We live in exciting but highly unstable times. Times that cry for new
ideas and new approaches to resolving international differences, as
well as internal differences, if we Humans are going to be around to
celebrate 2100.
The old practice of conquering and subjugating one another has never
resolved our differences. Violence has always resulted in new
violence. War has become the way of life, with Peace being only that
short period of time to retool, regroup, and mount a new attack.
Democracy does still exist in America. It can be found in local town
meetings and small town governments. But I've long ago stopped
believing that the United States of America is a Republic. Whatever
folks want to call it, I believe that we are living in the American
Corporate Empire. But even saying that, it is morphing into an
International Corporate Empire. In other words, the American
Corporate Empire is depending less and less on America for its
resources. And on the international level, just as the American
Empire's ruling class came to dominate governments in state after
state, it now is overpowering one nation after another. And at the
same time, the battle is moving from national dominance to Corporate
dominance. The giant international corporations are replacing the
national governments with Corporate Boards headed by CEO's.
Think about this, in past years could the United States go about the
world sending its drones into other nations in order to selectively
murder? Some say that it is because the USA is the biggest bully on
the block. But even bullies have boundaries. The neighborhood bully
may push all the little kids around, but if he decides to toss a rock
through the window of the jewelry store and grab a fist full of
diamond bracelets, the cops come looking for him. So why is it that
the USA has moved from simply pushing the other kids around, to
grabbing the jewels with impunity? Why have the other nations not
ganged up and called in the cops to stop this bully boy? One answer
that I hang my hat on is that national borders mean very little to the
Corporations jockeying for power. They no longer protect national
boundaries as much as Corporate Holdings.
As the American Corporate Empire mounts one campaign after another,
smashing or corrupting other corporate entities, it will abandon what
was once the USA, in order to protect its world-wide holdings. What
will be left here on the North American continent will be small,
warring states. Third World states. Still under the boot of the
Empire, but no longer a part of it. Third World in the sense that all
of the resources have been sucked up.
These giant corporate empires will continue battling until there is
nothing left to conquer. Unless the People of the World come together
and refuse to play the game any longer. What is the one thing all of
these international corporations are based on? Capitalism! A system
which allows a Ruling Class to exploit the masses to benefit the few
on top. Without the Masses, a corporation is nothing but a harmless,
hollow shell.
A toothless Tiger. My personal pipe dream is that our human instinct
for survival of our species is strong enough that we will come to
understand that we must stop supporting the corporate bully boys and
begin searching for a new world order that enables us to live together
with our Mother Earth.
Carl Jarvis
On 3/11/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> Only, who is the empire? It seems hard to define because although the US
> government seems to be the biggest bully on the block, it is controlled by
> other forces. Is it the international corporations? But they have competing
> interests to some extent. We discover that Gaza is being destroyed so that
> Israel can control their offshore gas and oil fields. But is it Israel or
> the gas and oil corporations that benefit? The Curds are fighting ISIS over
> who will control the oil. China and the US are competing for influence in
> Africa because of natural resources there. But who benefits? Certainly not
> the citizens of the countries. The governments? The corporations? All of
> the
> above? When we learn that Canada and New Zealand are doing the same kind of
> spying on their citizens as the US does on us, which country is benefiting?
>
> Miriam
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Blind-Democracy [mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On
> Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
> Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 10:20 PM
> To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
> Subject: We Have a Bunch of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American
> Empire: Or do we?
>
> Miriam,
> I guess what I'm saying is that it does not matter if we are speaking
> of our elected officials or those supposed experts they hire. We need
> to stop making believe that they are bunglers and buffoons. and start
> taking a harder look at what they're doing. Of course it appears
> crazy from our perspective. But when we stop and think about it,
> the fact that our politicians have been controlled by corporate
> dollars, and the people they appoint are like-thinking people, we can
> then answer the question, Why is our international behavior all over
> the map? To my way of thinking, while it looks as if our foreign
> policy has gone wild, if we take each incident and examine it in view
> of what will serve the needs of the Empire, we can see that there is a
> basic pattern. That pattern is to further the control of the Empire.
> This helps make sense when we hear the government accuse one nation
> for undermining the "Will of their People", while the Empire is busy
> quietly undermining a democracy in another part of the globe.
> The examples are far too numerous to detail here, but anyone who
> follows the Empire's contortions will understand that this is not the
> work of Fools, but the long range plan of the most Fearsome, Ruthless
> Empire known to Man.
>
> Carl Jarvis
> On 3/10/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
>> I think he's talking about the people who are appointed by elected
>> officials
>> to provide intellectual rationalizations for the wars that we wage. They
>> are
>> the people with intellectual and professional credentials who make the
>> unscrupulous actions of our government sound rational and humane. I have
>> been looking through yesterday's and todays articles for the past hour or
>> so
>> because I'm behind in my reading. The behavior of our government, as
>> described in one article after another, is so atrocious, that it really
>> becomes difficult to accept all of this stuff. We are accusing Venezuela
> of
>> undemocratic procedures and sanctioning some of its citizens. We are
>> accusing Russia of attempting to swallow parts of Ukraine after we
> fomented
>> a coup. We are pivoting toward China and trying to sign a trade deal so
>> that
>> China's economic and military power will be weakened. We are bombing
>> Syria
>> without Syria's permission, killing civilians and militants, without
>> knowing
>> which militants we're killing because simultaneously we are equipping and
>> training some militants. We are starting oil drilling in the Arctic where
>> accidents can't be repaired, and in the Atlantic, as we talk about global
>> warming and alternative power. We are providing military aid to Central
>> American countries in the guides of aid so that their citizens won't
>> emigrate to the US. Obama has again cut heating aid to poor people in the
>> US.
