Sunday, May 29, 2005

 

Tale of Two Presidents


Brothers under the Skin

[Another light note for your entertainment before we move on to the depressing subject of examining the undeclared motives of the Iraq war]

The president was elected under dubious procedures.
The other country was much smaller than his.
It had helped his country confront an earlier perceived ‘threat’.
He turned against it.
He invaded it under false pretexts.
He claimed he was freeing its people.
He bombed it and devastated it.
He encouraged looting its treasures and establishments.
He abolished the country’s police and army.
He caused the breakdown of law and order.
He encouraged chaos.
He caused the breakdown of all essential services.
He unleashed forces of darkness on that country.
Many people were killed at random.
Survivors lived in fear and misery.
He received words of gratitude from some of its people.
He instituted a government of cronies.
He tried to control it by force.
He failed.
He claimed victory.

Less than a year later, the Iraqi people rose up in arms against him.

The president was elected under dubious procedures.
The other country was much smaller than his.
It had helped his country confront an earlier perceived ‘threat’.
He turned against it.
He invaded it under false pretexts.
He claimed he was freeing its people.
He bombed it and devastated it.
He encouraged looting its treasures and establishments.
He abolished the country’s police and army.
He caused the breakdown of law and order.
He encouraged chaos.
He caused the breakdown of all essential services.
He unleashed forces of darkness on that country.
Many people were killed at random.
Survivors lived in fear and misery.
He received words of gratitude from some of its people.
He instituted a government of cronies.
He tried to control it by force.
He failed.
He claimed victory.

Less than two years later, the American people re-elected him with a higher majority.


Comments:

“Hello” Anon,

I know that you are eager to start on the ‘Undeclared Intentions’. I am not tantalizing you but I’m having trouble being brief! I must have written over 10,000 words on the subject. I certainly was using every spare moment I had to do that! Please allow me a little time to try and either condense the material… or break it down into smaller posts.

Here are the main topics I intend to address:

1. Securing control over a major oil resource
2. Creating a country to neocon design and to “Project for the New American Century” requirements
3. Avenging 9/11
4. Creating a haven for foreign investment in a rich country
5. Eliminating Saddam’s long-term threat
6. Intentional Devastation of Iraq
7. Leading the world into conflict intentionally (or what I call the “Theory of Perpetual War”). This is by far the longest item.
 
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For all of you out there who were worried on my behalf, I'm pleased to announce that I'm back into Blogspot.com. after trying everything else I could think of, I reloaded IE6 from scratch, and that fixed the problem. I reckon I got hit by something malicious.

CHARLES! WHAT WERE YOU UP TO ON THE NIGHT OF 27/5/05?

carry on, Abu, don't mind me.
Circular
 
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Hello Abu Khaleel,
Your phrase 'perpetual war' brought to mind the pamphlet "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch"
written by Immanual Kant in 1795.
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm
I would invite everyone to read this one page 'world constitution' and imagine how it might be realized, rather than debate how human nature makes universal peace impossible(and thereby prove humanity's inevitable, mutual annihilation).
 
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In the jovial spirit of the comment section today, here's a joke I received yesterday. I think it is an old one, but I found it amusing:

Last month the UN did a worldwide survey. The question was: "Could you please give your honest opinion about possible solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world."

The survey was a total failure.

In Africa, nobody knew what "food" meant.
In Eastern Europe, nobody understood what "honestly" meant.
In Western Europe, nobody knew what "shortage" meant.
In China, nobody knew what "opinion" meant.
In the Middle East, nobody knew what "solution" meant.
In the U.S. nobody knew what "the rest of the world" meant.
 
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And in NZ, nobody bothered to answer the survey, we were all too busy watching the Rugby.
The Lions have arrived, along with 20,000 pallid pot-bellied Pommie poofters!
First game on June 4th! Could you put Iraq on hold for a month, Abu?

Charles says, "Our ignorance is really just the latent capacity of our ill used and undefined intellectual capacities."
Charles, when President Bush said that to you about his Government, he was talking PRIVATELY. He didn’t intend for you to repeat it in public.
Circular
 
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“Hello” Anon,

Thank you for that Kant link. I am sure the old man was ridiculed by some people for some of those seemingly naïve principles. But don’t some of them remind you of the basic principles behind the birth of the UN?

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
 
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Circular,

I wish I could.

The wretched country seems to have a mind of it's own ;)
 
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Hello Abu Khaleel,
I think Kant was horrified at how (his)enlightment philosophy of 'reason' had unexpectedly resulted in bloody revolution filling Europe with huge armies and 'glorious' wars, and wanted to get things back on track with strong medicine(morality). After each great carnage (WWI, WWII) there is the usual movement to rationalize the international order, which is inevitably sabotaged by the self-interest of the victors. OTH, Schopenhauer thought the tragedy of life arises from the nature of the Will(represented here admirably by Charles), which constantly urges the individual (or collective) toward the satisfaction of successive goals, none of which can provide permanent satisfaction for the infinite activity of the life force, or Will.
Peace, the absence of the Will, like a rigorous diet has little to recommend it (except Health).
 
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Tell you another thing you could add to your facetious parallels between GW Shrub and Saddam Whosis, Abu - neither of them had much control over their Armies.
This latest nonsense - the "detention" of this Hamid guy - reinforces my contention that the US military hasn’t the faintest idea what it is doing in Iraq. As Juan Cole puts it, a clueless Army led by a clueless Commander-in Chief.
I mean, this guy was an Iraqi bigshot, right, very important person in Iraqi politics? Presumably living in a respectable house in a respectable neighbourhood? So what do George Vader’s Stormtroopers do? Go and knock on the door if they want to talk to him?
Oh no, it’s dawn raid with stun grenades, trash the house, handcuffs all round, hood the guy and stand on his neck for 20 minutes (and this is a man in his seventies.) Hooded ride in a helicopter - what’s with this hooding nonsense, anyway, except for an intention to disorientate, humiliate and intimidate the detainee? As Nadia and I concurred in the previous Blog, for these morons a suspected insurgent is just as good as a real one.
And these US troops haven’t been trained up by former Gestapo or NKVD experts, they all died long ago. This is homegrown American sadism and injustice. First the niggers, now the Sandniggers.
And as Riverbend reminds us, the same thing is happening to hundreds of innocent Iraqis every day - only most of them get to rot in camps for months, before being released without trial or explanation. And it seems the US is now backing up the Iraqi Army who are copying its methods.
With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Circular
 
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There was a lot of debate in the American press late bet basketball last year over whether Barack Obama’s first trip to China was a success, but there was a consensus on one thing: it was best understood in light of the visits to Beijing that other American presidents have made since the seventies. sportsbook We agree. But we do not just mean the 1970s, which is as far back as other commentators tended to go. We think that a look back to the 1870s has at least as much to tell us. When it comes to approaches to some political issues, recent history may be the only place one needs to turn. march madness For a sense of what U.S.-Chinese interactions can reveal about the way global hierarchies change over time, however, it is crucial to move between the present moment (near the end of the first decade of what some insist will be "The Chinese Century") and the late 1800s (when the period often dubbed "The American Century" was about to begin).
http://www.enterbet.com
 
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