[Peace-discuss] The message of wiki-leaks…

[C. G. Estabrook]

I was less interested in Paul Street's views - interesting and important as they
usually are - than in how the truth of things stands.

The problem is not the administration's intransigence, as this passage says, but
its consistent and carefully considered policy.


On 8/1/10 6:22 PM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> I can't believe you read the whole piece by Street… You seem to have
> blinders on.
>
> --mkb
>
> On Aug 1, 2010, at 1:56 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>
>> Even that's wrong.  It's not "dogged intransigence, etc." It's a
>> consistent imperial policy, in the interest of dominant social groups in
>> the US, who know that they can get the US populace to pay for it if they
>> present it correctly, as they have.
>>
>> That's not "regardless of the means or outcome, regardless of the
>> possibility of reward." American planners certainly consider means and
>> outcome; they display rationality as described by Weber in setting means
>> to ends; and they're quite clear about how those ends involve "the
>> possibility of reward" (to them).
>>
>> They're not idiots, they're criminals.
>>
>> That's been the US/Israeli policy for more than 40 years, the policy that
>> Obama signed up for.  It involves a choice between hegemony and survival,
>> so violates the other sense of rationality Weber spoke of.
>>
>> Like Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis (according to Sorensen's memoirs)
>> they're "willing to accept a probability of 1/3 to 1/2 of nuclear war, in
>> order to establish that the United States alone has the right" to control
>> the world's greatest energy-producing region.
>>
>>
>> On 8/1/10 11:37 AM, Brussel Morton K. wrote:
>>> *From Paul Street on a ZNet article:*
>>>
>>> “The lesson; no, the message; no, um, the takeaway of the leaked
>>> documents is not: if only they knew how badly it's going, how hard it's
>>> going to be, then the administration would bring an end to the conflict.
>>> Rather, the takeaway; no, the message is that even knowing how badly the
>>> war goes, they persist. The lesson is not the Administration's
>>> blindness, but its dogged intransigence, its total commitment to the
>>> endeavor, regardless of the means or outcome, regardless of the
>>> possibility of reward, regardless of the cost, regardless of suffering,
>>> regardless of sense and duration. The United States has an institutional
>>> commitment to the occupation of Afghanistan. It can't be argued out of
>>> it.”*[7]* * * One of the best reflections about Wiki-Leaks and related
>>> matters. See
>>>
>>> http://www.zcommunications.org/revealing-moments-by-paul-street * * * *