>>
>> Miriam
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Blind-Democracy [mailto:blind-democracy-bounces@octothorp.org] On
>> Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
>> Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2015 1:27 PM
>> To: Blind Democracy Discussion List
>> Subject: We Have a Bunch of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American
>> Empire: Or do we?
>>
>> Andrew Bocevich may believe that we have a Bunch of Debauched
> Intellectuals
>> Managing the American Empire. I disagree. In fact, such thinking is
>> dangerous. This nation, regardless of what we want to believe, or what
>> we've been told, has always behaved like an Empire. From the very onset
>> our
>> ancestors mowed down Native opposition and reduced once proud nations to
>> small bands of beaten tribes huddled on reservations. The mighty
>> Mississippi river did not stop us, nor were we slowed down by the
>> towering
>> Rockies. And finally, our Forefathers stood at the edge of the Pacific
>> Ocean and looked Westward for new Lands to conquer. As the Empire grew
>> in
>> strength it also grew in its ability to manage its people. It may not be
>> popular to suggest it, but we are owned by the Empire. Despite our
>> protests
>> to the contrary, despite what we proudly hold up as our Independence and
>> Freedom to speak and come and go as we please, we are all being carried
>> along by the never ending apatite of the Empire.
>> Regardless of how we feel individually, regardless of our personal Faith
> or
>> morals or beliefs, we are swept along, being called upon to fight the
>> Empire's battles, produce the Empire's weapons, feed and clothe the
>> Empire's
>> First Class Citizens. And most clever of all is the Empire's ability to
>> help us believe that our nation is b being managed by a ship of Fools.
>> We
>> have come to believe that our elected politicians are bickering infantile
>> egotists, looking out for their own special pork barrels. And somehow
>> our
>> nation continues to be the best, the most powerful, the most feared
>> nation
>> in all of history. I think there's a ship of Fools, alright. And we,
>> the
>> supposed People, are them.
>>
>> Carl Jarvis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
>> down Native opposition and
>>
>>
>>
>> Andrew Bocevich may believe that we have a Bunch of Debauched
> Intellectuals
>> Managing the American Empire
>>
>>
>>
>>> ________________________________________
>>> We Have a Bunch of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American
>>> Empire By Andrew Bacevich [1] / TomDispatch [2] March 8, 2015 To stay
>>> on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
>>> updates from TomDispatch.com here [3].
>>> Policy intellectuals -- eggheads presuming to instruct the mere
>>> mortals who actually run for office -- are a blight on the republic.
>>> Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where
>>> their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of
>>> extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance
>>> -- well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in
>>> print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch
>>> -- belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the
>> Great Lakes.
>>> It all began innocently enough. Back in 1933, with the country in the
>>> throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
>>> first imported a handful of eager academics to join the ranks of his New
>> Deal.
>>> An
>>> unprecedented economic crisis required some fresh thinking, FDR
>>> believed.
>>> Whether the contributions of this "Brains Trust [4]" made a positive
>>> impact or served to retard economic recovery (or ended up being a
>>> wash) remains a subject for debate even today. At the very least,
>>> however, the arrival of Adolph Berle, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell,
>>> and others elevated Washington's bourbon-and-cigars social scene. As
>>> bona fide members of the intelligentsia, they possessed a sort of
>>> cachet.
>>> Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the
>>> Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep
>>> thinkers, their agenda now focused on "national security." This
>>> eminently elastic concept -- more properly, "national insecurity" --
>>> encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or
>>> surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design,
>>> decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters
>>> said to be of vital importance to the nation's survival. National
>>> insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world's equivalent of
>>> the gift that just keeps on giving.
>>> People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to
>>> be known as "defense intellectuals." Pioneers in this endeavor back
>>> in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think
>>> tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional
>>> academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like
>>> Herman Kahn, who took pride in "thinking about the unthinkable," and
>>> Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of
>>> maintaining "the delicate balance of terror."
>>> In this wonky world, the coin of the realm has been and remains
>>> "policy relevance." This means devising products that convey a sense
>>> of novelty, while serving chiefly to perpetuate the ongoing
>>> enterprise. The ultimate example of a policy-relevant insight is Dr.
>>> Strangelove's [5] discovery of a "mineshaft gap" -- successor to the
>>> "bomber gap" and the "missile gap"
>>> that,
>>> in the 1950s, had found America allegedly lagging behind the Soviets
>>> in weaponry and desperately needing to catch up. Now, with a
>>> thermonuclear exchange about to destroy the planet, the United States
>>> is once more falling behind, Strangelove claims, this time in digging
>>> underground shelters enabling some small proportion of the population
>>> to survive.
>>>
>>> In a single, brilliant stroke, Strangelove posits a new raison d'être
>>> for the entire national insecurity apparatus, thereby ensuring that
>>> the game will continue more or less forever. A sequel to Stanley
>>> Kubrick's movie would have shown General "Buck" Turgidson and the
>>> other brass huddled in the War Room, developing plans to close the
>>> mineshaft gap as if nothing untoward had occurred.
>>> The Rise of the National Insecurity State Yet only in the 1960s, right
>>> around the time that Dr. Strangelove first appeared in movie theaters,
>>> did policy intellectuals really come into their own. The press now
>>> referred to them as "action intellectuals," suggesting energy and
>>> impatience. Action intellectuals were thinkers, but also doers,
>>> members of a "large and growing body of men who choose to leave their
>>> quiet and secure niches on the university campus and involve
>>> themselves instead in the perplexing problems that face the nation,"
>>> as LIFE Magazine put it in 1967. Among the most perplexing of those
>>> problems was what to do about Vietnam, just the sort of challenge an
>>> action intellectual could sink his teeth into.
