Scheer: "...beware ... those unrepentant Democratic hawks now hovering."

[laststeamtrain]

<snip>

Of course, the official story line at the time was that the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan to support their ally, which happened to be the governing power in Kabul, against the fanatic mujahedeen rebels, whom President Ronald Reagan would later officially embrace as “freedom fighters.” Those freedom fighters came to be united by our CIA with the likes of Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks.

It was decades later that the truth came out that the Soviets invaded only after being deliberately provoked by U.S. hawks. One of them was Robert Gates, who worked for Brzezinski in the Carter administration and who is currently the secretary of defense; President-elect Obama is now reported to be considering retaining Gates in that position. A 1996 press release promoting Gates’ memoir promised the revelation of “Carter’s never-before-revealed covert support to Afghan mujahedeen—six months before the Soviets invaded.”

The Gates revelation prompted an interviewer for the French publication, Le Nouvel Observateur, to ask Brzezinski in a 1998 interview whether he regretted “having given arms and advice to future terrorists,” and Brzezinski replied: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? ... What is most important to the history of the world? … Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

That was three years before those “stirred-up Muslims” attacked us on 9/11, but Brzezinski has not lost his nerve for escalating wars. While advising Obama, he gave interviews hyping the Russian “invasion” of Georgia as the occasion for a new global conflict, telling journalist Nathan Gardels that Putin’s action “was ominously similar to Stalin’s and Hitler’s in the late 1930s.”

<more>

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081111_cold_war_hawks_nesting_with_obama/

[moodforaday]

1. I'd like to strike pre-emptively

against the following content-free arguments that have been used and abused when discussing Obama's potential nominations in the last few days:

- "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer (and I don't care if they are enemies of the people like myself)".
- "I trust Obama's judgment (so shut up already because my brain is OFF)"

Rahm EManuel, Larry Summers, Jane Harman, and now maybe Bob Gates staying on. With so many ememies, when are we going to see a friend?

[blindpig]

5. More on Larry Summers

Summers is best known for the sexism controversy which cost him the presidency of Harvard in 2006. But fifteen years earlier he gained infamy as an advocate of African genocide and environmental racism, thanks to a confidential World Bank memo he signed when he was the institution's senior vice president and chief economist: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted, their air quality is vastly inefficiently low..."

After all, Summers continued, inhabitants of low-income countries typically die before the age at which they would begin suffering prostate cancer associated with toxic dumping. And in any event, using marginal productivity of labour as a measure, low-income Africans are not worth very much anyhow. Nor are African's aesthetic concerns with air pollution likely to be as substantive as they are for wealthy northerners.

Such arguments were said by Summers to be made in an 'ironic' way (and in his defense, he may have simply plagiarized the memo from a colleague, Lant Pritchett). Yet their internal logic was pursued with a vengeance by the World Bank and IMF long after Summers moved over to the Clinton Treasury Department, where in 1999 he insisted that Joseph Stiglitz be fired by Bank president James Wolfensohn, for speaking out against the impeccable economic logic of the Washington Consensus.

http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3679

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

2. Ah, so 9/11 was Carter's fault! n/t

[moodforaday]

3. Strawman argument.

The article doesn't say what you said. The article points out the well-known fact that Zbigniew Brzezinski, acting as Carter's security advisor, proposed and implemented the idea of arming the Mujahideen to fight against the Soviet Union, of which the later doings of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are indirect consequences.

The fact is well known, because Brzezinski is apparently somewhat proud of it to this day. To the extent that this policy helped entangle Russia in Afghanistan and weaken its economy and morale, it was a successful policy. As for why Brzezinski was not concerned about blowback, one needs to ask the man himself.

(ed: typos)

[WhiteTara]

7. the law of unintended consequences

applies here.

[nichomachus]

4. And now, Sam Nunn

maybe he can be in charge of same-sex marriage -- he did so well with gays in the military.

:sarcasm:

[wroberts189]

6. Gates will be removed despite the talk ....heard it here first :) eom