Rec,
A superb posting. I agree with all of it including the unfortunate duping of a fine American with many years of service, Colin Powell. They used him as the straight man in their conning of the American public and spit him out the other side.
I did have one thing to add about the StarWars project, though. I was never a Reagan fan, and I think he started one of the biggest divisions of culture in America in a long time.
As for SW, I am not sure if this was his idea, an idea from his staff, or neo-conservatism just getting lucky. But in my estimation, the StarWars project was one of the most successful military projects since the atomic bomb. Here is my logic:
First of all, the project was astonishgly ambitious. It required a number of technical innovations that did not yet exist at the time, and some of them may not even exist now. The probability of it working was pretty low if not zero. But the genius of the Reagan administration is the realization that "perception is reality". If you can get the general public to doubt science and engineering, you can also get them to expect things from it that are probably not possible.
So here is my version of the plan.
- Define an ambitious space based defense system that will make the US completely invulnerable to attack by ICBM. If you accomplish this level of defense, you rule the world because the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction would be defunct.
- Base the strategy on a series of necessary technical breakthroughs in a number of cutting edge areas that are very very ambitious. For example, massively parallel computing systems, languages and networks. Also, high powered laser technology, and radio communications.
- Start funding all the major defense contractors for projects related to StarWars, and fund every little company that also wants to contribute. The trillion dollars is really not a problem, because it will all go back into the economy anyway and whether SW is successful or not, it will have funded advances in military technology that ordinarily would have not been developed for decades.
- Foster endless academic and engineering debates at conferences and in the professional journals debating the various ways in which each breakthrough may or may not be established. Although you know that many of the breakthroughs won't be achieved, this step 4 is perhaps the most important part because if step 5.
- Leak a lot of information about SW to the Russians and know that naturally they will be studying all the technical journals.
- The Russians are now scared shitless because who would ever bet against the USA in areas like computer science, laser technology, and aerospace engineering. From all the activity in the journals and all the money being spent, the Russians will see a virtual tidal wave of activity that cannot be faked on such a large scale. Even if it looks iffy, the Russians cannot afford to gamble on the USA failing.
- Even wiith a faltering economy, the Russians now start work on their own similar project, and since they have some confidence in their own engineering prowess, they just start spending and spending on it thinking that they should be able to catch up. Additionally, the Russians think they know something more about certain particle beam technologies, so they think they can do an SW their own way.
- Ultimately, the Russians go broke never achieving anything that looks like it would work as an SW defense, all the while the furious development activity in the USA continues.
- Russia's economy collapses, the Berlin Wall comes down, and the East Germans trade in their Skodas for Mercedes.
- The US cancels the SW project and harvests the fruits of a trillion dollars of investment in computer, network, laser, and space technologies for the next 20 years.
By Jove, I think it just might work.
I appreciate your enlightend post, JA. Nonetheless, the alleged purpose of Star Wars was not fulfilled. There is no global ICBM protection system in place. It seems possible that Star Wars possibly helped usher the collapse of the Soviet Union. I don't think that this was really the American Government's design; It defeats the dog wagging theory.
I may have been too quick to blame the government for the inclination to wage wars. The Central Bank is more to blame--using the American Government as it's lacky.
"A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." -- President Woodrow Wilson.
America has been taken over by money manipulators; an elite few who control most of the cashflow in the U.S. via the Central Bank. This bank controls interest rates and the money supply (inflation).
Many Americans, possibly most, seem to believe that the American Government is the body that gives money to the citizens. In fact, it’s The American Federal Reserve which supplies, and controls, all of the money in America.
The Federal Reserve is a
private company. It make it’s own policies which are not regulated by the government. It loans money to the government at interest – interest which it determines itself. Basically put, the Federal Reserve has America by the balls.
"Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created." – Charles Lindbergh, Investor, Aviator
As you will, hopefully, read later, the Federal Reserve uses it’s economic influence to control the U.S. Federal government and her people. Nothing is more profitable for the American international bankers than war. It’s a tried and true tool for profit and control.
Since the inception of the Federal Reserve in 1913, America was involved in four major wars (WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq). The most lucrative situation for bankers to make money is war. It requires the government to borrow massive amounts of money from the Federal Reserve Bank.
The large banking interests were deeply interested in the world war because of the wide opportunities for large profits.” -- William Jenning Bryan, U.S. Secretary of State.
From the Sinking of the Lusitania, the Tonkin Destroyers, etc., we know that the American government brought itself into most of it’s modern wars -- if not all of them. The wave of public anger after events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 brought on a lust for accountability, massive enlistment, and carte blanche permission for the government to create unofficial martial law.
Imagine J.D. Rockerfeller (A Federal Reserve member) making $1.9 Trillion from WWI. This is possibly the most profitable private venture in world history. The Rockerfellers also made a fortune in Vietnam by setting up arms manufacturing plants in Russia (to fight the Americans in Vietnam).
"Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline no democracy would ever hope or wish to match." – President John F. Kennedy
The ultimate way to wag the dog is to create a war on terror. It's a surefire method to scare the public enough to invigorate their reactionary impulses. It’s the safest way to declare war on a faceless enemy. Cold wars can cause dangerous superpower posturing. Wars on terror are relegated to skirmishes.
"The entire U.S. ruling class, ruling elite, comes to see terrorism as the preferred means, indeed the only means, to provide social cohesion, to provide an enemy image for the society to keep it together [...] you have to have an enemy image in order to have a society…is a very dangerous thing, because it means the entire social order, the political parties, intellectual life, politics in general, are all based on a monstrous myth…" Historian Webster Tarpley
As G.. W. Bush said, "You can never win a war on terror." This sort of protracted warfare keeps the public afraid and the elite bankers richer. Elite terrorism provides social cohesion, and the Americans have tolerated the war for a surprisingly long time. Despite the popular desire for a troop pull-out, the U.S. government continues to terrorize it’s citizens to instill social order. Since 9/11, military spending in the U.S. has increased by 100 billion/year and much of the Bill of Rights has been subverted -- giving the government unprecedented powers. Americans should be outraged.
Is the Iraq war going badly? By sustaining it, the defence contractors get continual heightened profits, the Federal Reserve gets interest on 9 $trillion in US debt. Dick Cheney gets his Haliburtan profits, Bush’s family gets secured oil rights. Where is their incentive to stop the war? From the standpoint of the money barons, the Iraq war is a great success.
The philosopher Carl Schmitt claimed that the "friend-enemy" distinction is not only formative but constitutes the crux of national political existence – that an Enemy Image is a common tool used by oligarchical societies to control the people. Social order is based on the monsterous myth and those poor troops are losing their lives simply to make an elite few more rich and powerful. If you think that this statement is ludicrous, then ask yourself, "Why did American declare war on Iraq?"
