Letter Never Sent Tell me when to go.

Our government has been peddling a pack of lies. The whole case against Iraq amounts to a deception. As Heather pointed out, the US intelligence that Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials for a nuclear weapons program was fabricated. In other words, our government used false information because it suits their purposes and then tried to fool the rest of the world with it to garner support for their military takeover. The government has been trying to link Hussein to bin Laden since 1993 after the first WTC bombing. With a budget of trillions they have found NOTHING. It is a lie. As for regimes supporting terrorist, we have been guilty of that. When bin Laden was our ‘terrorist’, a mujahadeen fighting against the Soviets using the same guerrilla tactics, he was a freedom fighter. When we funded the Taliban and helped build Islamic training schools in Pakistan to ‘destabilize’ the Soviet Union with terrorism we were supporting ‘freedom’. Our freedom loving government brought Islamic radicals to the US to learn ‘sabotage techniques’. Now to me, this means terrorism.

If you think for a moment, you’ll realize that governments will always use ‘terrorists’ or guerrillas or partisans as proxies. This is the reality of warfare now. When you use or support ‘terrorists’, which most governments do, you make it very difficult to trace who did what and you can launch covert wars without any governmental or public oversight. To the military and to war planners terrorism is a beautiful thing so long as it is not used against you. The US funds terror groups. At the very least, they have in the past. We funded bin Laden a few years ago to do the same things he has been doing now against American interests. He was just as much of a zealot then as now.

Our government has no ethical problem with terrorism. That must be clear. Any claim to the contrary is a lie. We have supported narco-trafficking fascist guerrillas in Central America, narco-trafficking Islamic radicals in the Mideast, narco-trafficking Albanian Islamic ‘freedom fighters’, the Phillipine’s Abu Sayyaf, terrorists in Italy, even White Russian guerrillas against the Bolsheviks way back in 1918. Terrorists everywhere owe a debt to the US government.

According to most sources around 185 million people (185,000,000) died in all the wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions of the Twentieth Century. Using this equation, that’s 573.5 million pounds of brain matter, 231 million gallons of blood, 14 million tons of bone and flesh, 8.5 billion years of life that will never be lived, and untold millions who will never be born. The cost to human civilization and progress due to war is too high to pay. We cannot stand by quietly while those who purport to speak in our name and with our voice gird themselves to spill more innocent blood and prepare to wreak more havoc and more man-made armageddon against their fellow men. It’s sickening and I dare anyone to justify any of it.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. – Dwight Eisenhower

Parameters, a publication of the Army War College, often has some good articles. It’s a good window into how the defense establishment thinks and operates. New issue is out for Spring 2003.

PARAMETERS: US Army War College Quarterly, Spring 2003, Vol. XXXIII, No. 1

1. Taiwan: National pride is perhaps the prime motive for capturing Taiwan. Chinese leaders see Taiwan as the last vestige of the humiliation by Japan and the West during the colonial period when imperial powers carved China into spheres of influence. China reclaimed Hong Kong, the British colony, in 1997, and Macau, the Portuguese colony, in 1999. Taking Taiwan would complete that trilogy and end the civil war with the Nationalists.
2. The China Factor in the India-Pakistan Conflict
3. Sino-US Military Relations Since Tiananmen: Restoration, Progress, and Pitfalls: China handles its military relations independently, and conducts military exchanges and cooperation with other countries on the basis of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. Military diplomacy should serve the state’s overall diplomacy and the modernization of national defense and the armed forces. In pursuance of this purpose the PLA has actively engaged in external contacts and exchanges in a flexible and practical manner, and made sustained efforts for enhanced mutual trust, friendship, and cooperation with armed forces of other countries, and for regional and world peace, stability, and development.
4. North Korea’s Military Strategy
5. The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam: Islamic militancy is still not well understood by Americans. This is partly due to the secrecy which radical Islamic groups practice to protect themselves from the authorities and from outsiders who do not share their views and aims, but also because Western public communications media frequently tend to marginalize such groups. They are dismissed as religious fanatics, anti-Western hooligans, or mindless terrorists, without making an attempt to comprehend the deep discontents that have produced these Islamic groups’ violent actions or the logic of their radical cause which compels them to behave as they do.
6. Nuclear Smuggling: Patterns and Responses
7. Al Qaeda and the Internet: The Danger of “Cyberplanning”: The Internet allows groups with few resources to offset even some huge propaganda machines in advanced countries. The web is an attractive device to those looking for a way to attack major powers via the mass media. The “always on” status of the web allows these individuals not only to access sites day and night but also to scold major powers and treat them with disdain in a public forum. The web can be used to counter facts and logic with the logic of the terrorist. There is no need for the terrorist organization to worry about “the truth,” because ignoring facts is a standard operating procedure.