>>> Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to
>>> war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger,
>>> and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these,
>>> alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam
>>> marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in
>>> considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated
>>> by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More
>>> surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war
>>> well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members
>>> of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in
>>> failure.
>>> In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our
>>> National Identity [6], Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the
>>> University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas
>>> were.
>>> As Exhibit A, Professor Appy presents McGeorge Bundy, national
>>> security adviser first for President John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon
>> Johnson.
>>> Bundy was a product of Groton and Yale, who famously became the
>>> youngest-ever dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having
>>> gained tenure there without even bothering to get a graduate degree.
>>> For Exhibit B, there is Walt Whitman Rostow, Bundy's successor as
>>> national security adviser. Rostow was another Yalie, earning his
>>> undergraduate degree there along with a PhD. While taking a break of
>>> sorts, he spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a
>>> professor of economic history at MIT, Rostow captured JFK's attention
>>> with his modestly subtitled 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth:
>>> A Non-Communist Manifesto, which offered a grand theory of development
>> with ostensibly universal applicability.
>>> Kennedy brought Rostow to Washington to test his theories of
>>> "modernization"
>>> in places like Southeast Asia.
>>> Finally, as Exhibit C, Appy briefly discusses Professor Samuel P.
>>> Huntington's contributions to the Vietnam War. Huntington also
>>> attended Yale, before earning his PhD at Harvard and then returning to
>>> teach there, becoming one of the most renowned political scientists of
>>> the post-World War II era.
>>> What the three shared in common, apart from a suspect education
>>> acquired in New Haven, was an unwavering commitment to the reigning
>>> verities of the Cold War. Foremost among those verities was this:
>>> that a monolith called Communism, controlled by a small group of
>>> fanatic ideologues hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, posed an
>>> existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but to the
>>> very idea of freedom itself. The claim came with this essential
>>> corollary: the only hope of avoiding such a cataclysmic outcome was
>>> for the United States to vigorously resist the Communist threat
>>> wherever it reared its ugly head.
>>> Buy those twin propositions and you accept the imperative of the U.S.
>>> preventing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. North Vietnam,
>>> from absorbing the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, into a
>>> single unified country; in other words, that South Vietnam was a cause
>>> worth fighting and dying for. Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington not only
>>> bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, but then exerted
>>> themselves mightily to persuade others in Washington to buy it as well.
>>> Yet even as he was urging the "Americanization" of the Vietnam War in
>>> 1965, Bundy already entertained doubts about whether it was winnable.
>>> But not to
>>> worry: even if the effort ended in failure, he counseled President
>>> Johnson, "the policy will be worth it."
>>> How so? "At a minimum," Bundy wrote, "it will damp down the charge
>>> that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will
>>> be important in many countries, including our own." If the United
>>> States ultimately lost South Vietnam, at least Americans would have
>>> died trying to prevent that result -- and through some perverted logic
>>> this, in the estimation of Harvard's youngest-ever dean, was a
>>> redeeming prospect. The essential point, Bundy believed, was to
>>> prevent others from seeing the United States as a "paper tiger." To
>>> avoid a fight, even a losing one, was to forfeit credibility. "Not to
>>> have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major
>>> risk" -- that was the problem to be avoided at all cost.
>>> Rostow outdid even Bundy in hawkishness. Apart from his relentless
>>> advocacy of coercive bombing to influence North Vietnamese
>>> policymakers, Rostow was a chief architect of something called the
>>> Strategic Hamlet Program. The idea was to jumpstart the Rostovian
>>> process of modernization by forcibly relocating Vietnamese peasants
>>> from their ancestral villages into armed camps where the Saigon
>>> government would provide security, education, medical care, and
>>> agricultural assistance. By winning hearts-and-minds in this manner,
>>> the defeat of the communist insurgency was sure to follow, with the
>>> people of South Vietnam vaulted into the "age of high mass consumption,"
>>> where Rostow believed all humankind was destined to end up.
>>> That was the theory. Reality differed somewhat. Actual Strategic
>>> Hamlets were indistinguishable from concentration camps. The
>>> government in Saigon proved too weak, too incompetent, and too corrupt
>>> to hold up its end of the bargain. Rather than winning
>>> hearts-and-minds, the program induced alienation, even as it
>>> essentially destabilized peasant society. One
>>> result: an increasingly rootless rural population flooded into South
>>> Vietnam's cities where there was little work apart from servicing the
>>> needs of the ever-growing U.S. military population -- hardly the sort
>>> of activity conducive to self-sustaining development.
>>> Yet even when the Vietnam War ended in complete and utter defeat,
>>> Rostow still claimed vindication for his theory. "We and the Southeast
>> Asians,"
>>> he
>>> wrote, had used the war years "so well that there wasn't the panic
>>> [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed to
>> intervene."
>>> Indeed, regionally Rostow spied plenty of good news, all of it
>>> attributable to the American war.
>>> "Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other
>>> countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have
>>> seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore
>>> have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the
>>> emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia."
>>> So there you have it. If you want to know what 58,000 Americans (not
>>> to mention vastly larger numbers of Vietnamese) died for, it was to
>>> encourage entrepreneurship, exports, and the emergence of technocrats
>>> elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
>>> Appy describes Professor Huntington as another action intellectual
>>> with an unfailing facility for seeing the upside of catastrophe. In
>>> Huntington's view, the internal displacement of South Vietnamese
>>> caused by the excessive use of American firepower, along with the
>>> failure of Rostow's Strategic Hamlets, was actually good news. It
>>> promised, he insisted, to give the Americans an edge over the
>>> insurgents.
