusual to have a friend whose son recently went from studying photography at the Pratt Institute to searching for weapons caches south of Baghdad. Second, the nature of these wars demands a soldier who is more than an artilleryman with an engineering degree. After the military’s failure in Vietnam, it tried to turn war into a matter of firepower and technology—which is why, when the Sunni insurgency began to take off in the summer of 2003, American forces had no idea how to react and made matters far worse. By 2004, battalion commanders in Salahuddin were begging the Pentagon for information about the nature of Iraqi society. This year, the Army is actually deploying teams of social scientists with units in Baghdad and Afghanistan. The soldiers whose reputations have been made and not destroyed in Iraq—General David Petraeus, Colonel H. R. McMaster, Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl—have doctorates in the humanities. The best soldiers I met in Iraq were eager to share critical views with professors and journalists. This past spring, when McMaster led a group of officials and private citizens to Iraq to assess progress there, he picked as one member an anti-war British political-science professor who happens to know a great deal about the country. Desperate times breed desperate measures.

I have no illusion that this rapprochement between guns and brains is widespread or guaranteed to last. Plenty of people on both sides undoubtedly find it appalling. Some soldiers will return from Iraq convinced that they’ve been stabbed in the back on college campuses and in the liberal media. Some intellectuals find the war and the Administration so objectionable that they regard associating with the military as a kind of crime. (An anthropologist headed to Afghanistan told me that she’s been “shunned at cocktail parties.”) But a superpower can hardly afford to have its thinkers and its warriors despise and avoid one another.

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The Richest Year in History

The Richest Year in History
According to Forbes, this is the richest year in human history ... for those people who are already mind-bogglingly rich. But what about the rest of us?
By Tula Connell, TomPaine.com. Posted March 15, 2007.

Billionaires have it made.So what's new? What's new is that there are lots more of them and they're a lot richer. The number of billionaires around the world grew by 19 percent since last year, up to 946, with a total net worth increasing by 35 percent to $3.5 trillion, according to a report released by Forbes magazine. That's trillion with a "T."

Says Forbes Chief Executive Steve Forbes: “This is the richest year ever in human history. Never in history has there been such a notable advance.”

Of course this historic advance is largely confined to those who were already mind-bogglingly rich to begin with. For working people as a whole, there’s at best a holding action and at worst a retreat. Let’s look at the figures without Steve Forbes’ rose-colored glasses.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

From 2003 to 2004, the average incomes of the bottom 99 percent of households grew by less than 3 percent, after adjusting for inflation. In contrast, the average incomes of the top one percent of households experienced a jump of more than 18 percent, after adjusting for inflation.

In fact, it’s worse than that. The CBPP explained that the enormous gains at the top of the income pyramid caused a rise of income as a whole. But median income dropped between 2003 and 2004, and has not risen appreciably since then. In short, while the rich get richer, the middle class is shrinking, as economist Paul Krugman has pointed out.

Other economic indicators also show a less rosy scenario for working, such as the drop in construction jobs, which fell by 62,000 in February, after posting a net gain of 28,000 in January, according to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. As The Bonddad Blog notes,

The housing slowdown is starting to hit employment numbers. I would expect this number to continually worsen over the next year as the housing slowdown starts to bleed into the rest of the economy.

Manufacturing jobs took another hit in January as well, dropping by 14,000. Overall, private-sector jobs showed only a net gain of 58,000, its lowest monthly gain since November 2004. Public-sector job increases kept January’s job numbers from tanking, by adding 39,000 jobs, for a total increase of 97,000 jobs.

As the Economic Policy Institute notes, the job market remains tight and wage growth solid. (After nearly four years of stagnant wage growth, wages recently have shown some signs of life.) But the nonprofit group also says recent data show troublesome signs, such as slowing growth in the number of hours worked and a 1.7 percent spike in long-term unemployment. Plus real gross domestic product growth, with only a 2.2 percent fourth quarter increase, did not rise nearly as fast as in previous quarters.

As noted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research , even if the decline in hours worked was weather-related, it is worthy of note that this is the largest one-month decline since June 2004.

Even workers who own homes are losing. Exotic and subprime mortgagees are getting hit with new monthly payments they can’t afford. Some 20 percent of subprime loans at the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial, are more than 60 days late and late payments are increasing in the non-subprime mortgage markets.

So what does it all mean? Even if Bush wasn’t in Brazil peddling alternative fuels for South America while we pay higher and higher prices for fuel oil, the economy looks a lot better from the top.

Mahdi Army sitting back while we do the hard work

Paraphrased from a Fareed Zakaria Newsweek article.

Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea, but the crucial question is, will military progress lead to political progress?
American forces have won every battle they have fought in Iraq. Having more troops and a new mission to secure whole neighborhoods is a good idea.
NEWSWEEK's Michael Hastings, embedded with an American advisory team that took part in the fighting against Sunni insurgents in and around Baghdad's Haifa Street last week, reports that no more than 24 hours after the battle began on Jan. 6, the brigade's Sunni commander, Gen. Razzak Hamza, was relieved of his command. Directly from the office of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki - a Shiite.
Lt. Col. Steven Duke, commander of a U.S. advisory team working with the Iraqis describes Hamza as "a true patriot [who] would go after the bad guys on either side." Hamza was replaced by a Shiite. Groups like Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army don't generally start fire fights with the Americans or attack Iraqi forces.
Maj. Mark Brady, confirms reports that the Mahdi Army has been continuing to systematically take over Sunni neighborhoods, killing, terrorizing and forcing people out of their homes. "They're slowly moving across the river," he told Hastings, from predominantly Shiite eastern Baghdad into the predominantly Sunni west. If the 20,000 additional American troops being sent to the Iraqi capital focus primarily on Sunni insurgents, there's a chance the Shiite militias might get bolder.
So what will happen if Bush's new plan "succeeds" militarily over the next six months? Sunnis will become more insecure as their militias are dismantled. Shiite militias will lower their profile on the streets and remain as they are now, ensconced within the Iraqi Army and police. That will surely make Sunnis less likely to support the new Iraq. Shiite political leaders, on the other hand, will be emboldened. Remain uncompromising, as they traditionally have been.

The Maliki government, and the Shiite leadership more generally, understand that they must crack down on militias and compromise with the Sunnis. Why? In the words of one anonymous senior U.S. official because Shiite political leaders understand they no longer have "unquestioning American support anymore, especially from Capitol Hill." This suggests that the administration finally understands that Bush's blank-check policy for the Iraqi government has proved totally counterproductive. The one action that might be forcing the Iraqi leadership to make some compromises has been the threat that Congress would force a withdrawal of American support.
the dominant flaw in the Bush administration's handling of Iraq is that it has, both intentionally and inadvertently, driven the country's several communities apart. Every seemingly neutral action—holding elections, firing Baathists from the bureaucracy, building up an Iraqi military and police force—has had seismic sectarian consequences. The greatest danger of Bush's new strategy, then, isn't that it won't work but that it will—and thereby push the country one step further along the road to all-out civil war. Only a sustained strategy of pressure on the Maliki government has any chance of averting this outcome.
Otherwise Al-Queda will gain Sunni support, US ideals will be tarnished. The US will be aiding in ethnic cleansing.