Picture of the Day - "Progress" in Iraq / Update

[Florin]

QUOTE

I am no nuclear specialist (in fact nuclear physics are the part of physics I really didn't like). The Osirak reactor near Baghdad was almost 3 times as powerful as the TRIGA reactor at Magurele. That has something to say about its possibilities I think.

My father died because of leukemia when I was not yet ten years old. Most probable he got that leukemia due to the radioactive materials he handled for the project at Magurele, around that reactor. I heard that about 30...50 people died because of radiations in that environment. However, this is not confirmed, so you don't need to believe it. I have no clue about what happened inside, but I guess there was not too much concern for safety, at least at the beginning of the project.

[Chandernagore]

Ok. The neocon theory. Black on white. Part one (warning, long stuff, sorry no link available). Part 2 and 3 only if I am swept away by a tidal wave of furiously enthusiastic demands (not a chance).

Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been trying to come up with an operating theory of the world, and a military strategy to accompany it. Now there's a leading contender. It involves identifying the problem parts of the world and aggressively shrinking them. Since September 11, 2001, the author, a professor of warfare analysis, has been advising the Office of the Secretary of Defense and giving this briefing continually at the Pentagon and in the intelligence community.

THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, U.S. NAVAL WAR COLLEGE

LET ME TELL YOU why military engagement with Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad is not only necessary and inevitable, but good.

When the United States finally goes to war again in the Persian Gulf, it will not constitute a settling of old scores, or just an enforced disarmament of illegal weapons, or a distraction in the war on terror. Our next war in the Gulf will mark a historical tipping point - the moment when Washington takes real ownership of strategic security in the age of globalization.

That is why the public debate about this war has been so important: It forces Americans to come to terms with what I believe is the new security paradigm that shapes this age, namely, Disconnectedness defines danger. Saddam Hussein's outlaw regime is dangerously disconnected from the globalizing world, from its rule sets, its norms, and all the ties that bind countries together in mutually assured dependence.

The problem with most discussion of globalization is that too many experts treat it as a binary outcome: Either it is great and sweeping the planet, or it is horrid and failing humanity everywhere. Neither view really works, because globalization as a historical process is simply too big and too complex for such summary judgments. Instead, this new world must be defined by where globalization has truly taken root and where it has not.
Show me where globalization is thick with network connectivity, financial transactions, liberal media flows, and collective security, and I will show you regions featuring stable governments, rising standards of living, and more deaths by suicide than murder. These parts of the world I call the Functioning Core, or Core. But show me where globalization is thinning or just plain absent, and I will show you regions plagued by politically repressive regimes, widespread poverty and disease, routine mass murder, and - most important - the chronic conflicts that incubate the next generation of global terrorists. These parts of the world I call the Non-Integrating Gap, or Gap.

Globalization's "ozone hole" may have been out of sight and out of mind prior to September 11, 2001, but it has been hard to miss ever since. And measuring the reach of globalization is not an academic exercise to an eighteen-year-old marine sinking tent poles on its far side. So where do we schedule the U.S. military's next round of away games? The pattern that has emerged since the end of the cold war suggests a simple answer: in the Gap.

The reason I support going to war in Iraq is not simply that Saddam is a cutthroat Stalinist willing to kill anyone to stay in power, nor because that regime has clearly supported terrorist networks over the years [ahaha ha hahaaa ha . Ahem. Sorry.] The real reason I support a war like this is that the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment.

FOR MOST COUNTRIES, accommodating the emerging global rule set of democracy, transparency, and free trade is no mean feat, which is something most Americans find hard to understand. We tend to forget just how hard it has been to keep the United States together all these years, harmonizing our own, competing internal rule sets along the way through a Civil War, a Great Depression, and the long struggles for racial and sexual equality that continue to this day. As far as most states are concerned, we are quite unrealistic in our expectation that they should adapt themselves quickly to globalization's very American-looking rule set.

SO WHAT PARTS OF THE WORLD can be considered functioning right now? North America, much of South America, the European Union, Putin's Russia, Japan and Asia's emerging economies (most notably China and India), Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa, which accounts for roughly four billion out of a global population of six billion.

Whom does that leave in the Gap? It would be easy to say "everyone else," but I want to offer you more proof than that and, by doing so, argue why I think the Gap is a long-term threat to more than just your pocketbook or conscience.

If we map out U.S. military responses since the end of the cold war, (see below), we find an overwhelming concentration of activity in the regions of the world that are excluded from globalization's growing Core - namely the Caribbean Rim, virtually all of Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and Southwest Asia, and much of Southeast Asia. That is roughly the remaining two billion of the world's population. Most have demographics skewed very young, and most are labeled, "low income" or "low middle income" by the World Bank (i.e., less than $3,000 annual per capita).

If we draw a line around the majority of those military interventions, we have basically mapped the Non-Integrating Gap. Obviously, there are outliers excluded geographically by this simple approach, such as an Israel isolated in the Gap, a North Korea adrift within the Core, or a Philippines straddling the line. But looking at the data, it is hard to deny the essential logic of the picture: If a country is either losing out to globalization or rejecting much of the content flows associated with its advance, there is a far greater chance that the U.S. will end up sending forces at some point. Conversely, if a country is largely functioning within globalization, we tend not to have to send our forces there to restore order to eradicate threats.

[Alexandru H.]

Ha Ha! Nice article!!! I propose to offer each state in that "Gap" a nuclear bomb! For not having an income the size of Bush's favourite cow! :?

