arthurborges's Comments

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Oops, Our Bad!

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 07:55:21 +0000

In wars like this one, the people ARE the enemy: since when does a native of a defending country refuse a minimum of material assistance to the occupier without being considered a traitor and why would he (or she) do that without a B Plan like a Western passport and wad of cash to resettle the whole extended family abroad? Yes, there are tribal rivalries that go back centuries in time but alas everyone remembers how the US simply forgot about Afghans once they had helped secure the downfall of the USSR. That reputation for unreliability still sticks. Still, this is okay in a multiculture landscape of tribal alliances with compositions that shift with the economic, social and meteorological weather -- but when you play it that way, you're no longer in a position to demand the sort of total loyalty Generals Petraeus and McChrystal dream of. Total loyalty is due only to people who have earned it and become considered as full members of the tribe. Invaders come, invaders go; but the local tribes stay. Invaders are just another commodity to be exploited to the hilt whenever the tactical opportunity to do so arises. As for rhetoric, illiterate tribes have a longer oral tradition than Westerners. Anything the West promises instantly resonates with stories as old as their hills. They've heard it all before. Moreover, one advantage of illiteracy is that all records are kept in memory -- biological memory. Photographic memory and total recall are way more widespread among the illiterate than the literate. In the West, we are so easily fooled by appearances: we imagine anyone looking poor "ain't smart enough to get rich" so he's "dumb and backward". This a fundamental and inordinately costly mistake of thinking in the highest echelons of the West.

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 06:34:03 +0000

Epppie, I'm fascinated: Iran needs no help from the US Navy to halt oil exports. China and Russia would veto or, more likely, dilute any motions for international sancions to the point where they would be symbolic.

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 06:31:08 +0000

The IAEA has zero evidence of any nuclear weapons in Iran! The price of using nuclear weapons is serious retaliation by any of several declared and undeclared nuclear powers. Only the USA could get away with using the odd tactical weapon every now and then without having the mainstream media on its back. Otherwise, nuclear weapons are only useful a political bargaining chip: drop one and it becomes your target's trump card at the negotiating table. If Israel launched a nuclear attack, it might well be the last country to recover from the consequences -- if it survived the social, economic and political blowback at all.

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 06:20:17 +0000

Yes but the Federal Reserve is privately owned and so owned by non-US citizens, so much depends on how they structure their investments. It's just a matter of timing: shifting billions out of the US dollar when the ship looks ready to sink. Indeed, there is no evidence of even an experimental nuclear device, let alone an operational arsenal but then my Iranian friends all smile knowingly and say Iran will get a bomb "sooner or later, one way or another." That said, French ex-president Jacques Chirac said shortly before leaving office: "We can live with a nuclear Iran." By the way, Iran need only give 90 days notice to drop out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to recover full legal rights to build such a bomb, but then again, Washington cherrypicks what is and ain't legal.

News From Antiwar.com : US Threatens to Invade Eritrea

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:14:59 +0000

Oh, I'm sure someone will be churning out satellite imagery of what might be North Korean missiles with Pakistani warheads there soon. Or maybe just a teeny-weeny bioweapons laboratory in the backyard of some kindergarten so's we can add these beasties are using children as human shields too? By the way, do the Americans still operate a electronic listening post in or around Asmara? They did in the 1960s: I almost got my a55 kicked there in 1966 because a few patrons in a local café thought I worked there. Everybody in the whole place suddenly became really warm and human as soon as I said I didn't.

News From Antiwar.com : Biden: Gitmo Will Close by January

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:10:49 +0000

The issue is not what is closed or left open, but what happens to its, um, guests and the minimum standards of, um, hospitality to be applied at all detention centers worldwide. Torture's prime value is not extraction of operational information, but terrorization of the population within its reach. To that end, it is very very important to publicize that most detainees are probably innocent: that way EVERYBODY feels threatened and goes to extremes to keep beneath the radar screen. Got it now?

News From Antiwar.com : Clinton Seeks to Calm Russia After Biden 'Diatribe'

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 18:05:09 +0000

Mr. Biden has singlehandedly performed the second "zero reset" of Russia/US relations. (sigh)

News From Antiwar.com : Four US Troops Killed in Eastern Afghanistan

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:56:39 +0000

Yikes! THANX. Crimean War! Yes!

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Beyond the Hype:
Cronkite and the Vietnam War

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:40:15 +0000

Yep. He was a brilliant stand-up straight man in a macabre decade-long comedy that cost the lives of at least 57,000 Americans and 3,000,000 Vietnamese. Today 4,000,000 million Vietnamese suffer from the effects of Agent Orange and its molecular kin, with more freakshow babies born daily there. How many American babies are born funny because they carry the agent orange gene too?

