Phuoc Long Redux

[don]

Re: Truth about Bush

who ya gonna call . . . .

"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of 'cold war' with its neighbors...


It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no 'true patriot' ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours."


George Orwell

[Woodsman]

Re: Truth about Bush

I also spoke with someone who had an uncle in the CIA, and he told me the pre-war CIA consensus was "no WMD in Iraq". Bush (or his administration) put together a small clique of intelligence people who backed the position that Iraq had WMD.

This was son of "Team B."

The group, called Team B, was headed by Richard Pipes, a Harvard historian and father of Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum, a controversial pro-Israeli speaker. Its members included Paul Wolfowitz [and] current U.S. deputy defense secretary, as well as I. Lewis Libby, currently Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

Paul Nitze, a co-founder of Team B, also helped at about the same time to create the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), the objectives of which were to raise awareness about the Soviets’ alleged nuclear dominance and to pressure the American leadership to close the gap. Some members were even considering promoting a “first strike policy” against the U.S.S.R.

Both groups’ influence grew in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, who lent an ear to Team B’s more extreme evaluations and to the CPD’s analysis and lobbying. Reagan’s administration from the start included Perle and Wolfowitz. Among Reagan’s most memorable quotes, his characterization of the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” was a direct reflection of this shift in policy.

Anatomy of a Neo-Conservative White House

When the intelligence does not support their conclusions, they simply get new intelligence that does:

One reason that Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld made statements that contradicted what they were told in CIA briefings might have been that they were receiving information from another source that purported to have evidence of Al Qaeda-Iraq ties. The information came from a covert intelligence unit set up shortly after the September 11 attacks by then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith.

Feith was a protege of, and intensely loyal to, Cheney, Rumsfeld, then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Cheney's then-chief of staff and national security adviser, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. The secretive unit was set up because Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby did not believe the CIA would be able to get to the bottom of the matter of Iraq-Al Qaeda ties. The four men shared a long-standing distrust of the CIA from their earlier positions in government, and felt that the agency had failed massively by not predicting the September 11 attacks.

At first, the Feith-directed unit primarily consisted of two men, former journalist Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, a veteran of neoconservative think tanks. They liked to refer to themselves as the "Iraqi intelligence cell" of the Pentagon. And they took pride in the fact that their office was in an out-of-the-way cipher-locked room, with "charts that rung the room from one end to the other" showing the "interconnections of various terrorist groups" with one another and, most important, with Iraq, Maloof recalled in an interview.

They also had the heady experience of briefing Rumsfeld twice, and Feith more frequently, Maloof said. The vice president's office also showed great interest in their work. On at least three occasions, Maloof said, Samantha Ravich, then-national security adviser for terrorism to Cheney, visited their windowless offices for a briefing.

But neither Maloof nor Wurmser had any experience or formal training in intelligence analysis. Maloof later lost his security clearance, for allegedly failing to disclose a relationship with a woman who is a foreigner, and after allegations that he leaked classified information to the press. Maloof said in the interview that he has done nothing wrong and was simply being punished for his controversial theories. Wurmser has since been named as Cheney's Middle East adviser.

Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel

This is how these gentlemen work. Reagan's national security staff wanted justification for their planned massive military buildup. The intelligence agencies did not give it to them, so they made some up. Fast forward to 2001 with the Bush Jr. administration and you have nearly the same cast of characters reprising their roles.

Cheney spread the "yellow cake" story even after the government had publicly debunked it. Like jugglers, they had so many stories in the air that the citizens could scarcely tell when one had been taken down. FrontLine had a documentary about how wide spread the deception was, including Frontline itself.

You never know for sure if someone is lying, because you cannot read their mind. There is also lying to yourself--convincing yourself the world is how you want it to be.

Me, I think people like Cheney and Rumsfeld (and Clinton) lie every time they draw in air. Still, we can debate whether Cheney and the neocon brain trust really believed their own utopian domino theory about bombing the entire Arab-Muslim world into democratic American satellite nations “floating on a sea of oil” (in Paul Wolfowitz’s phrase). Somebody must have believed it, but it was clear to everyone outside the neocon bubble that such a prospect was about as realistic as the virgins in Paradise promised to jihadist suicide bombers, or the Soviet's claim that the the state would wither away.

