About Face: The Role of the Arms Lobby In the Bush Administration's Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy.
August 13, 2002 6:07 PM   Subscribe

About Face: The Role of the Arms Lobby In the Bush Administration's Radical Reversal of Two Decades of U.S. Nuclear Policy. A detailed look at their relationship and the influence of the defense industry on the policies which they profit from.
posted by homunculus (7 comments total)
 
Written in part by a wm dhartung yet!
posted by y2karl at 6:56 PM on August 13, 2002


And it certainly is exhaustive in detail--this will take some time to digest. Thanks, homounculus.
posted by y2karl at 7:11 PM on August 13, 2002


Written in part by a wm dhartung yet!

I noticed that too! Could there be a connection?

And it certainly is exhaustive in detail

Yeah, it's a lot to digest. This short article in The Nation summarizes the report nicely.
posted by homunculus at 7:47 PM on August 13, 2002


I noticed that too! Could there be a connection?

I'm thinking transporter malfunction, myself.
posted by y2karl at 8:09 PM on August 13, 2002


As far as I know, we are not related. If my dad ever finds the family genealogy book again, I may be able to find out if he's a distant cousin (it's one of several questions I have saved up).

I certainly respect his scholarship (I have read non-trivial amounts of his work), but it's annoyingly infected with the Merchants of Death quasi-conspiracy mongering that has been a feature of the ideological left for roughly a century. Is it really that shocking that an arms agreement was sought that preserves our interests in developing new weapons technology? The disarmament lobby loved the cold war because there was justification for intricate arms agreements, since without specifics we could not have trust. They were by no means disarmament agreements, but they could be seen that way -- even though each of them in its own way preserved the interests of the US and USSR. I'm sure they'd love it if WPI peaceniks started getting cushy Pentagon jobs and writing all our treaties, but that ain't gonna happen -- not even under Democrats, no matter what the wackjobs on the right think. Ever since the end of bipolarism, they've literally been hopping with worry that we have nobody with whom to negotiate disarmament.

Also, it's clear from other statements that the WPI basically hews to the borderline Chomsky position that the US is the most dangerous nation on earth (though they eschew his provocations of rhetoric), and pushes international law explicitly as a way to rein us in. It's one thing to sell it in our self-interest, but when you're this far off the green you're basically putting one foot in the Fifth Column rough. Put these two paragraphs together and you get a group who practically wishes we still had an opponent.

Seriously, though: They're about as far left as you can get and still be a serious think tank in this country. That's not a reason to ignore them, but it does frame their viewpoint.
posted by dhartung at 11:55 PM on August 13, 2002


They're about as far left as you can get and still be a serious think tank in this country.

And yet they still look like moderates compared to the subjects of this study. The "self-interest" of the entire world, including the USA, requires serious action towards disarmament. I'd rather like to see the earth survive and my kids grow up to enjoy it. That's not "Fifth Column" and intimating such is basically putting one foot in the Isolationist Totalitarian Rogue rough.
posted by nofundy at 5:02 AM on August 14, 2002


Put these two paragraphs together and you get a group who practically wishes we still had an opponent.

Lord Acton was neither a Chomskyite nor a Fifth-Columnist, but he had sensible things to say about such a state of affairs.

They're about as far left as you can get and still be a serious think tank in this country.

That's one lop-sided demographic, given that neocon madrassas such as the Heritage Foundation or, even better, the American Enterprise Institute, appear to be presented as serious think-tanks. But then again, it appears to be endemic.
posted by riviera at 5:26 AM on August 14, 2002


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