How destabilized could Iraq become after an American pullout?
When you peel the rhetorical/propaganda onion and get to the essence of what the PNAC crew has unleashed - I'd say
GAME OVER..., cept for the Ayatollahs counting and consolidating their winnings.
Solipsism (what a splendid term for ignorance, arrogance, and stupidity) done sealed the fate of this new american century...,
Islam declares in unequivocal terms that the real cause of our miseries is not economical. It holds that economic disorder is not the cause but a direct effect of moral degradation. Character building and development of moral health are the only remedies man is in need of. Without them social, political, economic or any other reform is simply unthinkable. Moral health is the master-key that opens all gates of progress and prosperity. It is the only power that can chase away all injustices, jealousies and the causes of conflicts and bad blood. To have a clear idea of the method we must know the real position of man.
The ultimate objective of Islam is to abolish the lordship of man over man and bring him under the rule of Allah (One God). To stake everything Muslims have - including their lives - to achieve this purpose is called Jihad. The Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving and Pilgrimage, all prepare the Believers for military Jihad. But as they have long since forgotten this objective as well as the mission entrusted to them, and because all acts of worship have been reduced to their spiritual contents – they have gone from ‘the top to the bottom’ of world’s leadership.
This brother was on a roll..., too bad he doesn't know about the prosperity pimps infesting the black church, then he'd really have an example of abject debasement and the extreme reaches of subhuman apostasy that reduce ones moral stature from the heights to the degenerate bowels of world leadership. Drug along like so much helpless and impotent intestinal flotsam and jetsam in the belly of this big blundering beast.
In the end, which will be in about 10 or 15 years, the Muslim world and the rest of the world will iinevitably face the fact that the islamic fascists are for the most part, illiterate and incapable of marshalling the military force required for their vision of dominance. Their ambition is, by definition, that of a political play against the center, which will hold. The Arab states won't stand for it, nor will any other. They will be mercilessly crushed for the good of Islam and the region.
I say that it is impossible for nationalism to be toppled by these groups. Your boy is trippin hard when he says:
Once and for all we better face it. Arabs are far from being at their very best if they are operating in the format of a ‘national state’. The Arab soldier may lack the necessary will to die for an idiotic flag. Both in the case of Saddam’s Iraq or Nasser’s Egypt, once within a conflict, a growing gap reveals itself between the charismatic, assertive, far over the top demagogue leader and some serious malfunctioning performance in the battlefield. Unlike the American, British, French, and Israeli soldiers who have proved throughout history to have some real tendency towards collective suicide for some empty promises shaped as ‘ideology’, the Arab platoon is slightly behind in exhibiting this kind of idiotic national patriotic militant zeal. He may as well be just too clever for those kind of deadly games.
There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere. The Arab platoon is a myth on the same level as the 'politics' of the 'Arab street'.
There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere.
In the course of your theoretical examination of the unusual properties/characteristics of virtual social networks - haven't you ever stumbled into big chunks of military operations research on netwar?
I mean really, the first time I ever encountered
William S. Lind was during the late 80's as I pored over military operations research on network security. The theoretical constructs undergirding assymetrical warfare and hacking have gone hand-in-glove ever since.
Theoretical synergy aside, perhaps it is only the direct experience of two or three people rooting a global corporate computing infrastructure in a matter of hours - that is capable of fully preparing one for appreciating the emergent/cascading effects of masterful exploitation of systemic vulnerabilities in large, massively interdependant constructs?
There's that. As well, the question of expense. The fact that the military requires 8 times the U.S. per capita expenditure of petroleum to operate - ungodly debt runups to enrich the weaponeers - and lastly the political capital squandered in maintaining the just-so-stories to mask unjust imperial aggression.
It would be bad enough if the PNAC-ians were winning.., but their strategies and tactics are vintage WW-I, and they're getting their hats handed to them with no end in sight.
In a contemporary war of attrition, in the cheap petroleum fin d'siecle, I'll bet on the hackers with a centuries old modus operandi of social networking that has proven massively successful at standing the test of time.
