[extropy-chat] fight your own mind wars

[Al Brooks]

Bush & Co. wanted more. Even heartless Stalin wanted
more than to conquer Eastern & Middle Europe in '45,
he wanted to liberate those regions from Nazism. All
individuals and groups have a mixture of positive &
negative intentions; all nations have a mixture of
positive & negative intentions. Don't you think you
are going a little far with this 'thousand year
republican reich' stuff?
My main point is you young turks can protest war all
you want, you can move to DC and picket government
buildings; you can stay on the web and write
government officials; 
you can email president at whitehouse.gov
 Protest any way you like but leave me out. I fought
mind wars in the past, now I'm retired. Fight your own
mind wars.

> Because Bush and Co. wanted it all, the oil, the
> military bases, transformative domination of the
> entire region.  They sought nothing less than total
> victory, glory, and confirmation  of the superiority
> of their worldview (the one that turned out to be
> soooo not-reality-based), and the establishment of
> the
> Republican thousand-year reich.  To ward off
> defeatism
> (cf. realism) they peddled a bunch of fables about
> the
> negative consequences of not "staying the course", 
> gloomy prognostications repeated mantra-like til
> accepted as true.  (Repeat something enough
> times...)
> Consider, please, the source, a cabal of sleaze who
> don't even bother to notice whether a statement is
> true or not so long as its utterance furthers their
> agenda.  
> 
> One of these has been the prediction--in the event
> of
> a premature or precipitous withdrawal--of a
> compellingly bad, bloody civil war.  Compelling, in
> the sense of the presumptive conclusion
> that--surprise, surprise--we must "stay the course"
> "as long as it takes".
> 
> So, if it please you, set aside the agenda-serving 
> propaganda, and consider some facts:  
> 
> Simple overflights, with the occasional spasm of
> air-to-ground missile fire, kept the Kurds and Shia
> cozy and safe for what?, eleven years, even though
> Saddam was in control of Iraq.  Now that he's gone
> and
> his security infrastructure trashed; now, with the
> Peshmerga, numbering 100,000 men and the Shia
> militias
> many tens of thousands more, all in tip top shape,
> do
> you really think the insurgents--tankless and
> planeless--are gonna have a field day taking on the
> Kurds and Shia.  Factor into the equation air and
> materiel support from the Americans, and then tell
> me
> whose blood is going to be shed.  Add the option of
> Iranian support (in case the Americans want to bug
> out
> completely), and  you have Kurds and Shia holding an
> overwhelming advantage in military resources,
> materiel, allies, world support, ... and
> outnumbering
> the Sunnis four to one.  Kurdish and Shia territory
> both have buttloads of oil, Sunni territory,
> buttloads
> of sand.  The Kurds and Shia have no reason to fight
> each other, and no reason to fight the Sunnis except
> defensively.  The Sunnis have every reason to
> negotiate a settlement because their military
> position
> is ridiculous, and if they get cut out of the oil,
> they'll be left a country of over-educated rag
> pickers.  If there were to be a civil war at all, I
> assert--on the basis of this fact-like analysis, not
> propaganda--that it would be a short one.  Have you
> ever heard anyone present the fact-like counter
> argument?   
> 
> > I've come to the conclusion that the least bad
> > solution would be a 3-way 
> > partition of Iraq, 
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > This would be a really, really bad
> > solution,  
> 
> It seems to me that this assertion is yet another
> negative presumption based on fact-free propaganda.
> 
> Why bad?  Why isn't it the logical, right, just,
> ethical, practical, pragmatic solution.  The Brits
> cobbled these three ethnic populations together back
> when (and, just for the record, sliced off Kuwait),
> and, like the Ottomans before them, left the Sunnis
> in
> charge of administrative duties.  Was that sovereign
> configuration the holy grail of mesopotamian
> nation-building, or a seething jury-rigged mess?  
> 
> And leave us not forget that it was the CIA who
> engineered the coups that brought first the Bathists
> and then Saddam himself, to power. (This is what
> I've
> heard, if you've heard differently, by all means,
> clue
> me in.)
> 
> In summary, the Bushie narrative of the events of
> their time has been unalloyed bullshit.  Dispose of
> that crap.  Start at square one, get the facts, and
> figure out what the possibilities may be, the
> reality-based possibilities. 
> 
> Best, Jeff Davis
> 
>   "During times of universal deceit, telling the
>          truth becomes a revolutionary act." 
>                          George Orwell
> 
> 
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