[Chandernagore]

The theory turns the United States into a sponge, one of the first organisms with immunological defenses The sponge differentiates between the "self" (core) and "non self" (gap), and agressively attacks the later. When all the environment is homogeneous self, stress dissapears and the sponge is happy :laugh:

[Chandernagore]

Acknowledgements :

1. Notice how the sponge pretended that the mildly bothering bacteria was actually a deadly dangerous virus for the sole purpose of activating it's agressive response .

2. "the resulting long-term military commitment will finally force America to deal with the entire Gap as a strategic threat environment"

There. The forever war.

[Alexandru H.]

BIG! BIG! BIG! BIG!





The 5 Minutes of Hate have officially ended! Back to work, you deadbeats!

[Chandernagore]

http://www.fahrenheit911.com/

The trailer.

[Chandernagore]

QUOTE

BIG! BIG! BIG! BIG!

Wait, I get an additional 17,5 seconds :
:blbl: :mad: :blbl: :twisted: :smg: :smg: :smg: :guns: :mrgreen: :guns: :drunk: :blbl: :blbl: :down: :curse:

[Alexandru H.]

Goldstein! We luv Bush! We luv Oceania! We luv his metaphysical views on the universe, enforced by means of peace, with a standard-issue Tomahawk! I will donate the future of all my descendents if he lets me work like a mere slave at his big farm of tomorrow, called planet Earth.

[Chandernagore]

George W Bush and Tony Blair are in a bar over a drink when another guest comes along and asks them what they are discussing.

"We're planning for world war 3" says Bush.
"Oh dear" says the guest "What are you going to do?"
"We are planning to kill 1,400,000 muslims and one International Security Expert" says Bush.
The guest just stands there baffled. - "A Security Expert...?" he says "Why? Why in heavens name are you going to kill the Security Expert?"
George W. Bush pats Tony Blair on the shoulder and says: - "I told you! No one is going to ask about the muslims..."

[mabadesc]

QUOTE

The 5 Minutes of Hate have officially ended! [...] Wait, I get an additional 17,5 seconds [...]

Well, finally....it took you guys long enough to admit that you hate him...
Why didn't you mention it sooner?
Don't hold back, just let it all out...it's healthy and it will make you feel better ...

QUOTE

Goldstein!...

Who/what is Goldstein?

[Florin]

QUOTE

QUOTE Goldstein!... Who/what is Goldstein?

I don't know what he tried to say when he mentioned Goldstein.

The only Goldstein I am aware of is in the novel 1984, by George Orwell. There, in the last third of the novel, you'll see that the ruling party of Oceania (a state consisting of former Great Britain, the United States, Canada and the Latin America) had like a basic official politic manual, where the official history of the party was included. There was mentioned
Emmanuel Goldstein, a party leader in the beginnings, turned into a traitor later. In the days were the action of the novel takes place, anybody considered by the secret service as enemy was labeled as a partisan of Goldstein.
As you know, 1984, written in 1947, was a futuristic fiction. An analogy between Goldstein and the real world would be Trotsky, in Stalin's regime, or Ernst Rohn, in the Nazi regime.

[Florin]

QUOTE

QUOTE Goldstein!... Who/what is Goldstein?

I don't know what he tried to say when he mentioned Goldstein.

The only Goldstein I am aware of is in the novel 1984, by George Orwell. There, in the last third of the novel, you'll see that the ruling party of Oceania (a state consisting of former Great Britain, the United States, Canada and the Latin America) had like a basic official politic manual, where the official history of the party was included. There was mentioned
Emmanuel Goldstein, a party leader in the beginnings, turned into a traitor later. In the days were the action of the novel takes place, anybody considered by the secret service as enemy was labeled as a partisan of Goldstein.
As you know, 1984, written in 1947, was a futuristic fiction. An analogy between Goldstein and the real world would be Trotsky, in Stalin's regime, or Ernst Rohn, in the Nazi regime.

[Florin]

QUOTE

Well, finally....it took you guys long enough to admit that you hate him... Why didn't you mention it sooner?   Don't hold back, just let it all out...it's healthy and it will make you feel better ...  :D

Well, when you are the captain of the ship, you are responsible for the behaviour of your sailors.
In the best case scenario for the supporters of Mr. Bush, he was just misled by some people in his cabinet, by far more evil and even with personal interests.
I accept that Mr. Bush is not the worst guy in the present administration.

It is interesting that while Bush is blamed everyday, by everybody, Dick Cheney and the economic deals made in Iraq by Haliburton, were he was previously CEO, pop-up in the press just accidentally, and only from time to time.

While Mr. George Tenet resigned even though CIA made the best reports compared with the other 14 federal agencies, and Mr. Collin Powel apologized few times for making wrong statements in the past, the people more guilty by far, first of all Paul Wolschowitz, the heart and mastermind of the ideology which generated the invasion of Iraq, have the impertinence to don't apologize at all. And Donald Runsfeld, who knew what is happening in Iraqi prisons since January, lighted his subordinates about what is to be done from now on: "No photos in prisons".
Paul Wolschowitz should be the first to crucified in this hypothesis list. Then, of course, Donald Runsfeld and Dick Cheney. Exactly the guys who have the impertinence to stick on and to bind their fortunes on the hypothesis of Mr. Bush reelection.

[Chandernagore]

QUOTE

Paul Wolschowitz should be the first to crucified in this hypothesis list. Then, of course, Donald Runsfeld and Dick Cheney

Well, the "captain of the ship" is also responsible for the choice of officers on board. No matter how you look at Bush I think that the buck stops there, not at the lower levels.

DDay ! Ok, I stop shooting for 24 hours

Bush scraped up enough courage to go to France for the commemoration of the events. He should not be bothered by anything else. I see some hotheads already started to demonstrate against him. Thats' plain wrong.