Congress voted overwhelmingly for the war.

Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld held the levers of power and so deserve most of the blame for the fiasco of Iraq and the present crisis. But plenty of people who call themselves liberals and moderates contributed to war fever. There were “liberal hawks” like Paul Berman or Christopher Hitchens, who had once been ferocious opponents of the Vietnam War. There were 29 Democratic senators, including onetime ’60s activists Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. There were supposedly sober and disinterested journalists, like the editors of the New York Times, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, who eagerly abdicated their roles as watchdogs of democracy and swallowed the Bush administration’s lies. They share culpability.

Of course, none of them will ever be called to account and will continue to fail up as they forever seem to do. All we can do is enjoy the humiliating spectacle of Dick Cheney trying to convince us that blame for the Iraq catastrophe should be assigned to the current administration and not to the one that first lied its way into the disaster.

[vt]

Re: Truth about Bush

Of course these are the same intelligence agencies that missed 9-11, Egypt, and ISIS in Northern Iraq.

I do feel Iraq was a mistake to go into.

[Mn_Mark]

Re: Truth about Bush

I think that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the leadership of his administration were intelligent, well-meaning people operating on the best information they had at the time. Saddam had actually used chemical weapons on his own people, had built a nuclear reactor as part of the process of a nuclear weapons program (which Israel destroyed) and had committed a lot of the worst atrocities most of us have ever heard of. He and his sons were truly quite ruthless, violent, despicable people who anyone with reasonable intelligence -- including most of the leadership of both political parties during the 1990s and 2000s -- could safely assume would be very happy to acquire nuclear or other WMDs and thus help assure their regime of survival against Iran and the West. It was perfectly sensible to assume Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, since he had tried to build them before, and was not cooperating with the sanctions/inspections programs. Some may be too young to remember the endless game-playing he engaged in with the Clinton administration and the U.N., kicking weapons inspectors out of his country, then only letting them back in at the brink of the threat of military action, and then kicking them out again. He made a joke out of the U.N. resolutions that were passed throughout the 1990s. He laughed at the sanctions and inspections and he really showed the U.N. to be quite unable to force him to change. As Bush said, it was nothing but a "debating society".

Keep in mind that we'd also just been caught flat-footed by 9/11, which showed us that hostile Middle Eastern fanatics were quite capable - and willing - to kill as many of us as they could manage.

It is dishonest to look back in hindsight, knowing that no serious weapons program was found after the invasion (it turned out the Saddam probably didn't even know that there was no program, and that he had been lied to by his own people about the actual amount of progress) and assume that the political leadership of the Clinton and Bush administrations were "lying" about the evidence of WMD programs. I imagine that it is much harder to get real evidence out of hostile regimes like Saddam's than armchair quarterbacks here in the West assume. I assume that our leaders have to try to make decisions based on fragmentary evidence and do the best they can.

Before 9/11, the costs of making a wrong assessment about Saddam's capabilities and intent seemed to be nothing more serious that the U.N. looking like impotent fools. After 9/11, the costs of being wrong seemed as though they very well might be a nuclear weapon produced by Saddam and given to terrorists to transport and explode in a U.S. city.

The invasion doesn't seem to have been about "oil" since as far as I know hardly any (if any at all) American oil companies ended up with any oil contracts. Some "war for oil."

The whole "turn Iraq into a friendly democracy like Japan and Germany" mindset is very much a liberal mindset, assuming that all people around the world and all cultures around the world are like white Western liberals and they all want democracy and honest elections. You can blame Bush for wrongly assuming democracy would work in Iraq, but it's the exact same belief that Clinton, Kerry, Pelosi, Obama, and the rest of the liberals believed back before Iraq. The whole neo-con worldview is basically liberal universalism with a little more fiscal responsibility and willingness to use the military.

I think Obama is an overrated narcissist who is wrong in just about every aspect of his political worldview, but I also believe that he is generally trying to do things the best he can see to do them. I think Bush and Cheney were doing the same. (Bush and Cheney had to do it with 90% of the press against them, while Obama has the same 90% on his side.) I think that generally speaking the men who occupy the presidency try to rise to the challenge and do the best they can for the country, as they see it. That doesn't mean they succeed much but I do think that it means that stupid conspiracy theories like "Bush lied, people died" are just wrong. I don't think the real world is full of cookie-cutter bad guys like that.

