Yep, sounds OK, except that "The US is bound forever to preservation of a Jewish state" which it isn't. It was the spear created in 48 to serve roughly the ends Ahmedinejad specifies for the reasons you mention, but the spear has long ago taken control of the hand, and in the end might does not make right, justice for European Jews is not achieved by these means, however you define that justice, any more than you noticed any burkas around in your year in Jordan; those are all transparent scams such as Israel has the right to defend itself but the Gazans don't.
I'd say "Apart from the fact there are rather too many Madoffs around in the community," only it isn't apart, of course. It's exactly the same thing. Pointing out other miscreants in other communities doesn't make it right. And there is in fact almost zero "common economic and cultural values" (except for the original purpose of creating a pseudopod for US domination - you'd be on better ground to claim that for the Irish and the US, but no one has so far suggested America must always support Sinn Fein) just as it makes no sense to claim that somehow Jewish people have the right to terrorize people without connection to their sufferings in Europe, as Netturei Karta, other anti-Zionist Jewish groups, and practically all Sephardis would point out. It's irrelevant.
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7 Jan 2009
Subject: And finally
The view you’re proposing “All Israelis are essentially Americans, and all Americans are essentially Israelis,” is, I notice, precisely the one endlessly promoted on my expensive TV, and it is a recipe for unending warfare, quite literally.
I’m quite used to that but I don’t have to like it. I’m rather happier with the current situation where the Brits and Germans may have hard thoughts about each other, but we’re not quite in the 1939 – 1945 situation. We won, after all. There was never any doubt which side I or my mother and father were on, but that doesn’t stop my noticing that it was the Brits and their cronies that made the whole situation almost unavoidable by the impossibly vindictive conditions they imposed at the Versailles conference after WWI; Maynard Keynes resigned from the commission for exactly that reason.
Similarly I never had any doubt I was on the side of the Irish, i.e., the Catholic Irish, the IRA, whose lives had been comprehensively smashed by the Black and Tans – as a senior Brit Embassy official once put it to me, “As an Englishman he reserved the right to be anti British,” though he may, of course not have meant by that what I do, and I regard the present situation where the IRA is becoming more of a political party in Stormont as an improvement over blowing up hotels where Mrs. Thatcher was due to be staying. Just my personal preference of course.
The point being that I never had any doubt that Mr. Schickelgruber had to be stopped by extreme violence, even though some at least of his opponents were responsible for creating the situation in the first place, nor that the Irish had to take rather more extreme steps to halt the Brits than forming a political party. I just prefer it when they’ve got beyond that point.
So the question Cui bono, who is profiting, seems to me to be vital in the current American preference for unending warfare, possibly nuclear. “To eradicate the jihadists” as you put it is clearly impossible – a quarter of the world’s population, roughly, is not going to lie down and die just because the Americans would like that. The progress visible from Yasser Arafat living in his ruined HQ in Ramallah under the guns of Israeli tanks, to the present situation in Gaza is considerable, however. Fatah was looked to for construction after hostilities when you were in Jordan, but it never got beyond the hostilities because Fatah were never a serious opponent – they relied on conferences and resolutions and negotiations and such and got decimated on a permanent basis, fleeing from one country to another, and ending with the Israeli tanks outside the window in Ramallah. Like Hezbollah, Hamas is a different proposition.
The arms merchants supplying both sides profit, of course, and any one else who has an interest in reducing viable countries to piles of rubble and corpses. I’m sure you can fill in the blanks. That they have to be stopped goes without saying for their own sake as well as every body else’s– no one survives unless they are. And negotiations are pointless until the ability to hand out bloody noses has been established, as the Russians did in Georgia.
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8 Jan 2009
Subject: And worse
McCain’s ludicrous “the economy is strong” forms the subtext of the official happy talkers; to get a realistic view you have to go to marginal people like Peter Schiff, whom I recommend to your attention.Subject: And worse
For the Gaza situation I rely on Olmert to screw up badly – a lesson to all of us that if you have military rule, never accept any one below the rank of a full colonel.
