Raimondo on the Punditland Holloweeners (Tom Ricks)
Mort Zuckerman
emcsw...@niaid.nih.gov, afa...@niaid.nih.gov,
Spin...@yahoogroups.com, kshe...@calea.org, fit...@gmail.com,
patrick.f...@usdoj.gov, model...@sbcglobal.net,
jdr...@nejm.org, let...@courant.com, Jgerb...@cdc.gov,
michae...@po.state.ct.us, con...@po.state.ct.us, executive-
edi...@nytimes.com, managin...@nytimes.com, news-
ti...@nytimes.com, the-...@nytimes.com, biz...@nytimes.com,
for...@nytimes.com, nati...@nytimes.com, dv...@cdc.gov,
brigidc...@optonline.net, tr...@hotmail.com, illino...@aol.com,
jle...@courant.com, tinaj...@yahoo.com, jhorn...@fff.org,
thomas...@usdoj.gov, thoma...@po.state.ct.us,
kur...@washpost.com, georg...@washpost.com, p...@allegorypress.com,
commissi...@po.state.ct.us, brans...@comcast.net,
vts...@comcast.net, o...@po.state.ct.us, freet...@charter.net,
scott....@po.state.ct.us, govern...@po.state.ct.us,
attorney...@po.state.ct.us, randall...@usdoj.gov,
Robert....@yale.edu, edi...@greenwich-post.com,
harol...@yale.edu
Cc: fra...@ucia.gov, dr-ahma...@president.ir,
eugener...@washpost.com, afa...@niaid.nih.gov,
bmi...@newstimes.com, tr...@hotmail.com, rast...@aol.com,
billc...@gmail.com, amcg...@rms-law.com, rjmu...@aol.com,
paulcrai...@yahoo.com, sidney_b...@yahoo.com,
criminal...@usdoj.gov, karla.d...@usdoj.gov,
christophe...@usdoj.gov, richar...@yale.edu,
harol...@yale.edu, james.p...@yale.edu, inq...@aldf.com,
ly...@idsociety.org
Subject: Raimondo on the Punditland Holloweeners (Tom Ricks)
Date: May 11, 2009 4:13 AM
ARTICLE BELOW
======================
The bankster and Israeli wussies are afraid
of losing their Saudi petrodollar arrangement.
Since 1971, when the dollar's demise was set up
by Heiney Kissinger and Richard Nixon (clearly
there were other players in the CFR, Trilateral
Commission, etc), we've seen a roll-out of stunts
that revolve around dressing up Anglo-Israeli
petrodollar banksters' desires.
It's sort of like Hollywood-and-Halloween or
some other parade, like Mardi Gras. *We're* always
dressing up as some sort of Almighty crusaders...
and the owners of the oil are dressed up as monsters.
There can't be any other way. There is no other
way to cheat people out of their stuff. The best
example of it, probably, is Israel as a "democracy,"
when we know it is nothing more than a forward
petrodollar base.
The best thing to do when the warmongers put a new
costume either on the USA or the people whose stuff
we want, is to ask them what we could do if there was
no oil? and force them to answer the question.
If they can answer it (without violating the Ten
Commandments), THEN you have an expert.
This is cowardice:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/17/opinion/17brooks.html
"We can all think of reasons that Israeli culture should have evolved
into a reticence-free zone, and that the average behavior should be
different here. This is a tough, scrappy country, perpetually fighting
for survival. The most emotionally intense experiences are national
ones, so the public-private distinction was bound to erode. Moreover,
the status system doesn’t really revolve around money. ***It consists
of trying to prove you are savvier than everybody else, that above all
you are nobody’s patsy.***"
They're AFRAID someone will abuse their
kindness and think it stupidity. They're
AFRAID of being taken advantage of.
FEAR, FEAR, FEAR, SCARE, SCARE, SCARE
If we Americans were not *cowards,* we would
not drink this Kool-Aid. If we were grown ups
we would decide it was us who was responsible
for our inability to think up any other actionplans
than to get rid of the people whose stuff we want.