[Raz]

Re: Truth about Bush

This is how these gentlemen work. Reagan's national security staff wanted justification for their planned massive military buildup. The intelligence agencies did not give it to them, so they made some up. Fast forward to 2001 with the Bush Jr. administration and you have nearly the same cast of characters reprising their roles.

Wish I could agree with you on this point, Woodsman, but I can't.
I remember those times very well, and I don't believe Reagan's team "made it up".

The Soviets were fielding powerful offensive forces in Central Europe and continued to enlarge these forces without any justification whatsoever as to legitimate defensive needs.

One of the finest public servants our nation ever had was Harold Brown. He's quoted on page 2 of the attached article.
(I subscribed to Foreign Affairs from 1976 until 1996 and have the hard copy of the issue where this article originally appeared.)

Dr. Brown said: "When we build, they build; when we stop, they build." Brown was right to kill the B-1 Bomber program and it was a colossal waste that Reagan brought it back - the plane was nothing but a problem from its first flight - and Brown chose very wisely those other programs and procurements that helped rebuild our military effectiveness under Reagan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_...ry_of_Defense)

Notwithstanding the arrogant idiocy of our invasion of Vietnam - asserting our troops into an Asian civil war - the Soviets were sending huge amounts of weaponry to guerrillas in Africa along with a large army of Cuban regulars in attempts to overthrow numerous governments throughout that continent, and not all of them because of apartheid.
The Soviets were also feeding money to Communist parties in Italy and France and clearly had intentions of "Finlandizing" NATO governments en masse.

I believe the military threat from the Soviets was real.

[flintlock]

Re: Phuoc Long Redux

Bush was "Stupid like a Fox". In other words, he found it was easier to pretend to be ignorant on some issues when it suited him. He or people around him had an agenda and he was at least smart enough to place responsibility on the "experts" so if things went wrong there was a political out for him. He also suffered from hubris and an oversimplified view of the world. A trait not uncommon in politicians. People confuse quick wit and speaking ability with intelligence. They are not always the same. Some of his bumbling in speaking engagements was an attempt to sound down to earth and not the child of wealth and privilege he actually was. Its also possible he was often tired and stressed and some people do not handle that so well, or fail to become cautious enough when they are in that state. Slicker politicians like Obama may come off as smarter but I'm not sure he is. Both probably lack the deep thinking actually needed for the job and are just along for the ideological ride, pushed by handlers and supporters who run things behind the scenes much more than people realize. Both have made clumsy attempts to "change the world", when in reality all most of the world wants is someone who won't muck it up. Harvard and Yale don't graduate idiots, even with the right connections and affirmative action. But then overconfidence can look a lot like idiocy at times.

[Woodsman]

Re: Truth about Bush

Wish I could agree with you on this point, Woodsman, but I can't....I believe the military threat from the Soviets was real.

Don't assume that I didn't see them as a competitor and potential threat, Raz. I suppose where we differ is how serious a threat they posed and how prepared we were, say in 1976, to deal with it whenever and wherever it might have presented itself. Things were never as desperate as the Team B guys would have had us believe, I think.

Ancient history, in any case, with the Sovs gone kaput.

[astonas]

Re: Phuoc Long Redux

Harvard and Yale don't graduate idiots, even with the right connections and affirmative action. But then overconfidence can look a lot like idiocy at times.

Actually, the unfortunate truth is that they can, and do.

One of the dirty little secrets of academia in general is that very little of the difference between schools lies in the teaching or examinations that occur there. (This connects somewhat to the education bubble that has been written about a great deal on this site.)

More selective schools are able to filter out a greater fraction of the population, and therefore wind up with a more ambitious and/or talented student body. It is this, and not the schools' curriculum or opportunities, that provide for improved career prospects. One fascinating study looked specifically at students who were admitted to -- but did not attend -- Ivy League schools. It found that their career arcs (initial pay, raises, promotions, etc.) were more closely correlated to the top tier school's graduates' than students who actually did graduate from Ivy League schools, but were admitted for non-academic reasons. Why you got in does matter, perhaps more than anything else.