News From Antiwar.com : Biden Backs NATO Membership for Ukraine

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:32:35 +0000

Such a move would take the Russia and the US one step closer to mutual thermonuclear evaporation and my guess is he's looking at window between 2012 and 2015.

News From Antiwar.com : Four US Troops Killed in Eastern Afghanistan

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 02:29:09 +0000

I'm sure Gen. McChrystal read the Charge of the Light Brigade when he was in high school but does he know it happened in Afghanistan?

News From Antiwar.com : West Offering to Endorse Israeli Attack on Iran as Part of Settlement Deal

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:19:50 +0000

Any strike package that failed to secure radical regime change would, among other things, cause Iran to drop out of Nabucco, which would seriously jeopardize US oil strategy out to contain China and Russia ad well as to reduce European dependence on Russian oil. Google up M.K. Bhadrakumar at, say, www.atimes.com for more insight.

News From Antiwar.com : West Offering to Endorse Israeli Attack on Iran as Part of Settlement Deal

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:12:49 +0000

There's an old story about a fellow who takes a commercial flight for the first time in his life. After a few minutes, the captain announces he's lost an engine, stresses the aircraft's safety and adds the only real problem is the inconvenience of arrival 20 minutes late. Half an hour later, the captain announces loss of a second engine and arrival 60 minutes late. Yet another hour later, he announces loss of a third engine and arrival 2 hours late. Suddenly, our passenger says to his neighbor "Gosh, I hope he doesn't lose the last engine -- otherwise we'll be stuck up here all day." The continuity of the current Administration over its predecessor is unfortunate but unsurprizing.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : NPR: 'Murder' a Controversial Concept

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 23:04:50 +0000

The purpose of torture is to terrorize the unarrested. To be truly effective, it is imperative to make it known that some or most of the tortured are innocent. That way, everyone knows "It can happen to me." It diminishes the sum total of a perception of freedom in a nation's population. Once the torture of innocents among the guilty becomes acceptable because it catches the guilty, they say, then it follows that it is acceptable to torture the citizen as well as the alien. This is where the game is going; Ms. Shepherd is a sharp player.

News From Antiwar.com : Obama: World Won't Wait for Iran to Build Nuclear Weapon

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:59:03 +0000

Well, if you're pro-abortion, then the unmaterialized peace dividend is indeed your baby.

News From Antiwar.com : Obama: World Won't Wait for Iran to Build Nuclear Weapon

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:57:54 +0000

So after kissing up to a sheikh or two, the neophyte president is kissing up to Netanyahu who may or may not be a blueblood. What else is new?

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 15:32:13 +0000

Sean, this website is not entirely user-friendly, so for the benefit of third parties, I'll start by reposting the pertinent content of the notification sent me: QUOTE Probably the only hope for humanity would be for Aliens from another planet to come down and vaporize the followers of Abrahamic religio= ns, for starters. Then teach all about the cosmos, science and technology. Are you still in China? I live in Taiwan. Personally I think Justin doesn't know squat about China. He is just regurgitating the things he= has heard about from uniformed sources. ENDQUOTE If you're still expecting pennies from Heaven, you might as well count on Jesus -- your neighbours will imagine you're less weird and will sleep all the better for it. Yes, I'm 61 in Zhengzhou and I might as well run out my clock here. Do reach me by email: just google my name and I'll probably be at the top of the list. I have no idea of Mr. Raimondo's depth of acquaintanceship with China. However do not underestimate the ability to read, screen, analyze, digest and concisely regurgitate unsorted, almost random data. Whatever his direct experience of this place, he is not far off what I think is the mark. Otherwise, I'd've laughed off the article and moved on to the next URL without contributing a single keystroke here. Have a great day!

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:45:14 +0000

Sean, I have no idea how to treat the psychopathology of monotheism: Christianity, Islam and Judaism each preach the Master Race Doctrine to their flocks, which is founded on the principle of a monopoly on The Truth. "Our" religion has it; everybody else is clueless and therefore inferior. You read Christian Americans who make assertions such as: "It's good we killed all those Indians -- it stopped them from having lots of pagan babies that would have all gone to hell." Their Muslim counterparts consider that if you kill a sinner or non-believer, you save him by preventing him from doing further evil. Both indoctrinate their followers to seek out converts, which is pure and simple spiritual colonialism. For its part, Judaism is more exclusive; it seeks no converts but has the doctrine of Greater Israel, which it has been busily and mercilessly claiming piece by piece since 1948. For Islam and Judaism, I see hope for a change of dogma in their women; for Christianity, its military and economic preeminence has generated a level of pretty bulletproof self-satisfaction and I see only a capability for creative repackaging of the same old handsoap. These last lines are pure intuition that I wouldn't bother to defend because I might be wrong, and indeed, hope that I am so.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 06:23:08 +0000