>>> The key to final victory, Huntington wrote [7], was "forced-draft
>>> urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in
>>> question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can
>>> hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power." By emptying
>>> out the countryside, the U.S. could win the war in the cities. "The
>>> urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often
>>> becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of
>>> life." The language may be a tad antiseptic, but the point is clear
>>> enough: the challenges of city life in a state of utter immiseration
>>> would miraculously transform those same peasants into go-getters more
>>> interested in making a buck than in signing up for social revolution.
>>> Revisited decades later, claims once made with a straight face by the
>>> likes of Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington -- action intellectuals of the
>>> very first rank -- seem beyond preposterous. They insult our
>>> intelligence, leaving us to wonder how such judgments or the people
>>> who promoted them were ever taken seriously.
>>> How was it that during Vietnam bad ideas exerted such a perverse
>> influence?
>>> Why were those ideas so impervious to challenge? Why, in short, was
>>> it so difficult for Americans to recognize bullshit for what it was?
>>> Creating a Twenty-First-Century Slow-Motion Vietnam These questions
>>> are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant
>>> when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of
>>> policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose
>>> bullshit underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to
>>> justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.
>>> The present-day successors to Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington subscribe
>>> to their own reigning verities. Chief among them is this: that a
>>> phenomenon called terrorism or Islamic radicalism, inspired by a small
>>> group of fanatic ideologues hidden away in various quarters of the
>>> Greater Middle East, poses an existential threat not simply to America
>>> and its allies, but -- yes, it's still with us -- to the very idea of
>>> freedom itself. That assertion comes with an essential corollary
>>> dusted off and imported from the Cold War: the only hope of avoiding
>>> this cataclysmic outcome is for the United States to vigorously resist
>>> the terrorist/Islamist threat wherever it rears its ugly head.
>>> At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two
>>> decades prior to that date, U.S. policymakers have taken these
>>> propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because
>>> few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity
>>> have bothered to question them.
>>> Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address
>>> such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting
>>> genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and
>>> Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to
>>> perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
>>> The fact that the enterprise itself has become utterly amorphous may
>>> actually facilitate such efforts. Once widely known as the Global War
>>> on Terror, or GWOT, it has been transformed into the War with No Name.
>>> A little bit like the famous Supreme Court opinion on pornography: we
>>> can't define it, we just know it when we see it, with ISIS the latest
>>> manifestation to capture Washington's attention.
>>> All that we can say for sure about this nameless undertaking is that
>>> it continues with no end in sight. It has become a sort of
>>> slow-motion Vietnam, stimulating remarkably little honest reflection
>>> regarding its course thus far or prospects for the future. If there
>>> is an actual Brains Trust at work in Washington, it operates on
>>> autopilot. Today, the second- and third-generation bastard offspring
>>> of RAND that clutter northwest Washington -- the Center for this, the
>>> Institute for that -- spin their wheels debating latter day
>>> equivalents of Strategic Hamlets, with nary a thought given to more
>> fundamental concerns.
>>> What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter's return to the
>>> Pentagon as President Obama's fourth secretary of defense. Carter
>>> himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington
>>> mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard
>>> and in "the Building." He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with
>>> a PhD. from Oxford. "Ash" -- in Washington, a first-name-only
>>> identifier ("Henry," "Zbig," "Hillary") signifies that you have truly
>>> arrived -- is the author of books and articles galore, including one
>>> op-ed [8] co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry
>>> back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea.
>>> Military action "undoubtedly carries risk," he bravely acknowledged at
>>> the time. "But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North
>>> Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater" -- just the
>>> sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and
>>> Albert Wohlstetter.
>>> As Carter has taken the Pentagon's reins, he also has taken pains to
>>> convey the impression of being a big thinker. As one Wall Street
>>> Journal headline [9] enthused, "Ash Carter Seeks Fresh Eyes on Global
>>> Threats." That multiple global threats exist and that America's
>>> defense secretary has a mandate to address each of them are, of
>>> course, givens. His predecessor Chuck Hagel (no Yale degree) was a
>>> bit of a plodder. By way of contrast, Carter has made clear his
>>> intention
>> to shake things up.
>>> So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth
>>> Pollack, Michael O'Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national
>>> insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all.
>>> Besides all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three
>>> share the distinction of having supported [10] the Iraq War back in
>>> 2003 and calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For
>>> assurances that the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound --
>>> we just need to try harder -- who better to consult than Pollack [11],
>>> O'Hanlon [12], and Kagan [13] (any Kagan [14])?
>>> Was Carter hoping to gain some fresh insight from his dinner companions?
>>> Or
>>> was he letting Washington's clubby network of fellows, senior fellows,
>>> and distinguished fellows know that, on his watch, the prevailing
>>> verities of national insecurity would remain sacrosanct? You decide.
>>> Soon thereafter, Carter's first trip overseas provided another
>>> opportunity to signal his intentions. In Kuwait, he convened a war
>>> council of senior military and civilian officials to take stock of the
>> campaign against ISIS.
>>> In a daring departure from standard practice, the new defense
>>> secretary prohibited PowerPoint briefings [15]. One participant
>>> described the ensuing event as "a five-hour-long college seminar" --
>>> candid and freewheeling.
>>> "This is reversing the paradigm," one awed senior Pentagon official
>>> remarked [9]. Carter was said to be challenging his subordinates to
>>> "look at this problem differently."