So the value of a Harvard or Yale education has more to do with it being a badge of how hard it is to get in, than what you experience there. If one is a dim student who got in due to family connections, one probably wouldn't have much trouble graduating at all. That also means that the fact that one graduated says next to nothing about whether or not one is an idiot, unless an examiner also looks at how one was admitted. The merit-based scholarship kid probably has a lot more going on than the legacy or affirmative action kid, regardless of the school attended.

It's a minor point perhaps, but important to remember before one shells out too much to attend a super-premium school. Whether and how you get in there actually matters more than whether you actually go there. (Assuming of course, that you still get actual training somewhere.)

[Woodsman]

Re: Truth about Bush

I think that Bush, Cheney, and the rest of the leadership of his administration were intelligent, well-meaning people operating on the best information they had at the time. Saddam had actually used chemical weapons on his own people, had built a nuclear reactor as part of the process of a nuclear weapons program (which Israel destroyed) and had committed a lot of the worst atrocities most of us have ever heard of.

Sure they are, only the reality of it is a bit less tidy.

Bush Secret Effort Helped Iraq Build Its War Machine : Persian Gulf: Documents show that 9 months before Hussein's invasion of Kuwait the President approved $1 billion in aid. Objections from others were suppressed.
February 23, 1992|DOUGLAS FRANTZ and MURRAY WAAS | SPECIAL TO THE TIMES; Frantz is a Times staff writer and Waas is a special correspondent.

WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1989, at a time when Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was only nine months away and Saddam Hussein was desperate for money to buy arms, President Bush signed a top-secret National Security Decision directive ordering closer ties with Baghdad and opening the way for $1 billion in new aid, according to classified documents and interviews....In addition to clearing the way for new financial aid, senior Bush aides as late as the spring of 1990 overrode concern among other government officials and insisted that Hussein continue to be allowed to buy so-called "dual use" technology--advanced equipment that could be used for both civilian and military purposes. The Iraqis were given continued access to such equipment, despite emerging evidence that they were working on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction.

That's how things work here in the United States of Amnesia.

He and his sons were truly quite ruthless, violent, despicable people who anyone with reasonable intelligence -- including most of the leadership of both political parties during the 1990s and 2000s -- could safely assume would be very happy to acquire nuclear or other WMDs and thus help assure their regime of survival against Iran and the West. It was perfectly sensible to assume Saddam wanted nuclear weapons, since he had tried to build them before, and was not cooperating with the sanctions/inspections programs.

But do we repeat the mistakes of the past because we're led by idiots or ruthless practitioners of realpolitik? And is there a meaningful difference?

Exclusive: Saddam key in early CIA plot
By RICHARD SALE, UPI Intelligence Correspondent | April 10, 2003 at 7:30 PM

U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials...According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements. Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.

What I object to is how easily we accept the gauze being laid over our eyes.

Some may be too young to remember the endless game-playing he engaged in with the Clinton administration and the U.N., kicking weapons inspectors out of his country, then only letting them back in at the brink of the threat of military action, and then kicking them out again. He made a joke out of the U.N. resolutions that were passed throughout the 1990s. He laughed at the sanctions and inspections and he really showed the U.N. to be quite unable to force him to change. As Bush said, it was nothing but a "debating society".

You would think folks would be less credulous, but alas no.

Exclusive: CIA Files Prove America Helped Saddam as He Gassed Iran
The U.S. knew Hussein was launching some of the worst chemical attacks in history -- and still gave him a hand.

The U.S. government may be considering military action in response to chemical strikes near Damascus. But a generation ago, America's military and intelligence communities knew about and did nothing to stop a series of nerve gas attacks far more devastating than anything Syria has seen, Foreign Policy has learned.
In 1988, during the waning days of Iraq's war with Iran, the United States learned through satellite imagery that Iran was about to gain a major strategic advantage by exploiting a hole in Iraqi defenses. U.S. intelligence officials conveyed the location of the Iranian troops to Iraq, fully aware that Hussein's military would attack with chemical weapons, including sarin, a lethal nerve agent.

