sultanofslack

2003-07-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

PLACE YOUR BETS!!!!

ok, i like to gamble. and having been to vegas, i know people bet on just about anything. maybe the wierdos inside of the pentagon just felt the commute was too far to go to place their bets. so they decided to open up the Policy analysis market (www.policyanalysismarket.org).

the idea of this new derivative market was to provide another source of potential terror attacks by betting on them. that's right, if you want to make money on someone else's pain and torture, then the pentagon is the place for you, some would say it has always been.

deputy secretary of defense wolfowitz was quoted as saying "maybe they got too imaginative." maybe? ya think paul?

if it weren't for democratic senators led by sen. john warner, who knows how far this would have gone. luckily there is some oversight to keep this in some sort of check.

2003-07-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

WHY DOESN'T LIBERIA MAKE THE CUT?

With the humanitarians in the white house successfully bringing freedom to the middle east, you would suppose they would want to take it elsewhere...nope.

the bush administration only claims humanitarianism after the fact, and only after it appears they would look like paranoid freaks if they stuck to the actual and legitimate reason they ousted saddam. but when they are faced with a chance to prevent a bloody conclusion to a civil war and help bring stability to a country that was founded by americans, there is no rush. granted, there is a cease fire in effect right now, and it is keeping the rebel groups at bay, but for how long without international intervention? it seems liberia will be overlooked and the bush administration will allow yet another African nation to plunge deeper into civil war.

and what is the reasoning coming from the administration and its backers? well, they just don't see the national security interests in liberia that they did in afghanistan or iraq. of course there really are no national security interests in either of those nations. we deposed the taliban for revenge, and invaded iraq for economic reasons. of course you could never squeeze the truth out of most pundits. they will admit that we have "strategic interests" in the middle east, but they won't be honest and say that we want friendly governments there because of the oil and the wealth it brings.

all i want is a little honesty from my government. and i wouldn't hold it against bush and co. if they came out and told the truth for once...

2003-06-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

WMD, IRAQ, AND OIL

the way military planners deploy assets in times of war can be instructive as to what the goals of said war were. looking at Iraq today, in the predictable mess it is in, you can see what the aims of the planners at the pentagon actually were. before the war, we were bombarded with numbers about what iraq may possess, 10000 liters of this, 8500 liters of that, i wasn't sure if iraq was armed to the teeth with deadly poisons or they were getting ready to make a huge cake. ok, bad jokes aside, we were presented with evidence of the threat iraq posed to the united states. don't let anyone tell you different, that is what the administration picked up on as their rallying cry before the war. we didn't want to wait around and allow the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" or sarin in the subway or anthrax at the anti war rally. saddam had for some time, according to the administration, habitually deceived the world as to his weapons capability. his one last deception was apparently convincing the bush administration that he did have all that stuff, and he was just waiting for the right terror group to join up with to make his great attack on america.

of course, there hasn't been much in the way of evidence to support this premise, but not for a lack of spinning on the administrations part. they got everyone worked up about saddam's al qaeda stronghold in the kurdish area held by his buddies in ansar al islam. his buddies of course were not part of the al qaeda network, but may have shared some low level members with the terror group. not to mention the fact that ansar al islam aimed to establish an islamic republic a la iran, which flies right in the face of saddam's arab nationalist oppression technique, but why dwell on that?

after the ansar connection was refuted, the pundits moved on to the al samoud rockets, which surprisingly flew farther than they were supposed to when their guidance systems and payloads were removed. what a shocker, you make something lighter, and it goes farther??? for the sake of the guys on the ground, we got the un to destroy most of those before we invaded, which may have saved american lives.

now that the war ended, everyone's favorite place was salman pac. this was saddam's proving ground for his guerilla groups that were supposed to play a larger role in iraq's resistance. no one can argue that this was a guerilla training ground, similar to our "school of the americas" where we trained special ops troops from here and abroad how to be terrorists. i guess those school of americas grads didn't like the competition.

they did find those mobile meth labs that most of the scientists that inspected them agreed may have been able to produce small quantities of chemical or biological agents. so, there it is, proof that iraq had been conspiring with terror groups to attack the united states, two trailers with no agents present that "may have been able to" produce chemical or biological weapons. thank goodness we stopped them from wiping out the american way of life with the non present WMD and the non present al qaeda operatives.

so we now know that this war was a success and was necessary because it made sure that saddam can never attack us with allies he doesn't have and weapons that we can't find. i feel way safe now.

that is what this war was about, ridding the world of saddam and his WMD. that is why some of the first military units dispatched across the border were sent to secure suspected WMD sites. did i say WMD sites? i meant oil refineries. remember our first great victories were securing the southern oil fields and the oil refineries and ports on the persian gulf? clearly, this war was focused on WMD all the way! then once we got to baghdad, virtually the only building we kept from being looted was the WMD ministry building right? well, if WMD is code for the oil ministry building then yeah, that's the one we protected. yep, those planners at the pentagon were so worried about the nuclear capability of saddam that we let normal iraqis take uranium home from the nuclear experimentation facility.

