No excuse not to try

Bringing Die-hard War Supporters and Feckless War Opponents to Their Knees
by Walter C. Uhler @ OpEdNews

‘To that end, we might follow the suggestion of Harper’s Garret Keizer and begin to prepare for executing a nation-wide strike. Sound impractical? Consider Keizer’s October 2007 Harper’s account of Danes saving Jews during World War II: “In 1943 the Danes managed to save 7,200 of their 7,800 Jewish neighbors from the Gestapo. They had no blogs, no television, no text messaging – and very little time to prepare. They passed their apartment keys to the hunted on the streets. They formed convoys to the coast. An ambulance driver set out with a phone book, stopping at any address with a Jewish-sounding name. No GPS for directions. No excuse not to try.” ‘

What’s our excuse?

Unused Intelligence

“KOLKO: Like the CIA, the military has some acute strategic thinkers who have learned from bitter experiences. The analyses of the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute – to name one of many – are often very insightful and critical.

The problem, of course, is that few (if any) at the decisive levels pay any attention to the critical ruminations that the military and CIA consistently produce. There is no shortage of insight among U.S. official analysts – the problem that policy is rarely formulated with objective knowledge is a constraint on it. Ambitious people, who exist in ample quantity, say what their superiors wish to hear and rarely, if ever, contradict them. Former CIA head George Tenet is the supreme example of that, and what the CIA emphasized for the president or Donald Rumsfeld was essentially what they wanted to hear. While he admits the CIA knew far less regarding Iraq than it should have, Tenet’s recent memoir is a good example of desire leading reporting objectively. The men and women who rise to the top are finely tuned to the relationship between ambition and readiness to contradict their superiors with facts. The entire mess is Iraq, to cite just one example, was predicted. If reason and clarity prevailed, America’s role in the world would be utterly different.”

The US Will Lose War Regardless What it Does by Gabriel Kolko
AntiWar.com

From Putin with (Tough) Love

“One country, the United States, has overstepped its national boundaries in every way,” Putin told the 43rd Munich Trans-Atlantic conference on security policy in February 2007. “This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations…This is very dangerous.”

Condemning the concept of a “unipolar world,” he added: “However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it describes a scenario in which there is one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making…It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And this is pernicious.”

-found at Tomdispatch

One might add that a unipolar Federal government has an equally pernicious effect on the lives and liberties of its citizens at home.