   Al Qaeda uses polemics on the net not only to offset Western reporting, but also to counter Muslims who don’t toe the party line. It defends the conduct of its war against the West and encourages violence. The web is important to al Qaeda because it can be used to enrage people and neutralize moderate opinion. The website of the Center for Islamic Studies and Research (according to one source, a made-up name), for example, has 11 sections, including reports on fighting in Afghanistan, world media coverage of the conflict, books on jihad theology, videos of hijackers’ testaments, information about prisoners held in Pakistan and Guantanamo Bay, and jihad poetry.26

   It does not pay for any major power to lie, as facts can be easily used against them. Even in the war in Chechnya, there were times when the Chechens would report a successful ambush of a Russian convoy, and the Russians would deny the event ever happened. To prove their point, the Chechens would show video footage of the ambush on the Internet, thus offsetting the credibility of the Russian official media and undercutting the power of their massive propaganda machine. Al Qaeda officials are waiting to do the same to Western media reporting if the opportunity presents itself. In other words, the internet makes government lies more risky.

8. Four Myths about
   Space Power: One way is through special forces actions. Given the growing power of small groups of people to inflict destruction, states may turn to developing massive special operations forces for spreading chaos behind an enemy’s lines. The Soviet Union had a force of 25,000 Spetsnaz troops who would have been unleashed en masse against Western targets from communications and transport systems to nuclear weapons facilities in the event of a third world war.14 North Korea has over 100,000 soldiers in its own special forces units, presumably intended to wreak havoc behind South Korean lines in a future conflict.15 It goes without saying that the chaos created by the most destructive attack a terrorist group like al Qaeda could stage pales compared to what such robust forces could accomplish given the chance.

From Covert Action Quarterly: Backing up Globalization with Military Might:

The Allure of Rich Resources and Cheap Labor

Perhaps most significantly, Yugoslavia has strong elements of a socialist economy —the last in Europe– however tattered it may have become by years of economic destabilization by the West and international financial institutions. Sixty-five percent of all firms are either state-owned or self-managed cooperatives. Most heavy industry is state-owned. Factories bombed during the 79 days of NATO attacks were exclusively state-owned. The banking and financial system is also state-controlled. Only 20 percent of the workforce is in the private sector. (56) Yet like scores of nations around the globe, Yugoslavia fell prey to the international financial institutions. …

UN: Russia Affirms Objection To Second Resolution On Iraq

I’m glad to see all these countries lining up against the US. From Machiavelli’s The Prince:

The Prince who establishes himself in a Province whose laws and language differ from those of his own people, ought also to make himself the head and protector of his feebler neighbours, and endeavour to weaken the stronger, and must see that by no accident shall any other stranger as powerful as himself find an entrance there. For it will always happen that some such person will be called in by those of the Province who are discontented either through ambition or fear; as we see of old the Romans brought into Greece by the Aetolians, and in every other country that they entered, invited there by its inhabitants. And the usual course of things is that so soon as a formidable stranger enters a Province, all the weaker powers side with him, moved thereto by the ill-will they bear towards him who has hitherto kept them in subjection. So that in respect of these lesser powers, no trouble is needed to gain them over, for at once, together, and of their own accord, they throw in their lot with the government of the stranger. The new Prince, therefore, has only to see that they do not increase too much in strength, and with his own forces, aided by their good will, can easily subdue any who are powerful, so as to remain supreme in the Province. He who does not manage this matter well, will soon lose whatever he has gained, and while he retains it will find in it endless troubles and annoyances.

I think this is what is happening. The weaker nations are banding together to check the power of the United States. In that sense, a balance of power can be a positive situation.

IHT: If Saddam were to go, experts still see violence. It’s going to be a mess.