If we were not cowards, we would have no fear
of Russia aligning with China, Iran, and the
other oil producers.
'We would not be like Dick Cheney, who is furious
over the failed 911 stunt for oil. Cheney thinks
Americans are not cowardly ENOUGH!! We should
be slamming the "bad guys" around harder!!
Rockefeller taught Cheney that the world's resources
will not support the current and growing world
population, which is to then assume "extra people"
are the problem, rather than the lack of intellectual
prowess in dealing with feeding them all.
This FEAR over the alleged population/resources problem
(the fear comes from asking oneself the questions, "How
am *I* going to get *MINE?*" "If *I* have to compete for
*stuff,* how am I going to do it?") is the very thing
preventing us from solving this alleged problem.
You have to remember that none of the Rockefellers
were any Einsteins. They're Baptist/Germans who look
down their noses at people who they think aren't working
hard enough. And they also think scholars are fairies
who do reading and thinking in order to get out of
physical labor. At a higher level, scholars and thinkers
(scientists and engineers) might produce an idea
that these banksters - the controllers - can't manage.
Remember that that was the issue over which we
Paperclipped NAZI German scientists. The Rockys
and the Israelis now simply terrorize the thinkers
into silence.
Or, in the case of Iran, these plutocrats think they
can threaten to bomb them back into the Stone Age
which is, of course, also intended to "send a message"
to any other POS little countries who have stuff
we want.
This character is talking about himself:
http://www.carlisle.army.mil/USAWC/parameters/97summer/peters.htm
"The contemporary expansion of available information is immeasurable,
uncontainable, and destructive to individuals and entire cultures
unable to master it. The radical fundamentalists--the bomber in
Jerusalem or Oklahoma City, the moral terrorist on the right or the
dictatorial multiculturalist on the left--are all brothers and
sisters, all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and
alienated by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or
ambitions. They ache to return to a golden age that never existed, or
to create a paradise of their own restrictive design. They no longer
understand the world, and their fear is volatile."
See it?
"...all threatened by change, terrified of the future, and alienated
by information they cannot reconcile with their lives or ambitions..."
He's speaking for Cheney and Rocky and their
Middle Eastern Wingnut wing, Israel. *THEY'RE*
afraid technology will get out of their control.
KMDickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
========================================
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2009/05/10/the-rule-of-the-experts/
Tom Ricks can kiss my a**
by Justin Raimondo, May 11, 2009
Email This | Print This | Share This | Comment
The idea that we should be governed by "experts" goes back a long way,
all the way to Plato, advocate of rule by philosopher-kings, who, in
their wisdom, would reign over the common herd of humanity – for our
own good, of course. More recently, the idea was picked up by various
would-be saviors of mankind on the Right as well as the Left. During
the Great Depression, a time when all sorts of half-baked "experts"
arose armed with panaceas, the idea reached its apotheosis in the form
of Technocracy, a movement founded by Howard Scott, which championed a
dictatorship of scientists and engineers. They would know how to fix
the broken gears of a shattered economy and set things right!
Such ideas were in the air, a byproduct of a society that had lost its
economic and social bearings and was veering out of control. The whole
concept of expertise, of a class of professional know-it-alls whose
collective wisdom could be mined and used to rebuild the socio-
economic structure, was taken up by the Roosevelt administration. FDR
and his advisers happily went along with the media’s characterization
of the president’s "Brain Trust," whose braininess would save the
nation. Ever since that time we have been infested with a plague of
"experts," all of them self-appointed, who are trotted out whenever
the Powers That Be want to pull the wool over the eyes of the American
people.
We saw this kind of operation in action during the run-up to the
invasion of Iraq, when the Bush administration unleashed its own
"experts" on the airwaves and the op-ed pages of the nation’s
newspapers. Drawn from the Washington swamp of neoconservative think-
tanks and covertly subsidized "journalists," this cadre of self-
appointed Iraqologists, laptop bombardiers, and armchair field
marshals were certain Saddam was hiding weapons of mass destruction.