>>> Of course, Carter might have said, "Let's look at a different problem."
>>> That, however, was far too radical to contemplate -- the equivalent of
>>> suggesting back in the 1960s that assumptions landing the United
>>> States in Vietnam should be reexamined.
>>> In any event -- and to no one's surprise -- the different look did not
>>> produce a different conclusion. Instead of reversing the paradigm,
>>> Carter affirmed it: the existing U.S. approach to dealing with ISIS is
>>> sound, he announced. It only needs a bit of tweaking [16] -- just the
>>> result to give the Pollacks, O'Hanlons, and Kagans something to write
>>> about as they keep up the chatter that substitutes for serious debate.
>>> Do we really need that chatter? Does it enhance the quality of U.S.
>> policy?
>>> If policy/defense/action intellectuals fell silent would America be
>>> less secure?
>>> Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently --
>>> just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England.
>>> Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let's see if we are able to
>>> make do without them even for a month or two.
>>> In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how
>>> best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over
>>> to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the
>>> Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might
>> turn up?
>>> Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch [17] regular, is a professor of
>>> history and international relations emeritus at Boston University's
>>> Pardee School of Global Studies. He is writing a military history of
>>> America's War for the Greater Middle East. His most recent book is
>>> Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
>>> [18].
>>> Share on Facebook Share
>>> Share on Twitter Tweet
>>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [19]
>>> [20]
>>> ________________________________________
>>> Source URL:
>>> http://www.alternet.org/world/we-have-bunch-debauched-intellectuals-ma
>>> naging
>>> -american-empire
>>> Links:
>>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/andrew-bacevich
>>> [2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
>>> [3]
>>> http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f
>>> 828c73
>>> &id=1e41682ade
>>> [4]
>>> http://www.gwu.edu/%7Eerpapers/teachinger/glossary/brains-trust.cfm
>>> [5] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
>>> [6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670025399/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>>> [7]
>>> http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23988/samuel-p-huntington/the-b
>>> ases-o
>>> f-accommodation
>>> [8]
>>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006
>>> 062101
>>> 518.html
>>> [9]
>>> http://www.wsj.com/articles/ash-carter-seeks-fresh-eyes-on-global-thre
>>> ats-14
>>> 24826250
>>> [10] http://www.salon.com/2007/07/30/brookings/
>>> [11]
>>> http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/12/03-iran-airstrikes
>>> -iraq-
>>> isis-islamic-state
>>> [12]
>>> http://nationalinterest.org/feature/brothers-arms-it-time-us-iraqi-all
>>> iance-
>>> 11712
>>> [13]
>>> http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/388522/robert-kagan-obama-adminis
>>> tratio n-must-prove-its-willing-fight-isis-order-gain-allies
>>> [14]
>>> http://www.understandingwar.org/report/strategy-defeat-islamic-state
>>> [15]
>>> http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/02/23/ash-ca
>>> rter-p
>>> owerpoint-brass/23895027/
>>> [16]
>>> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/carter-says-plan-destroy-isis-101500266.
>>> html
>>> [17]
>>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175949/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich,_a_h
>>> ug_for
>>> _the_muddlers/
>>> [18] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082964/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>>> [19] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on We Have a Bunch
>>> of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American Empire [20]
>>> http://www.alternet.org/ [21] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>>
>>> Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > We Have a Bunch
>>> of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American Empire
>>>
>>> We Have a Bunch of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American
>>> Empire By Andrew Bacevich [1] / TomDispatch [2] March 8, 2015 To stay
>>> on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest
>>> updates from TomDispatch.com here [3].
>>> Policy intellectuals -- eggheads presuming to instruct the mere
>>> mortals who actually run for office -- are a blight on the republic.
>>> Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where
>>> their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of
>>> extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance
>>> -- well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in
>>> print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch
>>> -- belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the
>>> Great
>> Lakes.
>>> It all began innocently enough. Back in 1933, with the country in the
>>> throes of the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
>>> first imported a handful of eager academics to join the ranks of his
>>> New Deal. An unprecedented economic crisis required some fresh
>>> thinking, FDR believed.
>>> Whether the contributions of this "Brains Trust [4]" made a positive
>>> impact or served to retard economic recovery (or ended up being a
>>> wash) remains a subject for debate even today. At the very least,
>>> however, the arrival of Adolph Berle, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell,
>>> and others elevated Washington's bourbon-and-cigars social scene. As
>>> bona fide members of the intelligentsia, they possessed a sort of
>>> cachet.
>>> Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the
>>> Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep
>>> thinkers, their agenda now focused on "national security." This
>>> eminently elastic concept -- more properly, "national insecurity" --
>>> encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or
>>> surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design,
>>> decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters
>>> said to be of vital importance to the nation's survival. National
>>> insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world's equivalent of
>>> the gift that just keeps on giving.
>>> People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to
>>> be known as "defense intellectuals." Pioneers in this endeavor back in
>>> the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks
>>> like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional
>>> academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman
>>> Kahn, who took pride in "thinking about the unthinkable," and Albert
>>> Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining
>>> "the delicate balance of terror."
>>> In this wonky world, the coin of the realm has been and remains
>>> "policy relevance." This means devising products that convey a sense
>>> of novelty, while serving chiefly to perpetuate the ongoing
>>> enterprise. The ultimate example of a policy-relevant insight is Dr.
>>> Strangelove's [5] discovery of a "mineshaft gap" -- successor to the
>>> "bomber gap" and the "missile gap"
>>> that,
>>> in the 1950s, had found America allegedly lagging behind the Soviets
>>> in weaponry and desperately needing to catch up. Now, with a
>>> thermonuclear exchange about to destroy the planet, the United States
>>> is once more falling behind, Strangelove claims, this time in digging
>>> underground shelters enabling some small proportion of the population
>>> to survive.