before the war you could here everyone screaming about saddam giving weapons over to al qaeda or some other ominous group. now, no one seems to care. most of them think he destroyed the only weapons he had that really could have slowed our progress to baghdad. i know that if i was an insane dictator, bent on the destruction of the untied states, that is what i would do when they showed up take me out. get rid of the only thing that i have in my arsenal that might scare them off. there are actually people getting tv time that say he destroyed all of his WMD to make the bush admin look bad after the fact. if this isn't the most rediculous thing i have ever heard, i don't know what is? who cares how the guy looks that killed you after you are dead? did saddam just want to get the last word in?

as for the new reason after the fact that we went in to liberate the iraqi people from the clutches of an evil dictator, why did we pick saddam? if humanitarianism was the real drive behind this administration, and i can totally see the bleeding hearts of bush, rumsfeld, wolfowitz, perle. etc. and the bleeding pacemaker of cheney really caring about the loss of human life. these guys are so compassionate they have ignored the civil wars that have claimed millions of lives in africa, have kept favored nation status for china even though they have illegally occupied tibet for the better part of a century, were parts of previous administrations that aided ruinous civil war in latin america and indonesia. give me a break! these guys don't give two sh*ts about iraqis as is evidenced by their drive to do in iraq what we have done in much of the rest of the third world, and that is privatize everything, make it virtually imposssible for a middle class to develop, and continue to enrich the corporations and the investor class. yep, they care...i can't believe they actually milked a vote out of me...

2003-06-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

well, go ahead and write off my previos post as wishful thinking. as soon as i think i find some pluralistic quality to this administration, and they may actually be standing up to someone that isn't a total pushover, i am snapped back to reality.

the reality is of course that bush and his administration have no real interest in establishing a palestinian state. i don't know why i had high hopes for this road map, after 2 and a half years of this administration i should have known that anything that wasn't self serving would not happen. we have nothing to gain by ending the relentless cycle of attacks by both sides. we have all but turned our back on the only secular palestinian organization that has half a chance at ending the attacks by hamas, islamic jihad, and the martyr's brigade (who decided on that name, and how are they finding people to join up???). we expect the palestinian authority to nuetralize these groups, who are better armed and better funded.

we don't have any problem pouring money into israel, we gave them an extra billion this year which helped cover the cost of the bulldozer that killed rachel corrie and the bullets that have riddled other international activists on the ground doing the RIGHT thing, intervening peacefully. at the same time, we are holding money back from the palestinians until they "reign in the terrorists" making it next to impossible to do so, since they don't have the money to accomplish this task. this also makes it possible for the really nice, well meaning arab neighbors continue to be the good guys in the palestinian's eyes. and money from all over the middle east goes to all the wrong people doing all the wrong things. sure, we whine about it, but we do nothing to create an environment on the ground in the palestinian areas that would enable the moderates to emerge and collectively say that they will no longer be pawns in a 50 year old grudge match. it is sick how the israelis treat the palestinians. it is sick how the arabs in the region treat the palestinians, and it is sick that all we can do is keep throwing money in all the wrong directions and make a lot of empty promises.

and now that men like sen. lugar from indiana are actually mentioning something logical like putting american troops on the ground to help guarantee the road map goes as planned, the white house runs for cover and sends its spin meisters out to talk about how it would be horrible to have american blood shed on israeli soil. these same people coming out, both from the right wing here in the US and in israel are almost the exact same people that had no problem putting our military on the ground in iraq-you remember, the "grave and growing threat" to the united states that fell like a house of cards and ended up not having NBC tipped missiles and similarly equipped terror squads waiting with baited breath to attack the great satan-of course, that "humanitarian mission" also involved a wealth of natural resources...more on wmd and oil later...

2003-06-01T12:33:00.000-07:00

Do I have false hope about this road map?

Last year, when President Bush announced that he wanted to see a Palestinian state implemented by 2005, and I thought, I knew there was some reason I voted for the guy other than the fact that I disliked Gore, and thought that Nader would be a disaster.

Then came Iraq.

And I sat and watched how it seemed Bush had no patience for what anyone, even our allies, had to say about the direction he had chosen to pursue.

Now he has another notch in his war belt, and it seems Powell is getting a chance to do something decent during his tenure at State. But as with anything that comes from a politician, and as a long-time supporter of the Palestinian cause, I am suspect of the process. I am happy to see that Arafat is slowly being sidelined, as it seems he was a bigger problem than Israel’s far right ever hoped to be. It is nice to see recent developments in freedom of movement, and at least talks of dismantling some settlements in the occupied territories. But to hear Bush talk about it, he still sounds like he wants Abu Mazen - assuming he is capable of doing anything at all, and even has a real desire to work with the Israelis – to do the impossible.

Now I am stuck with the hope against hope that the most extreme right Israeli Government in a long time, and an American administration that has turned out to be further to the right than even Reagan’s second administration will team up and go against all their own rhetoric and form a Palestinian state. I am sure you can understand my lack of faith that this, or anything really, will actually happen.

2003-06-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

where on earth does this go???