Furthermore, they had solid "evidence" of his links to al-Qaeda, and
they knew – they just knew – that unless we stopped him the entire
region would be drawn into a general conflagration.
Today, of course, we know there were no weapons of mass destruction
and no links to al-Qaeda, and the general conflagration now taking
shape in the region is directly traceable to our invasion of Iraq.
Whatever was possible to get wrong, these experts got wrong.
Spearheaded by Bill Kristol and his Project for a New American
Century, the War Party readily supplied bookers for CNN, MSNBC, and
Fox with all the "experts" they needed, and more, from the wacka-
doodle-doo Laurie Mylroie, who blames Saddam Hussein for everything
but the Kennedy assassination and the Teapot Dome Scandal, to the self-
assured little gnome himself, who blithely assured television
audiences that the Iraqis would greet us as "liberators," crying tears
of joy.
Sometimes these assembled talking heads would differ among themselves,
but only over specific details, never challenging the basic
assumptions behind U.S. policy in the Middle East – a policy seemingly
intent on enforcing U.S.-Israeli domination of the region. No other
views were allowed on national television, and when Phil Donahue was
one of the few to raise his head and challenge the consensus of
experts, he was quickly canned by MSNBC, his long history as a
successful and pioneering television talk show host sacrificed on the
altar of the war god. (By the way: it is one of the most sickening
examples of hypocrisy I know of that MSNBC, which now presents itself
as edgy-lefty – when it isn’t shilling for the Obama administration,
that is – hasn’t reinstated Donahue to his proper place in American
television. Instead, we are given – ugh! – The Ed Show. What craven,
clueless cowards these people are!)
In any case, now that the neocons have been driven out of town on a
rail – supposedly – we have a new bunch of Official Experts in town.
And if you hated the Project for a New American Century you’re going
to despise the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the freshly
minted Washington think-tank that seems to have been granted the
foreign policy franchise by the Obama administration.
I have written about their nation-building counter-insurgency doctrine
at length: it is based on the alleged success of the Iraqi surge – or
Surge, as our columnist Kelley Vlahos terms it – and its principal
author is Gen. David Petraeus, the Bush administration’s Caesar-like
figure whose exploits are now claimed by both parties.
The Bushies may be out of power, but their dream of a regional
transformation in the Middle East lives on in the CNAS-Petraeus COIN
strategy, whose advocates boast of their ability to effect change on
whole societies. It is a liberal version of the same old imperialist
game, this time played in the name of global uplift. It is
neoconservatism with a human face.
These left-neocons have their own cadre of experts, who are trotted
out to imbue our current wrong-headed policy of escalating the Afghan
war and dragging in Pakistan with an aura of faux credibility.
Prominent among these is Tom Ricks, the Washington Post’s Pentagon
correspondent and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American
Security. Like most of our vaunted experts, Ricks hates having his
credibility challenged, and he especially hates it when… well, let him
tell it:
"Antiwar.com rolls in touting Col. Gian Gentile as an unrecognized
savior and slams CNAS for being having several people (Nagl,
Kilcullen, Exum, me) being focussed on counterinsurgency. Note to
bloggers: This is what happens when someone writes about an area about
which they know absolutely freaking nothing. This is one reason, for
example, I try to avoid writing about, among other things, basketball,
golf, cats, oboes, scuba diving, physics, Maxwell’s demon, electric
cars, farming, abstract sculpture, the works of Anthony Powell, South
America, or Buddhism."
Notice the characteristic response of the Professional Expert when he
stumbles on an idea that doesn’t fit into his paradigm: the argument
from authority. Come to think of it, this is the expert’s response to
anything and anyone that challenges his basic assumptions: they don’t
know what they’re talking about! After all, I’m the expert!
Ricks is the product of an inbred, Washington-centric, tunnel-
visioned, technocratic elite who are so wired into the fast-fading
dream of an American empire that they can’t recognize how quickly it
is disintegrating, even as they draw up their bold plans to expand it.