It’s the collapse of the US economy that will pull the rug from under the Israelis. They can and will try for alliances with some of the totally corrupt Arab regimes. (Remember the video of the troops blocking the entrance to voting centers in areas where Mubarak was expected to do badly? A very blatant Middle East uptake of the Bush election rigging. “No war without Egypt, no peace without Syria.” The question is how long Mubarak can survive without the generous US donations, even allied to the Israelis.)
Obama’s tax rebates and rebuilding the infrastructure employment programs depend on a further two trillion or so borrowing. Borrowing only works with a lender and attitudes are hardening. Russia’s attitude to the Ukrainian (I won’t even speculate which of the usual suspects is behind that) gas cut off from eastern European countries is “Let them freeze.” Obama has no magic wand. Further borrowing will come at a greatly increased interest rate and other conditions tightening the screw further. As the unavoidable price controls get put in, with lengthening queues and emptying shelves at supermarkets, and a flourishing black market emerges (seamlessly penetrated by the Madoffs of the day) the impression will grow “Things were better under Bush.” So they were. Running the country like a banana republic means, however, existing like a banana republic in the end.
Plans for massive increases in military spending may have to be shelved. No doubt efforts will be made to have other countries pay for the seven hundred plus US bases (On the Clausewitz principle of having the oppressed pay the costs of their oppression) but an enthusiastic response seems unlikely.
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9 Jan 2009
Subject: You're an intelligent well informed guy
and I regard the back and forth between us not so much as an argument between two people as an effort to elicit a tight reply to standard presentations and attitudes. That way we're both performing a useful function, and I believe is the real skeleton on which all this drossy flesh rests.
The forty million Pathans have, it is quite true, some tribal practices peculiar to them. These include the burqa, cannibalism when convenient, and a generally brutal attitude to their womenfolk which is probably secretly envied by the pussywhipped Americans.
The first thing to notice about this is that these elements have remained essentially undisturbed for centuries, show no sign whatever of being changed, and it is a ludicrous piece of arrogance to claim that any western power is somehow justified in slaughtering the Pathans en masse, as both the Yanks and the Brits have been doing for centuries, because they happen not to like these tribal traits. It is also highly dishonest, of course, since the Brit pursuit of the "great game," and its American cousin, the adolescent "war on terror," have very obvious global aims to which these tribal habits are irrelevant. The central position of Kabul, capital city of the first Mogul (Moslem) emperor of India, from which he ruled all of India, while pursuing a policy of total religious tolerance as the best way to achieve prosperity and stability, that central position remains crucial. That neither Alexander, the Brits, the Russians, or anybody else ever achieved any more than a temporary hold on arguably the toughest people in the toughest environment on earth strongly suggests nothing will change.
The second thing to notice is that to use the Pathan tribal practices a thousand miles away to justify and explain seizing Palestine and corraling its inhabitants for slaughter at leisure is a fair measure of the woefully low level of current western dialogue, or rather monologue, since one side controls the main media outlets. That very few apart from the paid presenters of that view (and those for whom gullibility is necessary or advantageous) really believe it strongly suggests it can not be maintained in the face of any opposition.
That only leaves "might is right," (if one ignores for the moment the juvenile "turn it into a sea of green glass" arguments of the "Prince of Darkness," Richard Perle and his PNAC buddies), the great power arena.
Working westwards, the visibly cordial relations between China and Taiwan have destroyed the main western crowbar in the area, Russia has supplied Iran with an advanced missile system that makes an Israeli airstrike impossible, Kashmir/Pakistan/India remains an open wound but without much western leverage, only agonized apprehension, and Ahmed appears correct, the frontline is Palestine now. That's even without considering (from the top down) the current best estimate that 500 ppm (parts per million carbon/methane/et al) will be reached by 2050 - 300 feet higher ocean level the last time that was so, or NY, DC, and London no longer exist - and imminent bankruptcy looming for all western countries with financial power shifting to Asia. Assuming Obama survives assassination attempts, he'd probably prefer NOT to have a nuclear war against Russia/China.
The pathetic current attempts of the above Prince of Darkness to deny he or his buddies ever said any of the things they're voluminously documented as saying suggests reality is beginning to bite. No one really cares whether richly deserved hangings take place or not. Ye're on yer own, just like all the rest of us. Good luck.
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