I suppose it's a natural and normal psychological response, like projection.

Keep in mind that we'd also just been caught flat-footed by 9/11, which showed us that hostile Middle Eastern fanatics were quite capable - and willing - to kill as many of us as they could manage.

It is dishonest to look back in hindsight, knowing that no serious weapons program was found after the invasion (it turned out the Saddam probably didn't even know that there was no program, and that he had been lied to by his own people about the actual amount of progress) and assume that the political leadership of the Clinton and Bush administrations were "lying" about the evidence of WMD programs. I imagine that it is much harder to get real evidence out of hostile regimes like Saddam's than armchair quarterbacks here in the West assume. I assume that our leaders have to try to make decisions based on fragmentary evidence and do the best they can.

Before 9/11, the costs of making a wrong assessment about Saddam's capabilities and intent seemed to be nothing more serious that the U.N. looking like impotent fools. After 9/11, the costs of being wrong seemed as though they very well might be a nuclear weapon produced by Saddam and given to terrorists to transport and explode in a U.S. city.

And that's all the more so when we've been put into a state of near constant terror.

Report: Documents Disclose 9/11 Warnings
National Journal
By Matt Vasilogambros
September 11, 2012 8:51 AM

Documents show the U.S. was given more warnings about potential terrorist attacks in the weeks leading up to 9/11, writes Vanity Fair contributing editor Kurt Eichenwald in a New York Times op-ed...The direct warnings to Bush, he writes, date back to the spring of 2001. On May 1, the CIA told the White House that there was “a group presently in the United States” that was planning an attack. On June 22, a daily briefing described the attack as "imminent." Administration officials, however, dismissed the warnings, saying that Osama bin Laden was merely feigning an attack to distract the U.S. from efforts against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

But with all the lies piled on top of each other since 1947; is it any wonder we find ourselves completely flummoxed?

The invasion doesn't seem to have been about "oil" since as far as I know hardly any (if any at all) American oil companies ended up with any oil contracts. Some "war for oil."

Still, it's the same cast of cast of characters (family businesses are like that) using the same playbook; you'd think most of us would have been on to the game by now.

Western oil firms remain as US exits Iraq
The end of the US military occupation does not mean Iraqis have full control of their oil.
Dahr Jamail Last Modified: 07 Jan 2012 18:45

Baghdad, Iraq - While the US military has formally ended its occupation of Iraq, some of the largest western oil companies, ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, remain. On November 27, 38 months after Royal Dutch Shell announced its pursuit of a massive gas deal in southern Iraq, the oil giant had its contract signed for a $17bn flared gas deal. Three days later, the US-based energy firm Emerson submitted a bid for a contract to operate at Iraq's giant Zubair oil field, which reportedly holds some eight million barrels of oil. Earlier this year, Emerson was awarded a contract to provide crude oil metering systems and other technology for a new oil terminal in Basra, currently under construction in the Persian Gulf, and the company is installing control systems in the power stations in Hilla and Kerbala. Iraq's supergiant Rumaila oil field is already being developed by BP, and the other supergiant reserve, Majnoon oil field, is being developed by Royal Dutch Shell. Both fields are in southern Iraq."Prior to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, US and other western oil companies were all but completely shut out of Iraq's oil market," oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz told Al Jazeera. "But thanks to the invasion and occupation, the companies are now back inside Iraq and producing oil there for the first time since being forced out of the country in 1973."

But no. We never seem to catch on.

The whole "turn Iraq into a friendly democracy like Japan and Germany" mindset is very much a liberal mindset, assuming that all people around the world and all cultures around the world are like white Western liberals and they all want democracy and honest elections. You can blame Bush for wrongly assuming democracy would work in Iraq, but it's the exact same belief that Clinton, Kerry, Pelosi, Obama, and the rest of the liberals believed back before Iraq. The whole neo-con worldview is basically liberal universalism with a little more fiscal responsibility and willingness to use the military.

Considering everything eventually winds up in a useless and false liberal/conservative frame, I'm amazed we can put our socks on each morning.