Bink35, the folks you want to read are Henry CK Liu and Naomi Klein. All of Liu is at http://www.henryckliu.com and free of charge; for her part, Ms. Klein's "Shock Doctrine" is heavy-duty research that puts globalization into bottomline perspective. To answer your question, in the USA, foreign policy is hammered out in the think tanks while US officials express themselves way more cautiously. The think tanks in vogue say flat out "China is our next war." That the chairman of the JCS is an admiral is significant in that engagement against China would be heavily dependent on US naval assets, particularly submarines. Land invasion is not much of an option given that the invader's rule of thumb is 4:1 superiority for assured victory. Given the track record of US policy to carve up the USSR, I extrapolate the attitude to China is the same: break it up into bite-size backwater republics headed by tinpot saakasvilis. Western CEOs like it when they're talking to a head of state whose GDP is smaller than his company's annual capital turnover and the goal is to buy the country's natural and other resources on the cheap. On the Opium Wars, it wasn't just the British. The Americans, French, Germans, Russians and Swedes were in on the game too -- Yale University, for example, was founded with drug profits. Their idea of a drug war was a war to create and lock in a nationwide market of addicts. Which they did. And it lasted until 1949 when Chairman Mao had the dealers shot and sent the druggies into rehab -- much is made of the millions he killed; I rarely hear a peep about the millions he saved. Now that China has returned to a market economy, drug addiction is up. Predictably enough. There's only one thing you have entirely backwards: it was a _British_ trade deficit; the Chinese had the surplus: cheap opium marketed at monopolistic prices was a tool to bankrupt China. Which it did. At the time, the colonial business model was to rip off resources on the cheap, transform them into manufactured products for forced resale to the colonies and repatriate the profits in gold or silver. Today the business model is to get developing countries to manufacture on the cheap and pay them off in IOUs called dollars (USD) that are hard to spend (look up China's bids to buy Unocal and, now Rio Tinto) or convertible only into low-yield T-bonds and T-bills that yield little interest or, when US pressure to upvalue the USD/CNY crossrate succeeds, those Treasury certificates yield negative interest as soon as they're converted back into yuan (CNY). In a way, it's now "Trident-boat diplomacy" with a customer who has the option to get ornery if you refuse to give him vendor credit on the merchandise you're selling him, although this is not the full picture.

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:12:16 +0000

Dear Bink35, I guess I should do a blog. Thanx for the encouragement. Beyond the vested interests, the Western assumption is that Western democracy is exportable and desirable for the rest of the world. China has been a one-party state for centuries. That's what works best here. The nice thing about a one-party state is that everyone knows where the buck stops and leaders know they're on the spot, even if they have elbow room to fudge here and there. In the two-party state, party A leaders blame the voters' woes on the last party B administration, which was only fair of course because it, in turn, had blamed party A as soon it took office.

arthurborges's Comments

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Oops, Our Bad!

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

Antiwar Radio with Scott Horton and Charles Goyette : Allison Kilkenny

News From Antiwar.com : US Threatens to Invade Eritrea

News From Antiwar.com : Biden: Gitmo Will Close by January

News From Antiwar.com : Clinton Seeks to Calm Russia After Biden 'Diatribe'

News From Antiwar.com : Four US Troops Killed in Eastern Afghanistan

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Beyond the Hype: Cronkite and the Vietnam War

News From Antiwar.com : Biden Backs NATO Membership for Ukraine

News From Antiwar.com : Four US Troops Killed in Eastern Afghanistan

News From Antiwar.com : West Offering to Endorse Israeli Attack on Iran as Part of Settlement Deal

News From Antiwar.com : West Offering to Endorse Israeli Attack on Iran as Part of Settlement Deal

Antiwar.com Original Articles : NPR: 'Murder' a Controversial Concept

News From Antiwar.com : Obama: World Won't Wait for Iran to Build Nuclear Weapon

News From Antiwar.com : Obama: World Won't Wait for Iran to Build Nuclear Weapon

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Antiwar.com Original Articles : China's Porcelain Empire

Antiwar.com Original Articles : Beyond the Hype:
Cronkite and the Vietnam War