>>>
>>> In a single, brilliant stroke, Strangelove posits a new raison d'être
>>> for the entire national insecurity apparatus, thereby ensuring that
>>> the game will continue more or less forever. A sequel to Stanley
>>> Kubrick's movie would have shown General "Buck" Turgidson and the
>>> other brass huddled in the War Room, developing plans to close the
>>> mineshaft gap as if nothing untoward had occurred.
>>> The Rise of the National Insecurity State Yet only in the 1960s, right
>>> around the time that Dr. Strangelove first appeared in movie theaters,
>>> did policy intellectuals really come into their own. The press now
>>> referred to them as "action intellectuals," suggesting energy and
>>> impatience. Action intellectuals were thinkers, but also doers,
>>> members of a "large and growing body of men who choose to leave their
>>> quiet and secure niches on the university campus and involve
>>> themselves instead in the perplexing problems that face the nation,"
>>> as LIFE Magazine put it in 1967. Among the most perplexing of those
>>> problems was what to do about Vietnam, just the sort of challenge an
>>> action intellectual could sink his teeth into.
>>> Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to
>>> war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger,
>>> and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these,
>>> alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam
>>> marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in
>>> considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated
>>> by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More
>>> surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war
>>> well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members
>>> of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in
>> failure.
>>> In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our
>>> National Identity [6], Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the
>>> University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas
>>> were.
>>> As Exhibit A, Professor Appy presents McGeorge Bundy, national
>>> security adviser first for President John F. Kennedy and then for Lyndon
>> Johnson.
>>> Bundy was a product of Groton and Yale, who famously became the
>>> youngest-ever dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, having
>>> gained tenure there without even bothering to get a graduate degree.
>>> For Exhibit B, there is Walt Whitman Rostow, Bundy's successor as
>>> national security adviser. Rostow was another Yalie, earning his
>>> undergraduate degree there along with a PhD. While taking a break of
>>> sorts, he spent two years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. As a
>>> professor of economic history at MIT, Rostow captured JFK's attention
>>> with his modestly subtitled 1960 book The Stages of Economic Growth: A
>>> Non-Communist Manifesto, which offered a grand theory of development
>>> with ostensibly universal applicability. Kennedy brought Rostow to
>>> Washington to test his theories of "modernization" in places like
>>> Southeast Asia.
>>> Finally, as Exhibit C, Appy briefly discusses Professor Samuel P.
>>> Huntington's contributions to the Vietnam War. Huntington also
>>> attended Yale, before earning his PhD at Harvard and then returning to
>>> teach there, becoming one of the most renowned political scientists of
>>> the post-World War II era.
>>> What the three shared in common, apart from a suspect education
>>> acquired in New Haven, was an unwavering commitment to the reigning
>>> verities of the Cold War. Foremost among those verities was this: that
>>> a monolith called Communism, controlled by a small group of fanatic
>>> ideologues hidden behind the walls of the Kremlin, posed an
>>> existential threat not simply to America and its allies, but to the
>>> very idea of freedom itself. The claim came with this essential
>>> corollary: the only hope of avoiding such a cataclysmic outcome was
>>> for the United States to vigorously resist the Communist threat
>>> wherever it reared its ugly head.
>>> Buy those twin propositions and you accept the imperative of the U.S.
>>> preventing the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. North Vietnam,
>>> from absorbing the Republic of Vietnam, a.k.a. South Vietnam, into a
>>> single unified country; in other words, that South Vietnam was a cause
>>> worth fighting and dying for. Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington not only
>>> bought that argument hook, line, and sinker, but then exerted
>>> themselves mightily to persuade others in Washington to buy it as well.
>>> Yet even as he was urging the "Americanization" of the Vietnam War in
>>> 1965, Bundy already entertained doubts about whether it was winnable.
>>> But not to
>>> worry: even if the effort ended in failure, he counseled President
>>> Johnson, "the policy will be worth it."
>>> How so? "At a minimum," Bundy wrote, "it will damp down the charge
>>> that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will
>>> be important in many countries, including our own." If the United
>>> States ultimately lost South Vietnam, at least Americans would have
>>> died trying to prevent that result -- and through some perverted logic
>>> this, in the estimation of Harvard's youngest-ever dean, was a
>>> redeeming prospect. The essential point, Bundy believed, was to
>>> prevent others from seeing the United States as a "paper tiger." To
>>> avoid a fight, even a losing one, was to forfeit credibility. "Not to
>>> have it thought that when we commit ourselves we really mean no major
>>> risk" -- that was the problem to be avoided at all cost.
>>> Rostow outdid even Bundy in hawkishness. Apart from his relentless
>>> advocacy of coercive bombing to influence North Vietnamese
>>> policymakers, Rostow was a chief architect of something called the
>>> Strategic Hamlet Program. The idea was to jumpstart the Rostovian
>>> process of modernization by forcibly relocating Vietnamese peasants
>>> from their ancestral villages into armed camps where the Saigon
>>> government would provide security, education, medical care, and
>>> agricultural assistance. By winning hearts-and-minds in this manner,
>>> the defeat of the communist insurgency was sure to follow, with the
>>> people of South Vietnam vaulted into the "age of high mass consumption,"
>>> where Rostow believed all humankind was destined to end up.