I think Obama is an overrated narcissist who is wrong in just about every aspect of his political worldview, but I also believe that he is generally trying to do things the best he can see to do them. I think Bush and Cheney were doing the same. (Bush and Cheney had to do it with 90% of the press against them, while Obama has the same 90% on his side.) I think that generally speaking the men who occupy the presidency try to rise to the challenge and do the best they can for the country, as they see it. That doesn't mean they succeed much but I do think that it means that stupid conspiracy theories like "Bush lied, people died" are just wrong. I don't think the real world is full of cookie-cutter bad guys like that.

If only the left/right continuum were as reliable as the continuum between one administration and the next when it comes to the fundamentals.

The Rewards of Continuity Between Bush and Obama Policies
By DANIEL LARISON • September 14, 2012, 12:42 PM

Ross Douthat writes:

The problem isn’t apologies, but wishful thinking, and particularly the belief that this president’s identity and eloquence could enable the United States to transcend the hard realities of power politics that have long made us so disliked across the Middle East.

So the problem isn’t a baseless misrepresentation of administration policy. The real problem is a caricature of that policy that virtually no one has ever believed would work and was scarcely tried. This is not a very good description of what the U.S. has done in the last three and a half years. This description of administration conduct bears almost no resemblance to what the administration has done. One reason why U.S. favorability in many of these countries has not improved very much is that the U.S. has continued doing most of the things that generated resentment and hostility in the past. The nations that have been least sympathetic to U.S. policies in the past were never going to become sympathetic to them because of a change in leadership. That was a delusion shared by a few of Obama’s most optimistic supporters, but that delusion hasn’t been discernibly shaping policy.

Or as dependable as our tendency to back our team no matter what the reality.

[flintlock]

Re: Phuoc Long Redux

You are probably correct about that. But "idiots" graduating is probably an exaggeration. GWB's IQ would have to be at least a little above idiot. As a father of two kids starting college next year, I have come to the same conclusion that the career prospects may have more to do with the more ambitious and talented students than the curriculum. The connections available alone must be fantastic. How many "average" college kids will get to rub elbows with the sons of CEOs and other VIPs? My niece's( herself a Brown student) boyfriend attends Harvard and as a Junior just had lunch with the owner of a major league team. He wants to go into sport's management. Your average community college kid will almost never get that kind of opportunity. Even my teenage daughter realizes that just getting in is half the game. She got a taste of being around highly motivated students in the DUKE TIP program and it changed her completely. Not my cup of tea, but she is almost fanatical about school now. I can't help but wonder how healthy it is in the long haul.

[Raz]

Re: Truth about Bush

Don't assume that I didn't see them as a competitor and potential threat, Raz. I suppose where we differ is how serious a threat they posed and how prepared we were, say in 1976, to deal with it whenever and wherever it might have presented itself. Things were never as desperate as the Team B guys would have had us believe, I think.

Ancient history, in any case, with the Sovs gone kaput.

I didn't think for a moment that you saw them as "harmless". But I think you saw them as more of a competitor while I viewed them as a menace. And while we've been lead by some rather sordid and foolish men since the end of WW II, and have seen our country do some bad things during the Cold War, there's one thing that clearly showed the difference between us and them: we never had to fortify our borders and build walls to keep our people in.

And I wish it truly was ancient history - it would be except for the fools in our government like McCain and Obama.
NOTHING could happen in the Ukraine that would cause a threat to our security and the whole sorry mess is none of our damn business!

[jk]

Re: Truth about Bush

anyone who lived through the cuban missile crisis knows the reality of the threat posed by the us-ussr rivalry. of course, we had already placed intermediate range jupiters in turkey, which is what led to khrushchev's decision, so our hands were not clean.

and i agree that building walls to keep people in, versus building fences to try to keep them out is a very telling comparison

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: Truth about Bush

...NOTHING could happen in the Ukraine that would cause a threat to our security and the whole sorry mess is none of our damn business!

