Karen Watters Cole wrote:
>
[snip]
> I just can't lose this visual image of the Bush hawks, like kittens in a
> giant paper bag; unable to see outside the world they have created. Wish I
> could see them otherwise. There are other words to describe this: cocky,
> elitist, maybe even Big Brotherish but there is also a popular culture Top
> Gun mentality about it. Maverick pilot saves the day.
Loose cannon on the deck.
To repeat myself again, there are some really aware persons in
the United States military, and their patron saint is John R (Jack)
Boyd.
There's going to be a biography of Boyd coming out this fall-- should
really be inspiring and probably also discouraging (Boyd never
made General).
The great general wins without fighting.
(--Sun Tzu)
Second best is to cause the adversary to lose his orientation to
his situation so that he ceases to be able to function and
cannot meaningfully fight. (But this probably does not
apply when your adversary have lots of nuclear weapons deliverable
in less than 2 hours without any prep. At least 2 such
countries exist.)
> Meaning, I suspect that many Americans, uncertain about a lot of things in
> this post 9/11 year, share a Wag the Dog skepticism about the
> Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush ulterior motives, but they also fear that these guys
> might be right. After all, did most Americans read the lengthy Time
> magazine special report about the previous administration FBI-CIA files on
> OSB and terrorism? If they did, they'd realize that the Bush administration
> didn't "quickly learn" the suspects' origins without the background gathered
> for them by the Clinton FBA-CIA era and they weren't "up to speed" and "on
> the job" that accounts for a good part of Bush's popularity numbers.
"Bush and his top aides had higher priorities --
above all, ballistic missile
defense." (Barton Gellman, The Washington Post, p.A01, 20Jan02)
[snip]
> "He remains an important voice in the administration, but that is not to say
> he is the most important voice," Mr. Hamilton continued. "It's difficult to
> see how the Bush administration, or Bush himself, can backtrack from
> Cheney's very strong, aggressive stance."
[snip]
That does seem to be the Bush strategy: Burn everybody's
bridges and then look around
like "Did somebody just applaud my salacious -- uhh,
sagracious -- leadership of The Free World?"
Let's all remember that a couple dinks with a dinghy
full of home brew couldn't sink one of the United
States' most advanced warships, but only knock it
out of commission for over 18 months. It also
took two tries for them to knock over the world's
two biggest finance-capital bowling pins. And we
really do catch a lot of them. It's like ABM defense:
we can probably achieve a pretty good intercept
ratio (remember that Hitler lost the air battle of
Britain by a very small margin of British vs
German kill rate, so we may be able to outlast
them). But, as has been quoted here from this
weekend's NYT, Zgniew Brzinski(sp???) has made the
observation that they attack us because they
have grievances against us and they won't quit
until the grievance ratio goes down.
Jack Boyd said that the reason the US lost the
war in Vietnam is that we failed to follow the
first principle of anti-guerilla warfare:
offer the people a genuinely better life than
the guerillas can offer them. We can see
clearly that we are doing this
already in Palestine, where next?
All the sentimentality about "911" won't do any good
unless it gets all the Johnell Bryants in this
country to realize that when somebody threatens
to kill you, maybe they might do something to
hurt somebody, and you should report it to
your manager and, if they went into details and
asked about public buildings security, etc.,
you should also try to report it to the FBI, and
if at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
Every hero is a misfortune. Or, bringing this
discussion back the the past and future of work
in America, a coworker told me that, back in the
old days at "DEC", they had a saying:
If you are working overtime,
your manager isn't doing his job.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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