>>> That was the theory. Reality differed somewhat. Actual Strategic
>>> Hamlets were indistinguishable from concentration camps. The
>>> government in Saigon proved too weak, too incompetent, and too corrupt
>>> to hold up its end of the bargain. Rather than winning
>>> hearts-and-minds, the program induced alienation, even as it
>>> essentially destabilized peasant society. One
>>> result:
>>> an increasingly rootless rural population flooded into South Vietnam's
>>> cities where there was little work apart from servicing the needs of
>>> the ever-growing U.S. military population -- hardly the sort of
>>> activity conducive to self-sustaining development.
>>> Yet even when the Vietnam War ended in complete and utter defeat,
>>> Rostow still claimed vindication for his theory. "We and the Southeast
>>> Asians," he wrote, had used the war years "so well that there wasn't
>>> the panic [when Saigon fell] that there would have been if we had failed
>> to intervene."
>>> Indeed, regionally Rostow spied plenty of good news, all of it
>>> attributable to the American war.
>>> "Since 1975 there has been a general expansion of trade by the other
>>> countries of that region with Japan and the West. In Thailand we have
>>> seen the rise of a new class of entrepreneurs. Malaysia and Singapore
>>> have become countries of diverse manufactured exports. We can see the
>>> emergence of a much thicker layer of technocrats in Indonesia."
>>> So there you have it. If you want to know what 58,000 Americans (not
>>> to mention vastly larger numbers of Vietnamese) died for, it was to
>>> encourage entrepreneurship, exports, and the emergence of technocrats
>>> elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
>>> Appy describes Professor Huntington as another action intellectual
>>> with an unfailing facility for seeing the upside of catastrophe. In
>>> Huntington's view, the internal displacement of South Vietnamese
>>> caused by the excessive use of American firepower, along with the
>>> failure of Rostow's Strategic Hamlets, was actually good news. It
>>> promised, he insisted, to give the Americans an edge over the
>>> insurgents.
>>> The key to final victory, Huntington wrote [7], was "forced-draft
>>> urbanization and modernization which rapidly brings the country in
>>> question out of the phase in which a rural revolutionary movement can
>>> hope to generate sufficient strength to come to power." By emptying
>>> out the countryside, the U.S. could win the war in the cities. "The
>>> urban slum, which seems so horrible to middle-class Americans, often
>>> becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of
>>> life." The language may be a tad antiseptic, but the point is clear
>>> enough: the challenges of city life in a state of utter immiseration
>>> would miraculously transform those same peasants into go-getters more
>>> interested in making a buck than in signing up for social revolution.
>>> Revisited decades later, claims once made with a straight face by the
>>> likes of Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington -- action intellectuals of the
>>> very first rank -- seem beyond preposterous. They insult our
>>> intelligence, leaving us to wonder how such judgments or the people
>>> who promoted them were ever taken seriously.
>>> How was it that during Vietnam bad ideas exerted such a perverse
>> influence?
>>> Why were those ideas so impervious to challenge? Why, in short, was it
>>> so difficult for Americans to recognize bullshit for what it was?
>>> Creating a Twenty-First-Century Slow-Motion Vietnam These questions
>>> are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant
>>> when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of
>>> policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose
>>> bullshit underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to
>>> justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.
>>> The present-day successors to Bundy, Rostow, and Huntington subscribe
>>> to their own reigning verities. Chief among them is this: that a
>>> phenomenon called terrorism or Islamic radicalism, inspired by a small
>>> group of fanatic ideologues hidden away in various quarters of the
>>> Greater Middle East, poses an existential threat not simply to America
>>> and its allies, but -- yes, it's still with us -- to the very idea of
>>> freedom itself. That assertion comes with an essential corollary
>>> dusted off and imported from the Cold War: the only hope of avoiding
>>> this cataclysmic outcome is for the United States to vigorously resist
>>> the terrorist/Islamist threat wherever it rears its ugly head.
>>> At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two
>>> decades prior to that date, U.S. policymakers have taken these
>>> propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because
>>> few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity
>>> have bothered to question them.
>>> Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address
>>> such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting
>>> genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and
>>> Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to
>>> perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
>>> The fact that the enterprise itself has become utterly amorphous may
>>> actually facilitate such efforts. Once widely known as the Global War
>>> on Terror, or GWOT, it has been transformed into the War with No Name.
>>> A little bit like the famous Supreme Court opinion on pornography: we
>>> can't define it, we just know it when we see it, with ISIS the latest
>>> manifestation to capture Washington's attention.
>>> All that we can say for sure about this nameless undertaking is that
>>> it continues with no end in sight. It has become a sort of slow-motion
>>> Vietnam, stimulating remarkably little honest reflection regarding its
>>> course thus far or prospects for the future. If there is an actual
>>> Brains Trust at work in Washington, it operates on autopilot. Today,
>>> the second- and third-generation bastard offspring of RAND that
>>> clutter northwest Washington
>>> -- the Center for this, the Institute for that -- spin their wheels
>>> debating latter day equivalents of Strategic Hamlets, with nary a
>>> thought given to more fundamental concerns.
>>> What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter's return to the
>>> Pentagon as President Obama's fourth secretary of defense. Carter
>>> himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington
>>> mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard
>>> and in "the Building." He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with
>>> a PhD. from Oxford. "Ash" -- in Washington, a first-name-only
>>> identifier ("Henry," "Zbig," "Hillary") signifies that you have truly
>>> arrived -- is the author of books and articles galore, including one
>>> op-ed [8] co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry
>>> back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea. Military
>>> action "undoubtedly carries risk," he bravely acknowledged at the
>>> time. "But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North
>>> Korea's race to threaten this country would be greater" -- just the
>>> sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and
>>> Albert Wohlstetter.
