April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
7 comments:
I worked for the research division of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty during the 80s and early 90s. We had many successes, including correctly identifying the key importance of the non-Russian nationalities in bringing about the collapse of the USSR--something the CIA virtually ignored, focused as it was on the Soviet economy and military.
But I watched as first the Reaganauts, then the Bush I crowd, staffed the Radios' management with incompetent cronies who managed to do what the Soviet KGB could only dream of doing: take a wrecking ball to our world-class research operation.
So I can well imagine what it was like to be in the CIA's Soviet division during those years. Incompetence married to the GOP's power-worshipping ideology is a lethal combination. I can't wait to read the book.
A brilliant analysis and with your kind permission, the topic of a post on my blog.
Richard Parry's article is one of the most disturbing reports that I have read recently. I have been convinced that our governance system is badly broken. This article makes clear how deep the fracture to our system is. There is no place in government that has not been reshaped to push the ideological agenda of neocons in international politics and those committed to a radical free market approach in international economics. Back in the early 1970's I heard an oil executive state that he would have to place the interests of his company operating internationally over the interests of the United States if he were faced with a conflict. With the influence that corporate America has on contemporary politics, it is not surprising that the United States is in a state of serious decline.
In the 70's, the CIA came under attack for predicting the collapse of the USSR. Rumsfeld and Cheney were part of that attack. Bush I sponsored Team B to refute this claimed weakness and justify massive defense spending.
The Casey/Gates team in the 80's institutionalized politicized intel, satisfying short term hawkish political needs, but wound up missing the actual collapse of the USSR. Today, Cheney cites this lapse to malign the CIA, part of the justification for Feith's Office of Special Plans, the stovepipe pre-Iraq intel operation at DoD.
How does the Cheney-bloc reconcile their own disparate views of the CIA?
Full disclosure of everything is going to be the end of the government one day. When they run out of money to maintain the secrecy walls around their little kingdoms (or big kingdoms, if you believe the X-conference people http://www.paradigmresearchgroup.org/X-Conference2008/X-Conference2008-2.htm
The lies and disinformation are so deep because they are so unbelievable, and they are unbelievable because we let them dig so deep into their foxholes. Time to air some dirty socks.
they remind me of circus geeks. anyone ever seen "nightmare alley"? the circus geeks were guys who had lost any and all sense of dignity and most of their connection to reality. Jeff jacoby from the boston globe is one of these. it's as if he doesn't think we know how wrong he's been or doesn't care. it's macabre.
Exellent overveiw -incompetent insiders tend too be much more devesating than external enemies(as a canadian,I've my nose rubbed in that fact daily).
One (still) unsounded note-Whom are the nazi admirers inside the war crimminal in cheif(unindited)sphere of influnce who keep lifting old gobbels wermarch slogans?
I know sorting out the nazis from the other bushs is difficult,but I'm still finding no clues.
It is important,as R Herbert pointed out years ago,"Enclosed disiplines,impose their own words,phrases and laugage".So who came up with the approved(by Gobbels) translation of 'shock and awe',used in all german english propaganda for the term-'blitzkreig'?
There are other examples of this.
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