+1

[astonas]

Re: Phuoc Long Redux

You are probably correct about that. But "idiots" graduating is probably an exaggeration. GWB's IQ would have to be at least a little above idiot. As a father of two kids starting college next year, I have come to the same conclusion that the career prospects may have more to do with the more ambitious and talented students than the curriculum. The connections available alone must be fantastic. How many "average" college kids will get to rub elbows with the sons of CEOs and other VIPs? My niece's( herself a Brown student) boyfriend attends Harvard and as a Junior just had lunch with the owner of a major league team. He wants to go into sport's management. Your average community college kid will almost never get that kind of opportunity. Even my teenage daughter realizes that just getting in is half the game. She got a taste of being around highly motivated students in the DUKE TIP program and it changed her completely. Not my cup of tea, but she is almost fanatical about school now. I can't help but wonder how healthy it is in the long haul.

Connections are certainly one of the few real advantages of the top-ranked undergraduate institutions, and it's great that your family has been able to benefit. Many students don't realize that fact, and thus fail to take full advantage.

As far as the health of focusing on school, I can only suggest that most parents would love to be worried about what you are right now. Of course anything can be taken to far, but having a drive to work hard and do well is probably one of the most important things to learn, and learning it young is usually a great thing! Congratulations! ;)



I know this may be even more more tangential than my last post, but since I've already splintered the thread (sorry about that!) I figured I may as well go for broke. This was in the NY Times today:

Americans Think We Have the World’s Best Colleges. We Don’t.

It underlines the theme that what students are getting from college really isn't even average, let alone exceptional, unless they are doing research in one of our top graduate schools. (That's what those "reputation" ratings are really about.) Here's the graph from the article:

American College Graduates, Trailing in Math Skills

Average score on numeracy test, among 16- to 29-year-olds with bachelor's degree

Austria

Flanders (Belgium)

Finland

Czech Republic

Japan

Sweden

Germany

Netherlands

Estonia

France

Average

Slovak Republic

Denmark

Norway

Canada

Korea

United States

Australia

England/N. Ireland

Ireland

Poland

Cyprus

Italy

Spain

Russian Federation

326

325

322

318

318

318

314

314

308

306

305

304

304

303

301

297

296

296

296

292

289

287

287

283

283

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development





Perhaps one lesson is to consider the possibility of studying abroad until graduate school?

[Prazak]

Re: Truth about Bush

this was/has always been one of my biggest pet peeves about how the lamestream media chooses/likes to 'frame' their coverage, along with their targets - and i use the term in both of its meanings - and again - NOT that i'm attempting to defend geedubya, but the lamestream media has dumped a lot of blame on him - for things that developed (and couldve been stopped) during wild bill's 'magnificent' run inside the beltway - and how little we've heard lately (like since '09 and particularly since '12) about "the worst prez ever" - and we wont even get into the current occupant's lack of any real experience - of even ever holding a REAL job - vs geedubya's background - who at the very least was a popular 2 term governor ie: the CEO of one the largest state economies in The US (vs a not-even-one-term senate backbencher like the community-organizer-in-chief)

one of the earlier op/ed commentaries eye remember about him was along the lines of 'his resenting his eastern establishment/yale background etc' and not wanting to 'playball' the way his father had (or words to that effect, or at least my recollection of it) and why he ended up in TX (and kinda sorta same reason yers truly is no longer in new england)



exactly - with some of his most outspoken political rivals having been RIGHT THERE WITH HIM and voting FOR IT (at least until they flipflopped after the fact and voted against it, like john F(raud) kerry so famously did) - see my earlier post for some of the more... uhhh.... memorable comments/rhetoric on this

and even more HILARIOUS is how the same lamestream media likes to ignore how geedubya's predecessor's appointed types screwups are haunting us even TODAY

and like i asked woody the other day (on this same thread, above) - we keep hearing about what the current occupant's 'inherited' - but i dont recall ever hearing any of that from geedubya&co - do you?

they also dont seem at all interested in CONNECTING *ANY* OF THE MANY DOTS that suggest theres a veritable ICEBERGS worth of questions that they continue to ignore

again - its also why:

I was just re-watching this nearly at the same time as reading your entry, Lek: http://billmoyers.com/content/buying...n=buyingthewar

It's a long view, but I think you'll enjoy it -- because it is an indictment of the mainstream media's inside-the-beltway groupthink, corporate conflicts-of-interest, and the self-interested careerism of individual journalists -- even if it reaches conclusions that differ from yours.