I concede that. You are right with regard to the efficiencies of the cellular and networked. But those things work because the individual participants are modern - they must buy into the concept of interchangeability. Essentialists cannot make networks work, and it is the fundamental illiteracy of Jihadists and their audience that will cause them to fail to exploit such capabilities.
The educated, modern Arab and Muslim world is under no threat from neocons or 'zionists'. When islamic bombs start exploding in Dubai the way they do in Palestine, then we'll see the world do, once again, what they did for Kuwait. Jihadis will be routed like Chechens.
Essentialists cannot make networks work, and it is the fundamental illiteracy of Jihadists and their audience that will cause them to fail to exploit such capabilities.
Surely you jest? Either that, or you haven' been in an engineering classroom anytime over the last 20+ years!!! Cause the very last thing in the world that the jihadists are is illiterate, innumerate, or technically backwards. The
president of Iran gots a PhD in engineering, what's G-Dub got? I mean seriously.., you know good and gotdamn well them Ivy League skins he picked up in beer drinking and hell raising aren't worth the vellum they're printed on. ROTFLMBAO!!!!
The educated, modern Arab and Muslim world is under no threat from neocons or 'zionists'.
Oh yes it is. Iraq was highly educated, relatively highly modern, and no more scandalously oppressive than let's saaaaay...., China! The real and present danger posed by the PNAC crew is that their catastrophic mis-steps have already undermined the tenuous at best hold of middle-eastern elites.
This is precisely why those same elites have done a 180.
At the onset of the Lebanese crisis, Arab governments, starting with Saudi Arabia, slammed Hezbollah for recklessly provoking a war, providing what the United States and Israel took as a wink and a nod to continue the fight.
Now, with hundreds of Lebanese dead and Hezbollah holding out against the vaunted Israeli military for more than two weeks, the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is surging behind the organization, transforming the Shiite group's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, into a folk hero and forcing a change in official statements.
Cobb said...
I am but I'm not paying attention to official statements two weeks into a war. That's not telling me anything but the opinions of third parties. If Iran is sending fighters, that's something I care to know about. If the Syrian army is on high mobilization, that's news I can use. But the tide of public opinion across the Arab world is not. Who is showing up with rifles and orders, that's what I'm talking about.
Today there is no consensus about the sentiments of the Lebanese. When are we going to see a poll that breaks down Druze, Christian and Muslim opinion in Lebanon? Nasrallah is acting like Lebanon belongs to him and all his apologists say so too. I doubt it.
Furthermore, there are no reliable accounts of Hezbollah troop strength or casualties. As one person noted at Drezner, there hasn't been a rocket sent Haifa in two days. Does that mean they're out of rockets or shifting tactics. Israel is calling up 30k troops for training, does that mean they are escalating or losing too many on the front?
Bottom line - this war is far from over or decisive and all the opinion about it means nothing until some decisive battles are fought. That has yet to occur.
Hezbollah holds out for two weeks and that's a victory? Only for fluff journalists at CNN and Al Jazeera, but not in the real world.
Additionally, we both know this isn't about Amindinijad vs Bush. Even so, what's more crazy, snorting coke or taking hostages? This is about the willingness of an educated populace to support the direction of its government. And if you count Crazy A. as a jihadist, then we'll see how much tax and oil revenue he can collect from a repressed Iranian middle class.
As for the long term effects of hackers.. the black hats know little more than the white hats. When we're living in an age where people prefer the chaos of anarchy over the stupidity of conformity, all of the Jihadi dreams will come true. And then they'll enact Sharia and try to be the powers that be. I think it's un-bloody likely that smart people will stick with the Taliban template - they'd rather have Bush, Citibank and Walmart.
You've seen my orthodox interpretation of Blackness as interpersonal communion - as far I'm concerned - it is the quintessential disambiguation of the culture/concept.
(when considered from a social networking theoretical perspective, it's not a simple statement of the obvious, though that's not the angle of attack that led me to the interpretation) You're also aware of my conviction that the zenith of old school Blackness instantiated a moral dimension and value that is unparallelled in the history of this country, possibly the history of the world. (the latter is a debatable contention - the former is not - because only within Blackness have American ideals been exemplified).