They are so completely oblivious to reality that they truly can’t
comprehend how anyone could possibly disagree with their most
reasonable plans to subjugate vast swathes of central Asia, to wit:
"What’s Antiwar’s point here? Bad on CNAS, I guess, for being
interested in issues like protecting the population. I mean, does
Antiwar.com understand what it is advocating here? I’ve seen how the
U.S. military operated in Iraq in 2003-06, and I really think we don’t
want to go back to that approach. (I actually was embedded with Col.
Gentile’s unit in February 2006, and remember asking him why his unit
operated on a big FOB instead of being based out among the people.)"
The column that got under Ricks’ skin was by Kelley Vlahos, who
interviewed Col. Gentile – director of the military history division
at West Point and a former cavalry squadron commander in Iraq – and
gave a platform to his trenchant critique of the nation-building,
ultra-interventionist doctrines promoted by the CNAS and Ricks, the
flavor of which can be ascertained by this snippet from his piece
[.pdf] in the current Joint Forces Quarterly:
“Retired Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl, author of Learning to Eat
Soup With a Knife, is so cocksure of the efficacy of Army combat power
that he believes it will have the ability not only to dominate land
warfare in general but also to ‘change entire societies.’ … We are
organizing ourselves around the principle of nationbuilding rather
than fighting. For defense thinkers such as Nagl, that principle has
turned into a synthetic consensus. To repeat, how else can one explain
his most profound and deeply troubling statement that the Army, in the
future, will have the capability to ‘change entire societies’? In this
sense, the caricature of Nagl as a ‘crusader’ seems correct.”
Nagl is the new president of the CNAS, now that co-founder Michele
Flournoy has been appointed to take Doug Feith’s old position at the
Pentagon. With other CNAS alumni flooding into the Obama
administration, it’s just like old times again – except for the faces
and the names. There’s a "New American" something-or-other operating
not too far behind the scenes, armed with a doctrine [.pdf] that
justifies a policy of perpetual war. It’s the same old same old,
albeit this time presented under the rubric of "pragmatic" liberalism.
Ricks wants to know "what’s the point?" Okay, then, here it is: we’re
against your war. No matter how progressive its execution may be, no
matter how enlightened, we’re against it and will continue to be
against it no matter how many self-proclaimed experts vouch for it. We
oppose it because, contra Obama, yourself, Nagl, Flournoy, et al., the
tribal groupings that inhabit the isolated areas we have targeted
present no credible threat to the security of the continental United
States. We are told that Osama bin Laden is present in the area, yet
no evidence of this has been presented to the public by U.S.
policymakers. If they know where he is, why don’t they just go in
there, grab him – or kill him – and be done with it? But of course
they wouldn’t be done with it, because they’ll never be done with it –
not unless and until the American people rise up and say "Enough!"
Ricks just doesn’t get it, but there ought to be a clue in our web
address: Antiwar.com. I know it’s subtle, but you would expect a smart
guy like Ricks – an acknowledged expert-of-all-experts – to have
caught on. In his post on the web site of Foreign Policy magazine, he
cites "a colleague" – no doubt a fellow expert – who purportedly said:
"So let’s get this straight: Antiwar.com promotes Gian Gentile, who
argues that we should conduct COIN in the form of 19th-century British
punitive raids, as the Army’s shining light. Ergo, Antiwar.com is in
favor of more Predator drone strikes and ‘direct action’
counterterrorism?"
In his own voice, Ricks avers: "Good question, Antiwar.com."
This is how we are supposed to be framing the question: it’s not
whether we should be bombing Afghanistan, but how. Confined to those
parameters, the "debate" is meaningless, but I’ll answer Ricks anyway.
Yes, given our druthers, we’re in favor of smaller-scale military
operations that take on actual enemies, i.e., specific evildoers such
as Osama bin Laden. Our record is clear: see our first response to
9/11 posted on the very day of that horrific event. "Kill them and get
out" – that was our prescription, and if we’d gone that route instead
of sending our military rampaging through the Middle East like a gang
of thugs on a wild expedition, we’d all be a lot better off.