>>> As Carter has taken the Pentagon's reins, he also has taken pains to
>>> convey the impression of being a big thinker. As one Wall Street
>>> Journal headline [9] enthused, "Ash Carter Seeks Fresh Eyes on Global
>>> Threats." That multiple global threats exist and that America's
>>> defense secretary has a mandate to address each of them are, of
>>> course, givens. His predecessor Chuck Hagel (no Yale degree) was a bit
>>> of a plodder. By way of contrast, Carter has made clear his intention
>>> to shake things up.
>>> So on his second day in office, for example, he dined with Kenneth
>>> Pollack, Michael O'Hanlon, and Robert Kagan, ranking national
>>> insecurity intellectuals and old Washington hands one and all. Besides
>>> all being employees of the Brookings Institution, the three share the
>>> distinction of having supported [10] the Iraq War back in 2003 and
>>> calling for redoubling efforts against ISIS today. For assurances that
>>> the fundamental orientation of U.S. policy is sound -- we just need to
>>> try harder -- who better to consult than Pollack [11], O'Hanlon [12],
>>> and
>> Kagan [13] (any Kagan [14])?
>>> Was Carter hoping to gain some fresh insight from his dinner
>>> companions? Or was he letting Washington's clubby network of fellows,
>>> senior fellows, and distinguished fellows know that, on his watch, the
>>> prevailing verities of national insecurity would remain sacrosanct? You
>> decide.
>>> Soon thereafter, Carter's first trip overseas provided another
>>> opportunity to signal his intentions. In Kuwait, he convened a war
>>> council of senior military and civilian officials to take stock of the
>> campaign against ISIS.
>>> In a daring departure from standard practice, the new defense
>>> secretary prohibited PowerPoint briefings [15]. One participant
>>> described the ensuing event as "a five-hour-long college seminar" --
>> candid and freewheeling.
>>> "This is reversing the paradigm," one awed senior Pentagon official
>>> remarked [9]. Carter was said to be challenging his subordinates to
>>> "look at this problem differently."
>>> Of course, Carter might have said, "Let's look at a different problem."
>>> That, however, was far too radical to contemplate -- the equivalent of
>>> suggesting back in the 1960s that assumptions landing the United
>>> States in Vietnam should be reexamined.
>>> In any event -- and to no one's surprise -- the different look did not
>>> produce a different conclusion. Instead of reversing the paradigm,
>>> Carter affirmed it: the existing U.S. approach to dealing with ISIS is
>>> sound, he announced. It only needs a bit of tweaking [16] -- just the
>>> result to give the Pollacks, O'Hanlons, and Kagans something to write
>>> about as they keep up the chatter that substitutes for serious debate.
>>> Do we really need that chatter? Does it enhance the quality of U.S.
>> policy?
>>> If policy/defense/action intellectuals fell silent would America be
>>> less secure?
>>> Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently --
>>> just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England.
>>> Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let's see if we are able to
>>> make do without them even for a month or two.
>>> In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how
>>> best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over
>>> to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the
>>> Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might
>> turn up?
>>> Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch [17] regular, is a professor of
>>> history and international relations emeritus at Boston University's
>>> Pardee School of Global Studies. He is writing a military history of
>>> America's War for the Greater Middle East. His most recent book is
>>> Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country
>>> [18].
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
>>> Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@alternet.org'. [19]
>>> Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.[20]
>>>
>>> Source URL:
>>> http://www.alternet.org/world/we-have-bunch-debauched-intellectuals-ma
>>> naging
>>> -american-empire
>>> Links:
>>> [1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/andrew-bacevich
>>> [2] http://www.tomdispatch.com/
>>> [3]
>>> http://tomdispatch.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=6cb39ff0b1f670c349f
>>> 828c73
>>> &id=1e41682ade
>>> [4]
>>> http://www.gwu.edu/%7Eerpapers/teachinger/glossary/brains-trust.cfm
>>> [5] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
>>> [6] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670025399/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>>> [7]
>>> http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/23988/samuel-p-huntington/the-b
>>> ases-o
>>> f-accommodation
>>> [8]
>>> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/21/AR2006
>>> 062101
>>> 518.html
>>> [9]
>>> http://www.wsj.com/articles/ash-carter-seeks-fresh-eyes-on-global-thre
>>> ats-14
>>> 24826250
>>> [10] http://www.salon.com/2007/07/30/brookings/
>>> [11]
>>> http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/markaz/posts/2014/12/03-iran-airstrikes
>>> -iraq-
>>> isis-islamic-state
>>> [12]
>>> http://nationalinterest.org/feature/brothers-arms-it-time-us-iraqi-all
>>> iance-
>>> 11712
>>> [13]
>>> http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/388522/robert-kagan-obama-adminis
>>> tratio n-must-prove-its-willing-fight-isis-order-gain-allies
>>> [14]
>>> http://www.understandingwar.org/report/strategy-defeat-islamic-state
>>> [15]
>>> http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/02/23/ash-ca
>>> rter-p
>>> owerpoint-brass/23895027/
>>> [16]
>>> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/carter-says-plan-destroy-isis-101500266.
>>> html
>>> [17]
>>> http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175949/tomgram%3A_andrew_bacevich,_a_h
>>> ug_for
>>> _the_muddlers/
>>> [18] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805082964/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
>>> [19] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on We Have a Bunch
>>> of Debauched Intellectuals Managing the American Empire [20]
>>> http://www.alternet.org/ [21] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> Blind-Democracy@octothorp.org
>>> https://www.octothorp.org/mailman/listinfo/blind-democracy
>>>
>>
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>
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