After political civil rights were obtained, brand "Black" was at its moral zenith. MLK began aggressively wedding the moral qualities the core social capital of American Blackness to the cause of uplifting the poor and opposing American interventionism in Vietnam. This was clearly an archetypal Christian imperative - and one which I've come to believe not only signed his death warrant, but also shaped the way in which subsequent political and media propaganda have been directed at and influenced both perceptions of Blackness and the behaviour of lots of Black folks.
A concerted political and media effort has been underway for decades to undercut the superlative moral value with which Blackness was once imbued. It's obvious in the code words used by the post Southern Strategy GOP. While the authors of the Southern Strategy - such as Pat Buchanan - claim that "morality" not "race" was the chief selling point of the GOP in the south, I am convinced that that question of morality had as much to do with wresting control of the moral high-ground away from Blackness and reasserting it in the authoritarian and moralizing terms that have been established within the Evangelical base.
It's not even debateable whether MLK's Christianity had any semblance or relationship to the kind of insane garbage preached and practiced by John Hagee and others of his ilk.
Now, the current state of Blackness has been profoundly degraded - in large measure - because our formerly great interpersonal communion has succumbed to the withering effects of Americaness. We've lost the self-conscious moral compass articulated by MLK (post civil rights), and great efforts have been made to ensure that we never recover that degree of moral self-consciousness. (I'm getting back to the social networks, moral value, and long-term potential theme here) You stated that;
There is no precedent in Africa, Asia or the Americas for a non-national military force to ultimately perservere. The Arab platoon is a myth on the same level as the 'politics' of the 'Arab street'.
From a social networks perspective - you've misjudged the
long-term power/value of Al-Islam and wagered on the long-term power of the relative newcomer to the game, the nation-state. My contention, very simply, is that in terms of its collective self-consciousness Al-Islam
had been seriously degraded along its core competencies by the emergence of Trans-European Protectorate nation states as colonial powers and their installation of puppet elites to run their artificial and imposed national constructs.
Blackness has been similarly degraded in the post-Civil Rights era by subordination to Americaness, i.e., the installation of puppet Black elites in nominal positions of authority but with no genuine constituent fueled authority. However, the post-colonial era has seen the serial decline of nation states - cause as you know - the sun surely does set on the contemporary British Empire.
The PNAC-ians have blundered on some very very fundamental levels. On the trivially obvious level, by ignoring Santayana/Powell in Iraq. They simply didn't learn from the
British historical example and plumb phukked up.
From a more sophisticated perspective, had they been technocrats rather than ideologues, they might have understood what kind of sleeping giant they threatened to activate/vivify by continuing unjustifiable and disproportionate aggression against increasing numbers of Muslims. Do you genuinely care to try to measure the "enterprise-wide" assymetrical military potential of an angered, self-conscious, and militarized Islam?
Also, consider the fact that Sheiks and Imams have actual constituencies which empower them. These are not like simple negro agitators with no actual constituents and no autonomous means of political and economic support.
IMOHO - the Muslim agents provacateur of these crises understand
exactly what it is they're
seeking to activate. Ultimately, I believe they'll prove successful because the folks in charge on the nationstate side have proven themselves completely soft-headed and utterly contemptful toward soft targets.
It's even possible that the domestic non-agenda of the PNAC-ians will have the same vivifying effect on latent collective Black self-consciousness. One would at least hope so...,
Cobb said...
That's a lot of dimensions to chew on at once so I'm only going to spit back a little bit.
1) Your global hornet's nest is a bunch of arrogant rock throwers who don't have the decency to fight as men but instead hide behind women and children. They haven't developed enough to form a nation and seek to hijack the one they're in without the least of consent of the people they would govern, were they capable of that. But even so have demonstrated they are determined to be more bringers of destruction to Israel than protectors of their 'own'.
here's
not much point in staging a coup if you don't influence who is placed
in power in the aftermath. Of course in order for a puppet government to
be effective, they can't be perceived as such. You wouldn't want the
natives to get restless would you?