We oppose the Predator strikes, however, because we oppose our very
presence in Afghanistan and our violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, a
policy that can only destabilize an already tenuous Pakistani state
and cause the roiling cauldron of that country’s politics to boil over
into a regional catastrophe. The U.S. should lay off Pakistan,
withdraw from Afghanistan, and hurry up and get the heck out of Iraq.
If the Obamaites know the whereabouts of bin Laden, let them launch a
special operations task force to take him and his cohorts out, not
that that will destroy the global jihad he launched against us. But it
will satisfy the political requirements of exacting revenge – which is
what the war in Afghanistan is all about – and give Obama a huge jump
in the polls.
The nation-building, moral uplift goody-two-shoes variety of
imperialism is all the rage in Washington these days, but it sounds
suspiciously like the early war propaganda of the Bush administration,
which kept prattling on about how many damned schools they were
building while suicide bombers were blowing up half of Baghdad and the
insurgents – formerly known as the "dead-enders" – were taking over
entire provinces.
What especially grates on the nerves is this claim that our occupying
army in Afghanistan is charged with "protecting" the people of that
war-torn country. Which brings to mind the old complaint raised
against would-be "benevolent" despots the world over: Who will protect
us from our protectors? It naturally doesn’t occur to Ricks and his
fellow theorists of liberal counterinsurgency doctrine that the people
wouldn’t need to be protected from the effects of war if we hadn’t
invaded and occupied their country.
Clear, hold, and build: that’s the essence of the counterinsurgency
doctrine Ricks is so eager to defend. Clear the country of all
opposition, hold the territory, and build a compliant regime totally
dependent on the U.S. for its military defense and economic survival,
an American protectorate in a region where Russia, China, and India
glare at one another over oft-disputed borders. It is a process that
will take decades and provide plenty of work and government subsidies
for a whole bunch of folks – not the least of whom are Ricks and his
pals at the CNAS.
The rule of the self-appointed "experts" – God, I’m so sick and tired
of it I could puke. And I bet you’re sick of it, too. Well, one way to
challenge their rule, and get under the skin of the Tom Ricks types,
is to make a donation to this web site. You see, unlike Ricks and his
colleagues in the War Party, we don’t have generously funded
foundations with millions of dollars backing us up and making sure we
stay in operation. We don’t have the "prestige" of the Washington
Post, which supports America’s foreign policy of endless intervention
everywhere, yet they feel they have to take us on, anyway. And of
course they do have to, because we present the most cogent, the most
consistent, and the most widely-read critique of U.S. foreign policy
anywhere, 24/7. We’re always on the War Party’s case, and they know it
all too well.
That’s why it’s important that we don’t become just another casualty
of the economic downturn. That downturn, by the way, was long
predicted in these pages: it is the logical outcome of our
ridiculously extravagant spending on the military and foreign aid,
which are considered sacrosanct by members of Congress (who take in
big campaign bucks from lobbyists for their support).
What Ricks and his ilk want from the American people is a blank check
– after all, they’re the "experts," they know better, and who are we
peons to question them? Well, Ricks and his fellow "experts" can kiss
my a**, because I have news for them: the reign of the "experts" is
over.
Ricks & Co. just don’t get it. They don’t get the Internet, they don’t
get its implications for the priesthood of expertise, and what’s more
they don’t want to get it. Well, let them stew in their own self-
enclosed universe, where the Kool-Aid is always fresh and the
matchstick edifice that is the American empire will stand forever. Our
job isn’t to convert Ricks. He’s hopeless. Our job is to educate the
American people, and we are having an impact – or else they’d just
ignore us, now wouldn’t they?
Give as much as you can, as soon as you can. Antiwar.com is an
institution worth preserving, and not just because it annoys the heck
out of the bombastic Ricks – although that, in itself, is a perfectly
good reason (as far as I’m concerned) to double your usual
contribution. Or, if you have never contributed, it ought to spur you
to seriously consider it.
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci