quote:Jumping Jack wrote:
Do your good health, kins!
Bless You Jumping Jack !!!!!
Yes ! : Joey ! :
You are much loved by Joey my fellow Whoian Brother
'kins .
8th August 2007 11:15 AM
Joey
" How to Lose a War "
" There's a lot of beating around the bush in Washington, in the media, and in the think tanks these days. Everyone has something to day about the disastrous war in Iraq - how we should pull out, how terrible mistakes were made. But no one dares utter the L word. But there it is. The US lost. Again.
It's very hard for Americans to admit defeat. We like to be plucky and confident and upbeat. We don't really have a national narrative that allows defeat (unlike, say, the Polish, who suffer from the opposite problem). But it would be healthier to just own up, say we have been defeated, and figure out how to move on.
We have experienced this before, of course. Vietnam. Yes, the United States was defeated, whipped, driven out in a humiliating manner. But in the years afterwards, the politicians and rulers slowly, relentlessly, built their case, built their edifice of lies and deceptions. At first it was simply a comment that, "We won't be having another Vietnam," a tacit admission that it was a defeat. But then over the years the myths were built up. We could have won except for the cowardly politicians. We would have won except for the antiwar movement that was mean to the poor G.I.'s and spat on them. We actually did win but the liberal media never let us know.
These are all lies and myths but they have become accepted wisdom. Finally they declared that we had shaken off the "Vietnam syndrome" - like it was a psychological tick - and we were ready for a new foreign war adventure.
So here we are again. Another defeat. And no words to say it. Current politicians find themselves in the same dilemma as the congress in 1972 - how to get the hell out, knowing it is a lost cause, while wanting to not look like the ones who pulled the final plug. The Democrats are willing to let the war drag on another year so the bloody disaster will be on the Republican front porch come election time; if they succeed in getting us out too fast, they might get that old finger pointing from the Republicans.
We who fought against the Vietnam War knew that we faced decades of the "war to explain the war" - the struggle to define the meaning and significance of the defeat for the US. And for a long time, the establishment continued to get the upper hand. But the new disaster demands that we revisit the lessons of Vietnam and now of Iraq. If we had properly faced the lessons of Vietnam, the US would not be bogged down in Iraq.
For the Pentagon, those lessons are encapsulated in tactics - the problem is our errors in understanding how to deal with "asymmetric warfare," the clash between the powerful and the weak. They can take the field with a huge force of high tech machinery, but a small guerrilla assault might make all their efforts worthless.
The key reason the US continues to suffer defeat is because it is involved in adventures of conquest in a world determined to throw off today's version of colonialism. The United States is dead wrong in its aggression and people fighting on their own land are always going to outlast them in determination. In the meantime, the think tanks in the US come up with more and more bizarre explanations for the quagmire.
Harris, along with Rothstein in the Times, suffer from the typical American conceit of innocence: we are simply democrats, shocked by the madness of our adversaries. This racist reversal of reality is a recurrent theme in western culture. A good example is in every high school kid's introduction to political psychology, Lord of the Flies. William Golding posits the Hobbsian notion that we are all vicious at heart and, if not tamed and controlled by civilization, we would go crazy and do violence to each other. So his British schoolchildren, left alone on an island, sink down to the tribal core - they paint their faces, brandish spears, and commence to slaughtering each other. In other words, absent British civilization, we might become "like them," frightening, tribal, something like the Indians or Africans. It's a great scary bedtime story to give your kid nightmares, but it's a lie. Tribal people, indigenous people, lived relatively benign lives, hunting, gathering, and developing crops. Yes, there was violence - small violence between groups or with strangers. But it was the civilized, the British for instance, who developed real industrial-strength slaughter, who learned to kill in the millions. Why fear that we might become "them" when the real heart of darkness is in us?
Harris and Rothstein indulge the classic jingoistic device of demonizing the "other." Conrad nicely exposed this conceit in Heart of Darkness, signaling that all of our representation of the evil of the jungle and the indigenous people was just a projection of our own cruelty and evil.
In the end, it comes down to resources. As long as we continue to amass a huge treasury of wealth extracted from the rest of the world, and enforce that resource inequity with massive violence, we will be the target for small but painful blows of retaliation. Ultimately, in order to be safe and in order to join the civilized world, the west must move towards a more equal distribution of resources. You don't see the state of Indiana carrying out suicide bombings against Ohio. No, because they live with relatively balanced levels of resources and they are not in constant conflict to challenge or defend the inequities.
It would be wonderful if this balancing of wealth and resources could happen through peaceful means. But if it can't happen through peaceful means, it is likely to happen through violence and wrenching crisis. For our children's sake, let's try to bring about this equity sooner rather than later "
Lots of people dying
Lots of people crying
Lots of people singing
Kids songs
I want my kids songs
I want to say
ain't no one gonner treat me that way
I want my kid songs, I want my kid songs'
Lots of people dying,
Lots of people crying
Lots of people singing,
Kids songs!!!!
8th August 2007 12:12 PM
Joey
F- Fiji ?!
8th August 2007 12:13 PM
Joey
fiji ?!
9th August 2007 03:35 PM
Joey
Nanky ?!
9th August 2007 04:54 PM
Joey
N- Nanky ?!
9th August 2007 05:41 PM
nankerphelge
Joey?
9th August 2007 05:46 PM
nankerphelge
J-Joey?
9th August 2007 05:50 PM
nankerphelge
Joey?
9th August 2007 06:12 PM
Joey
quote:nankerphelge wrote:
Joey?
Nanky ?!
{ Joey Now Giggling to Himself Here at the Office }
10th August 2007 08:36 AM
egon
joey?
10th August 2007 11:09 AM
EELPIE
Joey?
10th August 2007 11:19 AM
Joey
EEL ?!
10th August 2007 11:35 AM
EELPIE
Joey?
10th August 2007 12:08 PM
Joey
quote:EELPIE wrote:
Joey?
Funny !!!!!
EEL ?!
10th August 2007 12:08 PM
Joey
EEL ?!
10th August 2007 12:09 PM
Joey
quote:egon wrote:
joey?
EGON ?!
10th August 2007 12:10 PM
Joey
N- Nanky ?!
10th August 2007 12:53 PM
nankerphelge
Joey?
10th August 2007 12:55 PM
nankerphelge
Joey?!
10th August 2007 12:57 PM
nankerphelge
OOooooOOO Joey!
10th August 2007 04:38 PM
CS
Sir Stonesalot?
10th August 2007 08:32 PM
VoodooChileInWOnderl
Joey's?
10th August 2007 08:33 PM
VoodooChileInWOnderl
BTW, I paid a platinum membershit for that, hope it's good enough. My membershit was used only for that as the fucking show was cancelled
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