SubscribeThis summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants... Now the emphasis is on 'surgical' strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism... The former intelligence official added...'Meanwhile, the politicians are saying, 'You can’t do it, because every Republican is going to be defeated, and we’re only one fact from going over the cliff in Iraq.' But Cheney doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the Republican worries, and neither does the President.'Shifting Targets by Seymour Hersh
As we know,-- Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense briefing.
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
'Every two months or so, Sy Hersh writes an article in The New Yorker magazine and CNN provides him a forum in which to talk about his article and all the anonymous sources that are quoted in it.'Unwilling to accept her talking points, reporters continued to pepper Perino with questions. 'We are pursuing a diplomatic solution with Iran,' she repeatedly insisted. One reporter shot back, 'That’s what he [Bush] said before we went to Iraq, too.'
Oh no. We're going to build democracy. The real thing in the mind of this president is he wants to reshape the Middle East and make it a model. He absolutely believes it. I always thought Henry Kissinger was a disaster because he lies like most people breathe and you can't have that in public life. But if it were Kissinger this time around, I'd actually be relieved because I'd know that the madness would be tied to some oil deal. But in this case, what you see is what you get. This guy believes he's doing God's work.Emphasis mine, obviously. You know, for the kids.
"...Per Webster's dictionary, a system is defined as "a complex unity formed of many often diverse parts subject to a common plan or serving a common purpose." It would be charitable in the extreme to confer this definition on BWII, which is to the gold standard what a five-year old finger-painting child is to Monet. The hallmark of the classical gold standard was the prompt adjustment of international payments imbalances. The hallmark of the pure paper standard is the indefinite postponement of international payments imbalances, all the more so when its major violator possesses sufficient military "currency" to prevent its creditors from punishing it for ongoing profligacy..."---
"...The lessons for present day policy makers are stark. A perpetuation of existing exchange rate policies, based on flawed economic analysis, is creating broadly similar conditions to those that prevailed before the Great Depression. History suggests great economic hardship will follow and that it will be proportionately borne by the debtor nations. Today's largest debtor nation is the U.S., which is showing itself increasingly prone to using military options to enforce its objectives, given the precarious state of its national finances and corresponding loss of economic leverage... as it has gradually militarized its energy policy. If one includes America's array of privately outsourced services along with a professional permanent military, the costs run around three-quarters of a trillion dollars a year. Chinese, Japanese and other central banks of East Asia via Bretton Woods II indirectly finance this cost. Since these countries also indirectly compete with the U.S. for the same energy resources, we have a paradoxical situation in which they are in effect "feeding the hand that bites it." This is inherently unstable as the foreigner eventually realizes that the provision of capital to a country engaged in war enables the country to invest more in military equipment—equipment that can ultimately be used against them. In such circumstances, America's external creditors will decide that they would rather invest the accumulated current account proceeds in their own military jets and equipment for themselves. That is to say, they would prefer to own the jet rather than finance it for the U.S. Then the "magic" of Bretton Woods II disappears..."
"...Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has abandoned the principles of building up a defense force for the purposes of addressing the security tasks immediately at hand, and instead has embarked on a policy of maintaining military capabilities far in excess of those of any would-be adversary or combination of adversaries. Von Clausewitz once said, "War is diplomacy by other means." Under recent U.S. administrations, however, war has become an extension, not of diplomacy, but of energy policy.
"While the Pentagon readily acknowledges it can do little to promote trade or enhance financial stability, it increasingly asserts that it can play a key role in protecting resource supplies. Resources are tangible assets that can be exposed to risk by political turmoil and conflict abroad—and so, it is increasingly argued, they require physical protection, which in turn is used to justify the extraordinary sums now lavished on the Pentagon.
"To add to the problem, we are on the verge of a collision between rising energy demand and depleting energy output from the developed to developing world, with the higher attendant political risk that accompanies this move. But America is paying little heed as to how it acquires this energy; it too embraces a form of renegade economics and is in part able to do so because Bretton Woods II provides nothing in the way of an external constraint of its debt-bingeing financing requirements. Quite the contrary: it subsidizes it..."
"...Faced with the inability to resolve its problems economically, the U.S. is likely to be increasingly tempted to embrace the military option for the resolution of its debt crisis. A successful military option enables the victorious country to reap the spoils of the loser. Military victories allow for the confiscation of foreign assets and/or forgiveness of prior debts. The realization of the futility of an internally generated solution leads to hope for and support of an externally war driven solution.
"The war solution, as seductive as it appears, has tremendous costs, which will be borne most fully by future generations... By now, the country's acute and growing debt build-up has led to a significant privatization of military and intelligence functions, well beyond any form of congressional oversight and, hence, impossible to control. It is also incredibly lucrative for the owners and operators of so-called private military companies—and the money to pay for their activities ultimately comes from taxpayers through government contracts. Any accounting of these funds, largely distributed to crony companies with insider connections, is chaotic at best. Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, estimates that there are 126,000 private military contractors in Iraq, more than enough to keep the war going, even if most official U.S. troops were withdrawn. "From the beginning," Scahill writes, "these contractors have been a major hidden story of the war,[1] almost uncovered in the mainstream media and absolutely central[2] to maintaining the U.S. occupation of Iraq." ... military spending today consumes 40 percent of every tax dollar. The Pentagon always tries to minimize the size of its budget by representing it as a declining percentage of the gross national product. What it never reveals is that total military spending is actually many times larger than the official appropriation for the Defense Department, due to "black budgets," increased outsourcing and the fact that many costs associated for the military are accounted for under "civilian" applications, such as health care costs for the soldiers..."
"...War is the natural outcome of the pursuit of renegade economics:[3] a "read my lips, no new taxes" fiscal policy entails the ongoing importation of capital. So the true costs of the country's increasingly militarized foreign policy is not simply the rapidly growing Pentagon budgets, but also the broader costs associated with the current account imbalance..."
In the economic sphere, both nations are locked in a mutual death embrace otherwise known as Bretton Woods II. The US cannot indefinitely accumulate liabilities, and the Chinese PBoC cannot indefinitely stockpile US Treasury bonds without exploding inflationary asset bubbles.cheers!
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posted by Mr_Zero at 12:35 PM on October 1, 2007